I Seasoned My Pierogi With My Tears
I didn’t associate my father with his homeland growing up. When I looked at a map, his town appeared to be in Poland. “I wasn’t Polish,” he would forcefully declare when asked, “I am Jewish.” I never really understood until decades later when I found his birth records and understood the history better. He was born in Austria-Hungary in an area that became Poland after World War I and is now in Western Ukraine. He came to the U.S. on a Polish passport. But, in his eyes he was never a Pole.
As a child growing up, I always thought my father had a speech impediment. I didn’t recognize his Polish/German/Yiddish accent and assumed that his inability to say “th” or “v” had nothing to do with the fact that English was his sixth or seventh language. I also believed my mother when she told me I was allergic to popsicles. I was fairly clueless.
I didn’t hear his accent because he was so much more “American” to me than his sisters and many of my friends’ parents. Their homes had food smells that were unfamiliar and what I thought of as “very Jewish.” Our house with my Cleveland-born working mother had hamburgers off the grill and bottled salad dressings, not the foods I couldn’t identify but frequently enjoyed in these other homes.
When my Mom worked on Saturday nights and my father and I were home alone, he would look at me and say, “ I’m good, have whatever you want.” His “good” was a brick of farmers cheese mixed with sour cream and green onions or pierogi. The cheese and sour cream mix was pretty gross to me then, so I often opted to pull out some frozen pierogi, fry them up and then smother them with butter and share them with my Dad sitting at the kitchen table. This routine started when I was in junior high school.
When I went off college and grad school and had my own kitchens, I found that my go to — soul enriching comfort food was pierogi. I mostly ate them alone. My roommates and later husband were often amused by this choice. I still seek them out in the frozen food section of the grocery store, and they always hit the spot. Since 2003, they have taken on another dimension of importance.
My father passed away in 1983 after a very long debilitating illness so when our family planned to travel to Ukraine for the first time in 2003, 78 years after my father had left his home in 1925, we turned to a Ukrainian researcher named Alex Dunai to help us arrange our trip. Alex was “booked” the week we had planned. He was taking another family into the countryside, so he only met us briefly for drinks at our hotel after we arrived in L’viv.
We immediately bonded with the gregarious Alex who explained that he had “found” my father’s family home in Synowodsko Wyzne — Verkhnie Synovydne (Ukrainian: Ве́рхнє Синьови́дне) and the timberland the family had once owned across the Carpathian mountains. The next morning Bruce, David and I ventured off with Svetlana, our driver and Alex’s important clues.
When we got to the bucolic little village, we saw an elementary school and confused it with the very large home we were looking for. So Svetlana traipsed off to find “the oldest person in the village.” She returned with an older woman who was excitedly speaking very fast in Ukrainian. She was explaining to Svetlana that she recognized the house in the picture and would take us there. She exuberantly climbed into the van with us. I am pretty sure she thought we were the first Jews who had ever come back to her town since the 1940’s.
Five minutes later, the house that Alex had found on the land records and had given us ways to identify, was right in front of us. Seemingly long abandoned, it was in significant disrepair and locked up. But it was standing.
We walked around the house in semi-shock confirming every tidbit that my father and aunts had told us in the one conversation Bruce and I had with my father and his two remaining sisters during a Cleveland visit in the late 1970’s. It was huge. It had a large stable. You could see by the fenestration that a porch had been removed where a formal picture was taken with my father as a teen with more than a dozen relatives, all but two others who had perished in the Shoah. There it was after a trip across the world to find it.
To say the least, on the ride back to L’viv I was flooded with emotions. But I hadn’t cried.
When we got back, we called Alex and told him that we had had an incredibly successful day and he was as thrilled as we were. Famished and exhausted we went to a restaurant he suggested. I looked at the menu and immediately ordered a plate of pierogi (known in Ukrainian as varenyky) .
As the plate was put down in front of me, I started to tear up. David smiled as he said, “we just spent a day finding your father’s house and now you’re crying.” I can picture the moment every time I taste a pierogi. The pierogi in L’viv that night couldn’t have tasted better. They were seasoned with my tears.
