Bubby’s enduring grief over the Holocaust

Bubby’s enduring grief over the Holocaust is expressed less through sustained conversation than through silence, ritual, and the practical care she gives her family. She rarely discusses the relatives murdered during the war, yet their absence shapes how she relates to Devorah, remembers the past, and interprets suffering. The memoir shows grief as both private and inherited: Bubby carries the losses, while Devorah encounters them through family stories, photographs, and acts of remembrance.

Loss and Emotional Distance

Bubby’s family was murdered in concentration camps, and she herself was near death from typhus by the time liberation came. Devorah understands this history as one reason Bubby does not readily connect with her emotionally. Bubby does not ask how Devorah is doing at school or show much interest in her activities; to the child, it can seem that her grandmother does not want to know her as an individual. Devorah connects that distance to the devastation of losing an entire family and to Bubby’s diminished capacity for emotional attachment after such losses.

The distance does not mean an absence of care. Bubby’s attention is persistently directed toward whether Devorah has eaten enough. She offers freshly prepared food at all hours, from bread and soup to strudel, and the household’s food is made from scratch. This practical, bodily form of care stands beside what Bubby cannot or does not say. The contrast gives her grief a daily presence: affection is made visible through feeding, even when personal questions and conversation about the past remain scarce.

Silence, Faith, and Fear

When Devorah asks why the rebbe required women to shave their heads if the practice had not been followed in Europe, Bubby explains the rule through a belief formed by wartime loss. She says that the rebbe wanted the community to become more devout than any Jews before it, in the hope that extreme devotion would keep God from hurting them again as he had during the war. After offering this explanation, Bubby falls silent and sinks into painful recollection. Her account links religious discipline not simply to custom, but to an attempt to make the past’s catastrophe intelligible and to protect against its return.

The scene places that explanation within ordinary work. Bubby adjusts her turban with a floury hand and continues preparing kreplach while Devorah asks questions she cannot stop asking. Bubby’s exasperation at the questions coexists with the sorrow behind her answer. Her silence is therefore not blankness: it marks the limit of what she is willing or able to discuss, while the domestic task continues around the memory. The memoir does not suggest that devotion resolves her grief; rather, the belief that greater piety might avert another catastrophe reveals how deeply the catastrophe remains present.

Memorials and the Work of Remembering

At Passover, Zeidy recounts a story about eating potatoes instead of matzo when flour was unavailable. Devorah notices that Bubby has heard the story many times and reacts with exasperation. The familiar account of deprivation occupies the family gathering, while Bubby’s own history receives little attention. She lost her relatives in the war, including people murdered in Auschwitz while she labored in Bergen-Belsen, but her story is rarely told. The difference between the repeated family anecdote and the largely unspoken account of mass loss gives the scene its tension.

Bubby nevertheless remembers her dead through a specific yearly practice: she lights a yahrzeit candle for each of them, from the baby Mindel to fourteen-year-old Chaim. The candles give individual names and ages a place in the present, even though Bubby almost never speaks about the people they commemorate. Devorah also keeps black-and-white photographs of Bubby’s parents, siblings, and other relatives wrapped in a paper towel in her top drawer. She looks at them when she feels able, then puts them away when grief overwhelms her. The private photographs and the candles form parallel acts of remembrance: one belongs to Devorah’s solitary encounter with the family’s faces, the other to Bubby’s recurring ritual.

Passover and Unfinished Suffering

The Passover ceremony makes the difference between remembering hardship and moving beyond it especially visible. Bubby takes a generous portion of horseradish, while Devorah struggles with its sharpness. Watching her grandmother eat it dutifully, Devorah wonders whether Bubby can remember the bitterness of captivity without being able to celebrate release from that bitterness. The ritual’s account of suffering and freedom thus meets Bubby’s lived history without neatly transforming it into consolation.

The night also reveals how much work remains Bubby’s responsibility. After the Haggadah, she must serve the meal, wait while the men continue the ceremony until dawn, and then clean up before going to bed. The sequence leaves little room for her own rest or for public telling of her losses. The ceremony commemorates deliverance, but Bubby’s labor continues through its conclusion; for Devorah, that contrast raises the question of whether her grandmother’s work, and the burden of remembering, will ever truly be over.

Memory Passed to Devorah

Bubby’s recollections of the Holocaust also shape Devorah’s understanding of Zionism. Bubby tells her that Jews fleeing the Nazis were turned away from Israel and sent back to the camps, and that children were separated from their families in efforts to form a different kind of Jew. These are Bubby’s claims as she recounts the history, delivered through the bitterness and grief of someone who lost her family in the war. Devorah absorbs them as part of her own developing picture of the past and says she would join a protest, despite women being excluded, for Bubby’s sake and for the relatives she lost.

The photographs make that inheritance personal rather than abstract. Devorah sees the faces of her dead relatives as living people and struggles to reconcile their visible presence in the portraits with their deaths. She weeps over them and returns them to their wrapping before her sobs become audible, mindful that Bubby does not like to discuss her family and that she does not want to remind her of the losses. In this exchange of stories, images, silence, and ritual, Bubby’s grief reaches Devorah without becoming a simple, complete narrative. Its influence is lasting precisely because remembrance is divided between what Bubby can tell, what she cannot bear to say, and what Devorah must learn to see for herself.