NADINE PETROV What My Grandmother's Hands Knew Heritage, resilience, and the things that survive everything
My grandmother made food out of almost nothing. That was her superpower and I don't use that word lightly, because I have come to understand that what she did was genuinely extraordinary. Beet soup from three beets and a bone. Bread that lasted a week. Dumplings that could feed eight people for under two dollars. She had learned this skill in Ukraine, in times when there was not always enough, and she brought it with her to Chicago and she never unlearned it, even when there was plenty. Her hands remembered scarcity even when her pantry didn't. I am twenty-nine years old. I have never gone hungry. I have never had to make something from nothing in the way she did. And
I think about that gap between us that gap of abundance and safety that her sacrifice and my parents' work created and I feel two things at once. Gratitude so large I don't have words for it. And a quiet worry that I have not yet been tested the way she was, and I don't know what I would be made of if I were. Every generation inherits something from the one before it. Sometimes it is money or land or a family name. But the things that survive everything wars, migrations, economic collapse, the complete uprooting of everything familiar those things are never the ones you can put in a suitcase. They are the recipes you memorize because there may not be a cookbook. The songs you sing because the language might be lost. The stubbornness to keep going that gets passed down not in words but in example, in the way someone gets up every morning and does what needs to be done without making a speech about it. My generation gets a lot of criticism for being soft, distracted, entitled, too online, not resilient enough. Some of that criticism is fair. Some of it is every generation saying the same thing about the next one since the beginning of recorded time. But here is what I know about the people I grew up with: when something actually goes wrong, and it has, and it will, they show up. They figure it out. They take care of each other. The resilience is there. It just looks different than it used to.
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My grandmother never owned a smartphone. She thought the internet was mildly suspicious. She died having never sent an email or taken a selfie or watched a streaming show. And yet she lived through more history than I will probably ever see, and she came through it intact, warm, funny, and making food out of almost nothing right up until the end. She did not need the tools I have. She had something older. Something I am still trying to learn the name of.
I have her recipe for borscht written on an index card in my apartment. Her handwriting. The ink is fading a little. I have made it three times and it has never tasted like hers. I keep trying. I think that is probably the point — not to get it exactly right, but to keep reaching for it. To keep the thread. To remember where you came from even when everything around you is new. I'm Nadine Petrov. Good night from the American Desk.