It is a quiet Sunday morning before Easter. San Francisco is rainy, the weather helping me sink into memories and continue work on the various memoirs that keep pouring from my “pen.” That pen is now either a keypad or a voice-activated iPhone, but one that still aches to share stories.
Lunch with Galya, my brother Sasha, Galya’s daughter Lena, and granddaughter Katya.
I was editing a tale of having lunch with my late Aunt Galya, a wonderful woman who was ninety-two as we sat in a restaurant on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Ailing from the heart problems that would take her life a few years later, she was still the vibrant, blond flirt with colorful clothes, a salon-managed hairdo, and a personality that never flagged.
Here’s what I wrote:
Lunch started with the chaos of ordering that seems to follow us around, and then we settled in for a chat. Before long, Galya was telling us a joke—in Russian, of course.
“An elderly, sophisticated woman is walking through the art museum, the curator at her side,” she started, then got on a roll. “The woman pauses before an image, peers at it, and says ‘That, I believe, is a Monet.’”
‘You are correct, madam,’ says the curator, polite because the woman might, after all, give money.
They walk to another image, ‘And that, I believe, is a Matisse.’
The new Americans: In front of our illegal apartment on Cabrillo Street in San Francisco in 1955. Sasha and I between my aunt and uncle, Shura and Galya, and my parents on the right. These refugees and immigrants were always carefully dressed and elegant, as was I until I made it to Berkeley in the 1960s.
‘In that, as well, you are correct, madam.’
They continue in this vein for a few more images, finally pausing for a longer time in front of a particular image.
After thoughtful consideration, the woman exclaims, ‘That, I know for sure is a Picasso!’”
Here my aunt set her best straight face and dignified manner, raised her head so she was looking down as if over her glasses, and said, flat of affect, “That, madam, is a mirror.”
As usual, she had us rolling on the floor, heading into her next story.
That’s me, holding Galya‘s daughter, Lena. In front of our house on Hayes Street near Golden Gate Park. I will let you guess the year.
Shura and Galya in front of the San Sabba refugee camp in Trieste Italy, 1952. Indomitable, in the middle of four years sharing floor space in a former concentration camp with no idea as to their future. I still am amazed when I see these pictures and think of how classy they looked. How could that be? And then I remember that they were successful business owners before they were forced to flee from Belgrade, and their suitcase must’ve held the clothes the defined them in a previous life.