::i::heart::grandparents::

i think that now is as good a time as any to tell you that i'm obsessed with my grandparents, both maternal and paternal. this post is regarding my dad's parents, the ones that have lived in the same row house in northeast philly since the fifties.

Jonathan Safran Foer inspired this post after I read his piece in last weekend's T Magazine Food Issue. He wrote, "My grandmother survived World War II barefoot, scavenging Eastern Europe for other people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits that clung to bones and pits. So she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes. I remember hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden Calves of breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich to swaddle in napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of the apple is edible." JSF, are you talking about my grandparents or your grandmother? I'm not sure.

reading Foer's thoughts on his survivor grandmother makes me think, "is there an entire group of people who have been affected by the behavioural habits of their survivor parents/grandparents whom i have a secret bond with?" and to clarify, survivors meaning those who survived the Holocaust, as both of my father's parents did. i don't think that i can truly articulate in a blog post what my grandparents have meant to me, imprinted on me, taught me. after visiting Auschwitz, one of the camps my grandmother passed through, while studying in Prague in 2005, i called her to tell her i had been there and that i had bawled like a baby. to me she said, "but you know our story. you know this. you have to live your life." and i believe in this more than anything else, that despite everything they have been through, my grandparent's deepest desire remains for their children and their children's children to live, to survive, to know happiness, and to know they are loved for who they are. now that's something worth surviving for.