Babusia

Hanna sent food over when my babusia was sick.

Now you can buy Polish sausage all ready for the pan any time you have a hankering for it. Good, some of it is, too. But when it is Christmas and your roots are in Poland, there is a chance the commercial product simply will not do. It’s got to be kitchen-made by you, as it was made by mama and babusia before you.

BUT WHAT about these pierogi? Looking at Helen [Szachta] you sense this is a woman who must be a master at making those morsels. Or Anne [Dresden], or Bea [Rybak] or Veronica [Grzena]. Nope. They never ate pierogi when they were kids. Or when they were, say, 50. “Listen, our mother never made pierogis,” Helen said. “And babusia (grandmother) never made pierogis,” Anne added.

A little girl, a first-generation American, sat on her front steps near Broadway and translated dispatches from Europe in the local papers into Polish for older women dressed in black, the eyes of the old “babusias” growing wide and small as they heard the names of besieged cities, towns and villages.

This recipe was handed down by my babusia (grandmother).

There are as many recipes for borsch as there are babusias (grandmothers), and at our kitchen in Poland, right on the border with Ukraine, we made many different versions, depending on who was cooking and what recipe their grandmother taught them (for more about our work in Ukraine, see Sharing Joy in a Brutal World, page 270).

Learn about some delicious and wonderful meals, including chicken soup, tamales, pasta, and borscht, that abuelas, nonnas, babusias, and other grandmas around the world make with and for their grandchildren.

Ukrainian became the language of the poor, the ignorant, and the backward. In the meantime, Soviet Ukrainian leaders, mimicking [Mikhail] Gorbachev, were saying that their babusias (the diminutive form of babushkas, or grandmothers) spoke a quaint tongue, but that Homo sovieticus was a man above quaintness and folklore.

I took photographs from afar, unbeknownst to them, that I would later use for my painting. There was one exception—the subject of my first babusia painting “Quietude,” a woman I had met in my mother’s house in Ukraine, a friend of the family. […] The rest of my babusias were strangers whom I never met until I began painting them several years later.

Volodya, his government-appointed driver who usually ferries him across town without comment, has offered him coffee, poppyseed bulochky that some old babusias are selling inside the station and, in desperation to get Stefko to relax, his own pack of cigarettes.