• Two elderly Czech’s (from Czechoslovakia) occupied the two homes right next to mine on Martha Avenue where I grew up.  Baba and Aunt Gusty as I called them, were actually my friend Lisa Jo’s grandmother and great- aunt.  These sisters, Baba and Gusty, were inseparable and they were pure Eastern Europe as I knew it.  And although I’ve never been there,  I think I know a bit about the culture from these women and others like them who were everywhere in my upbringing.  My neighborhood was largely Slovak or German and all of us kids were either 1^st, 2^nd  or 3^rd generation Americans. Our grandparents often lived with us (mine did) so the “old country” was evident in all we saw.  The term used to describe our somewhat mixed race was “hunky” which came from another term “mill-hunky”.  We were the class of people whose men worked in the steel mills…most were from Eastern Europe somewhere.  While this word is not what I would consider a racial slur using today’s lexicon, it wasn’t a compliment either.  Hunky folk were not well educated and they worked for very little money.  They hustled but the stereo-type doesn’t really include those who accumulated much.  They were honest but perhaps naïve.  Loveable maybe, definitely not pretentious but generally not accomplished either.  Unless of course it is an accomplishment to have left war-torn Europe with nothing but hope as a guide away from (and a weapon against) cruel circumstances.  They accomplished that.  Hunky women as I recall, were indeed very strong and most families were run by such matriarchs.

Baba and Gusty were no exception.   These women come to my mind for a number of reasons, mostly because they were wonderful and I am grateful for their memory today.  I saw them nearly every day as I played outside or walked to Lisa Jo’s house in the quickest way possible which was to cut through Gusty’s yard.  They wore baboshkas , they had plum trees,  big gardens and little back porches.  Baboshka’s were old looking scarves tied around their heads.  These rags were not worn to keep their hair set, but to catch the sweat that rolled naturally from their heads as they worked, usually in the garden or in one of their tiny, steamy kitchens.  Then they would sit on Baba’s back porch and drink ice water or tea and talk to each other or talk to us if we took the time to wonder over and sit with them for a minute.  I wish in a way we had taken more such minutes.  The conversation when we were in it was largely instructional, telling us what to do next or what never to do, ever, but it included as much laughter as it did insight.  It also included a foreign language at certain points when they didn’t want us to understand them.  I do remember some of those words.  One string sounded like this: yeshimudia.  That translates roughly to “Jesus Mary & Joseph”.  I say it to myself sometimes still.

While we would sit together on Baba’s porch I would notice the incredible lines in their respective faces, and their very strong hands.  Gusty would sometimes crochet while she sat there.  One or both of them were usually barefoot as well and wearing some kind of loose fitting dress, not a moo-moo, but a cotton dress with an intricate print. They were the original Bohemian women.   Baba usually wore an apron too.  Like the babushka, this was a weathered article, worn out even.  And her apron was not like one you might see now, brought out for a barbeque to protect something nice underneath.  No, Baba’s apron was just a part of her kitchen uniform.  It gave her another layer to soak up whatever sauce might splash or spill.  Baba did a lot with a pressure cooker or one of those ovens that sat on a rolling cart with the old electric cord wrapped in some kind of a tattered electrical fabric.  I think they thought this oven created less heat in the house than if they had just fired up the stove.  I can’t imagine this was true.  The smell in either kitchen was usually a mixture of many things cooking at once.  Cabbage or kohlrabi always formed the base of this smell.

Sometimes I got to sleep over at Baba’s house with Lisa Jo.  I remember the old steps that led to the 2^nd floor, the old bathtub with the claw feet where we would soak and play for hours, and of course this blanket called a begina.. or a feather bed.  That thing was both cool and perfectly warm at the same time.   I remember looking at all the stuff in Baba’s house.  Some of it was from overseas and some of it  she had made herself with her eclectic set of skills.  There were these really beautiful ceramic figurines with a particular kind of paint, I remember how she explained it to me, it was uniquely Czech stuff.  And there were lots of afghan’s , these are colorful woolen blankets.  I have one still that Aunt Gusty made,  it’s pictured above.  And Baba always cooked for us too, some kind of sweet bread and maybe some vegetable soup.  When we were older we would eat these cookies of hers called Kelachi, by the dozen – a delectable cure for the munchies, ha!

More than the things that surrounded them or that they produced, I remember the character of these women.  They were not soft spoken.  If either discerned that something was wrong, they didn’t seem to need courage to speak up.  I remember leaving my house for school one day after my mom was already off to work.  My shorts were REALLY short, I guess obscenely so… it was during the late 1970s.  Baba didn’t like my “look” at all.  She didn’t need to consult my parents or anybody before jumping off her porch to confront me and send me back home to change.  I was kind of embarrassed I guess, but there was no way I would ignore her instruction.  She had authority over me and she stood up, spoke out and carried on in public for what she knew to be right.  The point is that she cared about me and I knew this and I respected her.  Man am I lucky, are we lucky, that we had neighborhoods with people like her in them.

To conclude or make a point of this, much good came to my life from the Immigrants I knew, immigrants from war-torn countries.  I doubt that these Hunkies were any more welcomed here back then than immigrants are today, but they were allowed in and many built meaningful lives with a tremendous overall contribution.  The strength, work ethic, dedication to family and to me (a pesty  neighbor-girl prone to wearing slutty shorts)  is part of the fabric of my experience and that of my generation.  It’s something I guess I am proud of and willing discuss or even to jump off the porch about to say “go back in that house (America) and reconsider some of your choices” which seem somehow obscene to me lately.  Trust me, I don’t want to be murdered by a radical anything.  But I don’t want to overlook how important we are to one another in communities.  And the HOPE of the immigrant is likely something that hasn’t changed and that we could all use more of.  So here’s to more of Baba & Gusty…Jesus, Mary & Joseph too.