Honoring my creative lineage: pra-Babushka Leza

This month, I will write a series of vignettes honoring my creative lineage, which includes the people and forces that have shaped me, prayed for me and dreamed me into being, so that I may walk my own empowered path guided by them and the gifts they shared with me.

Pra-Babushka Leza  

I never met my maternal great-grandmother. I only really know about her life from the stories that are shared among family members who knew her. She died a year before I was born but her wisdom and creative resourcefulness has been the inheritance she left behind.

Her first language was Yiddish, which surprises me because it was never spoken in my family’s household. Her daughter, my last living grandmother, says a word or an expression here or there but it seems that her Jewish identity had no safe place when she moved from her small Jewish village located in Dymer in Kyiv Oblast (district or borough) to Kyiv, the capital. She was 12 when she left and I think about what activated her to leave her home at such a young age.

She was a seamstress by trade and, by the accounts I’m told, she was incredible with her hands. She wasn’t a designer type of seamstress but was extremely creative in the way she used fabric that was available to her. She made dresses from men’s ties and reused men’s suits to make tailored pants, pleaded skirts and jackets for children. 

I think about how she made beauty from what she had and adjusted her plans to make what was needed. She was also a wonderful cook and carried many traditional Jewish recipes for my family in her memory.

A saying she often gets credited for is “don’t burden yourself with doing something half assed or you will have to do the thing twice”. She was a wise and soft spoken woman who had a deep respect for the details of her work, no matter what she was doing. 

Her creative resourcefulness, making the best from what she had and taking great pride in her work, has helped me be flexible and intentional with what I create.

Thank you for all these gifts, dearest Babushka.