Passover

Today's the start of Passover: a moving account from the New York Times, in memory of Moses and the Jewish experience.
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Opinion

Bubby Locked Her Memories Away. One Passover Released Them.

‘I remember my father, before the war, hanging a matzo on the wall,’ my wife’s grandmother murmured, entranced. Suddenly, there sat a young Polish child.

By Mendel Horowitz

Mr. Horowitz is a psychotherapist.

• April 7, 2020

Bubby with her husband, Victor, and their children, Ruth and Mark.Credit...Family Photograph

JERUSALEM — By the time I married into the family, Bubby Bella’s reticence was pronounced. A survivor of Nazi genocide, Bubby had resolutely overcome it, posturing under large-brimmed hats while ordering egg rolls and lo mein in Philadelphia’s northeast.

Whatever demons Bubby knew in Poland were long silenced. Her wounds had in America become scars and like other women of her generation, Bubby kept them unseen. Beneath her traumas, her prewar memories lay dormant. Somewhere inside Bubby, an innocent child was lost.

One spring, Bubby flew first-class to stay with our budding family in Jerusalem. Aging and not in the best of health, Bubby spent the days before Passover convalescing from her trip.

In the company of her great-grandchildren, Bubby appeared content. My wife and I could sense our matriarch was at the end of her journey. For the children, however, and for Bubby, the occasion was joyful.

I try to imagine Bella as young and without inhibition, but I cannot conjure up a picture.

Though I worked hard to understand her mishmash of Yiddish and English, she never confided the details of her wartime ordeal. I know she was pregnant with her son when she and her husband fled to the forest from Korytnica, Poland.

Was she in town when Germans forced its Jewish residents into slave labor, when the Germans stole all their valuables and when, in May of 1942, the Gestapo shot most of the remaining Jews in a pit outside the town?

What were her defiant eyes made to see? Bubby would never say. Whatever tenderness she had known as a girl had been erased. How much of her childhood did Bubby remember and how much was she compelled by trauma to forget?

After the war, Bubby and her husband, Victor, buried their histories and moved on. Severed from their roots, the valiant pair and their children, Mark and Ruth, made their way to Philadelphia, where they tended to tradition in a manner that suited them. From her patois to her potato kugel, Bubby was thoroughly Jewish.

Though no longer Orthodox herself, Bubby took great pride in her Orthodox descendants. Just as certain recessive traits skip a generation, a compromised faith can take time to make itself known again.