Grandma of iron and embroidery - Yifat Kates

My job at Grandma Onyo’s home in Petach Tikva was to open the door to the customers who brought items for “artistic repair.” Grandma sat in an upholstered chair on the balcony, opposite a large window with wide-open shutters. I sat to her right, on a stool with four short legs and no armrests. To her right was a perfectly-ordered table bearing threads, needles, all kinds of buttons, and a gray, triangular pin cushion that had undergone an unimaginable journey during the Holocaust, when Grandma Onyo survived by mending clothes for the Germans.

Grandma needed strong light for the work of sewing together threads that made up her “artistic repair.” She had to find the ends and group them together, with such astonishing precision that no-one could have imagined that just a few hours earlier there was a cigarette burn or an unexpected tear in the garment. It sounds like the story of the survival of a person—or of an object. Of repair where there was a fracture. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was.

The afternoon was customer reception time. Grandma would tell me who was due to come—there were no spontaneous visitors. Everything was arranged in a timetable according to the type of repair needed. I waited for the knock at the door, sitting on a clean, olive-green sofa in Grandma’s well-kept living room—a sofa on which I was forbidden to eat, play, or even climb on in my socks. All I could do was wait for the knock at the door. I had a task and responsibility, and I liked it, because it created a connection for conversation between Grandma and me. Proudly, I led the customers into her studio. We passed through the shiny, polished kitchen; although the room looked as if it had never been used, this was where Grandma made food, because that’s how people survive. I already knew some of the customers and remembered their names, and sometimes what they had worn the previous time they came. In particular, I remembered Rosie and Yossi. They came back again and again to repair clothes. They talked with Grandma in Hungarian. I couldn’t understand a word, but often I could feel what they were saying—words of sadness and longing.

You can sense a sad face in any language.

I don’t know how Grandma mended the clothes. It seemed impossible to me that anyone could fix the holes and tears in a woven textile. It all fascinated me, and sometimes I would stick my head between her working hands. In her heavy Hungarian accent, she would say, “Yifat, mind the needle; it’s dangerous.”

My desire to understand the art of mending was stronger than my fear of a needle prick.

My Grandma Onyo died too soon. I did not manage to learn the art of mending from her. But I managed to learn from her how to seek things that need to be brought together. I learned to believe that what seems to be impossible is possible. She performed her work of healing through patience, careful attention to small details, and creativity in finding a solution for tears. She was also able to say that a particular piece could not be mended—professional modesty.

I am the girl who sat on a stool and grew up to become an artist and an art therapist who is not afraid to open a door or be pricked by an embroidery needle. Today I find myself preoccupied with the search for connections, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. My first artworks were embroidery and sewing, and I still work with collage and mixed media. Even today, I am not afraid of connection, of combining materials, and of finding a way to draw opposites closer to each other.

Yefat Kates

yifat.art@gmail.com