Babushka

Yet, much as I loved to listen to it, standing there in the heat of all the lighted candles and dressed in my heavy shuba and felt boots, I invariably, halfway through the service, would begin to feel an intolerable pain across my shoulders which would spread across my back, gradually getting worse, until in the end I was forced to go to the back of the church and find a corner on a bench especially placed there for all the old babushkas and dedushkas who were also unable to bear the strain of standing throughout the whole service.

There was a 92-year-old babushka who was injured, and we put her on the stretcher and helped get her out.

As a boy, I hand-made pelmeni with my babushka Alla, my hands and face covered in flour as we worked in the cold of my grandparents’ basement in Paterson, New Jersey.

White Parian bust of smiling Russian peasant woman - with babushka covering head, lovely detail work, 21½″ tall

“Say hello to old Stanley,” he called as she pattered down the steps into the street, flung a babushka over her license plate and screeched away down Telegraph.

The crowd falls silent, momentarily stunned, while a heavyset woman in a babushka pushes her way through, broadcasting the news […].

The present inhabitants of the Kremlin […] have rigged the Constitution in a series of articles which fit into each other like those wooden babushkas Russian peasants used to make, so that, as one shell after another is removed, the effective power finally resides in the tiny babushka in the inmost center.