Nina, my maternal grandmother, was born 119 years ago this week on February 12, 1907. President Abraham Lincoln was also born on February 12. It made my Russian immigrant great grandparents proud that their American-born daughter, in an upstate New York town that happened to be called Liberty, shared a birthday with one of the most revered U.S. Presidents, so Lincoln was her middle name. When she married my Grandpa Victor Lief, she dropped the Lincoln and used her maiden name, Rayevsky, though she often gave props to the Lincoln connection. 

Nina was 13 at the start of Prohibition, and by the time she was 18, she was a pre-med freshman at Barnard—one of only a handful of female students in her courses—living the flapper life. (I was going to say this would have been the legal drinking age back then but no age was legal in the states at the time.) 

When I was that same age in 1989, and attending New York University (obviously not pre-med), she started telling me the stories, like about how she and her friends made bathtub gin in the pathology lab at NYU med school. Also, about the time she got so tipsy at a speakeasy in a midtown hotel (unfortunately the name changed with every telling of the story) that she rolled down the carpeted stairs on the way out. The part of the tale that never changed: the fur coat she had borrowed from a roommate, not to mention the loosening effects of the alcohol, mostly cushioned her fall. 

When my parents moved apartments in 2021 we discovered several boxes that belonged to her, along with a treasure trove of photos from my mom’s side of the family. One of these was in a cardboard folding frame, bearing the inscription “Nina, to Paperboy with Love ‘25.” So this was a photo from that first year at school. 

In the sepia-toned picture_, she has her dark, wiry curls pinned up so her hair frames her face just above the chin line and droops slightly over her ears in a makeshift bob style (the 1920s equivalent of a faux-hawk, an option for those who didn’t want to commit to shearing off long locks), and she’s wearing a loose-fitting blouse or dress with a velvet burnout pattern. She is not smiling, but her expression, gazing slightly off in the distance, is one of quiet longing and contentment. 

I have so many questions. 

Obviously, the big one is who is Paperboy? 

Followed by: why do we have this photo? 

Did she lose her nerve? Was there perhaps a reason she could never give it to him (like, maybe he left town or something happened to him)? Emboldened by crush flush, did she give it to him but he didn’t accept it or returned it later? Was Paperboy my grandfather and she came back into possession of the photo when they lived together and eventually got married?

(The joke in my Jewish family: they still lived in “sin,” even if that’s a Catholic thing.) 

We don’t know exactly when Nina met Victor, who was also a doctor, though I think this photo pre-dates that meeting by a few years. 

I wish I knew the story. Though she wrote four books on child psychiatry, she never wrote a memoir and I always thought she should have. I wish I’d found the photo before she died so I could ask her about it. I wish I’d ghostwritten that memoir for her. 

By the time she was my grandmother, she had fuzzy gray hair she kept in a frumpy bun, wore girdles, and dressed very conservatively in long pleated skirts and loose blouses. Who is this Nina Lincoln Rayevsky in the flush of youth signing portraits to paperboys? 

Perhaps it was a Valentine, never delivered or returned. Something about it made her want to keep it until her dying day. 

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I rarely saw her drinking. Maybe a glass of Lillet or Harvey’s Bristol Cream at family cocktail hour, a few drops of wine during dinner. But I do recall that I learned about Brandy Alexanders from her. We used to go to a restaurant that served Brandy Alexander cream pie, and she told me she preferred the drink version. Hmmm. Wonder when she first had them? And with whom?

The cocktail is named for Troy Alexander, an NYC bartender who originated the recipe with gin in the late teens or early 1920s. Years before opening Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, Harry MacElhone started making a version of the drink with cognac at Ciro’s in London. In the 1923 edition of his book ABC of Mixing Cocktails, he published his brandy-based recipe, also with the addition of crème de cacao. This is now the default.

Brandy Alexander

(via Harry MacElhone, as written in Signature Cocktails) 

• 1 ½ oz (45 ml) VSOP cognac (or another good quality aged grape brandy) 

• 1 oz (30 ml) white crème de cacao

• 1 oz (30 ml) heavy (double) cream 

• garnish: grated nutmeg

Shake all ingredients with ice until well chilled. Strain into a coupe or Martini glass. Grate nutmeg over top in the foam, to garnish. 

This week’s lipstick: 

Besamé Red, a rich crimson hue inspired by the shade favored by the founder’s grandmother in 1920s Argentina. I have a few Besamés in my collection, but this is probably my favorite, and the formula seems to have the most lip-stickiness of the bunch. I ate pizza wearing it the other night and only had to dab on a retouch. 

It would have looked fabulous on young Nina.