I didn't get into the sourdough craze during the pandemic. I didn't have to; we always found bread and we already had some yeast. We also had a baby and he was enough of a project. But I saw the sourdough journey of friends and strangers via social media. They posted about their starters, and "feeding" and pictures of their loaves. I enjoy a good sourdough as much as the next person, but the modern-day sourdough loaf was not where my mind went as I saw this bread journey of so many pandemic-bound millennials. My mind returned to a family from Bohemia and the consternation their sourdough gave their American neighbors.
I am talking about My Ántonia, of course. A book that I have read countless times and a family that influenced my childhood so much. The book is set just miles from my hometown, and it describes the Nebraska of my ancestors in such vivid and poetic detail that I feel an instant connection to the characters, and their real-life counterparts.
The Shimerda family in the book (in real life their surname was Sadilek) were immigrants in the late nineteenth century. Their home country was so different from the American West. As with many immigrants the parents were very homesick. They also ran their household the only way they knew how, as their parents and grandparents had taught them. The narrator of the book describes the Bohemian immigrants’ bread in Book One, Chapter 4:
"I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread she [Mrs. Shimerda] gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast."
It is to this description my mind goes whenever I eat, read, or hear about sourdough. Undoubtedly the Bohemian immigrants didn't have access to commercially produced leavening agents, as many Americans did at this time, therefore using the fermentation process developed by humans over centuries before.
Well, to come full circle, I have been dragged into the sourdough craze. My Sundays now include feeding my starter & baking bread. This is timely though because my recent project has fully immersed me in Central Europe.
Central Europe, 1900, showing approximate location of the Galka family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
My husband requested a family history book of his maternal line for Christmas. One side is Irish (think soda bread) the other side Polish (the sourdough connection). The exact locations in Poland have been a mystery, but I was recently able to locate the last place of residence for all four lines One of these is in present day Western Ukraine, at one time the southern part of the Second Polish Republic, and before that the Austro-Hungarian Empire. John's great grandmother, Stella, grew up in this area, in the foothills of the Eastern Carpathians. She grew up on the farm of her maternal grandfather, Michael Galka, in Dolha Wojnilowska. Her mother returned to the US when Stella was 18 months old and her sister, Mary, was four, likely to earn money to send back to the family raising her children. Stella supposedly did not enjoy this childhood, and after studying the area I am not all that surprised. The more I learn about this area where Stella grew up, the more I wonder if she also learned to make bread in the same sourdough method as the Bohemian immigrants in My Ántonia. This region, Galicia, was incredibly poor in the early twentieth-century, with likely little access to commercially produced yeast. I think it is highly likely that Stella, learning at her grandmother’s knee, so to speak, learned to bake sourdough bread.
Stella’s mother, Katherine (Galka) Babinski, returned to New York in 1909, onboard the SS Noardam.
Photograph taken of a farmhouse in the vicinity of the Galka family, 1920s, photographer unknown, from Wolfgang Wiggers Flickr account.
When the two girls turned 16 and 14 respectively, they returned to the US, the place of their birth. At these ages the girls were likely considered capable of obtaining jobs in the US and provide additional money to send to their family still in Poland. They likely never returned to the farm where they grew up. Stella made a trip back to Poland in the early 1970s, but only visited the family of her deceased husband, near Warsaw. Her family’s home, now in Western Ukraine was firmly behind the Iron Curtain and had seen terrible ethnic cleansing during World War II. She likely did not wish to face those ghosts.
Excerpt from the family history book.
Stella and her family in Hempstead, New York, 1940s.
