Gary Cherkassky’s grandmother, who is 80 years old, isn’t on Facebook or Instagram. She doesn’t even have a smartphone. But if you are a Russian Jew, chances are you’ve probably heard what she has to say somewhere on the internet. That’s because she is the inspiration behind Baba Fira (“baba” is short for babushka, which…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On January 15, 2017, I — the mother of three adult sons — finally became a grandmother. Following the Jewish tradition, the new parents, Menachem and Emily, chose not to divulge the name of the infant boy until the bris. So when the rabbi announced that my…
In a recent essay in the Forward, new grandmother Rukhl Schaechter wrote of her fondness for being called “Bubbe,” the Yiddish term for grandmother. But Schaechter lamented that “the B-word” is now “seen as a vestige of a previous era, causing modern, educated women to run the other way.” Beyond Jewish-specific titles for grandmothers to…
The recipe notebook of Lola Blei, the author’s grandmother, who was known as Loly. Photograph by Daniela Blei. If there was ever a doubt that cooking is more than just a means of providing sustenance, the evidence lies in my grandmother’s cursive. Her recipes fill a wire-bound notebook, its brittle pages a testament to butter…
illustration by Lior Zaltzman My grandmothers, Bubbie R. and Bubbie G., lived next door to each other throughout my childhood in Wilmington, Delaware. They had also been next-door neighbors throughout my parents’ childhoods in that same city. Yet even then they were striking in their differences, as dissimilar to each other as night and day,…
I walked with my 90-year-old grandmother down a wide cobbled street in the middle of nowhere in Germany. We were in a small town called Bechhofen, and she hadn’t returned for nearly 80 years, since the threat of the Nazis forced her family to flee because they were Jewish. As my grandmother, Senta Baum, and…
Baboo is my grandmother. She’s one of those tiny Polish women whom you can’t picture without wrinkles, who dotes on her grandchildren with all her heart and spare cash, and who occasionally makes inappropriate jokes and then giggles at her own audacity. In short, she’s great. So it’s easy to forgive her for her occasional…
Sholom Aleichem’s granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, discusses teaching Jewish humor and storytelling at age 100. (And be sure to read this recent Forward piece on Kaufman.) The Smithsonian writes about the emergence of gender-specific baby clothes in the 20th century. “Who are you calling grandma?” asks the New York Times. And “why is my retired mom…
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