babushka

As a boy, I hand-made pelmeni with my babushka Alla, my hands and face covered in flour as we worked in the cold of my grandparents’ basement in Paterson, New Jersey.

“My babushka put a salve on it. It’s almost all the way healed.”

“She belonged to an old Khazar family. They escaped the old tsar’s slaughter. Fled north, like yer babushka. They had neighbors who...”

“There was a 92-year-old babushka who was injured, and we put her on the stretcher and helped get her out.”

In some villages, babushkas lay down in the roads blocking Ukrainian tanks, officers said, and in one, an especially cunning babushka kept stealing the soldiers’ helmets.