I really loved my paternal grandmother. She was an amazing woman, brilliant, multilingual, and tough as nails. Because of her determination and quick thinking, she was able to get my father’s family out of Austria just in the nick of time. She was a Polish Jew who emigrated to Austria when she married my grandfather who was an Austro-Hungarian Jew. She was probably the only literate person (except perhaps for the Catholic priest) in the small country bumpkin town that they lived in. Other villagers used to come to her to read the letters they had received or to write ones when anything official came up. She spoke Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian and German fluently when the family still lived in Kittsee. When, not by choice, the family moved to Shanghai in 1938, she adapted and learned Cantonese, Japanese, Russian, English and many of the other myriad languages that were spoken in the Hongkew Ghetto in which they lived. She was so smart that she not only learned these languages but learned them fluently. I can still remember when I was about 6 or 7 she told me I was an instigator. A what? I had never heard that word before and when I looked it up in the dictionary I was very upset. Was I a bad girl? But the point is that even though English was far from her first language she knew it well enough to admonish me with a less common word. That’s smart.
But…she was a short, fat woman with very flabby underarms. I loved my grandma but boy those batwings were really not pretty. Fast forward to me now, also a Jewish grandma. Besides inheriting her affinity for language, I inherited her figure and her batwings. Boy do I dislike those batwings. I google: how do I get rid of batwings but the solutions always involve exercise so that’s not going to happen. So I’ve got my affinity for language and I’m a short, fat, and now old Jewish woman.
Do I look fat in these genes?
Musings of a Jewish Mom 