by Wendy Peck

A man with thick glasses sits on a bench reading. He is tall, fair, and younger looking than his 36 years. It is a mild Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1962 in suburban New Jersey. The man is supposed to be watching his young daughter in a crowded playground. But mainly he reads his New York Times.

Seated next to him is an older woman wearing a printed red headscarf. The man looks up from the newspaper to watch his child negotiate a turn on the slide. There are other playground negotiations—who gets to do what when. The woman in the headscarf turns to the man, points at the dark-haired girl, and asks in a foreign language, “Is that your child?” The language is not foreign to the man who answers, in Yiddish, “Yes, that is my 4-year-old daughter.”

The two sit in companionable silence, watching the playground action. The older woman’s headscarf is called, in Russian, a babushka. She emigrated from the Pale of Settlement in Russia/Poland in the first decade of the 20^th century. Or this is what the man surmises because the woman looks like his grandmother. That is also how he knows the language—he overheard it spoken in his childhood home in South Philadelphia.

They watch his young daughter in the playground, see how she holds her ground with the older children, especially the boys. After a few minutes of careful observation, the old woman lifts her left hand, bends her index finger, points to the young girl, and declares “SHE wouldn’t have let the Cossacks spit in her soup.”

He does not know yet what her inner strength will bring. But the old woman knows.