My Grandmother's Chutzpah

Everything I need to know about being Jewish came from her

Jan 23, 2025

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

person holding brown and green plant — Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

One day, my grandmother sat in her tiny “one-tuchus” kitchen, where she could make an entire meal out of an onion and half a potato, and indulged me as I peppered her with questions.

“Grandma, when were you born?”

“Sometime in the spring.” She shrugged and held her right hand upside down, as if God might drop a more precise answer into her palm. When I pressed her, she shrugged again.

“Around Passover.”

“Where did you grow up?” She narrowed her eyes as if she could see her homeland somewhere off in the distance, then turned her hand over and pretended to push something aside—a non-verbal feh.

“Sometimes it was Russia, sometimes it was Poland, wherever the tsar decided to make the border that day.” (I later learned that my grandmother spent the first ten years of her life in Odessa, before immigrating to Brighton Beach—aka “Little Odessa”—where she lived for the next 89 years.)

“What’s the secret to your long life?”

My grandmother spread her arms wide, presenting herself to the world.

“I got borscht instead of blood running through my veins,” she joked. Then she grew serious. “It’s because I always lived by the sea.”

While there is something to be said for the nutrients found in beets and the positive ions in ocean air, I don’t think that’s why my grandmother lived to be three months shy of a century. The secret to her longevity can be summed up in one word: chutzpah.

When Shakespeare wrote, “Though she be but little, she is fierce,” he could easily have been talking about my grandmother. Whenever she didn’t get her way, she would plant her hands on her hips, draw herself up to her full height of four-foot-ten (in heels) and say, “Just because they said no to me, you think I’m finished?” Then she’d get to work.

Here’s a for-instance: One morning, in the 1960s, my grandmother visited the Lincoln Savings Bank on Coney Island Avenue. On this particular day, the bank was giving out free clocks as a special promotion, one of which was hanging on the wall behind the tellers.

My grandmother stepped up to a window, made her deposit, and addressed the teller.

“Ooh, I really like that clock,” she said, though there was nothing special about that square white plastic clock, except that it was free. “Can I have it?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. L.,” said the teller. “The clock is only for new customers opening up new accounts.”

“Is that so?” said my grandmother.

“Yes, Mrs. L.”

My grandmother cocked her head.

“You mean any stranger could walk off the street, hand you a dollar, open a new account and get a clock—but you won’t give a clock to me, a loyal customer for over 50 years?"

“That’s right. I’m sorry,” said the teller, who was no doubt sorry that my grandmother had come up to her window instead of somebody else’s.

“Darling.” My grandmother shook one red-polished fingernail at the teller. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take all my money out from the bank and close my account, walk around the block, then come back inside, give you back my money and open a new account and it will be more work for you and more work for me, or you could just give me the clock.”

She got the clock.

A few months before she died, my grandmother moved into a nursing home (she brought the clock). One day, we were sitting in the lounge when the snack cart arrived. Most of the residents were given small cups of vanilla ice cream; my grandmother received a piece of sponge cake, which she promptly handed back.

“I’d like some ice cream, please,” she said to the woman pushing the cart.

The woman consulted her chart. “It says here, Mrs. L. that you're down for sponge cake.”

“But I don’t want the cake. I want the ice cream,” said my grandmother.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. L.”

“You’re mixing me up with someone else,” my grandmother said. “Check again.”

Just to humor her, the woman took another look. “Yep. Right here, it says you get sponge cake.”

But my grandmother was far from finished.

“Darling,” she said, wagging that famous red-tipped finger. “Instead of telling me what to eat, maybe you should be asking me what I’ve been eating all these years to reach the age of 99?”

The woman couldn’t argue with that. She handed over the ice cream, but my grandmother wasn’t done. “And give me an extra. For my granddaughter.”

Ice cream in hand, my grandmother marched to her room with me scurrying behind. She pushed open the door and threw her snack into the trash. When I asked what all the fuss was about, she wagged her finger in my face.

“They ain’t the boss of me,” she declared. “You gotta stand up for yourself, mameleh. Don’t let anybody push you around.”

I have been told that I take after my grandmother. I have her curly brown hair, her pear-shaped torso, and her big flat feet. Not to mention her chutzpah. Years after my grandmother was gone, my mother lay in a hospital bed with pneumonia. I am sure she was known as “the woman with the difficult daughter”; I demanded (no less than five times) to be allowed to stay in her room long after visiting hours were over.

Permission finally granted, I sat next to my mother’s bed and massaged her feet, admiring her high arches, dainty toes, and red-polished nails.

“You have such pretty feet,” I told her. “I wish I’d inherited them. Instead, I have Grandma’s wide, pancake feet.”

“And her face,” said my mother. “You have my mother’s beautiful, beautiful face.”

Every day, I wear it proudly.

My Grandmother's Chutzpah

Everything I need to know about being Jewish came from her

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