August 15-25, 2001

Larry, you surprised me, asking for something so antique as a Letter from Croatia" rather than a formal essay, but the idea of setting down my observations in epistolary form thrilled me. Twenty-five years ago, upon emigrating, I fell in love with writing while composing very long letters, mostly to my friends in Croatia, from the States. Writing to them as persons, not as a faceless readership, gave me a chance to see and hear and feel what I was experiencing both from their perspective and mine; I could synthesize the new and the old perceptions of this incessantly surprising country. But the main thing was the pleasure of retelling strange things, letter to letter, depending on the unique background and personality of my reader. Since my friends still had one another for long conversations, they did not write much to me, but I kept writing out of habit, and soon, instead of letters which failed to stimulate the dialogue I wanted, I began to shape stories and essays to recreate the original pleasure I took in long letter writing.

I have been going back to Croatia on and off for almost a year, and other than a few e-mails I haven't written a single letter. Although you asked me to write for the readers of MQR, it's best that I address you since I can't envision writing a communal letter. Of course I expect your readers to eavesdrop, as we all like to do in public places, especially when matters like travel and politics are being discussed. One virtue of letters, or let's say one illusion of letters, is that they don't strain visibly for the mot juste, nor do they need to be carefully revised like stories and essays. They can be a bit raw, like a conversation. So, here goes. . . .

My family and I came here last May [2000] when I got some time off from teaching. We planned to spend a year in Europe, and, if we liked the change of scene, we would simply move. Having lived in polluted and conservative Cincinnati, spending too much time in traffic and wading through shopping malls, we longed for an alternative, a saner life, pedestrian style, and so we booked passage to Zagreb. We would have preferred Greece or France or some other glamorously healthy country, but because of my roots in Croatia, and my need for new materials for my work, this stretch of the Balkans made the most sense. Besides, my mother, who lives in my hometown Daruvar (close to Zagreb) seemed to be near death, and we wanted our children to spend some time with her. They would learn another language, get cheap music lessons, and see the world from a different perspective than the American super-power one. Croatia is an infra-power, or hypopower. The world looks a lot more threatening and complicated from down here than from the U.S.

We enrolled Joseph, 7, and Eva, 3, in the local elementary school and preschool, respectively. That introduced us to how things functioned here. Everybody told us that Croatian schools were hard, kids were under a lot of pressure to learn, etc. However, instead of starting on the fourth of September (already late, according to our American standards), the school was delayed, at the end of August, because of the heat wave, till the eleventh. And though the first week of September was unusually cool, the heat wave delay stayed in effect. And later on, under every imaginable pretext, classes were canceled and new holidays introduced. I thought absenteeism was something kids contrived, not teachers and administrators, but I learned otherwise.

Nearly all the people we talked to in Zagreb complained about the rushed tempo of modern life and the unrelenting work schedules, but the evidence was to the contrary. People mostly sat in cafes near every street corner, drank foul coffee with loads of sugar or half-liter beers, and talked on cell phones. Everyone here loves to stay away from home and the workplace, so the most reliable way to get in touch with them is via cell phones, which, despite their supposed poverty, nearly everybody owns. I felt almost proud of Americans, who seem to have resisted the cell culture, unlike the Europeans. For a while, we refused to buy a cell phone, much to our friends' and family's annoyance. We can't get in touch with you," they complained. Yes, you can, we have a phone." To them, calling a line phone seems nearly as odd as our sending handwritten letters on engraved stationery for personal communication.

Even my publishers spend most of their time in coffee shops and complain to every passerby how overworked they are, how many manuscripts they read, how not enough people read books. Well, how can they read if they spend so much time talking? Here, I witnessed a different system of getting published. In the States you rely on the post office to get your materials to publishers, via an agent or not, but in Croatia writers go to the hangouts where the editors and publishers have coffee and talk about the sorry state of current letters (i.e., profits). The task of a would-be writer is to be as entertaining as possible, a boon companion, so he or she dresses well and tells jokes, and following some especially charming interlude slips the manuscript across the table. I hate it when people just send me the manuscripts," my publisher told me, I have too many. I like to know the authors personally." Of course, it's mainly assistant editors who actually read these large tomes, or supposedly do.

Somehow books get published, many of them, but then they don't get distributed because publishing them was so exhausting the editors lose interest. Managers of bookstores often forget to pay the publishers for the books that miraculously do get sold, and to punish the bookstores publishers no longer offer their books to them. And so each publisher has only a few bookstores to sell the books. A book review comes out, and the reader has to visit a dozen bookstores to find the one that carries the book. If I sound a little cynical, that is the tone I have acquired listening to how things work, in precisely the same coffee shops where I too had precious manuscripts to hand across the table. I blended right in, except I was not as stylishly dressed, nor did I have a Nokia that went off every five minutes with a wedding march. Oh yes, and I did not smoke, so I could not look as soulfully afflicted as my fellow authors. When I gave up on hanging out with the publishers, when I no longer returned their calls and even canceled a few meetings, then they invited me to give them a new book, provided it did not have too many war stories, and provided it had a lot of diverting Americana in it. Even they have gotten tired of wars. In case you wonder what you get paid if you publish a book here, I won't hide that embarrassing fact: 500 bucks, not enough to live on for a month.

Jeanette thought of finding a teaching position at the university, but she had not completed her Ph.D. yet, and the salary range here struck us as pitiful, around 500 dollars a month. She thought she could make more through occasional daytrading, but that proved not to be true because of the continuous slide of U.S. stocks. It was a nice illusion, and kept us dependent on the Internet service, which in Croatia as in most European countries turned out to be quite expensive because you pay the local phone calls. Still, financially, staying here and renting a two-bedroom apartment for $220 a month seems reasonable. My family is reluctant to leave Croatia, at least until January [2002], whereas I'm committed to a New York Public Library Fellowship in the fall, and tremble as I read the high rent ads for Manhattan. Anyhow, for me this experiment in emigration (from America) will be over in a month. (In the States, people often ask, Is your family still in Croatia? They mean my brothers, sisters, mother. Yes, I reply, and they do not plan to leave. When I say that, people look at me blankly, as though it were news that the whole planet does not scheme to come to America. Actually, my grandfather emigrated from Croatia to the States in the beginning of the last century, and after a dozen years of working in metal factories in Cleveland he gave up on the American dream and went back to Croatia, a quite common reverse migration. In many villages all over the Balkans, you find people who went to America and came back. I thought the same might happen to me, but for now I have changed my mind.)

We live in the city, not in the center but not in the suburbs either, and we get around mostly by tram and on foot. I enjoy walking through old gray streets, gazing at the friezes and busts on the walls and roofs, history staring back at me, much of it ugly, and mostly a history of subjugation, of Croatia's being a colonized part of Austria and Hungary, and then of Yugoslavia as an inferior province. Although the city abuts a mountain with forests, and its industry has been decimated by the recent wars, the air here is not much better than in Cincinnati. But the food may be. We go to the farmer's market, two blocks away, and buy produce from old women. Like anywhere else in Eastern Europe, the city is full of old women and not so many old men. Men here don't live healthily; their addiction to tobacco, alcohol, and wars, plus degraded working conditions in factories, have resulted in a shortened average lifespan. The market is a mixture of imported produce from Spain and Italy and Greece as well as home-raised stuff. Egg yolks are dark orange, and when you fry them you have visions of suns setting over the snowy landscape of albumens.

Of course, it would be simpler to live on a farm in the States and raise our own produce, which perhaps is the next step for us in Pennsylvania (where I have a new job). If I were a commercially successful writer, we could settle in Europe. My family would still like to do that, but I would not. Yes, it is an alternative to the American madness, but Croatian culture is still more madness, to my mind. It is hard to get used to Croatian surliness, backbiting, and envy. For example, nobody in the literary world has anything good to say about one another, except now and then in the press for the most blatant ingratiating reasons. My book of stories came out here last year and received the Kozarac Award for the year's best prose work by a Slavonian writer. At first I got excellent reviews and was interviewed in all the major papers and on TV, but then a journalist made up the information that I had just been granted a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship of 50,000 dollars. (I had gotten it a while back in the amount of 20K.) Since she did not know how the Fellowship worked, the journalist said that the American government was paying me 50K to write. Immediately after that a review assailing my book came out, mostly centering on the issue of money. What would our poor writers have written if they had received such a huge sum of money? Novakovich has written too little to justify such good fortune. He has lived too comfortably and sold himself to the Americans, and therefore is incapable of seeing things clearly without bias in the tough and unforgiving Balkans. So, in a story in which I describe a Serbian siege of Vukovar, I was criticized for trying to find some redeeming traits in a Serbian soldier. I alienated the nationalists by not writing exclusively from the Croatian POV, and some of the leftists simply by being an American, which, when I am in Croatia, I feel I am. (Of course, in America I feel Croatian. I am hyphenated, between the two cultures, and I will never integrate the two, but will suffer always from multicultural schizophrenia, or rather, bicultural psychosis.)

From strangers I got many compliments on my work, but my old friends, except for one, a concert pianist, either abstained from commenting, except very minimally—for example: it's readable." Several of them complained that I had written about the war so much. Why, the war does not matter to you?" I asked. Oh yes, it does, but I'm sick of it. It's too ugly."

Should I write only about pretty subjects?"

But why write about wars? Is that all Americans are interested in? Croatian violence?"

I write what I write because of what I want to understand, not for a market. I don't have a market or an audience."

That I claim to not write for a definable market baffles them, since clearly I don't write a literature of beautiful effects and I don't experiment enough to claim a niche in the avant-garde. I disappoint my friends by not being a rich and slick writer or a flamboyant stylist. People here read a lot of Robert Ludlam, John Grisham, and other bestselling Americans, and a small coterie measures all new writing by the standard of Nabokov and Carver.

During the communist years, the country was in love with America, but now there is a surprising amount of anti-American sentiment from the right and the left. The nationalists resent America because of The Hague prosecutions and the perception that America has meddled in the elections here. The leftists mimic the general European disgust with Bush and American military supremacy and environmental insensitivity. Only pro-business centrists seem to like the States, but even among them there is a sense of disenchantment with America, which promised so much in terms of free market investments, and which does so little now. Unlike in Slovenia, there's hardly any investment from the States here, although the new government is mostly centrist and slightly leftist. It's certainly a reformed government, with the nationalists in the subordinate role, and at the moment it seems to be one of the most liberal regimes in the former communist block.

The shift to the left was a revolt against the regressive and nationalist leader Tudjman who had usurped all the power and stolen a fair share of the treasury. A perception reigned before the election that with a liberal government foreign aid would pour into Croatia. The timing may be to blame. Europe is in recession right now, and Serbia's pro-democracy track is a better attention getter. There are few new ventures in Europe now, and the States are in a downturn too. But it may be also that Croatia's image has been Nazified so much that it is hard to convince the world that there is anything progressive here. The old regime made sure not to emphasize the leftist history of Croatia: the inception of the communist movement in Yugoslavia here, Tito's (he was a Croat) strong partisan and anti-Ustasha and anti-Nazi activity, and even Tudjman's being an anti-Nazi general whose family members had been killed by the Ustashas in World War Two. Before Tudjman's death, at the 50th anniversary of the victory over Nazism, Tudjman was shunned by all the European leaders, although he was the only head of state who had been an active participant in the struggle against Hitler! Because of his stubbornness in pursuing the national liberation of Croatia from communist Yugoslavia, he deliberately understated his communist credentials and isolated Croatia from the West, and now the isolationism sticks.

Going back to the issue of global anti-Americanism: a friend of mine—a bookstore owner and publisher—tells me that he has a very bad impression of American journalists. Sasha had been a drafted soldier in the Croatian army in 1991 and again in 1995. A correspondent for the New York Times was going to conduct interviews at the Hotel Intercontinental, and Sasha looked forward to being able to talk in depth about the war for such an important newspaper.

They sat down, ordered coffee, and the American journalist opened the interview, So, how many Serbs have you killed?"

Sasha replied, You can fuck yourself," and left. He complained to me, What does the guy think, that he is a judge from The Hague and we are all war criminals? When you see that he has a bias and agenda, what's the point of talking? And even with an agenda, he could show more respect. These guys have an attitude that we are savages and they are Lords or something."

I asked him, Well, how was the campaign?"

For my unit, it was a ghost campaign. We traveled from one empty village to another. The Serbian population and the army had withdrawn prior to our coming. And it was better that way. Now they can come back—at least they are alive. Who knows how it would have been if we had to fight door to door? Anyway, their total withdrawal before our arrival was a brilliant chess move. Now they can claim we ethnically cleansed the region. It will be impossible to prove that it was not ethnic cleansing. So, they will have all the legal rights to return, with more than equal rights for employment and welfare checks. In other words, what they had under communism when they had nearly all the best jobs they will have again. Brilliant."

I asked him a rude question as well, but it was strategically placed as merely a stone in the flux of conversation. Do you hate Serbs?"

I used to, especially in 1991, when they destroyed everything and we had to crouch in trenches and hide. I had to train myself not to hate them."

He nevertheless followed their literature, and enthusiastically recommended the new Serbian writer Arsenjievic to me. When Belgrade had a book expo a couple of years ago, he went there, representing Croatian publishers. Even the Serb extreme right-wing Chetnik leader, Seselj, came to his stall, and said, Nice exhibit, lots of pretty Serbian books."

Sasha had the opportunity to get back at me when race riots broke out in Cincinnati. We spent the evening discussing American racism, and the whole time Sasha had a self-satisfied look of vindication, as though savoring the Biblical maxim, He among you who is blameless, let him cast the first stone." I explained that most of the professors at the university lived in the white suburbs and then criticized the working-class whites who lived in mixed neighborhoods and the police, who worked in the ghetto, for being racist. Kind of like Icelanders criticizing people in the Balkans for not getting along. Do you think Richard Holbrooke lives in a ghetto?" Sasha asked.

One person who seems to be universally hated is Milosevic. After Milosevic was handed over to The Hague, a cousin of mine, a car mechanic, told me that the maximum sentence of 50 years that The Hague could impose would do just fine, essentially a life-sentence. (As I write, the War Crimes Tribunal sentenced the Serbian general in charge of the Srebenica massacre of Muslims for genocide, and gave him 46 years in jail. I wonder why not 50?) Other people wished he could be shot like Ceaucescu in Romania. But a few friends said, Well, why don't they bring in former Governor Kerry and former President Yeltsin? Those two are war criminals, too, but it will never happen because they come from powerful nations."

The world, which was so lackadaisical when high U.S., British, and French officials did whatever they could to make sure Milosevic would not be disturbed in his aggression, now seems to be eager to act in the safe court, but first they should try those in power who made the aggression possible—James Baker, George Bush Sr., and John Major. James Baker gave Belgrade the green light for the aggression in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence by stating in Belgrade that Yugoslavia had the right to do whatever it took to preserve its unity. Still, people in Croatia loved seeing pictures of a fatter and grayer Milosevic in prison.

Now that two Croatian generals have been indicted and invited" to The Hague, the prevailing sentiment is against the Tribunal. People of most political parties agree that The Hague, by trying the general who was in charge of the war in Krajina in 1995—when Croatia in three days, with tacit and not so tacit American support, defeated the self-proclaimed Serb Republic of Krajina—has criminalized the war of liberation which Croatia led to restore sovereignty over the territory within its internationally recognized borders. Before that, Croatia was cut in half, and the Croatian population had been ethnically cleansed, thousands killed, and driven out of the region. In 1995, after the massacre of Srebenica, in which 8000 Muslim men were killed by Serbian soldiers within the UN Safe Haven, there was a threat of a bigger massacre if the town of Bihac in Bosnia, along the Croatian border, fell. NATO generals estimated at the time that half a million soldiers were needed to prevent the catastrophe, and it could not get them anywhere, so it invited Croatia to intervene, to break the siege by penetrating through Krajina, and Croatia did that, thus saving that part of Bosnia. Unfortunately a mass exodus of the Serbian population ensued, some 120,000 people fleeing the region, and that is one aspect of the war that needs to be redressed.

To be accepted into the civilized" world (which part of the world is not civilized?), Croatia will have to demonstrate a nonchauvinist politics, with the expelled Serbs actively beseeched to return. Many are returning, but slowly. My sister in law, who is from Serbia, says that her relatives travel to the former Krajina (everything is former here) without any troubles and have been doing that since 1996. I come from one part of what was once Krajina, the former Austrian Military Border, which was composed of a mixed population: Serbs, Croats, Czechs, and Hungarians. The region was never predominantly Serbian, so to turn it into an independent country along ethnic lines in order to annex it to Greater Serbia made no sense (around that issue the war started), just as it made no sense to annex Silesia to Germany around the issue of there being multitudes of Germans in Silesia. Germany lost that argument, and two million Germans were expelled from the Czech Republic without any redress. After that huge ethnic cleansing campaign Czechs now build walls to keep gypsies at one end of a village, to segregate them. Yet it seems the Czechs enjoy a reputation for being among the gentlest and the most progressive peoples of the world. Why is that?" I asked Ivan Klima at the Toronto International Festival of Authors when we talked about chauvinism in the Balkans. How come Czechs are so chauvinistic? He disagreed with me and gave me some fuzzy legal explanation why the conflict with gypsies occurred. I was astonished: he seemed to legitimize it.

The return of expelled populations is going too slowly in Bosnia as well as in Croatia and Serbia. So when I went to my hometown, Daruvar, I drove through Novska and north, where Serbs had the eastern part of their Republic of Krajina. They had destroyed many Croatian villages. Then Croats took over the region and destroyed many Serbian villages. So for about fifteen miles I drove through a ghost country. Of more than two hundred houses, perhaps five were whole and inhabited. The natural setting is amazingly beautiful, with lush fields and oak forests on a mountainous terrain, yet because of incomplete de-mining, you can't simply hike and birdwatch and go mushroom gathering there, although that is precisely what I always do when I visit the spot with my friend Boris.

So far so good. Now that I have declared my political positions perhaps I have undermined my letter and become an unreliable narrator. I wish I had spent more time writing about mushrooms than about politics, but what can I do? Just in case you are interested in mushrooms, I will say that Boris and I found on several occasions more oyster mushrooms on old beeches than we could pick. Another time, we found several pounds of lactarius deliciosus. And on another visit, we found lots of chantarelles, ceps, and King Boletes. We fried most of them in olive oil with onions and had our primitive fun, eating from our earth, sometimes with bits of the earth. Boris claims that he knows where the mines are, that they are only in the marginal territory between the Border Region (Krajina) and the rest, like double borders. Deep in the forest you are all right, he claims. Here the biggest danger are the boars, who dig through the ground undisturbed by hunters who had nearly exterminated them before the recent wars.

I went to the Pakrac hospital to visit my mother, who was recovering from her heart attack. In 1991, Serbian soldiers nearly destroyed the hospital, and now, ten years later, the hospital is still not restored, except for one small building out of half a dozen. It seems a strange place to seek recovery, with its window view of buildings with howitzer holes in them, but it's the closest hospital to Daruvar, and my brother, who used to be a doctor in it, still has friends working there. Nevertheless, driving by the ghastly and overgrown hospital wings did not put me in an optimistic frame of mind. No wonder that even she could not forget politics, but while watching TV asked me, being worldly, to explain to her why the world did not think it was right that Croatia defend itself. Did everybody except Croatia have a right to self-defense and self-determination? She wept while she asked these questions, and taking a look through the windows at the destroyed hospital, I did not know how to reply, except that she had overdosed on the Croatia-as-victim perspective from TV, that the world actually did not care whether Croatia defended itself or not, that most of the people in the States did not know where Croatia was and in fact many commentators confused it with Serbia and others thought it was part of the former Soviet Union. Consoling as it might be to imagine that people in America followed the fortunes of Croatia very closely, in fact hardly anybody cared. Well, Croatia could defend itself. But that does not mean that Croatia should not eagerly bring to court all those who committed war crimes. Many soldiers fought out of love for liberty, but many did commit atrocities—some out of personal revenge since their family members had been slaughtered by Serbs, and some did it who knows why—and all of them should be punished. Not that wars can be fought in a fair fashion according to a chivalric code, but even that illusion is better than condoning soldiers' cruelty and madness.

The recovery in general seems to be progressing here way too slowly. The Croats expelled from the rural Posavina region in the Republika Srpska in Bosnia do not go back, nor do the Croats expelled from Central Bosnia. Serbs have not come back to the villages in Western Slavonia in Croatia; they come back only to towns, in small numbers. Mines are still waiting for the returning exiles in many of their favored landscapes.

On the other hand, significant portions of Croatia never had much war, and if the country's not thriving, it's not doing worse than it did in years gone by. I am writing from the Croatian island of Hvar, a beautiful resort with many yachts in the harbor. Recently Goran Ivanisevic visited here on his victory tour after Wimbledon, together with a Formula One owner from Britain. Steven Spielberg was in Dubrovnik on the mainland. Tourism is thriving along the coast. The war interrupted it for a while but the country looks all the better for lying fallow, with fewer factories emitting pollution. Croatia is a land of many worlds; this one is Mediterranean. My home town is basically Hungarian and Central European. We are here because my son is taking lessons in a music camp. His favorite teacher, Vladimir Perlin from Byelorussia, is instructing him in the cello. He is a charismatic teacher, who plays with finesse and powerful expressiveness, and only because he is allergic to rosin is he not a renowned soloist. And I have a task, to write an article for the New York Times travel section about the island. That will be much harder than writing this letter, since I will have to keep politics out and present the sunny side up.

Well, here at the coast, there is a lot of sunny side, unlike inland. Last night we visited a ghost village here, with many houses falling apart. (Wait, that does not sound sunny, but it will be!) Only one couple lives in a house on the hill overlooking the ocean. We climbed through narrow cobbled streets, admiring old stone buildings with even the roof-tiles made out of stone glaring in the sun, and saw an open kitchen with a fireplace and old utensils, but no souls. Two dogs came out to growl at us, but then began to give us presents, bones from their digs. We petted them. We heard you could ask a day in advance to have a meal in a makeshift restaurant (Konoba"), and the man will go out in a boat, catch fish, and grill it for you, and give you his home-made red wine, for very little money. So, that's our plan for tonight, to have a fresh meal in a ghost village overlooking the Adriatic in the full moonlight. Odysseus, according to a few scholars, got lost in the Adriatic, where Kirke (Circe) might have been the Island of Krk or Korchula. The consonants are right, and the beauty is right. And yes, the sieges are over, so one can think of beauty and poetry, for an evening.

[Now weeks have passed. That beauty soon disappeared. The following day we got news that most subsidies for medicine would be slashed, so poor people will no longer be able to afford life-saving medicine. One woman said, I'll have to quit buying bread, so I can buy lipostatins." And suddenly, the phone rates tripled, so they are now much more expensive than in Western Europe. Croatia sold its phone communications system to Deutsche Telekom, which, facing bankruptcy, wants to milk from this poor country as much money as possible without competition and regulation. Sure, Croatia needs foreign investment, and the government liberalized the laws, but there is a difference between investment and exploitative takeover. Now the country is up for grabs by foreign corporate vultures. In that sense, the new regime, while pretending to be leftist, accomplishes what a right-wing, laissez-faire system would: no protection for the workers and the population in general. I think the people would mount a socialist revolution at this point if they had any will left over from the wars. From my perspective, Croatian independence is an illusion; it will be a colony again, this time of the large corporations and wealthy investors who are busy buying up all the islands.]

Well, Larry, I don't know whether this is the kind of letter you were looking for. Let me know, and I hope to see you in a few months. We'll find a Mediterranean-style restaurant in Ann Arbor, or wherever we meet, and it will be my turn to cover the bill.