My Grandma, Frances Markowski – Feodosia Machsuda Srebna – had been born in Ukraine and came to the United States in 1914, before the Soviet Revolution that took that land and swallowed it into itself. A picture of her as a young woman with her young son, Ivan/John, and her husband, Vlas/Alex sits on the cabinet under the window in my dining room.
As a little girl, I looked over the railing of the porch on the second floor of the flat on Ring Street to see my grandma walking slowly, head down and covered by a scarf – she was a true “babushka” – her long dark winter coat covering her legs, up the alley to sit with my mother in the kitchen, to have a talk in the language that was native to both. In later years, Mom would often forget much of her Ukrainian first language, only speaking a word or two, sometimes with humor, with her sister, Anne, or one of her brothers.
Grandma died when I was in high school, and her funeral was the last that my parents went to without me and my sister, Suzie. A few months later, my mother’s younger sister died, as if to follow her mother. Years later, her son, my cousin Mark, would tell me that he thought his mother – who was already battling cancer – gave up after her mother died.
After Grandma’s death, my mother went to the cemetery a few times a year to clean up the graves of her father and mother, a sort of homage. When I went with her, she’d send me off with a bucket to the water spout on the road that ran past the graves and I’d come back, the bucket filled with the water, so that she could tend to the dead. A few years ago, Jeff and I returned to the cemetery in Milwaukee, and when we drove into the gates, I provided directions that took us right to the graves. I have not forgotten.
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I wasn’t thinking of Grandma at all when I entered seminary in 1982 in Berkeley. One early morning, before sunrise, as I lay sleeping in my small room in the dormitory apartment that I shared with two other women, I was awakened by a presence in the room. I knew it was Grandma. I knew. She came into me that early morning. Frightened by this unbidden presence, I called out to Jesus.
Was I haunted? Why did she come to me? I asked the questions, longing to know, in a conversation with a friend. “Who else would she go to?” Her answer.
Jeff speaks of that time as a “haunting,” but I’m not sure. I do know that she lived with me, in me, for a number of years. And over the course of that time I wrote the series of poems I call “The Feodosia Poems.” They are her poems, not mine. She was an illiterate woman from the Old Country, and I am a woman of the New World, privileged, educated.
My mother told me she did not remember her dreams. But she remembered a dream one morning when I was visiting in her apartment. Just before she awoke, she dreamed she was standing looking at the back of a truck. The back of the truck rolled up, and there, looking at my mother, was a Matryoshka doll, a nesting doll. The doll’s face was her mother, my grandmother. She winked at my mother! And Mom woke up. She recounted the dream to me when we talked over coffee that morning.
A black and white photo from the 1950’s is the only photo I have of Grandma with a light in her eye. She sits between me and big brother Ronn, already a teenager, trying to look “cool.” Maybe we brought some joy to her.
How I wish I knew her better, my Grandma, my babusya. And maybe, I do.
Me, Grandma, Ronn, circa 1955
