Not everyone gets to claim a grandmother who lived in Vegas, but it was one of my favorite bragging rights.

Every few years, my Appalachian family would pile onto a plane and head to the city of sin—not for the neon lights or casinos, but because that’s where Grandma Marcia lived. My sister and I would spend our vacations terrorizing her doublewide in a quiet desert retirement community. We’d soak in her giant jacuzzi tub, spend hours “playing pool,” and stay up late on the air mattress in my grandfather’s game room.

She had two VHS tapes—An American Tail (yes, the Jewish mouse) and Lili, a forgotten ‘50s musical about a naïve young woman who finds unexpected solace in a puppeteer’s act.

I’ve always been curious about these choices. Maybe she had other movies, but these were the ones we played over and over, and she never seemed to mind. Marcia wasn’t particularly fond of kids, but she would sit with us every time we watched them. And as I grew older, it started to feel significant that my Jewish grandmother’s favorite films were about a lonely girl finding connection in an unexpected place and an immigrant mouse searching for his family in a new America.

Both films center on innocence confronting a harsh world. My Grandma Marcia wasn’t known for being warm—she had a gruffness, a defensiveness, the kind that comes from a life shaped by grief, loss, and broken dreams. I imagine she often felt like those wide-eyed protagonists, thrown into a cruel world, expected to survive.

There’s also something telling about how both films use art as a tool for survival—whether through music or puppetry. My grandmother wasn’t a communicator. She was often too direct, sometimes even cruel. And yet, watching those stories now, I wonder if part of her saw the power of expression when words fail. She may not have known how to say what she felt, but she knew that sometimes, art could do the talking.

And then, of course, the melancholy of it all. Both An American Tail and Lili balance light and dark—the sweetness of childhood dreams colliding with reality. There’s a longing in both, an unspoken sadness that might resonate with someone who had lived through displacement and loss, like so many Ashkenazi Jewish families in the 20th century.

It makes perfect sense that these were her favorites. They tell stories of survival, adaptation, and searching for home—something that likely struck a deep, familiar chord.

My Grandma Marcia passed away peacefully in her sleep last night. With her loss, I also lose one of my most distinct ties to my Ashkenazi heritage. We weren’t close, and this project probably would have confused her. But it still feels like a part of me has broken off—not lost, just tucked away into a more precious, hard-to-reach place in my heart.

She could be mean, but man, she was so funny. Once I let go of the expectation that she’d be a soft, squishy grandmother, I was able to appreciate what she did offer—dry wit, a love of dogs, and delicious BLTs. She had strong opinions (often wrong, lol), always had soda on hand, and loved collecting clowns and porcelain dolls. God, did she love clowns. Every time we visited, she’d take us to Ron Lee's World of Clowns Factory Tour. It was bizarre and strange, but to me, clowns will always remind me of her. Isn’t it interesting that such a sad woman loved clowns?

She wasn’t the type to reminisce about the past or pass down family traditions. And now, with her gone, I realize just how much of that history is lost with her. She was one of my remaining living ties to an entire lineage of Jewish women before me.

Jewish history is filled with disruption—family lines broken, records lost, generations scattered across new lands, forced to rebuild from nothing. We pass down what we can, but so much disappears along the way. Losing a grandparent is always a loss, but when that grandparent is one of the last remaining links to a culture shaped by endurance, it feels even heavier.

Grief is strange. I grieve the loss of her, the loss of the grandmother-granddaughter relationship I never really had, the fact that she left this world with so much unresolved pain. But it’s also a lesson—to be gentle, to be patient, to not project our hurt onto others.

And I grieve the loss of her history. The little details I never asked about, the stories she never told, the traditions that never made it to me. That’s what it means to be part of a people who have spent generations moving forward, sometimes at the cost of looking back.

But I look like her a little bit, I think. I never really thought about that before.

She was a Jewish matriarch. And she was my Vegas Grandma. I have one of those. Isn’t that special?