The Letter | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | June 6, 2025
On January 21, 1986, my grandmother sat at the dining table in her room in Kibbutz Kinneret and wrote me a letter. She opened it in the plural: “To our sweet granddaughter, dear little Mayale, greetings and blessings!” but immediately switched to the singular: “I simply missed you and decided to write to you.”
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She always wrote like that. In all the letters she sent to distant family in the United States, she used the plural. And she always signed on behalf of both of them—herself and my grandfather—even though he never actually wrote a single letter. This one too, the only letter I ever received from her, ended with: “With love, from Grandpa Yaakov and Grandma Rivka. See you soon.”
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So what’s in this letter, between the opening and the closing? Two handwritten pages, clear and neat, in which my grandmother, then 71, tried to spark a conversation with me, age 11. She asked a lot of questions: Are there student committees at school? Which one am I on? What are my duties? She asked about my after-school activities—music and dance. Then she told me that maybe I didn’t know it yet, but my childhood was a happy one, that I had young and wise parents who would answer any question I had. And she offered me a handful of life tips—how a girl should live: freely and lightly, but not to give up too easily on the things that matter to me.
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At some point she wrote: “Enough advice for one time, right?”
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That letter, in a pink envelope postmarked from Tiberias, was the only one she ever sent me. I could have replied to all those questions and received another letter—she even suggested we become pen pals to keep in touch. Back then, Hod HaSharon felt as far from Kibbutz Kinneret as halfway around the world. But a few days after the letter arrived, we went to visit them at the kibbutz, and I had already told her in person about school, and dance class, and my friends—so the whole idea of exchanging letters just faded away.
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Two or three years ago, I suddenly found that pink envelope again. I opened it like a time capsule and found inside a living will on thin stationery: “Don’t give up too easily on the things that really matter to you… on knowing what you want and standing your ground—while still being lighthearted and joyful.” I read it and cried. A wave of longing for my grandmother washed over me. I wanted to answer her: you were right. It was a happy childhood. Even though I wasn’t on any committee. I didn’t have any friends at school. I wasn’t carefree or joyful at all. And still—it was a happy childhood.
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Only after I folded the delicate pages and returned them to the envelope did I realize how hard my grandmother had worked to build a real connection between us, how seriously she took that effort. When we visited her, she would pull a chair close to her armchair, sit me beside her, and ask at length about my life. Even when I was only five. Or seven.
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During summer breaks, when I stayed with her for weeks at a time, she brought me along to work in the sewing room, on shifts in the dining hall. And she and my grandfather must have come to some kind of arrangement, because when I visited, he would sleep in the other room, and I never slept alone—I always slept in her bed.
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She asked me about my dreams at night and paid attention to every single detail. She asked about my friends, my fears, my dogs. And mostly—she let nothing interrupt us. She used to say everything else could wait.
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Now I think about how hard it is to build that kind of deep bond with children, especially with a granddaughter who lives far away. But sometimes, even with our own children in the same house. And how much depth my grandmother brought to our relationship. How she insisted on it. This letter is a reminder of how much she insisted. There was no WhatsApp, no group chats, no emojis—we didn’t even have a landline phone. But my grandmother found ways to insist on us.
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It shaped how I mother my own daughters. The questions I ask them, the attention I give to their answers. In a way, my grandmother’s effort to build a relationship with me guaranteed the relationships I now have with my daughters—and probably even the ones they’ll one day have with their daughters. How many generations forward were affected by one long-running conversation between a girl and her grandmother?
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When I was in the U.S. and the wave of antisemitism erupted around me overnight, my grandmother was no longer in this world—but the conversation with her still lived inside me. I recognized what I was seeing around me from the stories she used to tell me in exact detail. I held firm even when people told me it was just a passing wave. I knew better—because my grandmother had prepared me. And when I started searching for words to write about what I was going through, the first poems I wrote were a series of letters to her.
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Letters to tell her how I’m doing. What’s happening with me now. Thirty-seven years after that letter, I finally sat down and answered her. I replied very late, without a stamp that could cross the river between life and death that now flows between us, without a pink envelope. But they are part of the conversation my grandmother insisted on so fiercely. That conversation never went anywhere.
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This week marks 13 years since my grandmother Rivka passed away. I’ll end today with the first letter I wrote to her:
Three Letters to Safta Rivka After October 7
Eleven years after your death
I drag a chair beside your armchair, hold
your soft hand, your
burned-down town, your
murdered brother,
the lost years. I understand now that you were right:
we will not change the world.
We’ll have to survive it.
Danger lurks on every land, and every
Jewish family needs a son
outside of Israel, to save them
when the time comes.
What did you know about the time coming
that I refused to hear? You sat
in your aging armchair,
corduroy cover worn thin beneath your left arm,
your body tilted sideways, the weight of dwindling bones
and the thickening books—
what were you trying to tell me
about what would come upon us?
I resurrect you now,
I need you urgently,
I’m forcing you back into a world
you already left behind
I must hold on
to something now. Your history
becomes my future.
Your history becomes the future.
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Wishing us all a peaceful, quiet Shabbat—
and conversations full of meaning with our children, our granddaughters, our grandsons,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*