My grandmother, Anna Nessy Perlberg, was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known, and I was beyond lucky to call her my best friend in Chicago. She called me every day when I got home from high school, where I was bullied and had no friends, so her love and support meant the world to me.
She lived in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago for about half a century and loved it there, full of gay bars and nightlife. Her daughter (my mother) and I joke that she had a gay male fan club that evolved over the years. Seriously, if you go to one location of the Ann Sather restaurant near there and ask Mike, the manager, about Anna Perlberg, I’m sure he’ll have all sorts of kind words and funny stories to share. She was truly one of a kind.
In my life, though, it took her some time to believe that I’m gay. I realized it somewhere around eighth grade, and when I told her around 2002, she was sweet but patronizing: “You don’t know that!” My grandfather didn’t believe it either initially, but when I told them again five years later for National Coming Out Day, their feelings had changed, and they started to accept it.
In the spring of 2009, after my grandfather had died, I applied for an educational scholarship from a local chapter of PFLAG, the pro-LGBTQ organization—and was honored as one of the recipients. When I came back from college for that ceremony, I was grateful that my parents and grandmother came to support me.
When we were going around the circle introducing ourselves, my grandmother looked at me and said, “And I’m so proud of my gay grandson!” That was deeply meaningful to me because there were other recipients there whose families had disowned them. That was truly one of the greatest moments of my life.
I almost started crying right there. People who know me say that I’m more prone to crying than most men, though my skin is metaphorically much thicker than it used to be. In some ways she accepted me as gay more than I did because at the time I was struggling with internalized homophobia. I’ll always be grateful for her acceptance—and pride.
In 2011, after I had graduated from college, my grandmother fell and went to rehab to heal for six weeks. I moved to her apartment in Chicago at my mother’s request to keep it secure. I also took care of her dog and took in the mail until she returned. This unexpectedly turned into a long-term arrangement that lasted six years until she passed away.
Our relationship deepened over time and became more reciprocal. I helped make her feel safe in any way I could, running errands like grocery shopping and keeping her company, and she gave me a place to live while I was applying for work and graduate schools in the city, as well as an understanding ear during some rough years of depression.
She was one of the kindest people I’ll ever know, and I know she loved me like maybe nobody else in my life. She was a great listener, and I hope I became a better one because of her. She always showed great attentiveness when I came to her with anything, showing in her eyes that she cared. She accepted me as I was, although we didn’t usually discuss me being gay.
The two of us were quite the pair. We took up all the space on the sidewalk, especially with the patios in the summer: 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 pass by. “I’m entitled,” she’d say with a crowd of people unable to pass. I suspect that she felt entitled because of her age and because of the trauma that she had been through during World War II.
She was a Holocaust refugee, half-Catholic and half-Jewish, whose 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 and the Europe that she knew and about her early life in this country, and I would discuss what was important to me, such as issues of music and African American history that I studied in college.
And we both adored music. Her mother, Julia Nessy, had been a touring opera singer in the 1930s and 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 the beauty in some grittier singers that I loved, such as 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.
My grandmother and I had a lot of fun together. Her sense of humor never left her. In her last years, she started saying, “Fact” as a single-word sentence after I did, except she would yell it: “FACT!” I’m sure it sounds like a sitcom: a gay twentysomething living with his grandmother, taking care of each other. We bonded over how much we both hated commercial Christmas music—I can still hear her in my head saying, “Enough with ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire’!” She also, for reasons unknown to me, hated when people said they were “blessed”; she was not religious, and perhaps the word felt sentimental. I joked with her shortly before she died that with her watching over me, “I’ll be so blessed,” to which she responded by giggling and saying, “Shut up.”
In her late eighties, she wrote a memoir, The House in Prague, that was published in 2016. I helped with some of the technical aspects of putting the book together. 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 couldn’t have been more different than her birthplace of Czechoslovakia (as it was then called then). In some ways she had more in common with them than with her own children and grandchildren, who had not had those 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. Getting her Holocaust immigration story published at the end of her life was especially meaningful because she had supported and encouraged my grandfather’s career as a writer and poet throughout their fifty-five-year marriage. Because she had never ventured out on her own as a writer, when I said to her that my grandfather would be so proud of her, she quickly replied, “Oh, I’m not doing it for him! I’m doing it for me!” Hearing that made me overjoyed.
Over time, her vision and hearing deteriorated, and we learned in 2017 that her health was failing with pancreatic cancer. I’m grateful that I was part of her dying process. 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 that sounded like a prayer: “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 in the north suburbs of Chicago at age eighty-nine.
Our family held a memorial service for my grandmother in March 2018 at the Art Institute of Chicago, where my grandfather had held poetry readings with the Poetry Center of Chicago, which he had cofounded. I read two pieces that I wrote about how much she means to me. The first was an essay I wrote for my college applications in 2005 about our relationship. The second was a song I wrote for her around 2010; after I read her the lyrics, she told me, “Read that at my funeral”:
All of high school was never easy
I came home dejected every day
But there was one thing that I could look forward to
A phone call where she’d always say
“I love you” and “I’m so proud of you”
Those words I never heard outside
And every day, we’d find something new to talk about
But if not, I was still glad I had her on my side
Always there for me, always let me know I was loved
Always there when I needed an ear
She wouldn’t miss an occasion I was involved in for the world
And now I offer words for the world to hear
Grandma might just be one reason I’m still here
I wrote my college essay after many attempts at writing about
The music I love, when I got the idea in my head
My relationship with her was far more meaningful to me
Than anything I’d listened to or read
Years later, I got a scholarship for my successes in school
From an organization that accepted me with pride
At the ceremony, she was there, and she said for all the world to hear,
“I’m so proud of my gay grandson,” and I almost cried
Always there for me, always let me know I was loved
Always there when I needed an ear
She wouldn’t miss an occasion I was involved in for the world
And now I offer words for the world to hear
Grandma might just be one reason I’m still here.
Every word was true. I’ll never forget her.
Recently, I heard a song called “Grandma’s Garden” by Zac Brown, in which Brown sings, “And without her, I’d never had a prayer.” All I can say is, amen, both before and after I moved into her apartment: I don’t know if I would’ve made it through high school without her. And me moving into her apartment was the catalyst for so many great things that have happened to me in the last decade: graduate school, publications, and a far richer work history, community, and social life.
And then there’s Bill Withers’s song, “Grandma’s Hands.” If there is such a thing as heaven and I get there, I will indeed look for Grandma’s hands—and feel Grandma’s pride as her gay grandson. FACT!
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