Ugogo and Umzukulu: The Power of Storytelling Amongst All Generations

Sarah Gorbatov
 
I’ve always been around the elderly. I lived with my grandparents for several years after my parents

first divorced. They practically raised me, teaching me to put Vaseline in my nose before leaving the

house so I don’t catch a cold, to bite my tongue whenever I say something foreboding or displeasing,

and to fake it until I make it. Literally. My great-grandmother Sarah, who passed when my

grandmother was only 8 and whom I am named after, pretended to be a nurse so she could flee

Belarus during World War II. 

With the seniors in the JCC where I attend high school, I have succinct, yet sage encounters in the

hallways. With my neighbors, I enjoy blissful summer afternoons on their porch, myself sweltering

as Ada shifts her attention from the man mowing his front lawn across the street and smiles smugly.

Even as I’ve grown into a stubborn, ignorant 14-year-old, I’m still “sweet Sarochka” according to

my grandmother, “nice girl” according to Lenny of the Better Together program, and “umzukulu”

according to Ada. They often tell me I’m an old soul and that I’m not like the rest of the kids these

days. I hadn’t known what this meant for a while, but I accepted it as a compliment. 

 
I’ve spent a great deal of my time with Ada, who, in a strange yet comforting way, seems to have

always been old. In 1932, Ada was born to a Bantu tribe in South Africa. After the National Party

gained power in 1948, that same year she fell in love with a White South African, a man two years

older than herself to whom she felt inexplicably and incontrovertibly bound. He had a fierce temper

and a desire, a tendency to domineer as the central pulse of her life. She was his and he was hers.

But however much he struggled against the Party, against the apartheid, and against losing Ada, he

wasn’t strong enough. For 43 years, he and Ada lived apart and never saw each other until, in 1991,

crossing paths on the shores of Cape Town, Ada alone and Christopher with one hand upheaving a

young, perhaps 4-year-old girl, and the other clasping the hand of a fair-skinned, grey-haired woman

Ada’s age. No words were spoken. At least out loud. 

During Mandela’s presidency in 1996, Ada decided to immigrate to New York. Having received no

education and thus having no “professional” abilities beyond knowing her way around a canvas, she

became a street artist in the East Village. Living in a studio and off of food stamps, she recognized

both her poverty and her despondency. The city offered a rich, culturally diverse environment, yet

she often felt lost and struggling. Its imposing architecture came across as too imperial, too distant,

too foreign, and out of touch. Four years after coming to America, she moved to the suburbs and put
down her roots in a townhouse on Cobblestone Way in Tenafly, New Jersey. A decade later, after

my sister Arielle’s birth, my family, putting our utmost faith in the Tenafly public school district,

also settled on Cobblestone Way. I was 5 at the time and preoccupied with my kindergartenly duties

and American Girl dolls, but I did notice Ada and she did me. 

“Hello, I’m Sarah. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, but you seem nice. Hello.” 

“Hello, I’m Ada. And I am nice.” 

From this simple, congenial exchange blossomed something incomparable, a relationship from

which I have learned everything there is to know. 

Throughout the years, after many a bike ride around the block from post to pillar and pillar to post, I

race up the stairs to Ada’s porch panting and collapse into a wooden swing alongside her. As I

sprawl, it vigorously sways back and forth and a displeased expression appears on Ada’s face. 

“Umzukulu, how many more times do I have to tell you not to do that? You know that I can fall and

hurt myself. Do you want me to hurt myself?”

I bite my tongue. “No, Ugogo.” 

Umzukulu means “granddaughter” in Zulu and Ugogo “grandmother.” She started addressing me

and I her as such a mere week after our first encounter. Ada never married. Never had children.

Never fell in love after 1948. 

Hastily forgiving my reckless behavior and noticing my withered condition, she hands me a BOS

that’s been waiting to quench my parched tongue on a small, white circular table to her left. As I

gulp down the tea and then bring my hand to my mouth to wipe it clean, Ada begins to relay a story

about the time she overheard her mother being screamed at for bringing home gooseberries too

green for her father’s liking and thereafter being kicked in the stomach repeatedly. Or rather, the 17

times she overheard this happen and the hundred times more it did in private behind closed doors.

Her detached, almost philosophical narrating of this tragic past lays bare the grief and sorrow that

overshadow much of her former life. That past is both a lense and a filter through which she sees the
world around her. She is kind and generous, yet she is acutely aware of how degrading the bottom of

our existence may be.

As snickering children zip by on their scooters, the mailman delivers a wedding invitation to the

door front of the Taufields, and the warm wind whistles in the branches of a Weeping Willow, the

stories Ada tells are not always pleasant. Some make me cry, some leave me aggravated, some

doubtful, some puzzled, some challenged, some probing to be told more and more and more, and

some happy. But no matter my emotion, hers remains unchanging. Her eyes remain wide and gazing

into mine. Her lips remain the color of caramel, plump and prepossessing. And her coal-black afro

remains still, despite the wavering wind. 

She then reaches to her left and with the press of a button, Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers To Cross

plays. Slowly closing her eyes, she starts snapping her fingers with her left hand, every part of her

moving. With her right hand, she takes hold of both of mine. She feels soft, untouchable. Like a

baby. 

Ada loves music—reggae, soul, folk, rock, pop, opera. She says if she had to pick three musical

compositions to listen to for the rest of her life, they’d be Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Cyndi Lauper’s

She Bop, and the Beatles’ Michelle, indubitably. Ada also loves to swear. Her favorite obscenities

are -----

and ----.  Unlike most others who blaspheme, her way of doing so somehow enhances the clarity of

her thoughts, amplifies the emotional content of what she feels, and brings her stories to life.

Ada knows how to plant and how to build a fire. She’s the wildest, yet the gentlest person I’ve ever

met. She’s unceremonious and difficult to please. She’s headstrong, yet small and delicate-featured.

She’s interested in everything and everyone.

More than anything else, Ada tells me stories. At this, she’s phenomenal. She knows all the

fundamental elements: love, mystery, and trouble. In her anecdotes, there’s tragedy, comedy, a

defiant woman who would not be defeated, a man who would receive his comeuppance, a

community that ostracizes the heroine. Some were historical tales and others fantastical fables, but

either way, I was always consumed, moved, and educated. Sometimes, I would tell my own stories.

I’d bring my long-lost great-grandparents to life, I’d blithely detail a crush I had on Jack or Adam or
Matthew, and I’d recite an uproarious argument my parents had had the night before. We’d laugh,

sing, dance when she was in the mood for it, argue, cry, sit in silence. We’d always be doing

something, and that something was always powered by a story. 

This is what we’ll lose if we don’t communicate with our elders: oral history. For instance, how

many of us are knowledgeable about the intimate trivialities of the Kardashians’ lives but don’t

know the love stories of our own parents? The sorrows, the joys, and the tribulations of the older

generations provide us examples to emulate, to learn from, or even to avoid. Age segregation, with

all the current boomer and gen z labeling, is becoming more and more ingrained in our culture. What

history will be repeated? What misconceptions will flourish and be revivified? 

Ada, just like everyone else, is not perfect. She can be xenophobic and homophobic in a very

unabashed but also casual manner that many of her generation share solely because they don’t know

better. They’re not hateful, and they don’t mean to be hurtful. When I was younger, as I learned that

the slurs she used occasionally were not appropriate, I taught her as such. I educated her.  

We must decide if it’s better to segregate each other or to embrace everything there is to give one

another, fostering enjoyment, knowledge, and mutual respect. People of all ages have value. Our

elders are our past, and the past is all we have to weave our own stories together. It is a foundation

for the future and our ability to sustain it and form history out of it is what makes our species so

remarkable.

Now, we have a strange new beast on our hands: COVID-19. Normally, human contact between

elders and those younger is encouraged, but now this exact contact is deadly. At play is a terrible

irony—in order to mitigate the virus we must increase elders’ social isolation. By severing

intergenerational relationships, the coronavirus has disrupted all past approaches families have taken

toward coping with disaster. And through whatever peculiarity of biology, the virus spares children.

As a result, Americans seem to be relieved about its selective mercy. But the very probable product

of this pandemic, just as most others throughout history, will again reveal our more basic, instinctual

inequities. For us children and our parents, this will mean that mortality rates are only the beginning

of the story. 
At this time, more than any other, I am agonized over Ada’s well-being. She’s 88 and lives alone.

And although I live just across the train tracks from her, I can’t visit. I can’t console her, and she

can’t console me. We still call each other, listen to music, and talk, but it’s not the same, and will it

ever be? Ada sometimes wonders whether, when the virus recedes, people will hug each other again,

or if that practice will simply disappear. I can tell she feels a loss of herself and that she’s painfully

lonely, and that pains me. All I can do now is call, wait, and convey this story. 

I’ve never told anyone about Ada before. Not even my parents or sister. Partly because she doesn’t

want to be known but also because knowing someone, loving them, and learning from them is

intimacy in its prime, something that should never be obstructed. Yet here I am telling you all of this

and passing on the story of Ada and myself because I believe it must be heard. It’s a story from

which we can all learn, especially now.