Illustration by Catherine Chan
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My grandparents’ large house was built in the 1960s. Growing up, I adored how during family gatherings its capacious rooms and dark corners served as the perfect venue for a good game of hide-and-seek with my brother and cousins.
I now understand that the house represented Bubbie’s and Zadie’s rise from modest beginnings in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where her family owned a kosher poultry shop and his owned a bagel bakery. Its grand staircase and formal décor carried the weight of another time – an era after the Holocaust when many Jewish families were stepping into a new world of opportunity and security.
In September, 2023, I visited my 95-year-old Bubbie at the house. She had adamantly, even stubbornly, insisted on aging in her home. The furniture on the main floor had been thinned out and an electric stairlift wound up the grand staircase. Bubbie was connected to an oxygen machine and a caregiver was always nearby. Yet Bubbie was still the same person who had embraced me unconditionally when I came out a decade before. So, we shared our latest Netflix binges, played Bananagrams and, in passing, talked about Israeli politics – unaware that October 7 was around the corner. When I left, Bubbie hugged me tight and whispered, “I love you, darling.”
Her funeral a few months later fell on a snowy day. After I helped carry Bubbie’s dark casket through the cemetery, I hugged my mom and said I loved her.
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We returned to Bubbie’s house for the Shiva, a Jewish mourning ritual. In a quiet moment, I thumbed through a photo album of my grandparents’ 1970 trip to Israel, which was hosted by the Israeli government in appreciation of the fundraising efforts of the Canadians travelling in the group. There they were, in idyllic landscapes and beside landmarks such as the King David Hotel. The family laughed at a photo taken at a private event that showed Bubbie in front of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who appears in the background like another landmark. As with many diaspora Jews, Bubbie never lived in Israel. More than a place, Israel was an idea.
With the house to be put on the market, my mom and her siblings decided to host one last Passover Seder there in 2024, marking both Jewish liberation from slavery and the end of an era for our family.
The evening before Passover, one of our family members sent an e-mail noting that the family was “deeply divided” over the conflict in the Middle East and asking that we refrain from “starting, or engaging in, divisive discussions or arguments.” To be honest, I felt relief knowing there wouldn’t be a pie fight.
The gathering was nostalgic and lovely. We reminisced about Bubbie. We went around reading from the Passover Haggadah. In Hebrew, my cousin’s children chanted the four questions – when the youngest person present asks about the meaning of Passover and the family answers by retelling the story of exodus from Egypt.
There was a yellow ribbon on the Seder table, representing the Israeli hostages then in Gaza. Some family members wore dog tags with the engraving, “Bring Them Home.”
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We celebrated Jewish liberation, but did not discuss Gaza’s destruction. Recalled plagues, but did not mention Israel’s occupation. Ended with the perennial words “next year in Jerusalem,” but ignored the Nakba and the longing of Palestinians ever since to return to their homeland.
As it happens, the following year I travelled to Jerusalem. At the city’s edge, an Israeli guide walked me down a steep hill to visit the ruins of Lifta, a Palestinian village whose residents fled violence and were expelled in 1947 and 1948. My Israeli guide told me how growing up he found the stone houses magical and otherworldly, but he was not told who used to live there. Later in life, it all clicked when he met a Palestinian man who had been expelled from Lifta as a child. Not allowed to live there, he visited his old home every week.
This Passover, I’m thinking about that story of trying to return home, and about Bubbie, who chose to stay in hers until the end.
Bubbie’s house was sold and its objects divvied up. My mom helped me snag Bubbie’s quirky owl-shaped cookie jar, grandfather clock and Shabbat candlesticks, which I light on Friday nights with my husband. Using some money that I inherited from Bubbie, I contacted a Palestinian artist. He shipped me two paintings – a landscape and a still life. We hung them in our home with help from friends. I don’t know what Bubbie would have thought about that choice. But inheritance – whether of objects, stories or identity itself – shouldn’t just be the passive receipt and protection of what has been given. Each generation is responsible for deciding what to do with these legacies.
Passover teaches that freedom begins with asking questions about oppression, memory and justice. Perhaps the real challenge in answering is noticing which stories we choose to tell.
Ben Hanff lives in Toronto.