Carol Bobrow

My grandmother’s letter rests in a dark frame on a dark mat beside its white envelope which is open, the triangular flap lifted up, causing it to resemble the small white house I was living in my junior year of college when this letter arrived over fifty years ago. 

The blue ink looks fresh, having been pressed hard into the page, its script a little jagged as if the words had been rambunctious and with effort were reined in—order was restored with a generous space between each word and its neighbor.  Letters are of varying sizes but sentences lie ruler-straight and the margin is clear and even; capital letters have been given the dignity of a little flourish.  This letter was not written by a hand at ease with writing, but like her tidy, immaculate apartments, there is order, care and deliberateness.

“Bauby” was a pillar of my life, the person who cherished me, the person who taught me I was lovable.  We spent many weekends together in her ever changing string of apartments, riding buses to visit  relatives who came from various European countries—France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia; conversations were a mix of English and Yiddish which I didn’t understand but loved to listen to. 

Our afternoons were spent in and out of the shops along Devon Avenue—the fruit market, the butcher, the bakery, even the Kosher ice cream store, in her never ending quest to put weight on me.  At home in the green-lawned suburbs, my friends hung out at the beach or the mall but I had no regrets for I had been transported to a world of another time and another place. 

At the end of the day Bauby and I sat on the worn back steps of her building, taking in the view of Chicago rooftops at dusk, a section of the Chicago SunTimes beneath us to keep our bottoms clean,

Bauby died a few years after writing my letter— the emptiness was immeasurable.  I could not bear to let her go. I thought I caught glimpses of her on the “L” platform, or waiting for the cross light at Devon and Western, shopping bag in hand, babushka on her head. The sightings haunted me, then disappeared.

I understood my loss to be part of a larger tide of loss as, one by one, European Jews of her generation disappeared from the world, taking with them their humor, their warmth, and the weight they carried with them of pogroms and Czarist Russia and the rise of the Russian revolution— their history as heavy on their shoulders as the sodden woolen coats of Chicago’s winters.

One day, I knew, Yiddish-crafted English would no longer be heard; a language that seemed to float on a sea of irony, where single words were capable of expressing whole ideas—so many of them funny, making our own language feel flat and unimaginative.  It was a language that required amplification by animation—shrugs, hand gestures, lifted eyebrows, or a downturn of the mouth.

That world returns to me in my grandmother’s letter. In her phonetic spelling  I hear the richness of her voice.  She tells me that she knows her “spaling is not riete" but it is the best she can do, “like in roshen.”  She tells me she is proud of me, and that she loves me. I hear her voice, and in my mind’s eye I see her give a soft pat of the air with her hand as if to signify the end of a thought put properly to rest.  This is all that I have of my grandmother, but it is enough.