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.

             

           

Zayde: An Introduction

Our grandfather, Zayde, Schmulka Bernstein was famous long ago in the small world of observant Jews for the purity of his kosher meat products and the generosity of his purse. 

         

To come upon him in those days on Rivington Street, at the butcher store or in the family apartment that was just across the street from the store -- you would not think him a prosperous or important man. He stood less than five feet tall, with small, shapely hands and fingers that looked like my mother's hands or mine.  His command of English was marginal. Thick green-tinted eyeglasses, a treatment for easing glaucoma, dominated his face and made his expressions unreadable. This added to the sense we, the grandchildren had, that he was remote, unworldly, someone other.

        
Winter or summer, on the street or in the store, he dressed the same: a fedora, then a white butcher's coat covering a business suit jacket and beneath that a vest so that he seemed lost in his own clothes. Pockets in his white coat, pockets in his suit jacket, pockets in his vest. From one of these he would extract wrinkled two dollar bills - which were unusual even in those days - that he had saved especially for the "kinder," the children, so you knew he thought about you when you weren't there.  

         
His two famous products were notably American. One was the five pounder salami, not originally an Eastern European Jewish food. The other was fry beef, which was a kosher bovine equivalent of bacon and was sold in the same folded cardboard packaging as its pork prototype.

These were both manufactured in a smokehouse at 109 Rivington Street.. Next door to the smokehouse was the family butcher store that offered fresh meats and poultry as well. Business was good. The Lower East Side was still a Jewish neighborhood, though already the exodus to the other boroughs and Long Island had begun.

         
Zayde's other activity of note was his openhandedness to Jews in need. This was not something that I, or any of the grandchildren actually witnessed.  But we were told.

        
"They called him the Angel of Rivington Street," Aunt Natalie once said.

        
And Aunt Lillian said, "He brought people home so he could feed them." 

         
Uncle Harry described him this way,  "He had, you might say, a cultural approach, not a business approach, not a modern approach. He wasn't really interested in the American dream.  Be religious, follow God's will, take care of the Jewish people according to the Jewish law. That was his main concern.

         
"He lent money to anyone who came to him: a rabbi, a stranger. They had to be recommended of course. He lent them money. He did not expect to be paid back. I wonder how many ever paid him back. He didn't ask, my mother didn't like that, though she gave too - to women, he just gave.

         
"Levinson - you remember Rabbi Levinson? - once told me he thought he had given away at least $250,000,  maybe more. And that was really a lot of money in those days."

         
When I knew him, just after World War II and through the nineteen-fifties, he seemed impossibly old, but he was actually in his relatively healthy sixties, younger than I am now. His sons, my uncles, ran the factory.   Zayde spent much of his time either sitting on a bench at the front of the store with one or two rabbi friends or taking care of a few of the very oldest customers, usually small Yiddish speaking ladies, who would only buy their chickens if they could be sure Schmulke's hands did the cleaning and evisceration.

         
Unlike the rabbis who were his bench-sitting buddies, Zayde did not have a beard. When I asked my mother why, she said it was because he was in business.  On the other hand, he was rarely clean-shaven  - which had something to do with religious law and going to barbers instead of doing it yourself.  But what law my mother couldn't say. And I never found out.

         
As I said when I introduced him, Zayde did not look prosperous or important.  He looked confused, like a person from another planet. And so he was. The planet of Poland.  Which, like Superman's planet Krypton, had imploded, at least in terms of the Jews.        

        
The planet of Poland was now impossible to reach because it was behind the Iron Curtain which I imagined in a literal way as an endless undulating wall of steel.  You could not get in and no one was allowed to leave. In an odd way this felt like a kind of justice, since the Jews who had lived there had been put beyond speech.

        
He was our grandfather, emphasis our: our important person. Whose stature on the Lower East Side shed its grace on we. He gave scratchy kisses with that three days growth of beard. He looked often bewildered, but maybe he was not. You cannot be bewildered and at the same time build a noted and prosperous business. Or can you?

         
Strangers with heavy accents would come to the store just to shake his hand and say, "Hello, Mr. Bernstein, Hello Mr. Bernstein."   We thought they came to honor him, and perhaps that was so. Only now it also occurs to me that maybe they were asking for money.