Unlikely Words

CHERRY HILL — Yetta Rappoport, 89, died at her home on Saturday.

Yetta was one of seven brothers and sister born to Gussie and Israel Sagotsky in Freehold in 1916. She was a pioneering woman when she graduated from Rider College in 1936, and married her college sweetheart Daniel Rappoport in 1940. She worked as a bookkeeper as they settled into their lives in Trenton. Over the next 48 years Mrs. Rappoport was mother to three daughters and a son, and became known for her interest in politics, Hadassah, gardening and baking apple and blueberry pies. Her husband of 48 years died in 1989. Survivors include two daughters, Ann Rosenberg of Cherry Hill and Eileen Rappoport of Washington, DC; son, Joel Rappoport of Winston-Salem, NC; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

— The Trenton Times

One of my earliest memories of my grandmother is from when I must have been about four years old. We were still living in New Jersey, she was visiting us from Trenton, and I was playing in the front yard with my sister and some friends. Suddenly we heard a shriek from up the road and saw a gaggle of concerned kids standing around a girl of about seven or eight with long brown hair. She had somehow caught her fingers in the spokes of a bicycle…or a tricycle…or something. In my memory, the girl’s right hand was a mangled bloody mess, but I’m sure my memory is an exaggeration because the picture in my mind is more of a hand covered in ketchup than of anything particularly realistic. Regardless, my grandmother was there in a flash, putting her arm around the girl and whisking her into our house. As they passed me, I heard my grandmother saying, “Come with me. It’s all right; I’m a grandmother.”

And she was. Over the past few years I have had several opportunities to go through old family photos, so I can attest that even in pictures taken before my cousins and I were born, she looks like a grandmother. I don’t just mean she looks old; I mean that in my parents’ wedding album you can already tell that she is a woman to whom her grandchildren will matter more than anything in the world.

Even though she always signed all her letters and cards “Grandma,” we never called her that. My dad’s mother is “Grandma.” (Actually, even though there has never been any ambiguity, we almost always refer to her as “Grandma in New York.” It tends to get compressed to a single word, as in, “Do you remember the old blue carpeting at Grandmanewyork’s apartment?” Even though she now lives in St. Louis, she’s still Grandma New York.) No, my mom’s mother was always, always “Bubba.” (A note on pronunciation: Bubba is Yiddish for grandmother, so the “u” is pronounced like the “oo” in “book,” not like the “u” in “luck.” In the International Phonetic Alphabet (if you care) that’s bʊbᵊ. The more common Anglicization is, apparently, “Bubbe,” but that’s just not how our family spelled it.) My mom’s father was always “Zayde” (pronounced “zay-dee”). It was Bubba and Zayde’s house to which we were excited to go, and it was Bubba’s chicken soup for which we clamored.

Most of my memories of Bubba revolve around food. Her chicken soup with lokshen (noodles) was legendary, of course, and no one has ever been able to replicate it exactly, despite a late-in-life revelation of the secret ingredient (which I am sworn not to reveal to anyone outside the family). I consider myself something of a cook, but I’ve decided the best way to pay homage to her soup is simply to make my own soup, my own way, and whenever I serve it to assure whomever’s eating it that Bubba’s was better. Pretty much any meal in which she participated (and I never knew her to eat a meal that she didn’t prepare at least some of) included her kugel and ended with her blueberry pie or strawberry cake. Every morning that we spent at her house started with fresh squeezed orange juice — every morning — and that’s why even Tropicana Pure Premium Homestyle with Tons O’ Pulp just doesn’t cut it for me. Every Passover Bubba would make several quarts of homemade horseradish, spending hours grating the stuff in her kitchen, eyes watering – and she didn’t even like horseradish. That’s what a grandmother does.

Food, of course, was a somewhat problematic way for us to interact when I was younger. I was a fairly scrawny kid and ate, as she told me, “like a bird.” My dad’s strategy to get me to eat was literally to chase me around the house with a piece of chicken. Bubba had a much better technique, one that worked even once I was old enough to drive to see her on my own. She’d look at me, look at the food, and say, simply, “I made this special for you.” Special for you. I am not made of stone, people. “I think I’ll have another bowl of chicken soup, thank you Bubba.”

Bubba had a rough childhood, I think. She was the youngest of seven and grew up on a dairy farm in Freehold, N.J. She spoke Yiddish as a child but never taught it to her grandchildren. (I think part of it was the usual ambivalence of a child of immigrants toward the culture and language of her parents, but more importantly it enabled her to talk to her husband and children in front of the grandchildren without our having the faintest clue what she was saying.) But whatever difficulties there were in her past (and our extended family is still something of a mystery to me, thanks to various feuds between her siblings), they didn’t prevent her from presiding over a family that I know made her proud − and one that I’m proud to be a part of.

RAPPOPORT YETTA (née Sagotsky) January 14, 2006 of Cherry Hill N.J. Wife of the late Judge Daniel Rappoport. Mother of Ann (Paul) Rosenberg, Joel (Susan) Rappoport, Eileen Rappoport and the late Lois Harvey. Sister of Sarah Eidelsberg. Grandmother of Eric (Liat) Rosenberg, Gregg (Shoshana) Rosenberg, Marc (Yael) Rosenberg, Ellen Rosenberg, Matthew (Rachel) Harvey, Rachel Harvey, Lauren Harvey and Michael Harvey. Great grandmother of Danielle, Shir and Aryeh…

— The Philadelphia Inquirer

At Zayde’s funeral, Bubba clung to us. My cousins and siblings and I somehow contrived to make sure that at least two of us were at her side at all times, and she told everyone who came to comfort her, “These are my treasures. My grandchildren are my treasures!” It was strange to be comforting and supporting someone who had always been a rock (if a soft, welcoming sort of rock) for us, but it was the very least we could do. I don’t remember how she made it through my mother’s funeral, but I’m sure my cousins made it possible.

Bubba’s house always had a piano, and when she was ailing I would attempt to pick out the songs she always sang to us. “You’re just too good to be true…” and “I love you, a bushel and a peck…” When she couldn’t talk to us, the family would sit around her bed and sing to her:

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
You make me happy when skies are gray
You’ll never know dear how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away.

Her last years of life were not how I prefer to remember her. After her stroke, she was diminished to the point where I felt I had said goodbye to her long before she actually died. The customs of Jewish mourning are designed, in part, to bring home the reality of the death of your loved one: the mourners actually drop the first shovelfuls of dirt into the grave, and the sound of soil hitting wood is unambiguous. But even though I was there, it still doesn’t seem quite real to me that she’s gone. Partly it’s that Bubba has, in a sense, been gone for a long time, and partly it’s that I never really believed it would happen.

The day of her funeral was bitterly cold, with a fierce wind whipping the snow around. We said goodbye, sniffling from both sadness and the cold, and although the weather was raw, the sky was cloudless and blue. We made our way back to the cars, squinting against the brilliant sun that shone down on us. Fittingly, there were no gray skies for Bubba.