Passover is the season for nostalgia: when eyes mist over with recollections of Seders past: the uncle who wouldn’t eat the eggs in salt water; the cousin who draped a sheet over his head and claimed to be Elijah; the simple son who drank all four glasses of dipping wine. And presiding over the feast, the true guiding spirit of the night, is one indomitable figure: the bubbe.
As families squash round the groaning table, who else but grandma will light the candles, plump the cushions, make sure the herbs are bitter enough, and find enough chairs for everyone in case a stranger should pop in?
So when my daughter first became pregnant it gradually dawned on me that I wasn’t simply about to become a grandmother. I was going to be a Jewish Grandmother. I quickly realised that anyone taking on such a powerful new status desperately needs a reliable guide to what it entails. So here, for the benefit of all my fellow matriarchs, is a Bill of Rights.
And the first of these is the right to see the children not just regularly, but as often as possible.That’s the view of Jewish grandma par excellence Vanessa Feltz. She was shocked by the results of a recent World Jewish Relief survey that showed that one-third of adult Jews see their grandparents only four times a year or less. She urged young people to buck up their ideas and go and see their grandparents immediately.
"When I was growing up we saw my grandparents at least once a week. I would go to Grandma Zibbles on Friday night for dinner and Grandma Babs on Sunday. I adored them. I don't even think once a week is enough."
Our family was the same. We saw our grandpa every week, just as my own children saw theirs. For Jews regular, close contact with the grandchildren isn’t just a habit, or a duty, it’s Number One in my Bill of Rights.
So I was baffled by a recent decision of the Italian Supreme Court. Children, it decreed, shouldn’t be forced to see their grandparents. Last month, after a protracted battle in Milan when grandparents were pitted against parents, the court finally ruled that visits should be up to the children themselves.
Don’t worry, though. The Jewish grandmother will simply dismiss the declaration as a mishigas that will never catch on.
My second unassailable principle is the Right, the absolute Right, to spoil the grandchildchren. It’s our way of loving them. After all, we’ve done the hard job of bringing up our own children. So why shouldn’t we welcome the chance to sit back and enjoy the next generation without having to lay down all those rules? The Jewish grandmother knows it’s part of her job to give children forbidden treats.
Freud famously suggested that the special bond between grandparents and children exists because they are united against a common enemy: the parent. So when children are given whatever is not allowed at home they’re conspiring with Granny in an act of joint naughtiness. She’ll offer crisps before dinner, keep them up way after bedtime, let them play Minecraft on her iPad. When they hide the afikoman on Seder night who else will teach them the most foolproof blackmail strategies? And who but the bubbe will stuff them with so many macaroons that they’ll be sick on the way home?
But her overindulgence, according to some disapproving experts, can be an act of hostility: a pernicious undermining of the parents.
The Jewish grandmother only has one answer to that damning analysis. As Joan Rivers put it: “I know he’s spoiled rotten. I couldn’t care less.”
After all, there’s no better way to spoil the grandchildren than with food, the ultimate gift of love.
The novelist Howard Jacobson recalls in his memoir “Mother’s Boy”, that his adored grandmother would take him to the kosher butcher’s “where impossibly complex negotiations about the age and cuts of meat invariably ended in her buying just a chicken. Or, rather, a hen, for a hen made the best of all chicken soups. . . After the butcher’s the shops we spent most time in were those that sold that soft, seemingly pre-digested baby bread we call challah, bagels, chopped and fried fish balls, herring, liver and tasteless cheese.”
Today’s Jewish grannie may not be quite such an expert in those old ways. But she still buys challa on Fridays and fetishises salt beef sandwiches (on rye, obviously,) cheesecake that will cling tenaciously to the roof of your mouth and smoked salmon. My friend Jenny claims that when her transgressing grandmother fed them bacon, she’d simply tell them it was smoked salmon.
Nostalgia for Granny’s cooking, especially for families who have been uprooted or dispersed, is a comforting link to decades of cultural traditions and identities. What is Pesach, after all, if not an affirmation of centuries of suffering, liberation and feasting? So even though we may have modernised the diet a little, cooking and feeding and overstuffing the grandchildren remains just as important as ever.
Finally, a right that the Jewish grandmother has made absolutely her hallmark. She is the world’s champion boaster. All women know deep down that their grandchildren are the smartest, most beautiful, most talented ever. But the Jewish grandmother isn’t shy about saying so. She’ll brandish a phone full of photos, bore everyone at the nail bar by loudly extolling the children’s accomplishments, post adorable videos on Instagram (which she will have mastered for that very purpose.)
This doesn’t always go down well with parents, who are often wary about exposing their children to the public gaze. They will be irritated if grandma pops round not to wash the dishes or change the baby’s nappy, but simply to take more snaps to show her friends.
Rest assured, the Jewish grandmother is made of stern stuff and will carry on regardless. Boasting is in her blood. As it was for the grandmother who was with her children in the park when a lady approached her. “My, what charming children. How old are they?” The kvelling grandmother replied: “The doctor is six and the lawyer is four.”
Sally Feldman is currently writing “How to be a (nearly) Perfect Grandmother.”
Howard Jacobson talks to Sally about his grandmother in her latest podcast at: sallyfeldman.org.
