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Bubby Cookies
When I was a little girl, my bubby—my mother’s father’s mother—made cookies. We called them Bubby Cookies.
In truth, they were a variation on the crescent- like rugelach, except made with cinnamon sugar instead of date paste. The smell of them baking was intoxicating.
My grandfather was born in 1933 in Lithuania. When I was young, eating Bubby Cookies, he would tell me stories from his own childhood. I didn’t understand it at the time, but those stories were some of my most important lessons about humanity.
When my grandfather was a little boy, seven years old, he was living with a Russian family. They were not Jewish like him; they were Christians. They had their own children, they were poor and they didn’t really know him, but still they took him in. They told everyone he was a cousin who was staying with them. It was a lie, and an important one.
The family was so poor they could only afford to buy cabbage and brown bread to eat. Every day, my grandfather would go to school, come home and eat cabbage soup with brown bread. It was boring, but it kept his belly full.
Every day, before school, my grandfather would go to a secret place in the fence of the ghetto. He was outside the fence. My bubby was on the other side. She would slip away for her job in the factory and sit by the fence, holding her son’s hand and talking.
Every day, before they parted, she would warn him to be careful of the Nazis, not to let them know he was Jewish, or they might shoot him. Then she would go back to work, and he would go to school.
On his way to see my bubby, he would pass through town, past the building that housed the Gestapo headquarters. The building boasted Nazi flags. Outside, soldiers marched.
One day, as he passed, a soldier called him over.
My grandfather recalls being frightened. Thinking he was caught. They knew he was in hiding; he should be in the ghetto. He recalls thinking the soldier who called him would take his rifle off his shoulder and shoot him in the street.
He considered running, but he didn’t. Instead, trembling, he obeyed, and crossed the road.
The soldier took his pack off and set it down. He took the rifle off his shoulder. My grandfather, just seven years old, accepted his fate.
The soldier put the rifle down beside his pack and opened the bag. And took out a sugar cookie.
He handed it to my grandfather who, for more than a year, had not tasted sugar. He mussed my grandfather’s hair, told him to be good, and sent him on his way.
My bubby died before I could ask her for that cookie recipe. I’ll never taste it again, but the memory of it is etched on my tongue. And so, I imagine, is the memory of that sugar cookie etched on my grandfather’s tongue.
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