The Letter Tav

    You might not think the pronunciation of one consonant could open a rift between a grandfather and a beloved (I hope) grandchild. But so it happened. I am talking about the letter tav, the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet.

           

Say I'm eleven years old, it's 1956, and we are, as usual on a Sunday afternoon, visiting our grandparents on Rivington Street. This is the three room apartment, the smaller one, that they moved into later in life. Once inside, it is doorless and hall-less, each room opens onto the next. Wherever you are, you know what anyone in the other two rooms is doing or saying.

           

My seven year old sister, Jayne and four year old brother Arne are squabbling over who gets to ride up and down on the Barcalounger in the bedroom.  Zayde and I are in the middle room, the living room dining room combination, watching a Hopalong Cassidy western on a small black and white television.  I am in love with Lucky, Hopalong's handsome young sidekick who usually has his arm in a sling because of some bad guy.  I don't think Zayde is interested in the plot. But, as I've said before, he likes to watch the bounty of healthy herds of cattle lowing across the American plains.  At the kitchen sink my mother and Bubbie are peeling onions and potatoes, talking in Yiddish, their heads bent toward each other.

           

During an advertisement break Zayde asks me how I'm doing in my Jewish studies.

           

"Good, very good," I say.

           

And I am. I really like Hebrew school. I attend three times a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays after regular school and on Sunday mornings. There we study all things Jewish - prayer book and modern Hebrew, history and holidays.   My reports home are filled with the word mitzuyan, which means excellent. 

                                                 

           

Zayde asks me to read from the Sh'mona Esrei which is the central daily prayer. And confidently I begin the Amidah and come to the word "avoteinu..." our fathers. 

           

Which is where he stops me and begins speaking rapidly. At this moment, sensing interpersonal danger, my mother stops peeling vegetables and comes toward us on the couch.  

           

"He wants you to say it "Avosehnu," she points out.

           

I stare at them both in consternation. My Hebrew school teachers consider the soft tav a worn out relic. They would not allow it into our classroom. I'm the New Jew - not that I really know what that means. So are my teachers and everyone in Israel- not that we're in Israel, but still, none of those East European singsong nasal esses for us. I try to explain to my grandfather how we do it in the modern halls of Queens. But between my English and his Yiddish we are at an impasse.

           

My mother looks pained.

           

"Ma," I wail, "Ma, tell him."

           

And she does, in Yiddish. "This is the way it's taught now, Papa," and some elaboration on that theme. He is not satisfied.  The demonstration of my achievements is over for the day.  The two of us turn back to the television.  

           

The odd thing is, this same scene recurred several times over the next two years. It was as if Zayde hoped, each time he asked, that I would have learned the true articulation. And I hoped, each time, that he had finally understood how I had to read it.  This never happened.  But, now I think, it is to our credit that we kept trying to connect.  

                                             

The Last Seder at 110 Rivington

If you saw us that year, 1955, gathered at twilight at the Passover table, you might have thought we were the exemplary extended family. All ages represented. A large, "up from nothing, from dust" family, as my father, Max, would say, prospering, with two of the generations American born.  In a way we were, as much as any family can be ideal. Which is not very much.

        

There we sat, crowded around an expectant, appointed table that filled the middle room, some twenty of us- aunts, uncles, cousins and a few of Zayde's undernourished- looking bachelor friends. At each place setting a fine china soup bowl atop a fine china plate, beside a small Haggadah in English and Hebrew. Silverware polished to a high shine and two glasses - one for wine even for the children and one for water or seltzer.  In the center of the table, six candles flamed in wrought silver candlesticks and next to them a stack of matzahs that were covered by an embroidered cloth. Everything was ready. And we knew that in the apartment directly below us Uncle Sol and Aunt Ruth, cousins Isaac and Bernie, Eleanor and her husband Bill and their small son Ira, were sitting as we sat, about to begin as we were about to begin.  And all the Jews in New York City, including Uncle Harry and our cousins in Brooklyn, the same.

A couch with Mission-style wooden arms was pushed up against the table. This was where the children were placed- Barbara, myself, Harvey, David, Ira, Allen - I don't remember where the really little children were. My father and the uncles, Morris and Ben and Murray, sat facing us.  Zayde was at the head of the table leaning on pillows because the Haggadah said we must rest on pillows as we tell this story to demonstrate that we are free people.

        

And the women, you might be wondering. Where were the women - my mother, Ida and Aunt Yetta, Aunt Ann and Natalie, and Bubbie, where were they? Ah, now we begin to approach the flaws, the falling short that is part of any family picture. The women's chairs were nearest the kitchen door, at the open end of the table because they spent the evening getting up and helping Bubbie serve and then sitting down to eat something and then getting up again to clear and wash the dishes, all the while keeping note of which child was eating what and how much because being "a good eater" was much prized in those days. Bubbie didn't sit down at all.

        

Led by Zayde, the men rushed through the Hebrew text of the Haggadah in a mumbling singsong. Now about this Haggadah.  

Every year from the time I could read I would search in the Haggadah for the story, the really compelling story of Moses in the basket, the Princess who found him, his time in the desert, with the Pharoah and finally the great exodus from Egypt. Each year I would imagine I had somehow missed it the year before. But, no it wasn't there. It was never there. Instead the Haggadah was a series of obscure vignettes about ancient rabbis, Rabbi Gamliel was one, who said this or that and sat up disputing until the cock crowed. I assumed that this text was the way it had to be, like the Torah, not a word could be changed.

        

The men read on, but no matter how fast they read, it was not fast enough. The roast was getting cold, the children irritable. The women hovered, paced, ached to serve. It was already eight o'clock.  But the meal could not begin until the men had finished.  Cousin David pinched me and I rushed to pinch him back and our mothers glowered at us so we switched to kicking each other under the table.

        

Finally everyone was fed and the children went careening into the darkened far bedrooms to search for the afikomen, the hidden middle matzah without which the meal and the story are forever incomplete.  It was Ira, the oldest, who found it that last year, wrapped in a napkin, tucked under a lamp. He was promised five dollars when the holidays were over. The rest of us were each promised two.

        

Sometime later that spring Bubbie and Zayde decided they were too old to care for a six room apartment. They moved across the street to three rooms and our large gatherings downtown were no more.  

        

After that, the setting for our seders was a suburban finished basement, minus the grandparents who wouldn't travel on the holiday or stay in anyone else's home.  Without them the link to something larger vanished, at least for me. I'm not sure why this was. Maybe because we just repeated what had been - the same Rabbinic Haggadah stories we didn't understand, the mumbling, the hovering, the meal served too soon or too late. We never made it our own.

        

It's different now, as I'm sure you know.  The Haggadah, as it turns out, is not at all like the Torah. An infinite number of approaches are possible.  Currently, for every nuance of Jewish observance there exists a suitable Haggadah text in English or Hebrew or both. And, if you can't find a published one to your liking, you can always create your own. Even the occasional liberal church hosts some ecumenical version during the Easter season.

        

This year, on April 22, my sister Jayne will set a lovely table.  My husband Sam (not Jewish but might as well be by now) and I will go to her home in Connecticut where her husband Larry and all our adult children and their partners will join us.  Maybe there will also be some friends.  Our leader is female, it's me, since I'm the one who cares the most and is the most knowledgeable. I will lead the seder as a participatory event, mostly in English, using a Haggadah that tells the story of the Exodus and, with additional handouts, we will recall modern examples of oppression and freedom.  The telling, the washing, the dipping, the sandwich of bitter herbs and our songs are completed in less than an hour. For myself, on this night, the seder is remains a connection to Jews around the world and to our stories past and present. I do not know if this is so for my own children. Perhaps this year I will ask them.

No Tales To Tell

     

Our grandparents rarely referred to their childhood or teen-age years, they didn't speak about their own parents or other relatives.  We knew they had both lost their mothers early and that their fathers had remarried as soon as possible. So, two half-orphans, a painful truth.  Other than that, to us the world they came from was formless and void like the time before Creation.

When I was in sixth grade, in 1956, our social studies theme was A Nation Of Immigrants. For homework, I asked my mother, "Where did Bubbie and Zayde come from?"

"Poland," she said shortly, because she knew I already knew.

        

Then I tried to stab at a puzzle no one else seemed to notice: "But we don't say we're Polish?"

        

"No. Jewish."

        

"Polish-Jewish?"

        

"No. Just Jews. Jews from Poland."

        

Oh, I see.

        

Well, not really. I'm not sure my mother did either. But she wasn't interested in the problem. The knot of it - from a place, but not of it - twisted around my mind along with other mysteries of the adult world, some of them deep, some slight - like why do we write JacksonHeights, New York as our return address and not Jackson Heights, Queens.

        

It's not that I was obsessed with these mysteries back then.  Not at all. Like everybody else in Class 6-4, the smartest in P.S. 69, I was busy piling up A's, keeping slam books hidden from my friends, having arguments and making up, playing stoop ball or box ball or going to Hebrew School three times a week. But these knots - the questions the adult world couldn't quite answer - returned now and again, year after year.

        

I was in graduate school before I understood how remote Jews and Poles were from each other, even in the same town or on the same street. Only a tiny percentage of Jews knew more than a few words in Polish and an even tinier percent of Poles spoke or understood Yiddish. Yes, in the villages and towns they traded with each other, passed each other on the road, but that was it.  You don't need much language for that.  Here's an imaginary interaction:

        

Jewish housewife: "Hello, Pan." She is thinking: You bully, you drunk. I fear you.

Polish grocer: "Hello, Pani." He is thinking: Why are you so weird looking with that ugly wig. Christ-killer. Accursed.

        

Jewish housewife points: "Potatoes?"

        

Grocer: "One Zloty."        

        

She bought or she didn't. It was a good price or it wasn't. The end.  A thousand years of minimalist relations.        

        

Once, when I was an adult, I asked my mother why we didn't have more family information. She said, "We didn't ask questions.  Bubbie and Zayde worked very hard. They made a good Jewish home. I was busy with a boyfriend or school or something. We didn't ask questions."                 

        

Occasionally I would  berate myself for not being curious when there was still time to find out. But then I consulted Uncle Harry, the only living brother of my mother's original four.

He said, "Actually, you couldn't know them too well. That was part of it. They came from Russia, Poland - it was really Poland at that time. They didn't have an easy life there. But we never got a true picture of what went on there.

        

"We tried, my brother Benny and I tried. We were always digging, questioning, never got good answers. The time would be Friday night or Saturday afternoon, after shul. That was the only time. Time for family. 

So my mother would be busy preparing, she didn't butt in at all. So if we questioned my father, how did he get out of Poland, how did he get to the boat, we never found out. My father had his own agenda so to speak. Take care of the Jews. Follow the commandments. All we knew is that his brother David, from Philadelphia, met him at the pier. That's all we really knew."

        

So nothing, even when asked directly.   Okay.  I moved on to a different kind of inquiry: Why not? The historian Ruth Gay attributes this extreme reticence about their personal pasts to the whole generation who arrived between 1900 and 1920. In her book UnfinishedPeople that is part memoir, part historical narrative she writes, "They knew that their world was primitive - without paved streets or sewers, without running water - and it made them ashamed. They were not quick to admit that they had started young to work for little wages and lived poorly. They did not think that such memories would bring them honor, but on the contrary would diminish them in the eyes of their delicately raised American children."

        

There's something to what she says. Especially if you bypass the Fiddler-On-The-Roof nostalgia and look in detail at photos from that time. The streets are unpaved, rutted and muddy, the children are barefoot and equally dirty.

But maybe a more generous interpretation of Zayde's Saturday-after-lunch refusal is possible.  May he didn't know where to begin. Not everyone is a good tale spinner. Maybe he didn't like the spotlight. I don't think he did. Or didn't consider it important.  It's a relatively modern concept, after all, that the narrative of an ordinary person's life has significance. And Bubbie and Zayde, for all that modern life had allowed them to flourish, were not modern people, did not wish to be modern people.

        

Some twenty years ago, the youngest of us, Karen Bernstein Angel, collected the relevant paper documents - ship manifests, a record of detained aliens, census lists for 1920 and 1930, evidence of citizenship.  Zayde was 24 when he arrived in 1910 on the S. S. Amerika. He was held one night, until his brother David claimed him.  Their surname was then Dmocher. 

Two years later, on July 24, 2012, , Bubbie arrived on the S. S. Leeland, her surname was Bernstein by then, and so was Zayde's. Who knows why.  Bubbie arrived with our uncle Sol, then aged four, and our aunt Yetta, then aged two. Nine months later to the day, our uncle Ben was born, or so goes the family joke.

        

To fill in around these demographics, this is what I can tell you. About Zayde, we know that he grew up in Andrzejewo, a village of maybe two thousand people, 34% Jewish in 1905, says the internet.   We know he was dedicated to that village because his religious home was always the tiny Anshe Andrzejewo shul, a renovated first floor apartment in a brownstone on Henry Street.  

        

He had other choices. He could have joined the much larger and more prosperous Bialystoker Synagogue on Willett street, since he came to manhood in Bialystok and since he himself now had a large reputation and had prospered. Instead he remained bound to those from his childhood village.  And alongside them, he and Bubbie chose to be buried, in a cemetery plot purchased by the members of the congregation.

What Andzrejewo was like in the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the internet does not inform us.  Of Bubbie's village we don't even have a name. Data being so available these days, I could probably find out. But data doesn't speak to the thickness of her experience: how she learned to read, to cook, what made her laugh, had she time to play?

        

About the city of Bialystok, where they met and married, many particulars are available in English. The historian RebeccaKobrin in Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora describes it in 1900 as an expanding industrial center that drew Jews from the many small nearby villages.  It offered rural youth every twentieth century option. There were factories to work in, small shopkeepers with whom one could apprentice, paved streets down which to stroll, Yiddish theaters to attend, motor cars to admire and yearn for. Carpentry and other work in the trades was available, also real estate to buy or sell if you could afford it.  Plus several left-wing political organizations:  Zionist, Socialist and Socialist-Zionist.

         

Which brings to mind one scrap of specific incident that I learned when I was a sullen teen-ager and my parents insisted I accompany them on a visit to relatives in Colchester, Connecticut.  There I met Zeidl Goldberg, our grandfather's cousin. He told this story: While still in Bialystok he, Zeidl, took part in a demonstration for fair wages for factory workers and was jailed for his efforts.

        

"Your grandfather," he said,  "bailed me out."

        

"Was he a socialist too then?"

        

"Schmulka?" said our cousin. "No. Always religious."

        

Now I take this moment and enlarge it. There he is - originally
Shmul, the formal Yiddish version of Samuel, called by the diminutive Schmulka, little Samuel - unusually short but robust, quick on his feet, rushing to the bailiff's office with cash tucked into those hands that look like my hands.  He was ma-tir a-su-rim, freeing the captive, an act of charity we appreciate three times a day in services.  Later, he returned to somewhere - home or work or shul - and said the evening prayers.   Many belief systems were on offer in that city in those years, but Schmulka's choice remained the Eternal One, Blessed Be He.

        

Old Men, Old Books

Sometimes, when we still live at 110 Rivington Street,  and I am already in my footed pajamas, on a week day evening after dinner, I see Zayde walk over to the glass cabinet in the living-dining room and choose one tall, leather- bound book from a row of others, all of which look exactly alike. Then he retrieves his rectangular magnifying glass, an eight by four inch object that he uses when he reads.  A knock at the door.  Of course, one of the rabbi friends.

           

Soon the two men chose one corner of the dining room table, as tucked away as they can be in this apartment that has no private spaces except the back bedrooms. They open the book. It is not only taller, but wider and heavier than an ordinary book. Its leather spine is cracked and dry so it easily flattens onto the table. In a loud mumble, something like a chant, they read together and pour and hunch over the book, sometimes pausing to talk to each other in Yiddish. Around them the business of the household goes on as usual - Bubbie in the kitchen, maybe my mother helping her, maybe my mother reading to me on the couch across from where the two men are engrossed in the pages of the text.    

           

           

Old men reading old books, is how I define this scene then. An interpretation  I breathe in from the air of my parents' attitude. It is not an activity my mother or father would engage in during their evenings or encourage me to do; they were proud to be modern people.  "I did not want religious," said my mother about looking for a boyfriend. Not that she or my father looked down on Zayde for spending his evening with an antiquated book and an antiquated friend. Not at all. If anything, they admired the piety, the diligence, admired it but wouldn't want it for themselves. It was a remnant of the old country on its way out. 

This was perhaps a decade before Tevye the Dairyman in Fiddler On The Roof  gave old world religious activities a poignant dignity when he sings, "If I were a rich man. . . . I' d discuss the holy books with the learned men seven hours every day. That would be the sweetest gift of all."

           

Many years later, long after I graduate Hebrew School, decades after I am Bat Mitzvah, - perhaps when I see Fiddler for the first time on film and afterward burst into sobs, despite my sophisticated understanding of the extreme poverty and ignorance which dominated the real villages of Eastern Europe, but probably even later when in Jewish adult education it finally occurs to me that the two men must have been studying Talmud. Only then do I learn that studying, disputing and elaborating on Talmud is at the heart of Rabbinic Judaism as it was practiced for almost two thousand years, and is still practiced by the Orthodox and Hasidim. It is only then that I recall this scene and am touched by having several times been a witness to a working man at the end of a long day choosing sacred text study as a pleasurable leisure activity.  

           

About Talmud I have now read several books, mostly written by women trying to imagine women's lives in the pre-modern era. Also the touching and informative The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen. On my bookshelf are several volumes of what you might call Talmud for Dummies. They are aspirational. I have never actually opened one. I keep thinking someday I will.

           

What I understand about the act of study for its own sake is that it placed Zayde, or any student of the text, in dialogue and connection with the many who came before.  A few of us - two Rosenfelds and at least one Abramowitz - continue to turn to the Talmud as a way to be rooted in both the past and the present. Most of us puzzle out how to live without the benefit of links to tradition. Yet when one appears, we grab onto it.  Perhaps the most popular of these is Fiddler On The Roof. For all the sentimentality in the musical, for all that we know life was much more desperate than it is portrayed on stage or in the film, still it connects us in love to those who came before us.  Those whose lives might have been irredeemably erased, otherwise. This connection is a small ballast when daily life gets, as it often does, too complicated. In the spirit of small ballast I also write this blog. In this spirit perhaps you read it.

More About Meat

 Zayde was both bemused and gratified by American abundance. At the beginning of each month he greeted his Social Security check with an incredulous laugh. Free money, what a country!  Then he scribbled his endorsement on the back and handed it over to Uncle Morris for deposit with the business receipts. His personal needs were modest.

           

He liked to watch old Hopalong Cassidy movies on television for the moments when a herd of healthy cattle thundered across the Plains. Such bounty was so different from the time and land from which he had come. 

          

In Poland at the turn of the twentieth century, "a butcher was not like a butcher here." This is what Uncle Harry said when I interviewed him. "There he would do everything, from start to finish. He would go out to the farm, buy a piece of cattle - one, not more than one. That's all they could deal with was one. Buy it, bring a truck or rent one, bring it to Bialystok to a slaughterhouse. It was by hand, everything by hand. He would oversee the maschgiach, whatever, the ritual slaughterer. I don' think he did the skinning. But had to do the rest of it. We don't know who paid it, who had the money to buy it. There must've been an entrepreneur involved. Had to be. There was a lot of money involved."

             

A wrinkled, brown paper bag of birdseed was always tucked beneath the cash register in the store.  Once a day Zayde drew this bag out and went onto the street. This was an activity we, the grandchildren, could share with him.

           

On the sidewalk, right in front of the store, he gave a shrill, moist whistle that we could never imitate, no matter how many times he showed us how to do it.  In a few seconds there were ten, twenty, fifty pigeons fluttering to the pavement, as if they had just been waiting for his call. Clucking struts and manic pecking as Zayde tossed grain in a circle.  On the perimeter, sparrows and starlings hopped up and down hopefully.  With the wide arc of his arm, he made sure that each small outlier got a share. Everybody eats.

           

In New York City feeding pigeons is illegal. Sometimes a passing patrolman gave him a ticket. This happened once while I was there. The policeman was towering, large-headed, matter-of-fact; he had done this before; he knew it was futile.  From beneath the brim of his grey fedora, Zayde peered up at the guardian of law and order and gave a small, crooked smile:  Feeding the hungry is a problem? Later one of the uncles walked over to the police station and paid the fee.  This happened many times. Fine after fine. Every penalty was paid. Everybody eats.

                                  

            

The Store

We said 'the Store,' as people say 'the White House,' a one and only.

Schmulka Bernstein's spanned 109-111 Rivington Street with two swinging glass doors and two long plate glass windows.  Entering, you came into coolness - a floor of red quarry tiles covered by clean sawdust and the mild, persistent hum of the refrigerated counters.  There was a wooden bench just inside the door that was darkened by use and age. Anyone could have a seat here and watch the world go by, and an occasional customer did.  Sometimes our grandfather, Schmulka, sat there, because by my time, the 1950s, most of the details of the business had been turned over to his sons, our uncles. Or a visiting grandchild might sit comfortably beside him and be pleasantly ignored while he greeted customers. Other days Zayde sat cozily wedged between two rabbis.  One ruddy and round, the other pale and gaunt. This threesome would sit facing forward, talking Yiddish to each other while their eyes faced the street. The two rabbis were paid a salary to certify that every beef and lamb carcass in the store and the smokehouse met kosher standards. But when all this certifying was done, they repaired to the bench. 

           

The ruddy rabbi was Levinson. He was corpulent, smiley, a cheek-pincher and a man who actually paused to pay attention to children. He had a bushy red beard, wild, unruly sidelocks and red moustaches that were always wet.  Years later I learned that with his family he had escaped Europe by going east, overland until reaching safety in Shanghai. The other rabbi was thin and pallid with a scraggly white beard. He was the younger son of a famous Talmudist who needed a job. And even though the business didn't need another certifier, Zayde hired him. Because this is what Zayde did. It didn't matter what his sons thought or the business could afford. Need came before profit.

Behind the men on the bench there was a row of immaculate white counters. Above the counters a mural of Biblical scenes covered one wall: Abraham at the opening to his tent, Rebecca waiting by the well, Joseph in the pit. Not great art, but good enough illustrations. The painted tales of our ancestors, along with the rabbis, gave the store a hallowed aura: A place of koshering, as in following holy commandments.  A place where just by standing in line waiting to choose your shoulder chops for dinner you were engaged in a ceremonial act.

We could not then imagine that we would someday find ourselves in the present world where friends state with an air of superior knowledge, "Oh I never eat red meat." Minute steak, chuck roast, shoulder or brisket, delmonico, flanken, steak cubed or rib, lamb chops baby or shoulder. We loved them all and dined on the best cuts - two, three, four times a week. Red meat was essential, like the human need for earth, air and fire. God Himself loved the savory fragrance of roasting beef or goat or sheep.  When, in Genesis, He "smelled the soothing aroma" of Noah's burnt offerings, He was convinced to spare the world.

             

           

Bubbie Comes Next

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.