Bubby

Bubby is the narrator’s grandmother and one of the devout elders who helped raise her. She answers the narrator’s questions about suffering, recalls a family history marked by loss, and carries memories that would otherwise disappear with her generation. Her beliefs do not settle the narrator’s doubts: instead, their differences expose a widening gap between inherited religious explanations and the narrator’s own interpretation of what people endure and how they respond.

Faith and Explanations of Suffering

When the narrator asks whether bad things come from God, Bubby answers that they come from Satan. The exchange takes place during an ordinary household task: Bubby dries dishes while the narrator puts them away. Her explanation is direct and certain, but the narrator immediately tests it against the life she knows. She wonders whether Satan could account for her father’s limited ability to care for himself or for her own arrival in her grandparents’ care. The questions turn Bubby’s simple division between good and evil into a larger problem of responsibility, abandonment, and undeserved hardship.

The narrator has also been taught that suffering is measured out by God in response to sin. She cannot reconcile that lesson with the hardships endured by Bubby and Zeidy, whom she regards as deeply devout. Bubby offers a different comparison when she speaks about hardship in her own childhood: material scarcity once made even a small amount of food a reason for gratitude, while people now complain about lacking desirable clothes or a car. She remembers family togetherness as what mattered most. Her account gives the narrator a sense of the standards by which Bubby understands hardship, without removing the narrator’s question about why faithful people suffer.

Chana Rachel and the Inheritance of Memory

Although Bubby dislikes talking about the past, the narrator can sometimes persuade her to tell the story of her mother, Chana Rachel. Chana Rachel was the fifth of seven children in a Hungarian family. By the time she married, only two of her siblings were still alive: a diphtheria epidemic had killed four children, one after another, before Chana Rachel herself fell gravely ill.

When Chana Rachel developed a high fever and symptoms that threatened her breathing, her mother intervened in an urgent attempt to clear the obstruction in her throat. Chana Rachel recovered. She later heard the story many times from her own mother, but Bubby was the only one who lived on to pass it to the narrator. Many of the narrator’s cousins carry Chana Rachel’s name, so the story moves through both family memory and naming. Bubby credits prayer for the recovery; the narrator instead sees a mother who took decisive action to save her child. That difference matters to the narrator, who is moved by the possibility of courage expressed through action rather than passivity. Bubby preserves the account, while the narrator gives its meaning a new emphasis.

Fear After September 11

During the September 11 attacks, the household listens repeatedly to radio coverage, despite Zeidy’s usual rule against listening to the radio. Bubby fears that the attacks will lead to another Holocaust, riots, and efforts to drive Jews out of the United States. She distinguishes Israel from Jews when discussing who might be blamed, while Zeidy warns that others may treat them as the same. Her fear connects an immediate crisis to the inherited memory of persecution: for Bubby, the possibility of renewed danger is not an abstract historical comparison but a recurrence she believes she had long expected.

This response also places her earlier reflections on hardship in a different light. Bubby can remember a childhood in which family solidarity helped people endure deprivation, yet she anticipates that Jews may again face collective danger. The narrator sees in her grandmother both a person shaped by previous generations’ losses and an elder trying to read a new crisis through that history. The episode does not resolve whether Bubby’s fear is warranted; it shows how memory organizes her perception of the present.

Age, Home, and the Narrator’s Departure

The narrator’s last visit to Bubby and Zeidy takes place at Purim in March 2009, as she is contemplating whether she can leave the community with her son. By then, the brownstone where she grew up is visibly deteriorating. Paint peels in the hallways, and the stairway linoleum is worn through in places. Bubby wants to sell the house to a developer who has offered a seven-figure sum, while Zeidy resists giving up control of what he considers his best investment. Their disagreement makes the home’s decline concrete: it is at once a family residence, a valuable property, and a place whose history the narrator fears is being left to decay.

The narrator also observes how much Bubby and Zeidy have aged. Bubby’s former energy has diminished; her steps are slow, and the narrator notices disorientation in her eyes. Zeidy, too, seems more absentminded, with less quickness and precision in his speech. These are the narrator’s observations, not an explanation of the changes. Set beside the worn house, they make the visit feel like a farewell even though the narrator has not yet made a firm plan to leave. She understands that some parts of childhood have already changed beyond recovery.

Narrative Role

Bubby’s importance lies in the way she transmits stories and beliefs without controlling what the next generation makes of them. Her account of Chana Rachel carries a history of epidemic loss and survival; her explanation of suffering offers one religious framework; her response to September 11 reveals the persistence of historical fear. In each case, the narrator listens but also interprets, sometimes reaching conclusions that differ from Bubby’s own. Their relationship therefore joins inheritance to disagreement: Bubby keeps the past available, while the narrator tests its meanings against her experience of family, faith, and the possibility of leaving.