Times of transformation

My bubby came from a small town near Odessa on the Black Sea. She always described Odessa as a beautiful city especially in contrast to New York where she lived for the first 10 years or so after she came, a young girl of 16, to find her fortune in the new world. She met my zayda in Brooklyn in Prospect Park. They had a small business, a grocery store as I recall, in New York before they moved to Trenton, NJ and opened up soda factory and then a liquor store. If only my zayda had bought the franchise for Pepsi instead of near beer, we would all be millionaires today, or so we grew up believing. Like many immigrant families we were unflinchingly optimistic. Good luck might come to us as it had to so many others no more deserving than we were. But we were always instructed to work hard and never depend on luck or other external forces. You can pray to do well on your exam, my mother would say, but you better give god a little help. We lived with my bubby and zayda for the first two years of my life, while my father was trying to proselytize and convert the troops into communists, above the soda factory along with my mother's two sisters and for awhile with their husbands. When we finally moved to our own house it was only 10 minutes away. Hardly a day passed that I didn't see my bubby and zayda and my bubby didn't impart to me some lessons about the ways of the world that I dutifully internalized and tried to apply to life as I experienced it growing up in an Italian Catholic neighborhood in America.

Passover and other passsages

As a major holiday approaches, one that everyone in my extended family and friends' circle loves, jews and non-jews alike, and the family makes plans to gather together, this year with two new baby boys, my new grandsons, I contemplate my passage into old age. Maybe my age is not so old, but when your parents (the previous generation of grandparents) are all dead and your children and grandchildren look to you as the prevailing "expert," it feels pretty old. Maybe we're not like our grandparents and our parents, maybe we are in better shape, maybe we do more and go more places, but we still have limited time to create a lifetime of memories for our grandchildren.

They are still very young, and no where near able to say the four questions, but what can I do to make this holiday, this family, this view of the world, an important part of their lives? How can I link them to me and my beliefs? Is being their bubby just symbolic, or does it signify a connection that will sustain me and sustain them all of our lives? As we have discussed so many times, why do we care whether our grandchildren are jewish? Why are there so many questions and so few obvious answers?

This being a bubby is not for sissies.

From the beginning

Before I became a bubby, I had a bubby. My bubby was very old, had white hair, and loved me very much. She lived nearby and oversaw my mother's childrearing practices with some disdain. She respected and deeply appreciated my mother, who as the oldest daughter of immigrant parents became an attorney and looked after the welfare of the entire family. But she thought she was out of her league when it came to nurturing and raising my brother and me.

My Bubby wouldn't eat at our house because we didn't keep kosher, but on Fridays she brought us a chicken dinner, with vegetables and soup and noodles, to make sure we had good food to eat. It's true my mother couldn't cook and the assorted housekeepers she hired to look after us knew nothing about Jewish style meals. So Bubby made it her business to ensure that at least on Fridays we were well looked after. She herself didn't drive, so she got my Zayda to drive her to our house and help her unload all the pans and dishes and pass to us (whispering don't tell your mother) white paper bags of m&ms from the five and ten store.

My Bubby was the life partner of my Zayda, and they managed several small businesses together. She was  a seamstress and came to this country by herself at age 16. For my entire life, she would lift the hem of any skirt or dress I bought, examine it, and ask me how much I paid for it. I would halve the price and she would still exclaim: "too much!" She didn't care at all about style or even fabric. It was the sewing that she eyed. And nothing was sewn well enough to meet her high standard.

My Bubby was old world, spoke English perfectly well, but was never fully Americanized. She was stern and very business-like in her dealings, even with her grandchildren. I knew she loved me, but she didn't express her love in obvious ways. She didn't hug and kiss me all the time. She expected me to do well in all my endeavors, to be smart and stay close to my family. She was ambitious for me (especially given that I was a girl) but also cautious. She died in the Jewish home for the aged she had helped to found at 89 shortly after my first child was born. When I brought him to her, she was upset that, even in July, I took him out without a hat and booties. By my next visit, she had visited the gift shop and bought him a set. Then she was gone.

That was my Bubby.