It began in the old country, in a place I have never been, with my great-grandmother, the woman I knew as Babcia. Every family has a source. The source is the one you remember, the one from whom the generations spring, the stories are generated and retold, the patterns and rituals and habits are formed. Babcia was the source.
Perhaps one day I will visit the small town in southeastern Poland where Babcia was born. If I make it there, I will know no one. No one there will know that I am the great-granddaughter of Sophia, who came to New York in 1902 to work as a maid for a Jewish family, married an Italian immigrant, settled in Brooklyn, and became Babcia.
Perhaps someone may remember old letters written in Polish on thin blue air mail paper, or the stories of money and medicine stitched into the hems of coats and dresses and mailed in boxes covered in brown paper. They may have had an impression of Sophia’s life. Perhaps they imagined her a sophisticate, living on the edge of Manhattan with its subways and skyscrapers. Perhaps the letters revealed that the streets of America were not paved with gold, that the family lived in a rowhouse in Greenpoint, a neighborhood adjacent to a lumber yard and an oil refinery, among the soot and the sound of the trucks and the elevated trains?
Perhaps she wrote of the news of the day—politics, presidents and dictators, the bread lines of the 1920s, motion pictures and radios? More likely her letters focused on the issues pertinent to her family, the births, the deaths, the marriages. Did she write of her in-laws, who mocked her because she did not speak Italian? Did she write of the daughter lost to influenza, the son killed in an auto accident, the sister who gave birth out of wedlock, the husband who suffered from depression, the daughters who buried their husbands?
The relatives in the old country had their own concerns: wars, occupation, liberation, communism. Their town, Lezajsk, was at times part of Austria, part of Poland, occupied by the Russians during World War I, occupied by the Nazis in the 1940s, then under Communist rule until the fall of the Berlin wall. I don’t know which of my family members fell victim to the various regimes, but thousands of their neighbors were massacred by Russian soldiers, Nazi soldiers, or the Polish Home Army. The entire Jewish population, which numbered three thousand in the 1930s, was destroyed.
Babcia had a reputation in our family as a woman of strong Catholic faith. She attended the Polish church alone, the local parish with the family. Babcia was shrewd if not book smart. She was known as a no-nonsense woman who held things together and got things done. My grandmother used to say that her family never experienced the Great Depression because Babcia always put a good meal on the table. She was a baker, a vegetable gardener, a thrifty cook, a believer in tradition. She learned to speak English, but also learned Italian and Yiddish. She was the keeper of the memories of the home country, the red roofed buildings and spires behind the Iron Curtain. She was an unsmiling, somber presence in the row of faces in a black and white wedding photo, wearing a dark dress, a hat, her hair pulled back from her face, exposing the round apples of her cheeks and her high cheekbones.
I remember climbing the steep stairs to her apartment on the second floor of the Greenpoint row house, the feel of well-worn cotton and soft flesh as I hugged her, my kindergarten arms around her waist. I remember eating a vanilla cupcake, choosing it from a row on the kitchen table, and impatiently sitting on a dining room chair, trying not to swing my too-short legs and biding my time until I could go and play with my cousins who lived in the first floor apartment.
Babcia was the first person I knew to die. I remember my mother’s tears when she learned that Babcia had passed, at home, at the age of eighty-six, her last words prayers muttered in Polish. I remember the wake, the open coffin, Babcia’s hair styled in unfamiliar braids. I remember my grandmother and her siblings sitting in a row, familiar yet acting in a way that I had not seen before. I remember the whispers from the elders, that a six-year-old was too young for a wake, that my mother should take me home. I may have been too young, but from this I learned that while Babcia’s death was a sad occasion, wakes and funerals were part of life and not something to be feared.
Sophia was my Babcia for only six years. More than fifty years have passed since her death. All of her children have passed on. I realize that what I don’t know about Babcia far exceeds what I do know. I know the mother and grandmother, but little about her as a person. Does anyone remember her favorite color or whether she would choose chocolate or vanilla if given the choice? What did she do in her spare time? Was she a reader, a knitter, a lover of games? What made her laugh? I wish I had listened better to the stories of the relatives in the old country.
What I know is that her words, actions, memory still guide our family. We follow traditions she established, mixing Polish and Italian customs at Christmas and Easter. She lives on through her recipes, her babka and cheesecake, her apple and rice pudding. Her name is still invoked when instructions are given: “This is the way Babcia did it.”, “Babcia would never have used a cake mix or sauce from a jar.” And there were the backward-looking “I told you so” situations: “Babcia knew she shouldn’t have married him.”, “Babcia knew that a baby, born to a cousin five months after her wedding, was not really ‘premature.’”
Babcia had thirteen granddaughters, all of whom provided opportunities for her to impart her wisdom, even from beyond the grave. Babcia, a devout Catholic, believed that if you made your bed, you had to lie in it, even if your bed partner was a drunk or a cheater, because you could not divorce. If you fell pregnant, you married the father, whether he was a good man or not because there was no other option. If your husband sank into despair after the death of your son, you put your grief aside, took him to the country, and nursed him until he regained some of his old spirit. When your daughter’s husband died too young, you made sure that her daughters were clothed and fed.
From Babcia, we learned that where family was concerned, you practiced forgiveness, overlooked flaws, provided a crutch to those whose life did not turn out as planned. We also learned that you could not escape family.
One of the thirteen granddaughters married a German soldier that she met at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, and moved with him to Germany. This was an interesting twist for the granddaughter of an immigrant whose family had lived through the Second World War in Nazi-occupied Poland. This granddaughter was the only one to escape the day-to-day routines and responsibilities of the family. Most of the family stayed nearby, several living on the same street in Brooklyn. One cousin bought the Greenpoint rowhouse after Babcia died. Even after you did leave, moving upstate, to Long Island, or even south of the Mason Dixon line, you couldn’t escape, not really. Babcia’s influence knew no boundaries.
The story of my family is the story of Babcia’s legacy. It has filtered down to the successive generations, in the way that legacies do, changed somewhat by time and memory. I read somewhere that a mother gives her children roots, but also wings. Babcia might have focused a bit too heavily on the roots. She taught her family how to persevere, but perhaps she also needed to teach them when they should cut and run, when it was okay to peel themselves from the flypaper of family history and expectation, shake out their wings and fly in a different direction.
Lois Henry is a native New Yorker and current resident of Midlothian, VA. Lois is an attorney by day, a baker on the weekends, and writes memoir and fiction with Cindy Cunningham on Tuesday evenings. Her husband and her two daughters have learned that Tuesdays are sacred writing nights. Her cat Minerva does not respect the sanctity of Tuesday nights and often makes her presence known during class.