Bubbe

I’m long overdue on blog entries----I’ve got lots to say about my post-Soviet Passovers and the Peace Corps freedom seder, and I’ve had some really extraordinary experiences cultivating the small plot of land my neighbors have given me to plant. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention something about Bubbe, who died early Tuesday morning.

Bubbe, Yiddish for grandmother, closely tied linguistically to the Ukranian Babusia, was not my relative. Frankly, I don’t know how to describe my relationship with her, if the sum of our interactions even constituted a loose definition of that term. Bubbe was my friend Jeff’s grandmother, and she was tough as nails.

I don’t know how old Bubbe was, or where she was born. I’ve got bits and pieces of her biography scattered throughout various stories I’ve heard over the years. Her legal name was Tilly Gittelman, but even though she was not my grandmother, I always called her bubbe.

Jeff lived about five minutes away growing up, and we spent a lot of time together. Sometimes too much time together. We rode our bikes around town, we played basketball in the park, we meandered around the local mall for hours. And every time, there was bubbe, warning us to take a helmet, or a cell phone, or a full body styrofoam suit incase we fell.

Bubbe never went to a doctor. Not in years, at least. But she must have been pushing ninety when she died, proving most anti-aging techniques tenuous at best. Bubbe simply had this unbelievable will to live, a refusal to get sick, a refusal to die. For a woman who couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds, she had a mental strength that I’ve rarely seen.

Everyone will likely always remember where they were on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was in Jeff’s living room, scared shitless, waiting, because Debbie, Jeff’s mom, Bubbe’s daughter, hadn’t yet returned home from her office on the 64th Floor. She never did.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to fully verbalize what happened in those few months. But I do know that somewhere, somehow, Bubbe, and her husband Ralph (or in the Yiddish Zayde) decided they were going to stay alive to help raise all the kids. Jeff was 14, and he had siblings as young as 9.

Here we are, almost ten years later, and they did it. They woke up early every morning and firmly planted themselves within the confines of Jeff’s house at 19 Clarkson Court, making lunches, running errands, dropping off at after school programs. They gave up everything, and they got even more in return.

At the time, they were occasional complaints. Her chicken often needed salt, and the nagging could be a bit much. But I can guarantee that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, Jeff and his siblings will remember they had a Bubbe who loved them, and who showed it, in her own tough, stubborn way.

Sometimes I am walking around in my village, and I see a woman with a hunched over back and little hair and bad eyes. And they are lugging a bucket of water or a pile of hay or occasionally a live chicken. I always offer to help (well, sometimes not with the chickens) and they almost always refuse. They’ve been doing this for some time now, they tell me, and they can take it a little bit farther. This is the picture of the Ukrainian Babusia, never quitting, strong of spirit, an unspoken power. They go to the well every day because that is was Babusias do.

Bubbe raised children for 60 odd years, first her own, and then her children’s children. She cooked and cleaned and nagged and helped and taught and warned and loved. And when people told her to stop she kept going, because that was just what Bubbe’s do.