New story for 80 Minutes Around the World

Why my grandmother was a serious badass.

I performed this last night at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago as part of “80 Minutes Around the World,” an immigration storytelling show organized by Nestor Gomez. There will be a video of me performing it!!

In one of my favorite songs, American country singer Brad Paisley sings about an adoptive father, “I hope I’m at least half the dad that he didn’t have to be.”

I’ve applied variations of that line to a few people, including my grandmother, Anna Nessy Perlberg: she embodied many things that she didn't have to.

She told me about a time she and my grandfather were in a restaurant where the owner was blasting a television program—at full volume—about “illegal immigrants taking American jobs.”

My grandmother stood up in the restaurant and shouted, “Turn that down! I’m an immigrant!” and proceeded to get in an argument with the owner, also an immigrant. She never said if he turned down the TV, but it didn’t matter. She was righteous and proud to stand up for justice, including with her work on the Board of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

She will always be among the most important people in my life. When I was in high school, where I had no friends, she called me on the phone every day after school, and I wrote my college admissions essay about our relationship.

In 2011, after I graduated from college, my grandmother fell and went to rehab for six weeks. I moved into her apartment in Chicago to keep it secure. This unexpectedly turned into six years of us living together.

The two of us made quite the pair. We took up all the space on the sidewalk: her, a small, diminutive eighty-something-year-old woman with a cane, and me, a big, tall twenty-something-year-old man holding her other arm, sometimes telling her to please move over so that others could walk by. “I’m entitled,” she’d say with a crowd unable to pass. I suspect she felt that way because of her age and her trauma during World War II.

As a Holocaust refugee, she was half-Catholic and half-Jewish, and her family came to the U.S. in 1939, barely escaping the Nazis from her birthplace of Prague. She was an example of living history. She taught me a lot about the war, the Europe that she knew, and her early life in this country.

And we both adored music. Her mother, Julia Nessy, had been a touring opera singer in the 1930s in Europe and the first female harpist in the Czech Symphony before their family was forced to flee. My grandmother and I didn’t always see eye to eye: sometimes her Eurocentric sense of aesthetics kept her from appreciating some grittier singers that I loved, like Otis Redding. We both loved, however, to listen to Ella Fitzgerald, with that mellifluous, smooth-like-melted-butter voice that to this day makes me feel joy like nothing else. More than any other, Ella’s voice was one that we could share. Music was a lifeline bridging our generation gap.

In her late eighties, my grandmother wrote a memoir, The House in Prague, that was published in 2016. The book was inspired in part by her speaking to groups of children, many of whom were immigrants like herself, for Chicago Public Schools classrooms where my brother, Mike, taught. These middle school students connected with her deeply because they, too, had lost their language and culture when they came to the U.S.

They came from Honduras, Albania, Mexico, and other places that could not have been more different than her birthplace of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). But in some ways, she had more in common with them than with her own children and grandchildren, who had not had such experiences. After The House in Prague was published, she received emails and phone calls from readers all over the world, including South Africa, Australia, and Slovakia, who resonated with her story.

Over time, her vision and hearing deteriorated, and we learned in 2017 that her health was failing with pancreatic cancer. With fascist tendencies in U.S. politics, she was terrified. In the hospital, when doctors asked if there was anyone she did not want visiting her, she instantly said, “Trump!”

Towards the end, when she was lying in bed, dopey on pain meds and barely awake, she said, in a soft, fragile voice, something I’ll never forget: “We’ll listen to music together across the skies.” And I, too, believed that our relationship would continue after her death. I was there when she died six days later at a hospice care facility at age eighty-nine. I’ll never forget her.

In the years since my grandmother’s death, my greatest professional source of joy and enrichment has been working as an embedded tutor—like a teaching assistant—in English classes at Truman College, one of the City Colleges in Chicago. I joined Truman as a Consultant in their Writing Center a month before she passed. I love working with students as an embedded tutor on their reading and writing, especially because I’ve struggled with both.

I’ve most often worked in ESL classes with many immigrant students, and it has been one of the most inspiring and rewarding things I’ve ever done. With everything happening in the world, these students give me hope, including in their willingness to learn from mistakes.

This year, watching immigrant students perform at a storytelling event, organized by nationally renowned storyteller Nestor Gomez, reminded me of the exceptional motivation of these students . . . and the tenacity of my fearless grandmother, who connected with immigrant students before and after the publication of her memoir.

At the event, the sound system played music of each student’s choice from their home country. My grandmother probably would have loved classical music from her native Czechoslovakia, like a symphony from Antonín Dvořák, to introduce her story. But her spirit was there, listening with me across the skies.

And now I think, I hope I’m at least half the courageous lifelong learner, activist, and storyteller that she—and each of these students—didn’t have to be.