Prologue: Two Bohemian words figure prominently in this story. One is bábovka, pronounced bob-BUFF-ka. It’s a kind of poppy-seed pound cake made in a bundt pan. The other word is bačkory, pronounced buch-coody, which rhymes with much-goody. (Trust me.)
One time when they hadn’t been married too long, my folks stopped one evening to visit with my father’s parents and two unmarried sisters who still lived at home. Grandma served coffee and bábovka, and in a sincere effort to compliment the cake as well as to show her willingness to absorb some of the ethnicity of her husband’s family, my mother said to her mother-in-law, “This bačkory is the best I’ve ever had.”
Everyone laughed. My mother wanted to know what she had said, but nobody would tell her. They all thought it was so cute, and Grandma just nodded her head and beamed upon her new daughter-in-law, accepting the praise in the spirit in which it had been given.
Alone in the car on the way home, my mother demanded to know what was so funny, and my father said, “You told my mother that she makes the best house slippers you ever ate.”
Epilogue: If you're going to pick up one or two words of a foreign language from hanging around people who are speaking it, what are the chances one of them will be the word for house slippers? But I can tell you how my mother heard it, and probably often. Grandma Knez couldn’t abide seeing people without shoes. If someone came into a room in stocking feet or, worse, barefooted, she would encourage them -- not so subtly -- to put on some house slippers by pointing at their feet and crying, “Bačkory! Bačkory!”
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