A conversation between bubby and grandson

By Jesse Ilan Kornbluth

 

 

 

On Asarah B’Teves, our enemies surrounded the walls of the holy city of Yerushalayim, intent on destroying us.

And throughout the centuries, they’ve tried to do the same, again and again and again.

Pogroms and persecution.

Death and discrimination.

Expulsion and extermination.

But through it all, we remain strong, standing tall and serving our Creator.

This is one woman’s incredible story of survival during our nation’s darkest hour, and the community that embraced her.

 

 

 

 

My bubby’s house is a time capsule.

From the outside, an unassuming single-floor home on a quiet corner of an oak-lined block in Lakewood, New Jersey, where she moved from Queens with my zeide in 1985.

On the inside, a vibrant, dizzying array of technicolor patterned wallpaper, canary yellow shag carpet, and couches covered in protective plastic. Vintage 1970s New Jersey decor laid in the mid-80s stubbornly persisting today.

Everywhere you look, there are wooden carvings handmade by my zeide, made purely for utility but with a flourish of art and skill that he developed as a teenager in a Siberian labor camp. A mezuzah carved into the shape of the Kosel’s stones, an ornate wooden esrog box, an elegant wooden cane to stabilize a limp Zeide Abu carried since an accident in an Austrian DP camp in his early 20s.

Year by year, as her family tree grows, the wood-paneled walls cede their final empty cubits to new photographs, joining a visual home archive that now spans eight generations and four continents, from her great-great-grandparents to her own great-grandchildren, of which she has many.

We sit across from each other at the kitchen table, the configuration of so many of our deepest conversations throughout my visits to Lakewood over the years. What I’m about to hear is an entire 93-year personal history squeezed into the time between lunch and an afternoon nap. I’ve heard her story—and my zeide’s parallel survival story—in individual pieces throughout my entire life, a mosaic of shattered lives, survival, hope, and resilience. A story of the struggles and small miracles that are so common in the oral histories of our grandparents’ generation.

I’ve exhibited my family history visually at the International Center of Photography Museum on the Lower East Side and will share an exhibition, “Roots,” based on three years of archival research into my family’s history, at the United Nations. Over the course of this work, I traveled to my zeide’s shtetl in southern Poland, hoping to uncover my family’s lost past, only to find that the world had moved on. Today, only a small Jewish cemetery behind a chain link remains, an insufficient landmark of a once vibrant Jewish community.

This is the first time I’ve written about Bubby Zelda and Zeide Abu beyond a museum plaque, eulogy, or social media caption.

As we talk over slices of pizza from JII in her compact kitchen, various prescriptions, newspapers, and rugelach strewn about the table, the conversation flows naturally. Bubby Zelda wears her trademark bandana, housedress, and white Nikes.

At 93, face-to-face with her own mortality, she bears a sharp self-awareness of the importance of her experience extending beyond her own family. She’s one of the last survivors of a nearly lost culture, holding the fading memory of a generation whose stories will soon be limited to oral histories and memoirs. This is precisely why I’m writing this story today.

Before I switch on the voice recorder, she reflects openly on this: “This isn’t easy to talk about, but you should know our story. The next generations must know because we are dying out. There are lessons in our past, Jesse…”

I start recording our conversation, and any notion of a linear timeline collapses into a series of tangents and stories spread across decades and oceans. Suddenly, we’re no longer in Lakewood. We’re in Lunienec.

 

Chapter I: Rumors of war

“It’s a small town near Pinsk nobody’s ever heard of,” she tells me, her voice sharp and devoid of nostalgia. “Back then it was Poland; today it’s Belarus.”

Before World War II broke out, her life was defined by the modest rhythms of a working-class shtetl existence. Her father, Shloimey, had smichah and tutored local boys for their bar mitzvahs. They lived a normal life that was shattered in an instant, like so many others.

She attended school; she played with her younger sister. Before the Germans arrived, they had saved enough to buy a cow, a marker of modest financial progress in the shtetls of Poland. But the local Poles wouldn’t let the “Jewish cows” graze in the pasture during the summer, so she was kept in a stall behind the house.

“The flies were bad, but we had no choice. At least we had fresh milk.” This silver lining sentiment would echo throughout our conversation and her life.

The war didn’t begin for the Turkenitch family with explosions, but with a slow shift in the continental atmosphere toward intolerance and fascism. It was September 1939. Poland was carved up like a challah—half to Germany, half to the Soviet Union. Lunienec fell to the Russians, and for a moment, the town held their breath. Some families fled immediately, some took their chances and stayed. Then, in June 1941, Germany invaded, and everything changed.

“About 10 days into the war, we were still home,” Bubby Zelda remembers. Her father was working in a bank at the time, when things started to take a turn. The local Poles began showing up at work with knives hidden in their boots. “They threatened him, ‘We don’t have to wait for the Germans to kill you; we’ll do it ourselves.’ They saw an opportunity and they took it; they wanted our house, our belongings.”

She pauses, looking past me, perhaps at the wallpaper, perhaps through it. “War makes normal people do ugly things.”

 

Chapter II: Survival

The decision to leave was made in haste and with a hopeful—if not naive—optimism. Her father was certain the Germans wouldn’t touch women and children, so he decided to flee with several other men from the village with a plan to find work elsewhere and send money home. Expecting to return before winter, he left with little more than a cane, just in case he had to walk a long distance.

Bubby Zelda describes this moment vividly: “His mother—my bubby—yelled at him on his way out, ‘Shloimey, at least take a coat!’”

“Did he listen?” I ask.

“No. Does any man ever listen to his mother when he should?”

 

The family followed him to the train station, carrying a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread for his journey, only to discover that men were barred from the trains. The impromptu plan shifted in real time. Bubby Zelda’s father told her mother, Dashe, to take the girls and get on the train. He ran back to the house to get his own mother, but she refused to leave, “I have a house, I have a cow, and in a few months, they’ll be back. I’m staying.”

They never saw Bubby Dashe again.

Bubby Zelda boarded the train with her mother and sister, without a plan or destination. The old steam engine chugged along slowly toward the east, full of Jewish refugees seeking safety. In a twist of fate that Bubby Zelda characterizes as a small miracle—one neis in a series of many—they disembarked in a well-known town called Baranovichi, and after a few days, bumped into her father walking on the street. He had walked the whole way, dragging himself eastward.

“If we hadn’t bumped into him in Baranovichi, who knows if we would have seen him again during the war?” she asks.

I suggest that perhaps they would have found each other eventually.

“Probably not,” she replies without hesitation.

There’s no room for naivety in recounting her childhood, only the cold truths of survival.

They boarded a freight train heading further eastward, this time together, along with many others who had fled the shtetls of Poland. At the Russian border, a soldier boarded the train, demanding travel permits. They had nothing to show. Zeide Shloimey, a man Bubby Zelda describes as “the most honest man you’ve ever met,” reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled document that had allowed him to enter the bank where he worked in Lunienec at night. Without a second thought he handed it to the soldier, claiming it was a permit for the entire extended family. Though it was only the four of them—Bubby Zelda, her sister, and her parents—Zeide Shloimey claimed that everyone surrounding them in the train car was a relative.

“The soldier looked over the paper, handed it back, and said we could all cross,” Zelda says.

Approximately 30 people were allowed to stay on the train because of that piece of paper; the rest were sent back to Poland.

“So the soldier accepted the fake letter? Why?” I ask.

Bubby Zelda smiles, tapping the table. “That was the neis here—the soldier couldn’t read. If he could, they would have sent us back, or straight to Siberia.”

I offer a different interpretation: “Or maybe he could read but saw the opportunity to save your lives?”

She pauses, considering this. “Hmm, maybe. Never thought about that.”

“Either way, a neis,” I reply.

She agrees.

 

Chapter III: Uzbekistan

The train of human cargo continued eastward, stopping in a town in Siberia, where the family stayed for several weeks. Eventually, they began hearing rumors that all men were being drafted into the Red Army, so they fled again. This time, they landed for several weeks in Tashkent, finally settling in a small town in the Bukhara region of Uzbekistan called Qorakoʻl.

“We were poor; we had nothing but each other,” she says. “But we were the lucky ones.”

 

In Qorakoʻl, disconnected from their former lives, they lived a quiet, if meager existence. Her father, Shloimey, was eventually drafted into the Soviet workforce. He was gone for over six months, his whereabouts unknown. Throughout these years, hunger was the overwhelming state of being. People were beginning to die of starvation.

“When we were hungry at night, with nothing to eat, my mother used to tell us, ‘Kinderlach, go to sleep; you’ll eat in the morning…’ The hunger was very big. Der hunger iz geven a groyse,” she says, slipping into Yiddish, the language of her deepest, most sentient memories.

Bubby Zelda and her sister went to a Soviet school, where they received a pittance of bread, 300 grams a day. They would always stuff their small portions of bread in their pockets to bring home for their mother, who had become too weak from hunger to leave the house.

For months, they survived on morsels of bread, until a few rubles started appearing mysteriously in the mail, with no name or return address. They suspected it was sent by Zeide Shloimey, but this only made Bubby Zelda’s mother worry even more, not knowing the source of this income. She suspected Zeide Shloimey was selling his blood.

After more than six months, Zeide Shloimey was released from the workforce. While waiting for several days in Tashkent to catch a train back to Qorakoʻl, he collapsed to sleep on a park bench and woke up in a hospital, dying of exhaustion. He had survived months in Siberia on soup that was little more than boiled saltwater with the odd vegetable.

Yet, amid their struggles, there were equal measures of growth and resilience. Bubby Zelda and her sister excelled at school. These were formative years for the Turkenitch girls. While their parents struggled to stay alive, the children lived. You might even say thrived. A sacrifice that parents of the Shoah—and refugee parents across the world—know all too well.

When I ask about the antisemitism she faced from the locals in Uzbekistan, she’s quick to correct my pessimistic assumptions. “The Uzbeks are Semites! They treated us well. They would say to me, ‘Zelda, you come to school barefoot, hungry, you have no books. Maybe you’re such a good student because you’re Jewish.’”

They spent approximately four years in Qorakoʻl, including an extra year after the war ended because there were no trains. When they were finally able to leave Qorakoʻl in 1946, the long, bureaucratic march back west—and to a new life—began.

 

Chapter IV: The war ends

The family landed in a Displaced Persons camp in Salzburg, Austria, run by the US Military. Eventually, an aunt, Bubby’s father’s sister who had already made it to Montreal, found them. They’d been trying to make their way to Palestine, but Bubby Zelda’s aunt intervened. “You have family here in Canada, you’ll have a roof over your heads, and you’ll be safe. Don’t even think about going anywhere else.”

As the dust settled and families began to take account of their loved ones, it became clear that most of her extended family had perished. Her father’s mother and four sisters were all gone, Hy”d. Her mother’s family was decimated, rachmana litzlan.

At this point, we start to dig into what had become of the rest of her family, a brutal and tragic calculus of recounting survivors and those they lost.

Bubby Esther, Bubby’s maternal grandmother, had been widowed before the war at age 45 and was left to care for nine small children on her own. Two of Bubby Esther’s sons had fled to Argentina before the war, and two of her daughters had gone to Palestine. Two more daughters tried to emigrate to Palestine, but the British wouldn’t let them in, so Bubby Esther decided to travel to Palestine first, thinking that once she was there, the English would let her other children join her.

But before they could escape, the Nazi beasts invaded their village, took all the remaining women and children into the woods behind the village, and shot them in cold blood. The thick woods, forever silent, are the only witness to the brutal way the lives of these kedoshim ended.

There were two more sons who had gone to Pinsk; one died from an ulcer before the war started, and one was killed by the Germans. B’chasdei Hashem, the four who had escaped to Argentina and Palestine survived.

I’ve met my bubby’s cousins in Tel Aviv, including one who leined at my bar mitzvah on Masada. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to track down our lost cousins in Argentina.

Zeide Shloimey had five sisters; one survived and went to Canada after the war. His mother, four sisters, and their children didn’t leave Poland in time. None of them survived, rachmana litzlan.

To this day, Bubby Zelda always uses her maiden name, Turkenitch, whenever her name appears in print, “just in case someone from the old shtetl recognizes it.”

Recognizing the pain in her voice discussing her family’s fate, I try to shift the conversation away from tragedy. I ask her to tell me a story she’s never shared with me before.

She begins to tell me about a neighbor she once had in Poland. A Jewish man, but fully assimilated. A man who had shed his Jewish identity almost entirely. He was a doctor, so the Germans found a use for him. Eventually, they decided it was time to get rid of all the men in the village, but they told him they would spare his life because of his utility to them. “But he refused,” Bubby Zelda says, her voice trembling and tears welling up in her eyes. “He said, ‘No, I’m going with my brothers.’ So they shot him too.”

“There’s always a pintele Yid,” I reply.

“Always.” She nods, narrowing her eyes at me. “And where did you learn that phrase?”

“From you!” I laugh. “You called me a pintele Yid last time I visited a few weeks ago.”

 

 

Chapter V: Postwar in Europe

We move to the post-war years. The DP camp in Austria was a life in limbo that lasted four years, until 1950.

Life in the camp was a series of bureaucratic hurdles and visa denials. Bubby Zelda’s sister developed a heart condition, and the camp doctor was a known antisemite. The condition put their visa status at risk—many refugee-receiving nations were hesitant to absorb Jewish refugees, let alone sick ones.

So Bubby Zelda devised a plan: She asked another girl in the camp—small and blonde like her sister—to pretend to be her and take the cardiogram on her behalf. The plan worked.

“Another small neis,” Bubby Zelda says. “We owe our life to that little girl, and she wanted nothing in return.”

With a clean bill of health, they embarked on their mission to emigrate to Canada, but that required a sponsor (which they had, Zeide Shloimey’s sister) and money (which they didn’t). Zelda’s aunt in Montreal tried sending cash to the camp, but it was stolen in customs. Eventually, they learned to smuggle bills inside spools of thread.

“My aunt was over 50 at this point; she was washing floors to make money to bring us over,” Bubby says.

When they finally stood before a judge, her aunt pleaded in Yiddish.

“Maybe the judge was Polish or German and could understand her, or maybe he could just feel her pain without understanding her words. Finally, we were approved.”

The journey to Canada was two weeks of seasickness and cold.

“My sister and I slept on the floor, and my mother stood most of the time to protect us from the cold. She got pneumonia on that ship, and her lungs never recovered.”

As the conversation arrives in Montreal, the narrative shifts from a tragedy to a sweet shidduch story.

“This is confusing and important, so pay attention,” she tells me, her finger raised.

Arriving in Montreal, Bubby Zelda was no longer a child. She was a young, charming woman with a sharp wit and high standards.

“People were always trying to set me up,” she says. “But there was no prospective shidduch with all the qualities I was looking for in a husband.”

One afternoon, she visited her friend Esther and met Esther’s houseguest. The young man was visiting from New York; he was Esther’s sister-in-law’s brother. He could speak English, but with a thick Galicianer accent.

The shidduch was redt, and the courtship was short. After an adolescence on the run to survive, there was no time to waste. They were engaged by the time their second date ended. Mazel tov!

That visitor from New York became my zeide. I can still hear his Galicianer accent today, 10 years after his passing.

 

Chapter VI: A new life

They married. They moved to Brooklyn after another bureaucratic battle. (It was the McCarthy Era, and the government was wary of Jews, especially from Soviet states.)

Bubby Zelda describes Greenpoint, Brooklyn, of the 1950s as “a big shtetl.” They were poor again, but this time it was a poverty of opportunity, not persecution. Zeide worked in a doll factory. They moved from Greenpoint to Brownsville to Far Rockaway, where they raised my father and his sisters.

 

Finally, in March 1985, they moved to Lakewood.

“There weren’t too many Jewish people here back then; it was a small shtetl,” she recalls. “But the community embraced us immediately.”

It’s true. Walking down the street with my bubby in Lakewood is like walking with a local celebrity. Everyone calls her “Bubby” as they stop to schmooze and wish her well.

She tells me that when she first arrived, she was so taken aback by the warmth of the community that she wrote about it for a local magazine, Ha’Kesher: “How the Lakewood Community Adopted a Middle-Aged Couple from New York.”

“And they never let you go,” I say.

“Never,” she says firmly. “This is my extended family here; I call them my Lakewood children.”

As her grandson, I’m extremely grateful to Lakewood. I could have written another 3,500 words on how this town cared for my bubby. How when their fridge once broke before Shabbos, someone came by with a mini fridge just in time to save their food. How her neighbors’ children made a beautiful handmade sign welcoming her home from the hospital several years ago that still adorns her front door. How when I came to visit Lakewood on Sukkos, we were welcomed into three different sukkos for a nosh within a one-block radius. Everyone knows her name, from the children to the old folks.

When she recently fractured her hip, she could have gone to a full-service rehabilitation clinic with more intensive care, but it was 90 minutes from Lakewood. My father, a physician, implored her to go to rehab at Leisure Chateau, where she’d be close enough for her Lakewood family to visit. And visit they did. Every day.

“I couldn’t have recovered without the love and support of my neighbors from Lakewood,” she tells me.

She looks around the kitchen. The pizza I brought for lunch is now cold. The wallpaper is still shouting its floral pattern, a bright, joyful contrast to many of the stories I just heard.

“We need to finish now, Jesse. This is hard for me to talk about, and I need to rest.”

After all, she turns 93 years old on the day of the publication of this article.

“My whole life we’ve suffered, but I’m lucky,” she tells me. “Hashem was with me every step of the way.”

I look at her, my bubby, surviving in her vibrant kitchen on Oakwood Avenue, and I realize she’s right.

Her life has been a series of small nissim, from the cow in the backyard to the illiterate soldier on the train to the young girl stepping in to take the cardiogram to the wonderful neighbors she has here in Lakewood.

They’ve tried to destroy us again and again, but we’re still here. In our colorful kitchens and Nikes, in our headscarves and talleisim, we’re here.

We’re still here. And we must remember.