It has been ten days since my grandmother’s funeral and I have been, if not enjoying this past week, definitely enjoying telling stories about her life and her influence on her grandchildren.  She died at age 99, laying down to take a rest because she did not feel well — the Torah writes that those who die in their sleep are Tzadek, truly righteous, and I know she belongs in that category.  I popped in last week to talk to my dean briefly and proceeded to tell him the following:  I made it all the way through law school before I believed at all that perhaps, perhaps, women were not quite as assertive as men in negotiations when I found, in the year that I taught negotiation at Stanford, more of the women needed some work on being more assertive and more of the men needed some work on listening.   Now, that has not been the case in every class that I have taught over the years and it was a pretty simplistic view of each student’s skill sets at the time but . . . the point was that it did not even occur to me that there were gender differences in levels of assertiveness because I never saw any in my family. (Just ask my brother, husband, or brothers-in-law!)   I had read about these so-called gender differences in my negotiation class.   I just did not buy it — no one I knew would ever have been subject to that description.  And, with Mama’s passing, I realize how indebted I am to her for my understanding of negotiation. 

Over the past 15 years in particular, as I have led an “adult” life — marriage, kids, career — I also started to view my grandmother as a three-dimensional adult and not just the relatively limited view that grandchildren tend to have of their grandparents, particularly when we are children. 

This is not to say that she failed in any classic grandmother category — her unwavering support of all of us was amazing — and my brother rather hilariously eulogized my grandmother last week by noting that she was convinced that each job he ever had was filled after a nationwide search for the smartest and most talented person in which he was selected above all others.  But she also had a life beyond us — at least before us — and the stories of her life were lessons for me.  She was a high school accounting teacher — yes, she excelled at math — facing a law which stated that all teachers had to quit the moment they got pregnant but had to return to work immediately — the kind of law that was clearly not drafted by anyone who had ever been pregnant.  I loved the story of how when she got pregnant with my uncle she lied about when she got pregnant so that she could work longer—she had two “seventh month babies” in fact.  And then, after he was born, she connived with the doctor to write a note that the baby was sickly so that she could stay home to nurse him. 

Of course, that is only part of the story — and my grandmother made sure that I knew all of the stories of strong women in my family.  The doctor in this case was my great, great Aunt Rayah — who had been a doctor with the White Army in the Russian Revolution before coming to this country and restarting her medical practice.  Another set of stories focused on my namesake, my great-grandmother Anna, who had come to the U.S. in 1904 at the age of 17 all by herself.  She later sent for her parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. as she earned enough money to send passage for each of them.   And, although she never attended college, she made sure that all four of her children, including my grandmother and my aunt, went to college and had professions.  One last story about Anna – when my grandmother and grandfather were married, in 1933 at the height of the Depression, they bought a new bedroom set at a furniture store that went bankrupt in between payment and delivery.  My great-grandmother apparently went to the store and physically sat on the furniture until they delivered it.  She had a rather persuasive negotiation approach. 

So, Mama, thank you for all of your stories.  I hope not to have to negotiate by sitting on my purchased goods until they are delivered — but because of you, I know that I would be more than capable of doing so if the situation warranted.