In Her Hands. My First Substack Publication
I am sharing a preview of my Substack work here in hope of enticing you to join me over there! Which you can do by here
In her hands are the strands of dough that she plaits into a challah on Friday afternoon. In her hands is a sprig of dill that she holds up to her little boy’s face, so that he knows what her childhood smells like. In her hands is a black-and-white photograph of her great-grandmother, which she shows to her daughter, so that the little one knows who she is named after. In her hands is the history of her ancestors, which she weaves into a colourful tapestry of scents, flavours, and stories—to make sense of, and make the most of, her own life here and now.
Welcome to my new endeavour. I am so grateful that in the myriad of options on Substack, you made the choice to be here with me. After working professionally in the world of food for ten years, I felt a new calling. Following a wider trend set by so many food writers I admire, I have started my own newsletter. Here, I will try to give you a taste of what’s to come, and share a bit about my family and my own creative journey. I hope that some of it will resonate with you.
Many years ago, I created a photography project that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would become one of the most meaningful things I have ever produced. It was my A-level graduation exam, simply entitled Autobiography. Without much hesitation, I focused the project on my great-grandmother, Rosalia. It was 2001, and she was in her early 90s. I travelled back to my hometown in Siberia and spent a few hours in her small Soviet-era flat, taking portraits of her in the kitchen. She was a bit self-conscious and confused, failing to see what was so special about her that merited a dedicated photo session.
And then I looked at her hands.
They became the key subject of my project. Hands That Raised Me became the title of the show, and the central image was a black-and-white photograph of her hand, resting palm-up on the kitchen table. I printed it as large as the school photo studio would allow, and suspended it in the air on a fishing line, to give the impression of weightlessness—of timelessness. It felt as if, if you quieted your mind enough, you could hear the photograph speak to you. The hand was pillowy soft, with deep grooves that held so many stories. It was the hand that comforted me to sleep when I was a little girl; Rosalia, who shared a room with me, put me to bed every single night. It was the hand that fed me my first meals. It was the hand that held mine when I walked to school.
It was as if the photograph called out to me—it knew it had to be taken—for it would become the very last photograph ever taken of my great-grandmother. She passed away later that year. The photograph itself also disappeared; it somehow got lost in the twenty-odd years since it was exhibited in my school show. I still have the other images from that photo session in her little kitchen, but the hand itself is gone. At times, I feel regret and anger on a visceral level for losing it; other times, a calm acceptance washes over me, and I appreciate the fleeting nature of life, of people, of objects.
Rosalia’s hand—and her life story—have guided me ever since that photography project first showed me the value of understanding one’s past in order to make sense of one’s present identity. Often, when I reflect on my career, I feel embarrassed by its seeming lack of coherence: cultural events organiser, film history scholar, budding university lecturer, translator, caterer, cookbook author. Yet there is a thread that, at times, comes to the fore more prominently and at other times recedes into the background. It is the exploration of my family’s lineage—our story—as a lens through which to explore and try to make sense of the bigger picture.
In my early twenties, when I worked in cultural and film exhibition, I attempted to write a film script based on Rosalia’s and my grandfather Yuri’s wartime experiences. The idea remains etched in my memory, and to this day I can recall the scenes and recite lines from the script, even though the document itself was lost in a sudden laptop crash.
In my late twenties, I embarked (perhaps a bit prematurely) on a PhD research project exploring cultural memory and the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. After earning my doctorate, I made a U-turn and decided to cook for a living. I have never felt closer to Rosalia than I did at that point—she too earned her living working in various Soviet-era canteens. Sharing her story on the radio—a genuine pinch-me moment to this day—was the first step toward my career in food writing. The first cookbook I wrote, in 2019, was dedicated to Rosalia, the woman “who showed me that the act of feeding is the act of love.” It featured many of her much-loved recipes.
You’d think that by this point I might have felt satisfied enough to leave the subject in peace. But the reality was completely different. The more I did, the more I felt it wasn’t enough. A nagging, sometimes anxiety-inducing feeling often left me frustrated. And then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Soon after, October 7th happened. My world—already fragmented—was blown apart. The ensuing pain, bewilderment, and solitude made me long for the childhood comfort of Rosalia’s hand, stroking my hair at bedtime. Her Ukrainianness and her Jewishness became the two staples holding up the crumbling foundation of my identity.
Rather than continuing to berate myself with the useless question—“Why can’t my identity be more uniform?” “Why can’t I be comfortably and proudly from just one place?”—I finally opened up to the painful complexity of my identity. I carry labels like Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, Soviet, immigrant, British.
As a diligent former PhD student, I continue to formulate key questions in my (re)search.
Today, the question looks like this: What does it mean to be a descendant of a Ukrainian-Jewish woman who lived most of her life in Siberia under the Soviet regime? What was it about her presence and her contribution to my life that compels me—sometimes obsessively—to lean deeper into the Jewish part of my roots? To ensure that my children feel connected to this lineage?