In the previous post, I wrote about the Grabbes. I don’t know as much about my paternal grandmother’s family, but it certainly deserves mention. Maria Nikolaevna Bezack Grabbe passed when I was four. She loved chocolate and used to slip me M&Ms when my mom wasn’t looking. My dad grew up in the Saint Petersburg townhouse that belonged to her family. The Bezacks were Huguenots originally from Toulouse, France. My father’s great-great-great grandfather, a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig immigrated at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Dad’s maternal grandmother was the only daughter of a landowner whose holdings included thousands of acres of forest in the Upper Volga. Her brother was a distinguished chemist who established the first thermodynamics laboratory in Russia. Her father rose to high rank in the civil service under Alexander III to become minister of post and telegraph. Dad remembers how his babushka surrounded herself with books, magazines, and newspapers. He writes in Émigré, his memoir, “Grandmother did not like to be disturbed when she was immersed in her reading. At other times, she would listen to me, ask questions, talk to me on every imaginable subject. Many were beyond my grasp, such as why she liked certain authors and what it meant to be civilized and how the words we used could affect our behavior—like the English word, fairness, for instance. ‘It is an English concept, and it’s a good one,’ she told me. ‘We could use some of it in Russia, but we don’t even have a word for it here …’”
