*Not Granny Tales | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | August 15, 2025*
Today, exactly ten years ago, my Grandma Leika died. Two days earlier I had rushed to her all the way from western Canada, hoping to make it in time to see her. I was with two little girls and a pregnant belly. We flew from Vancouver to Seattle, and from Seattle to Amsterdam, and in Amsterdam, on the way to the boarding gate, the black pearl necklace I was wearing around my neck suddenly burst and scattered in all directions. The girls, the pregnant belly, and I, and a bunch of people around us, all bent down to help gather the black pearls rolling across the floor. I didn’t want to understand what it meant. But when I entered my father’s house in Israel, my brother told me that Grandma Leika had died just two hours earlier. It happened while we were in the air. We missed her. And then it was me who fell apart on the floor.
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I didn’t get to say goodbye. Not even on the phone - she was already very foggy in her final days. I don’t even know if she knew I was on my way. I recorded her some messages, and Nancy, her caregiver, played them for her and even filmed it all for me. Grandma Leika lying in her clean bed, my voice playing from the recording, and then a half-smile arises on her face.
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She was 88 years old, but she always acted twenty years younger. Death wasn’t on the agenda. Did she die because we left her and moved to another country? That thought has haunted me ever since. Two and a half years earlier she had lost my mother, her eldest daughter. And then we left - each of us to a different place in the world - and Grandma Leika parted from three of her granddaughters and four of her great-grandchildren. Every morning I would video call her and place her on the car dashboard, and she would drive with us on our way to daycare and school. “What a beautiful fall,” Grandma Leika would say from her place on the dashboard. And also, “What happened that there are so many cars today?”
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Another one of her great-grandchildren used to eat his morning cereal with her. She remained woven into our daily lives just as she had always been- a grandma who was part of grocery shopping, part of the school books in our backpack, a grandma who took her granddaughters abroad in the summer, who would come over once or twice a week to cook lunch and help with homework. Not to mention the long weeks we spent with her during holidays.
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She was also an especially cheerful grandma. Her childhood in Tel Aviv was very poor in possessions but rich in love, and maybe that’s why she remained a child until her final day - loved to play the games she bought us no less than we did, buying herself candy, sitting on the floor to roll a ball, getting hurt to the depths of her soul and loving to the depths of her soul, and laughing until tears even if she had heard the same joke fifty times.
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As a child, she was also deeply devoted to us, even when we weren’t on our best behavior. She would always look at us with sparkling eyes and say we were angels in human form. She also embarrassed us quite a bit. Like when she pulled out a bag of meatballs in the middle of a movie. Or when she tried to set me up with total strangers in the street. Or when she told people exactly what she thought of them, no filter, no manners.
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I opened “Feminism As I Taught My Daughters” with a story about Grandma Leika. I told how she got her first period. Oh dear! If my grandma knew I had told that story, she would be furious. “Period” was a word that was never to be uttered in their house, so she didn’t even know such a thing existed. In class, in 1930s Tel Aviv, they called it 44 - the numeric value of the word “blood” in Hebrew. “Have you gotten 44 yet?” she asked her mother what it meant, what everyone was talking about. Her mother’s response was to slap her. When the blood came, her mother shoved a pile of cloth between her legs. And some aunt, at some point, straightened things out and helped her get through the rest of her periods more or less in peace.
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I don’t know a single story about a grandma getting her period. I barely even knew that story about mine - I sat down one day and interviewed her, and she told it in the voice of someone being forced to talk about these things in an interrogation room. I haven't heard a single other story about any other grandma getting her period, so I felt the urgency to open my book with it
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There are many silenced areas in women’s lives, but grandmotherhood is one of the most silenced. Grandmas aren’t on screen, not in news studios, not sitting in any important places off-screen either. They don’t make decisions about society, the community, culture, politics, the economy. And when we do talk about grandmas, it’s often in very diminishing ways. For example, I thought about calling this column Granny Stories, but that expression, just like “Old wives’ tales” implies something entirely made-up and non-sensy, whereas what I’m writing here is deeply important. And if there’s a natural remedy for something, they’ll call it a “grandma cure,” implying it’s unscientific, unproven, not peer-reviewed. No matter how effective it is, it’s only been reviewed by... grandmas. And they don’t count.
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On the other hand, grandmas, like my Grandma Leika, often play an active role in raising grandchildren for decades. Which means not only do they have an educational and thus political impact on entire generations, but they also serve as a labor force that enables the economy to function. Even when a child stays home. Even during school vacations. Many companies owe their existence to grandmas, and some economists have measured the percentage of a nation’s GDP comprised of grandmother labor. In some countries, that percent reaches 40%!!
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In other words: while my Grandma Leika stood in her silk slip in our house every Monday cooking us meatballs, took us in during holidays, helped with our homework, and generally devoted decades of her life to us - the Israeli economy relied on her, and on grandmas like her, to grow, expand, and function.
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And by “economy,” I mean everything: the government, the army, the wars. Recently, a scientific hypothesis even proposed that women live longer than men because they serve a key evolutionary role as grandmothers. In any case, the life we know depends on grandmas like mine - active, involved.
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I dedicated the first chapter of “Feminism As I Taught My Daughters” to her because grandmas are erased from literature and film and TV shows and studios and commercials. But the truth is, every grandma has a story. And it’s time literature made room for them, and told their stories. And that their stories wouldn’t be considered only “women’s literature,” because grandmas raise grandsons too, and enter deeply into their hearts and minds and the people they become as they grow. And it’s time we stop calling it Grandma Stories.
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Even though I really did want to call this column that.
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I dedicate it to the memory of my one-of-a-kind Grandma Leika, my living longing. And to all grandmas, everywhere - who are immeasurably important.
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.Wishing us all Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*