This was a lost day, as is often the case after I go all-in on finishing a longer post. There were things I needed to finish and schedule, followed by a conversation with Youngest Sister. Mostly we talked about family matters, including in-laws and holiday stress, but I also ran a list of books by her to make sure the kids don’t already have the ones we’d like to give them.
“[Oldest Niece] probably has Matilda, since she’s seen the movie 800 times,” I guessed.
She checked a bookshelf and replied “No, she doesn’t have it. I didn’t even know that was a book.”
That was as scandalized as I’ve been in ages — who doesn’t know that Matilda is based on a book? Danny DeVito’s 1996 film adaptation was beloved by my sisters, who once watched it almost daily, and before that Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel was one of my favorite childhood books. It was a gift from a remote great-grandmother, one who lived a half-hour away but rarely visited because she disapproved of my parents’ interfaith union.
She was Papa’s mother — he wouldn’t have called her ‘mom’ — but their relationship was often fractious, as were her relationships with pretty much everyone else. I remember her kosher kitchen and the vases in her condo that us kids weren’t supposed to approach. Her prized fur coats, which looked heavier than she was, left a lasting impression. But her legacy is that of Grandma Bitch.
It was the moniker my mom and my aunt secretly gave her, one I heard so many times as a tot that I mistakenly thought it was her name. (The two of them still laugh about that.) She wanted her furs and baubles to attract attention and on one memorable occasion they did — she and Papa were carjacked in the ’70s or ’80s, a crime that became a kidnapping when the perpetrator drove off with her still in the car.
She was released unharmed a ways down the road and it became a family joke (told only behind her back): “He was going to hold her for ransom, but once she started talking he knew no one would pay to get her back.” Or “Soon he realized jail was preferable to one more minute with her.” Despite her unflattering reputation, she was never rude to me — just indifferent.
I was her first great-grandchild and because I was halachically Jewish, thanks to matrilineal descent, my birth nudged her to tepidly tolerate my father. But other than writing a $36 check on my birthday, she had little to do with me. By the time of my hospitalizations in the early 1990s, she was in poor health and made no appearances. Instead, she called a local B. Dalton and asked them to assemble a care package of chapter books that somehow ended up at my bedside. Included were Strawberry Girl, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and Matilda.
It was my good fortune she either hadn’t known Roald Dahl was a notorious anti-Semite or hadn’t asked the bookseller what they selected. Otherwise she might’ve nixed Matilda, which I immediately fell in love with — as all bookish girls do, including Crankenstein. Though we eliminated many duplicates from our libraries once we moved in together, we retained our respective childhood copies of Matilda, which had provided as much warmth and comfort as any teddy bear or baby blanket.
Other than Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Fifty Shades of Grey, Youngest Sister wasn’t much of a reader; maybe her offhanded “I didn’t even know it was a book!” remark shouldn’t have been so shocking. Our niece will have her own copy of Matilda by the end of the month and I hope, to paraphrase Dahl, her strong young mind continues to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea, and that these books give her the same hopeful and comforting message they gave Matilda (and countless others, including her aunts): She is not alone.