Fraida (Bubby)

Fraida (Bubby) is Devorah’s grandmother and a central figure in the family’s daily life. She feeds and cares for relatives, making her kitchen a place where Devorah feels safe and connected. Yet this generous household presence coexists with a guarded emotional reserve, a voice constrained by religious expectations, and a history of devastating wartime loss. Bubby’s character emerges through the contrast between what she continually gives others and what she seldom says about herself.

Identity and Family History

Bubby’s family history is marked by the Holocaust. While she labored in the factories of Bergen-Belsen, her relatives were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. By liberation, she was close to death from typhus. The scale of that loss helps explain why her past remains difficult to discuss: she lights a yahrzeit candle for each of her dead relatives, including the youngest, baby Mindel, and fourteen-year-old Chaim, but almost never speaks about them.

The family’s memories of the war do not receive equal attention. Zeidy often tells stories of his wartime experience, including his work preparing meals for an army while trying to keep a kosher kitchen. Devorah recognizes that Bubby’s story is the one that goes largely unheard. During one retelling, Bubby covers the side of her face turned toward Zeidy and shakes her head. Her gesture registers her exasperation at hearing a familiar account, while the contrast between his repeated stories and her silence underscores how little room the household gives her own loss.

A brief exchange about women shaving their heads brings the history behind Bubby’s religious observance into view. She explains that Zeidy says the rebbe wants women to become more devout than any Jews before them, in the hope that God will not hurt them again as he did during the war. After giving this explanation, Bubby falls silent and sinks into painful recollection. Her account presents extreme religious devotion not simply as a rule to follow but as a response to wartime suffering, bound up with the hope of preventing its return.

The Kitchen as Care and Refuge

Bubby’s care takes practical, repeated forms. She cooks beef especially for her son, Devorah’s father, even though Zeidy avoids beef after a scandal ten years earlier revealed that some supposedly kosher beef was not kosher. She also continues to cook for her married sons, who come to eat despite having wives of their own. At ten each night, she wipes the kitchen counters and jokingly announces that the family restaurant is closed. The routine makes her labor visible while treating the return of adult sons for dinner as an ordinary part of family life.

The kitchen also provides Devorah with a refuge from instability elsewhere. She eats there and sleeps at Bubby’s house much of the time because her mother is often absent and her father cannot be relied upon to care for her. As a small child, Devorah makes her way down one flight of stairs from the family’s third-floor apartment to Bubby’s kitchen on the second floor, hoping for cherry-flavored Jell-O. Later, she waits for the spatula after Bubby mixes chocolate-cake batter and watches her prepare meals. Devorah associates this room not merely with food but with safety and a sense of belonging, in contrast to the feeling of being lost in a place where no one seems to know who she is or what language she speaks.

That refuge has limits. Devorah remembers her mother reading her stories when she was very young, but at Bubby’s house the available books are prayer books. Devorah wants to read again but has limited English and no independent way to obtain books; instead, she finds comfort in cupcakes and egg kichel, and becomes caught up in Bubby’s pleasure in food. Food thus connects them through an everyday shared interest, even when books and conversation do not bridge the distance between them.

A Private Voice and a Reserved Relationship

When Zeidy is away, Bubby sometimes hums while preparing food, identifying the tunes as a Viennese waltz or a Hungarian rhapsody and tracing them to her childhood memories of Budapest. When he comes home, she stops. The household’s expectations restrict women’s singing, though singing before family is permitted; Zeidy nevertheless encourages it only on Shabbos, saying music should be avoided except on special occasions because the Temple was destroyed. Bubby sometimes plays a cassette of her cousin’s wedding music on Devorah’s old tape recorder at low volume, ready to turn it off if she hears someone in the hallway. The contrast between her private humming and her vigilance around the recorded music shows how carefully she manages this small expression of herself.

Bubby explains that her father was a Kohain and that his ancestry extended back to the Temple priests, who were known for their beautiful voices. Zeidy, by contrast, cannot carry a tune, and his loud, flat singing of traditional Shabbos melodies overwhelms the other voices. Bubby says that only one of her sons inherited her voice; Devorah, who has been chosen for a solo in the school choir, hopes that she may have inherited the family’s clear singing voice and wants Bubby to be proud of her. Their exchange offers a point of connection through music and inheritance, even as Devorah longs for a more direct interest in her life.

Devorah observes that Bubby does not ask how she is doing in school or take an interest in her activities. She suspects that Bubby has little energy left for emotional connection after the murder of her family. This is Devorah’s interpretation rather than an explanation Bubby gives herself. The distinction matters: Bubby’s practical care is abundant, but her inward attention remains difficult for her granddaughter to reach.

Narrative Significance

Bubby’s presence holds together two contrasting forms of memory. The kitchen preserves family life through cooking, shared meals, and routines that draw generations together; the war survives there too, in the loss that Bubby marks with candles and in the explanation that religious extremity might protect the family from further harm. Her labor is constant and public, while her grief and singing are largely private.

For Devorah, Bubby is both a source of security and an elusive person. The child experiences the kitchen as a place where she belongs, but she also notices that Bubby rarely seeks to know her as an individual. The difference between those experiences prevents Bubby’s care from becoming a simple portrait of uncomplicated closeness. She can make a dependable refuge for Devorah without being able, or willing, to answer all of her questions. Through that tension, the memoir portrays how family affection may be expressed through sustained acts of care while histories of trauma and silence shape what relatives can share.