Once Upon A Time
This is a story about my grandmother Alica, a kind-hearted soul of the years past, who relived the literary greatness of her youth in the motherland through the telling of bedtime stories to her adopted grandchildren. The tale that was told was in the time when the grownups were children in their days.
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“Once upon a time there was ghost,” uttered my grandmother Alica in the slang of her speech as she told her grandchildren their usual bedtime story. No, the stories were not meant to be scary, but of the lore of her birthplace. They were rather unusual stories to be told to wee ones before the closing of the eyes.
That was the way with my granny. Children of our age were treated to fables of the Grimm Brothers or the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson, but these tales were not for us. Our grandmother told us stories she heard in her early years in Russia; tales which were written by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and so forth. These stories remained with her after her flight to the western land after the toppling of Czar Nicholas II in the revolution of the proletariat.
My grandmother Alica was a rather unusual woman in her ways. The corpulent woman, gray-haired and wrinkled in years, had a very strange history and background. She had a passion for the downtrodden and the workers of the world, which started in her early years under the boot of the czar and his Cossack horde. A passion she continued in her new life in the ‘goldena medina’, the USA. She had married and widowed, bore four children, but tragedy followed them in their paths and my mother was the last of her brood. That is a rather long story that would take reams of paper to inscribe.
How we children came to be cared by my