{"id":63429,"date":"2022-03-15T22:27:36","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T22:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63429"},"modified":"2022-03-15T22:27:37","modified_gmt":"2022-03-15T22:27:37","slug":"growing-up-as-a-mixed-race-child-with-survivor-grandparents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63429","title":{"rendered":"Growing up, as a mixed race child, with survivor grandparents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up, as a mixed race child, with survivor grandparents<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Forward<\/a>
\n2022-03-08<\/p>\n

Kyla Kupferstein<\/strong><\/a>
\nOakland, California<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Courtesy of Kyla Kupferstein<\/a>
\nKyla with her grandmother Fela and grandfather Hershl<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a child growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my younger brother David and I did everything in Manhattan<\/a>: it was where we lived, went to school and played with our friends.<\/p>\n

Except for the weekends when my parents would take us to visit my grandparents in the Kingsbridge<\/a> section of the Bronx<\/a>. Buba Fela and Zayda Hershl lived in the Amalgamated Houses<\/a> on Sedgwick Avenue<\/a> \u2013 a cooperative apartment complex that functioned like a reassembled shtetl<\/a>, a Yiddish<\/a>-speaking community of Jews from Eastern Europe<\/a> who had somehow escaped or survived the Nazi genocide<\/a> and lived to tell the tale.<\/p>\n

As my brother and I (known at our grandparents\u2019 home as Kylashi and Davittle) sat at our grandparents\u2019 kitchen table, we were fed a steady diet of Holocaust<\/a> talk. \u201cThe war<\/a>,\u201d they called it, when they spoke English, which they did only for us. Hitler<\/a>, Stalin<\/a>, the camps<\/a> \u2013 all these were a part of their normal vocabulary. And their neighbors, some who had been my grandparents\u2019 friends back in Warsaw<\/a>, most of them Bundists<\/a> ranging from agnostic to atheist, were the closest thing to an extended family that we had.<\/p>\n

Unlike many other survivors who kept silent because they couldn\u2019t bear to revisit the atrocities, everyone in this community told their stories openly; we waited for those stories, just as we waited for Buba\u2019s misshapen cookies and trips to the sprinklers in Van Cortlandt Park<\/a>. Countless times we heard the story of how they left: when young men were urged to leave Warsaw because of Hitler\u2019s imminent arrival, my Zayda, Herschel, decided he couldn\u2019t leave without his love, Fela. Her grandfather quickly married them, and they fled to Russia<\/a>, innocently believing it would be safe for them as socialists. But they were arrested at the Russian border, and then jailed separately in Stalin\u2019s prisons in Siberia<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyla Kupferstein describes how her yiddishkeyt was sparked by her Buba and Zayda in the Bronx and what her Jewish journey has been like since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,1245,28,459,3601,8,820,20],"tags":[18817,20566,33257,26580,33258,2711,596],"class_list":["post-63429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-biography","category-europe","category-history","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-usa","tag-bronx","tag-forward","tag-kingsbridge","tag-kyla-kupferstein","tag-kyla-kupferstein-torres","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63430,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63429\/revisions\/63430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}