Here is the letter we read to Yelena at her brit bat:
Dearest Yelena Meira,
We could not be more overjoyed with you, our amazing daughter. Before you were born your daddy was so sure you were a boy. When you emerged, it was the first time you defied expectations and we know it won’t be the last. We look forward to the many ways you will surprise us over the coming years.
We chose your name before we met you and only now we discover how appropriate it is. Your first name, Yelena, is the Slavic version of Helen. Like that ancient Greek namesake, you are truly beautiful, although if you launch a thousand ships we hope it is because you are an admiral or shipping magnate and not just for your good looks. As you grow, we hope inner beauty radiates through your whole person. Your Hebrew first name is Ye’ela, a variant of Yael, which means “to ascend.” We chose it partly because it sounds like a diminutive of Yelena but also because we love the meaning, and hope that you will climb to great heights and step up to whatever your callings may be. Your middle name is Meira, meaning “light.” Combined, we hope your name will be a blessing and a prophecy for you to follow God’s commandment for the people of Israel to be a light onto the nations. Already, you are a light in our lives.
As is Jewish tradition, you are named to honor the memory of two very special people, your Mummy’s maternal grandmother and your Daddy’s brother.
[MILA:] You were born two days after Grandma Helen’s birthday. She took great pride in being a Leo and possessed the qualities of courage, generosity and love that allegedly characterize Leos. She loved lions and she loved babies and I know she would have adored you.
It is said that the mark of a truly great chef is how well they roast a chicken. Neither in the finest restaurants of Chicago, New York or LA nor in the best corner bistros of Paris have I ever had a roasted chicken to rival my grandmother’s. If food is love, Grandma Helen was an acolyte of Venus. Growing up, we would attend nearly weekly feasts at her apartment that were not just Epicurean but epic, meals in which one would be stuffed before the main course, but unable to resist her urgings for a second helping of everything, especially desert. I loved the ethnic foods she would make – sarma, gibanica, palijinka, baklava – and was transfixed watching her cook, as she could layer filo more deftly than most people can beat an egg.
Just as she never stinted on saturated fats, Grandma Helen never stinted on saturating us with love. She was very affectionate with her grandchildren and there was nothing as reassuring as being enveloped by what can only be described by the old fashioned term, her ample bosom. She was also the most generous person I have known. We would tease her about her propensity to say, whenever anyone admired anything she owned, “You like it? You can have it.” I doubt I ever visited her without coming home with some booty, usually bags of it, whether her free samples from the Estee Lauder make-up counter, trashy paperbacks of which my parents surely would not have approved had they read them, a beautiful afghan she crocheted, or a remarkable item she bought for 75% off. Grandma Helen was a champion shopper and whenever I purchase something wonderful significantly under retail I always think of how proud she would be. If she had lived to the era of eBay, she certainly would have made her fortune as she had a knack for finding exquisite items in the thrift shops of LA. However, her combing talents weren’t limited to furniture and objets; when in college, your Uncle Aaron bought a 1976 Chevy Malibu that only had an 8-track player she managed to unearth some Bob Dylan 8-tracks for him, hip grandma that she was.
Spending time alone with Grandma Helen there was always the marvelous sense of conspiracy that should accompany any healthy grandparent-grandchild relationship. Soda, candy, make-up, perms and gossip were all provided. Sometimes she would heat up some slivovitz with brown sugar, give me a cordial glass of peppermint schnapps and, once, I remember her filling up an enormous goblet of amaretto and setting it before me – in retrospect, a clever baby-sitting strategy. We would also watch old movies together; if she turned on the TV she could identify and outline the plot of any movie within seconds. She loved reading stars’ biographies, from which she’d regale me with the choicest bits of scandal and, when cleaning out her apartment, I found an enormous folder full of articles about Henry Fonda, her favorite.
When your grandma, my mother, was 10, Grandma Helen divorced her husband because she believed it was in the best interest of her daughters. In an age when divorce was stigmatized, she made a courageous choice to do the right thing and ignore social consequences, a moral example I hope you emulate throughout your life, bravely choosing to do the right thing for yourself and those you love, even if it is not the easy or popular choice. In whatever endeavors you undertake, I hope you inherit her industriousness, as she managed to raise five children essentially by herself, work full time, have dinner on the table, mend clothes and type papers, all without calling herself a Supermom or a having a drivers license. She was highly creative and always busy making beautiful things – clothes, needlework, even her handwriting was beautiful – and I hope you use your talents, whatever they may be, to make the world a more beautiful place.
She often told me that her grandchildren were special. Those of us who knew her miss her deeply and, as part of her legacy, I hope your Daddy and I, our families and our friends always make you feel as special and loved as she made me feel.
[ELI:] The last nine months have certainly been a mixed blessing. While we welcome our daughter into this world, we also said good-bye to my brother, Moshe who, in December, after suffering for over a decade from schizophrenia, made his own exit from this world. We never had the chance to tell him about his future niece. A shame since he always loved children and they in return had always taken a shine to him. Though most people, adult and kid alike, did, as he had a magnetic personality driven by a great sense of humor and a top notch, award winning smile.
In my mind, my brother was an artist in the truest sense of the word. As a teenager he excelled at drawing and poetry. Later photography and painting. He also dabbled in any other medium he could get his hands on: sculpting, wood carving, pottery, acting – just to name a few. And of course with talent, comes the temperament of an artist – one moment it’s feelings of (or maybe in his case) delusions of grandeur, the next it’s feelings of failure and “what artistic value am I adding to the world?” His favorite subjects were the human figure and face and portraits. At one point in his artistic development, I call it his “peak” phase he did some incredible paintings – very large paintings of James Dean, Pablo Picasso, John Coltrane and Marilyn Monroe. One day he learned that the Marilyn Monroe had been stolen while on display at a local coffee shop. Moshe and I used to muse that he should take it as a compliment, that someone enjoyed his painting so much and probably had to rent a small van just to transport the stolen booty from one place to the other. In the last few years of his life though, it wasn’t about an artistic discipline or the final outcome of a particular work, it was a matter of daily survival of his vicious schizophrenic life. His later works reflect the emotions and expressions of a world of pain, of sadness and darkness rather than the form they inhabited.
I always envisioned my brother as this tremendous ball of raw, unformed creative energy just waiting to burst and show the world – “I am Moshe, hear me roar!” Yet, so remarkably sensitive was he to the world and others around him that any formal art training he began – which in any medium, inevitably leads to constructive criticism – would then more often than not, lead to him dropping the course or class and unfortunately stunting his growth as an artist. Unfortunately, I believe that schizophrenia kept Moshe from ever reaching his full potential.
Growing up he was my idol. I wanted to be an artist just like Moshe. And while I pursued a path in music later in life, enduring criticism of instructors and self-abasement, I still find myself taking an art class here and there, reminding me of my greatest influences in life.
In honor of his memory, we have chosen the middle name Meira for even in his darkest days, Moshe was constantly searching for the light. He fought daily for peace and tranquility, knowledge and truth, perfection in his creativity, and the Divine. However, much of his life was shrouded in mystery, often too dark and terrifying to share with others. One can’t possibly imagine the hell and pain he lived through on a daily basis. Tragically, in the end, the war within himself was too overwhelming. Any dying embers of light gave way to a lost will to live.
Yelena Meira, light of our lives, we hope that you are always in search of knowledge, truth and creative expression. We hope that you will always have a guiding light and provide one for others. Yelena Meira, our little Leo, we can’t wait to hear you roar.
