Gesya

Work in progress - series of short animations based on the memories and textiles left from my great grandmother, Gesya. This is a joint project with my mother, who writes short memorable episodes from her grandmother’s life related to textile objects. Gesya (d. 1984) lived in Nevel, a small town in West Russia.

The Striped Towel

Elena Magid

Of all the nine grandchildren, our grandmother favored the older two, but she made this clear to us only when everyone was grown up. She gave the older granddaughter money to buy an apartment and even attended her wedding. She paid the debts of the older grandson, a scampish drunkard. The rest of us were only awarded her sneering gaze and Yiddish muttering: wrong husbands, wrong wives.

Once two of her grownup grandsons, from the disgraced bunch, came to visit on a cold evening. As the story goes, they had a bottle of vodka with them. Grandmother served them baby porridge as a snack and even deigned to address them in Russian. “Yes, lads,” she said, “able drinkers you are. As fathers as sons.”

I came to see her with her great granddaughter, who was then four or five years old—not to see her as much as just to visit the town. She stared intently at the girl and muttered something in Yiddish, then pulled a bundle of keys from her pocket, rattled them, opened a cupboard, still muttering, contemplated the contents for a while, and retrieved a towel, a new one, with a label still attached.

This is how the large towel with green and white stripes, Granny Gesya’s gift, came to be in our cupboard.

(Nevel–Pskov, 1950–80s)