The Dance of the Cherry Queen
“The Cherry Queen took Lorelein to a miracle cherry tree. When they came close to the tree they could hear a very soft melody. It came from the ripe cherries…they opened the red hearts and found little notes in the center. The notes were about people who needed help. Some children were poor and needed clothes; others were hungry and needed food. Old folks needed visits to cheer them up and help them get better.”
– Excerpt from “The Cherry Queen,” a short story written by Visnja Toth-Fejel
I was so excited to find out Gretchen wanted to share the life story of her grandmother, Visnja (pronounced VISH-nyah). Gretchen is a former housemate of mine and close friend, and I’ve always enjoyed hearing about her Croatian grandmother and her baked goods. I had no idea how little of the story I had heard, however.
Visnja Toth-Fejel’s life story is part WWII refugee story, part Croatian love story, a few parts 100 Years of Solitude, all tucked in with beautiful stories of fruit, the natural world, and her insatiable love for dance.
But also, a dash of Brother’s Karamazov level confusion when it came to names & characters: I found myself needing to construct a family tree in order to keep everybody straight (which was actually really fun! Turns out I love making family trees.)
I was sent three life histories to peruse: Visnja’s, her husband Andrew’s , and her mother’s, who is referred to as “Baka” in this article (Baka is the Croatian word for grandmother). Visnja and Andrew had written both of their life histories; Baka’s life history was written by Sandy Wiley, Gretchen’s mother, who interviewed Baka over the course of several months.
Gretchen had told me “no pressure to read the whole thing,” but I found myself racing to get home from work every night, to cozy up in my reading chair, and bury myself into their life histories. It felt like a novel from three different perspectives. I loved it.
Her Parents: Baka and Vlado
Visnja’s paternal side was a colorful cast of characters who were descended from Croatian aristocracy, but were not wealthy themselves. Their cited patriarch was legendary playboy, Doktor Zelic. He had many illegitimate children, and financially supported all of them.
Half of them seemed light-hearted and a bit careless and the other half sounded deadly serious and, well, grouchy. Visnja’s father, Vlado (Vladimir), was very much in the light-hearted camp. She boasts proudly about her father’s ability to tell jokes on a streetcar in Zagreb and leave the whole car in stitches.
He wasn’t strict with young Visnja, and was always a source of fun and merriment. Vlado’s parenting style was very much in opposition to his wife’s: Baka was beautiful, charming, and very disciplinary.
Baka, her mother, grew up in the mountains of Croatia to a large family known for their honesty, hard work, and hot tempers.
“My mama always told me that she is a witch from Klek (“Vještica sa Kleka”) — when I was little, I believed her.” wrote Visnja. “
Baka’s father, Guro, once got so angry at peasants who were out shearing wheat late at night. He was bothered that they were working past midnight on a Saturday, which meant it was the Sabbath, and also, frustrated at the sound. So, looking to solve the problem, he found a pumpkin, carved a face into it, then put it on top of a long stick and proceeded to scare the peasants with it. His scheme worked, the peasants stopped shearing, and this is how Guro brought Halloween to Croatia. (Just kidding. Maybe.)
From all the stories I read about her, it seems Baka inherited Guro’s ability to solve a problem, though she never used a jack-o-lantern. “She just wouldn’t take no for an answer.” wrote Visnja.
Baka moved to Ogulin to attend grammar school, where she graduated and ended up finding work in a law office. After moving to Zagreb, she found another job in a law office and built a reputation for herself for being talented, capable, and powerful. Her keen abilities in the legal and political realm eventually lead to her creating powerful, but troublesome, connections. Unfortunately, at the end of WWII, these connections forced her and Visnja to flee Croatia for their safety.
Baka, became acquainted with her husband, Vlado, through a social accident. Baka mistook a lady on the street for her friend, and greeted her as such, but after they sorted out that they didn’t actually know each other, the lady, Slavica, decided she would, after all, like to be friends. She was taken with Baka’s charm and incredible beauty, and quickly introduced her new, and now real, friend to her three brothers.
“All of them fell in love with her,” wrote Visnja, “but the middle one, Vlado, was ‘chosen’ (by the family) to be the one for her.”
Baka wasn’t interested in any of the brothers, but her parents were starting to pressure her to get married. That pressure was later coupled with Vlado making a suicide threat if she didn’t marry him, so she caved and agreed to marry him.
Vlado remained infatuated with Baka his whole life, but she never grew to love him. Baka remained loyal to her husband, even after her and Visnja fled Croatia, leaving him behind. Due to his wife’s professional associations, Vlado was later imprisoned. Visnja’s account is unclear of what ended up happening to her father.
Visnja’s Early Life
“When I think of my grandmother, I think of fruit and fruit trees.” Gretchen told me. “Her name ‘Visnja’ is Croatian for cherry, so people were always giving her cherries and things with cherries on them.”
Visnja Zelic was born October 3rd, 1930 in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. She was born in a large, beautiful house, with beautiful gardens in the back. On the day she was born, her mother planted a cherry tree in the gardens for her daughter to watch grow as she herself grew.
When I read through her life history in these early years, three things stuck out to me that ended up being important themes through the rest of life: her love for nature and fruit, her love for Catholicism and helping the needy and lastly, her love for dance.
Nature and Fruit. She remembers being a very picky eater, disliking most cooked vegetables, but enjoying eating them raw. Her mother was known to be a resourceful and wonderful cook, and was always bothered by her daughter’s particular appetite. For Visnja, the perfect meal would be a picnic with a cold chicken sandwich. Dessert would be fruit she picked from the wild and gobbled down.
Most of her happiest memories take place when she’s outside, picking flowers, and enjoying fresh, delicious fruit. Gretchen told me later that along with cherries, apricot trees also became very important to her, as apricot jam became a central ingredient to her kolaches (a kind of Hungarian cookie.)
Catholicism and helping others. She loved attending mass, and remembers her first communion vividly. Throughout her life, her Catholic faith remained central to her understanding of the world, and what preserved her during some of the hardest of times. She briefly considered becoming a nun, but ended up changing her mind when she fell in love with a young architect. (They were later separated by Baka deciding to relocate her and Visnja to America.)
Visnja saw it as her duty to help the less fortunate than herself, and she remained a kind and generous soul her whole life. I was very touched by her short story “The Cherry Queen”, in which she uses cherries as a vehicle to communicate the needs of the less fortunate. The importance of helping those in need she saw as an extension of herself.
Dance! “When I heard music, I could not sit still.” wrote Visnja about finding her love for dance in second grade. She started to love dancing as a little child, and would beg her strict mother to put her in dance classes. Baka consented to the classes for a short period of time, but eventually did what she could to get her daughter out of the lessons.
Visnja writes, “Mama took me to a doctor and pretended that he order me [sic] to not go to ballet any more. I saw her giving a sign with her eyes to the doctor, and I never forgot that. When I asked her many years after, she told me that she was afraid that I would be so good in ballet and become a ballerina.”
Though she didn’t get to stay in the classes for too long, she never stopped dancing, and was continually organizing performances for the neighborhood (or later on, refugee camps). Sometimes the performances were just for fun, and occasionally they were fundraisers for the needy.
Visnja was very proud of the compliments people paid her on her dancing. Her mother was also talented at a great many things, and one these things was sewing something out of nothing. She put her talents to good use for Visnja’s directorial endeavors and would sew costumes together for the whole cast, sometimes only using scraps rummaged from refugee camps.
After they fled Croatia, Visnja and Baka were relocated to different parts of Europe, and eventually made the long trek to America. Through it all, however, one thing stayed the same: Visnja would organize dance performances, and Baka would sew the costumes.
Visnja and Baka become refugees
As the Axis powers began to lose their footing in WWII, Baka realized that her political connections put her and her daughter in grave danger. They would be considered Nazi sympathizers, and would be shot on sight by the communists who were taking control of Croatia.
They began the long train rides to refugee camps, often having to lie about their identities and eventually needing to assume aliases. They might not have survived at all if an American soldier hadn’t given her a loaf of bread to eat. Her mother decided to share the loaf of bread with a Latvian refugee family. In return for her generosity, the Latvian family told officials that the mother and daughter traveling with them were their distant family. Because of that, Visnja and Baka were able to stay in a Latvian refugee camp, and receive food, safety and shelter.
Being sneaky, clever and generous, they were able to survive for many years traveling between refugee camps. Most of Visnja’s teenage years were spent in the camps, where she could still attend school and was even able to start taking ballet lessons again. They were eventually able to live in relative peace in Bavaria, until, in 1950, Baka decided their safest course of action would be to emigrate to America.
Nana Visnja, beloved grandmother
“Everyone would stay hungry if they had to depend on me to feed them.” wrote reluctant cook, Visnja about her teenage years. “Even if I knew how to cook, it is different to cook and prepare (shopping) for 15 or 20 people than it is for just two.”
Despite her doubts, she clearly figured it out: Visnja raised and fed a family of eight children.Her husband, Andrew, was Hungarian, and insisted on eating only Hungarian food in the house, which made up the bulk of Visnja’s new cooking.
Fortunately, Visnja once again planted fruit trees outside her house, and was able to fill her life with the fruits and vegetables that delighted her so much.
Gretchen often stayed with her grandmother when she was a baby, and grew very close to her. And she remembers that yes, her grandmother never really loved to cook, but she did love to bake. Visnja had a love for sweets and desserts, which made up some of Gretchen’s cherished food memories. She loved eating Nana’s apricot jam-filled kolaches, or her frosted moon cakes.
Gretchen remembers her Nana and Nagypapa (Hungarian for grandpa. Literally translates to “big daddy.”) being happiest together when they were dancing. They would occasionally waltz together, or sometimes do traditional Hungarian and Croatian dances to the delight of Gretchen. She remembers his Hungarian dances to be filled with stomps and hand-clapping, and Nana’s more feminine Croatian dances to involve holding aprons and dancing around in a circle.
The Graham Cracker Cake
Click for the Graham Cracker Cake Recipe
There is one very special cake that Visnja would make that, to me, is the exact definition of a family heirloom recipe. The recipe was invented while Baka, Visnja and her cousin Mimica were briefly living in a small apartment in Berlin with no stove or oven, using war rations for groceries, and were apparently all craving cake.
The cake’s inventor is sometimes credited as Baka, and sometimes credited to Mimica, and is therefore called either a “Graham Cracker Cake” or a “Mimica Cake.” It is made by basting graham crackers in a mixture of milk and rum to make it soft and cake-like, and stacking them high, between layers of a simple frosting made from butter, powdered sugar and cocoa powder (or, in appropriate war ration fashion, whatever the heck you have access to.)
If the Toth-Fejel extended family would allow me to share my personal take on the cake’s genesis: my theory is that Mimica was the inventor of the cake. Mimica’s mother was Anka (Baka’s sister), who had a great love for baking. Visnja tells a lovely story about Anka making a cake for Christmas, constructed out of layers that reminded her of waffles. Anka had bought the layers, and assembled them into a huge sheet cake, measuring about 20″ by 15″.
To me, that sounds an awful lot like the progenitor to the Graham Cracker Cake. I imagine young, displaced Mimica recreating a cake that reminds her of the cake her mom would make for Christmas.
Obviously, it doesn’t particularly matter which one thought of the cake first, but it’s interesting to think of how it came about. It’s very touching to me that this cake is still regularly made in the Toth-Fejel family. I received a few different iterations of the recipe from Gretchen’s father Tihamer, and also her brother, Thomas.
Gretchen personally considers her younger brother Thomas an authority on the cake at this point, since he’s recreated it many times (a few of his friends will adamantly request it). In authentic Baka & Mimica fashion, Thomas’ most recent iteration made use of the things he had already in his kitchen: chocolate graham crackers, almond extract and blue food coloring in the frosting.
According to Gretchen’s uncle George, the construction of the Graham Cracker Cake was the perfect way for Nana to bond with her grandchildren. She’d make the filling and let the grandkids stack the layers. When Visnja was staying with George’s family, he recalls a memorable time she made the cake.
“The cake also reminded me of my mother’s personality..she completed the cake and took a test bite. ‘Oh nooo!’ she blurted out in a self-deprecating voice. ‘Dis did not turn out,’ she said in her East European accent.
With a twinkle in her eye, my wife responded,
‘Darn. You’re right. It didn’t turn out. That means you have to try again.
You can’t leave until you get it right.’
Mama looked at her, smiled, and shook her finger as if scolding her daughter-in-law. We all smiled.
The joy of not having it turn out just right was a benefit for everyone.”
Visnja passed away just this past year, and at her funeral the family made a Graham Cracker Cake to honor her memory and love for the sweet things in life. To quote George Toth-Fejel, who put it so well, “Good food connects us all. For my family, Graham Cracker Cake is one of them.”
“But ironically,” Gretchen noted, “I don’t think Nana liked eating it.”
I imagine she’s probably eating a bowl of cherries, and dancing to the music.
Nana Visnja dancing with her son, George.
Thank you so much to the Toth-Fejel extended family for sharing their time, stories and recipes with me. I’m honored for the opportunity to share these stories.
