I try to imagine Bella as young and without inhibition, but I cannot conjure up a picture.

Though I worked hard to understand her mishmash of Yiddish and English, she never confided the details of her wartime ordeal. I know she was pregnant with her son when she and her husband fled to the forest from Korytnica, Poland.

Was she in town when Germans forced its Jewish residents into slave labor, when the Germans stole all their valuables and when, in May of 1942, the Gestapo shot most of the remaining Jews in a pit outside the town?

What were her defiant eyes made to see? Bubby would never say. Whatever tenderness she had known as a girl had been erased. How much of her childhood did Bubby remember and how much was she compelled by trauma to forget?

After the war, Bubby and her husband, Victor, buried their histories and moved on. Severed from their roots, the valiant pair and their children, Mark and Ruth, made their way to Philadelphia, where they tended to tradition in a manner that suited them. From her patois to her potato kugel, Bubby was thoroughly Jewish.

Though no longer Orthodox herself, Bubby took great pride in her Orthodox descendants. Just as certain recessive traits skip a generation, a compromised faith can take time to make itself known again.