If Zayde was the captain of our family ship, then our grandmother,
Bubbie, Khinke Bernstein, was the helmswoman. In the early years, before my time, the 1920s and 30s, she stood
long days at the cash register in the butcher store - if you can imagine a cash
register as a navigational aid, the rudder that will bring this family to the
sheltered harbor of financial security.
"They liked," said Uncle Harry, "a quiet
life."
A safe life, ah! What can compare to safety when you've both
been born on the lowest rung of the social order, orphaned young and
Yiddish-speaking in the middle of The Pale of Settlement, which is sometimes
Poland, sometimes Beloruss and Ukraine, but now has the zip code of Tsarist Russia.
They always lived in lower Manhattan and very, I mean very,
near the store, either one flight up or just across the street. For the family apartment was also a
workplace. There, in the railroad flat kitchen, Bubbie spent her Thursday and
Friday mornings making and baking stuffed dermas - which were beef intestine (yuck!
spare me!) filled with chopped meat, onions and spices or meat knishes. These were
sell -out items that bachelors and working women purchased for their Sabbath
tables. No moment was wasted. No
penny ignored.
"A woman of strength," sings the final biblicalProverb, "what a rare find! Her worth is far beyond rubies. Her husband
puts his confidence in her, and lacks for no good thing." That was our
grandmother: Iconic in her energy and endurance.
Old, when I knew her, white hair wrapped in a tidy flat bun,
Bubbie had a wide, pale face. She was broad-shouldered, neither fat nor thin, a
sloping bosom sat on a peasant's torso, strong and rectangular. Where Zayde was
all rough gabardine and scritchy-scratch, Bubbie's cheek was satiny to the touch,
her skin pliable as a silk handkerchief.
They met in the city of Bialystok where he was a butcher and
she cooked for a wealthy family. She was a "fussy customer," which my
grandfather admired. It meant she knew quality when she saw it. She couldn't be fooled.
Bubbie spent much of her life indoors at home or in the
store, sometimes a visit to us in Queens - but these were rare. In later years,
when she no longer had to pilot the family ship, when they were comfortable and
noted, she would still bake a mound of braided challahs every Friday morning. Each son and son-in-law - they all
worked in the butcher business or down the street - would stop by the apartment
and pick up a paper bag with one big and several small loaves to carry home to Brooklyn
or Queens. The small challahs, which we called bulkies, were no taller than a
child's hand. These were made especially for the kinder.
That's the iconic Bubbie. The one you locate these days when you tour the TenementMuseum on Orchard Street in Manhattan. The one whose historical function is to
make it out of Europe just ahead of two world wars and get and beget us here.
But there was another Bubbie - the person beside the persona. The one who was called by her name, Khinke,
rather than her title. The one who meant something to herself. It is that individual I also want to
call up here, as much of her as I can. Less than I would wish.
She was not a hugger. Hello, Bubbie, a peck of a kiss on the
downy, white cheek, was it. She did not make much of us. Didn't say how
beautiful we were or how tall or any other observing or praise. The story goes that my mother once left
me alone with her when I was still an infant. I cried the entire time. Bubbie said, "She doesn't like
me."
Which, being translated might have meant she had had enough
of crying babies, it might have meant she had raised six children but never
liked babies. It might have meant many things, but one is for certain: an
iconic female figure, a good Jewish mother cannot say directly that she's not
in the mood to be nurturing.
Aunt Edith once said apropos of I don't remember what,
"My mother-in-law, God bless her, was not a warm woman." Once this was stated and I thought
about it, it occurred to me that my younger uncles each wed buxom, welcoming
women.
I know Bubbie nursed a resentment against 'the Professor,' who came every week to
Friday night dinner but "never brought a present." The Professor was
one of many solitary old men, all bachelors, that our grandfather befriended. They
were men from Eastern Europe who had washed up on American shores still alive
but not suited, it seemed, for adaption to any American dream. Of a Friday evening at least three of
these elderly, Yiddish speakers would be seated at Zayde's end of the long
holiday table. They were never
introduced and I don't think my mother or any of my uncles knew any more about
them than we, the children, did.
Did some of the other men, the undernourished, hunkered down
men, bring presents? Did Bubbie resent cooking and serving them all? Am I
making too much of this one mention of her resentment? Probably. I know I am
deducing a lot from a little, but the little is what I have.
Twice, in the last year of her life, when I was 18 and she
was 77, I stumbled on a glimmer of what I consider the private person - the one
behind the beautiful braided challahs, the meticulous ritual observance. Not
that these tasks of religion and nourishment weren't genuinely offered and part
of her. They were. But, I also yearn for the subjective story, the secret story
of the self.
Two scenes from the last year of Bubbie's life. Number one was the surgical recovery
room of Beth Israel Hospital. I was standing behind my mother, hiding really,
because I didn't want to see my Bubbie or anybody looking frail and pale and
pathetic. But there she was, lying absolutely flat in a hospital bed with the
bars pulled up around her. Her
hair had been twined into braids that lay limp on either side of her head like
frayed ropes. My mother, who must have wanted to cry out in grief and fear, was
yet speaking calmly to the surgeon in his white coat. He exuded a professional satisfaction.
"Clear margins," he reported about the breast
cancer nodule.
Then from the depths of that crib-like bed, my grandmother
raised her head, "Can'n 'ir
gibn mir a nyya h'arz?" Can you give
me a new heart?
At the time I heard it as poignant plea, but when I think of
it now I wonder if there was also dark humor there or sarcasm. Because it was
her heart that was going to kill her and soon. Or maybe both these meanings were present - the dark joke and
the underlying prayer.
A few days later, there was just the two of us in her
private hospital room. I was standing at the one window that looked out across
the bare trees of Stuyvesant Square.
No guardrails and Bubbie was propped up on two pillows, a little
improved. Her hair had been returned to its usual tidy bun.
"Two weeks I've been in prison," she said to me in
English, so I knew she really wanted me to understand: she objected to her
situation.
In the histories written by the children and grandchildren
it is sometimes implied that the immigrant generation accepts its destiny as
one of entry and then a gallant stepping aside. But, in fact our Bubbie didn't want to go gracefully anywhere.
She didn't think of herself as a conduit for someone else's journey. She hated being limited and diminished, just
as I hated to see her like that. In her understated way she was railing against
fate. She did not want to die.
