Bubbeh

Mexican Jewish writer Sabina Berman is best known for her successful plays and is not often recognized for her equally noteworthy prose. "Bubbeh" provides insight into Berman's childhood and adolescence, as well as Jewish life in Mexico City ... The novel ... is a tribute to her immigrant grandmother. The narrator, Sabita, recounts her memories of the life and lore surrounding her bubbeh, a proverbial woman of valor, whose home provides sustenance and refuge for her extended family. The bubbeh's stories from the Kabbalah and the oral tradition serve as an antidote to the mother's Marxist rejection of religion... In Berman's account, the bubbeh is at once the diminutive and ridiculous formal foreigner whom the granddaughter rejects as a teen, and the giant force whose very image is larger than life. At two points in the narration, Sabita remembers how, in her childhood, the figure of her grandmother is so big it blocks out the cathedral clock. Bubbeh saves the family when they are destitute in Japan. Sabita recalls her heroic foresight: "That's what my grandmother is to me: the woman who has her wisdom tooth excavated to store a diamond, and then, when the last resources have been exhausted and no one knows how to geep on going, she removes the diamond and asks: 'Will this do?'" Critics will debate whether this novel reverts to an essentialist vision of women or breaks new ground in feminine writing. Certainly this work, like other Mexican novels such as "Como agua para chocolate" by Laura Esquivel and "Antes" by Carmen Boullosa," reevaluates and treasures lessons and traditions learned in the kitchen and that have been passed on by our grandmothers. Andrea Labinger's rendering of the novel sparkles like the gem in the bubbeh's molar. Her prose preserves the freshness and immediacy of the young narrator. The translation successfully suggests the personal quirks of many different speakers and rettains the humor of Berman's novel.