Babcia

These cakes are from family recipes, from great-grandmothers and babcias, from kitchens as far apart as Knoxville, Tennessee, and Warsaw, Poland.

I visited my babcia Lottie Korosz in Hunlock Gardens and all the relatives on my mother’s side of the family. My babcia Jadwiga Gobolewski died while I was still in Washington, but my grandfather Wiktor greeted me warmly in Glen Lyon.

My babcia would only stare morosely at photographs of my father’s father, showing me the black and white albums, their youth in Poland, the countryside, the funny dress, the world outside a world outside a world of memories and lost hopes.

But there’s no question she’s brought Polish food back to the neighborhood—the menu features potato pierogi, golabki, borscht, kielbasa, and a few items you probably wouldn’t recognize if you didn’t grow up with a babcia cooking for you.

However, with the increased geographic mobility in Poland after 1989, and the greater push to look for jobs in other cities, fewer relatives are on hand to provide child care. Women who had babcias considered themselves lucky.

The Germans were “kind” to some families in Poland, too. Just not us. What difference did it make if you were kind to some, if you were beating and stealing others’ mothers and babcias? I suddenly understood more than my father did.

My babcia was hired to attend funerals and weep for those who had few friends or family members.

There are many women in these processions, many of them old babcias with cheeks pink as a young girl’s under their flowered headscarves.