Opinion | My Grandma, Rasputin

A few months ago, I was in the back seat of a cab in New York with my parents. They were having the kind of conversation that’s easy to ignore: flight plans, work grievances, my father’s mother’s recent move to a nursing home at a small town in central Israel. I zoned out. Then I heard them grumbling. Something about how my grandma, Talia, had been sowing trouble at the nursing home. Something about how she had quietly, behind the scenes, fomented an insurrection. I turned to look at my parents with a squint and they smiled. Because they realized that they had been, unintentionally, describing just the kind of character that I’ve been obsessing over for years.

Political advisers, influential pop producers, sports gurus — in my estimation, any character wielding power that is not technically theirs is an interesting one. I call them Rasputins, after the most famous behind-the-scenes operator in history: Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, a quasi-holy-man Siberian peasant, who was assassinated just over a century ago in a hit motivated by his perceived control over the czar and the czarina of the Russian Empire.

As the historian Douglas Smith’s 2016 biography showed, the actual manner of Rasputin’s control over Russia’s royalty has been overblown, misunderstood and purposefully mangled for decades. And I suppose I’m doing some of that mangling now myself. But it’s still a lot of fun to obsess over him as some sort of evil-genius master manipulator and to look for his legacy in everyone from Aleksandr Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s alleged ideological Rasputin, to Rosario Murillo, the powerful Rasputin-slash-first lady behind Nicaragua’s tyrannical leader, Daniel Ortega.

How had my parents neglected to mention I had a Rasputin in the family? And that it was my dear savta?

My dad sketched out the situation.

“She doesn’t like the movies they’re showing at the nursing home.”

What’s wrong with the movies at the nursing home?

“They’re too old. And they tape them off the TV.”

What movies does she want?

“New ones!”

So what’s her tactic?

“She’s going from one person to another, creating a front without the management understanding where it was coming from. And all of a sudden there’s complaints from 10 to 15 people who never complained before. The management told me they suspected it was her. But they couldn’t figure it out.”

I’d always known my grandmother to be a difficult character. Once, when we were out to dinner, a leg on her chair broke and she tipped slightly, lightly over. She promptly put the fear of God in the restaurant and its staff, a fear that did not subside until she was given the largest, truly the largest, brownie sundae I’ve ever seen. And while she was full of love, without a doubt, she also had an almost preternatural ability to make you feel like garbage.

I’d never really known her to mess with anyone toward any particular end, though. I always thought she just had a nihilistic streak, especially when we talked politics and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. She once announced to me that she didn’t like Jerusalem. “Why not?” I asked, taking the bait. “Too many Arabs,” she said. Then a long pause: “And too many Jews.” She also has a few jokes she likes to repeat, apolitical jokes, and yet so extreme and so strange that I can’t even hint at their contents here.

After that conversation in the cab, my dad revealed that in Gibton, the tiny village where Talia had lived most of her life, she’d managed to pull strings for decades. The local council allocated one vote to every household, but since Talia’s home was built on a plot of land officially owned by her sister, that meant she didn’t have a vote. And yet, my dad explained, again and again, referendums on local transportation issues, on garbage pickup, on rezoning rules consistently seemed to break Talia’s way.

“It’s the same thing, always,” my dad said. “She’s stirring the pot. Making people feel like they’re being taken advantage of” — unless they side with her point of view.

I’d sniffed out Rasputins in political organizations, in pop culture partnerships, in drug cartels. I had to know how my grandma was doing it in the nursing home.

So I call Talia in the nursing home. Savta, what’s wrong with the movies?

“It’s not movies from the cinema! They record them from the television! I don’t know where they get them! And it’s not a big screen! It’s a nice auditorium, too. Now they’re doing a nice Purim party. They’ll be singing, dancing. But I don’t know where they get these movies from.”

What movies do you want?

“I want cinema movies. New ones! Good ones!”

So is it working? Are you managing to convince people? She sounded deflated.

“It won’t work. I’m just two months here. They’ll call me a nudnikit. They’ll say, ‘She complains about everything.’”

It didn’t sound as if she was managing to Rasputin the situation after all. Maybe the insurrection was just a flash of her old Rasputin ways. A little pulse of her old special arts and dark talents. I had worried that the whole situation — my obsession with Rasputins finding its way into my family — was almost too perfect.