This poem is dedicated to her. She was not educated: the Tsar forbade girls from getting an education, probably because they were indentured to sew for the royals.
In later years I met someone whose grandmother also sewed for the Tsar, and it dawned on me that little girls had to work at the palace to make the clothes.

My mother mentioned that someone came to her mother’s door to ask that the family let little Sophie go.

Apparently the tiny fingers of little girls were assets.

Sam (Wasserman b.1892 d.1949) was a loving, intelligent man who spoke English, Russian, Yiddish and read the “Forward” in Yiddish.

I am not sure whether he sent for my grandmother or if they were married prior to an arrival to the USA. They raised four girls in a walk-up, cold water flat in Brooklyn. My mother told me that when she came to this country Sophie sewed stage costumes, and that when World War II ended, she danced in the street.

When I was six, (grandpa had died when I was 6 months old), grandma and I sat together on my mother’s feather-pillowed couch. I took out my big Golden Dictionary; we looked at the pictures and words together, and I tried to teach her how to read. She spoke mainly Yiddish, and was illiterate, but she was trained to sign her name. She was delicate and gentle, she was smart, very beautiful, and made the best potato blintzes this side of Brooklyn.

Map of area near Odessa, marked in red, with Chișinău (Kishinev). Chișinău is the Polish name for Kishinev, which was once within the Polish borders.

Needles
©2002 by the author, all rights reserved
From The Cerebral Jukebox

Sophie Kolsadt
born in Kiev,
in the province of Kishenev,
in the 1890’s,
(when, one day it was part of Russia
another day, it was Romania,)
was never allowed to go to school;
she was a girl,
but she could sew,
and when she was six,
a tiny girl with long blonde braids and green eyes,
she sewed for
The Tsar of Russia.
At Christmas she was given a dress.

II

I saw a museum exhibit
of the Russian Royal family’s treasures.
There were gold Fabergé eggs that opened and
housed intricate music boxes and dancing ballerinas,
encrusted with jewels and inlaid enamels.
There were garments of silk, awash in seas of tiny seed pearls,
heavy woven brocades of gold and silver threads
trimmed with feathers and furs.
I wondered which of the Romanovs wore
these garments,
these diamond tiaras en tremblant,
was it Anastasia?
As I looked at these,
I caught my green-eyed
reflection in the glass
in case after case in the splendid exhibit hall,
and I wondered
how many of the billions of
tiny silken stitches
my grandma Sophie may have sewn.