Love, Baba Nina Galinsky ’26 I sat on the edge of my bed each night as a child while my Baba tucked the blanket carefully around my shoulders, smoothing it the way one does when trying to keep something from unraveling. My room smelled faintly of linen and old books. The lamp beside us cast a small yellow circle onto my blanket, holding us inside its light while the rest of the room dissolved into shadow. Slowly, a Jewish woman born in Persia and her American granddaughter established a ritual. To my seven-year-old mind, many of her tales sounded implausible, ranging from the existence of aliens to her life in Iran before the revolution, though she spoke of both with equal conviction. Some of my earliest memories are not of myself, but of the stories Baba Maria told me before I fell asleep. She handed me books first - A Series of Unfortunate Events quickly became my favorite, though I suspect she appreciated the irony more than I did. The pages bent slightly at the corners from my fingers, and she would wait patiently for me to finish each chapter before turning off the light. When the lights went out, she told me about her own childhood instead. Growing up on Ferdousi Street with Mount Elbruz framed perfectly in her window gave her both beauty and uncertainty. “Women walked past our window in silk dresses and high heels,” she would tell me. She remembered sitting on the cool tile floor near the balcony, watching laundry sway in the dry heat, her mother polishing the silver candlesticks before Shabbat. She told me about walking to her convent-run boarding school, and I struggled to reconcile her childhood with the woman beside me. Iran had been different then, she said. Europe too. Everything had been. As time passed, my bed grew smaller, and stories gave way to conversation. Fairy tales were replaced by news articles. Her storytelling now arrives in my inbox, usually written the same way. Dear Nina, I have just sent you another article that may interest you. 42
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