by Matt Weiland
Enter the Bosnians. They are largely responsible for boosting the city’s population four years in a row for the first time in a half-century. Most of the Bosnians now in the St. Louis area—as many as 80 percent of them, in fact—emigrated first to some other part of the United States. That means St. Louis is beating out many other communities where they originally emigrated, most likely due to the lower costs of living in St. Louis. There are twenty-five Bosnian “settlements” in the United States in all, from San Francisco to Tampa. Why St. Louis? “The city had everything they needed,” says Anna Crosslin, the president of the International Institute of St. Louis, which started bidding on contracts to bring Bosnians to the city in 1995. They succeeded. The IISTL is a former settlement house dating back to 1920. Crosslin’s father is Japanese and she was born in Japan. But she’s been a St. Louisian for three decades now. She says “it was a dance” with the State Department to get Bosnians to St. Louis. There were already many Mexican immigrants in St. Louis, and people from Burundi and Somalia. But most of them are unskilled laborers; the Bosnians brought skills.
“We had plentiful jobs. We had a welcoming attitude. And most of all, we had an affordable place to live.” True enough, but surely the fact that the Bosnians are white has made their middle-class mainlining a bit easier, too? “I would say being white hasn’t helped them and hasn’t hurt them,” says Crosslin, slowly. “They are educated, highly educated.”
Suki is much more blunt. “Missourians would rather have Bosnian workers than blacks”—but that, in his judgment, is because the Bosnians work very hard and take pride in what they’ve done for the city. If there is prejudice helping them, he says, it is an American phenomenon, not the Bosnians. His wife, Mirsada, puts it this way: “The reasons Missourians trust us is that we didn’t come here to lie, we came here to tell the truth, and even in Bosnia, a lot of the truth is prohibited. But here we have no discrimination and no jealousy. And that’s why we can live here and buy houses.”
“The truth is,” says Taussig, “we were thrilled to see all these immigrants—not just the Bosnians—take up the slack because I don’t know who would have taken up the slack. They didn’t know one neighborhood from another, though they’ve learned. And sometimes they inculcate our prejudices. They’re the new economic base of the city.” And she adds: “The Bosnians—I think they have all those classic, core, American values in terms of wanting to be ambitious for their families, wanting a good safe place of opportunity for themselves, and to raise their families and be successful and be wealthy.”
Mayor Francis Slay cannot say enough good things about them. “The Bosnians truly seem to enjoy being here,” he told me. “They’re industrious. They’re hardworking. They have created their own chamber of commerce, erected the first minaret, held festivals, increased the tax base, and added to the spice of the city.” It’s an American success story.
When Suki was a boy in military school in Sarajevo, he read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. He was twelve or so, about the same age as Tom. His memory of the exact details of Tom Sawyer were hazy after almost forty years, but he remembered the hiding in a cave, the sense of heroism for a young boy, the liberation of a slave, and being part of something important. “It was a story to show boys they could be something positive,” he says.
Like Twain, Suki was born excited, full of the sense of doing something grand and important. But it seemed Mark Twain and his fictional avatar would have little to do with Suki’s life. Ask him about his boyhood school days, though, and he still has the school schedule memorized. And it’s clear he loved it:
“Up at 5:30 for exercise for half an hour, winter or summer, we’re out there bare chested doing our exercises. Then, 6 a.m., breakfast line. At 7:30, classes, 2:30, lunch, 3:30 to 4 p.m., sports, 4 to 8, mandatory study. Make sure the book is in front of you. Somewhere in there is half an hour for the news, we watch all together. Eight p.m. to 9 p.m., dinner. Nine to 9:30, play accordion, 9:30 to 10 p.m., clean everything. At 10 p.m., lights out.”
His specialty was military electronics. He learned to defuse bombs: “French Durandal, English cluster bombs BL755. Any type of NATO armaments.” He also learned about every battle important to the Yugoslav People’s Army, from the Battle of Kosovo to World War II. And he learned about chemical and biological weapons.
“Interesting part of my story,” continues Suki. We had gone perhaps three miles from the airport and I already had writer’s cramp. Biographically speaking, we were still in the 1980s—just when I was floundering around Missouri, covering the Times Beach dioxin spill without a biohazard suit, and Suki was in Belgrade in a soldier’s uniform.
“My love was actually photography; not military. Military is my head, not my heart. During my work in Belgrade I developed interest in photo labs and custom color. But it was very difficult to find the chemicals in Communist country.” He pronounces the ch in chemicals. “As military officer, I can’t just go to Italy or Germany so I sent my wife. I enrolled her in the photo school. I send her just for cover. I took the pictures. Little by little, my photos become more professional.”
Suki married Mirsada when he was nineteen and she was eighteen, and they lived a good life in Belgrade. But they were both homesick for Sarajevo; and Suki could not get the military to discharge him. Then came 1991, and “something incredible. They discharged me. Said ‘Go.’ No interviews, normally takes like five years to get out. They knew the siege was coming, and I was Muslim.”
When he and Mirsada and their two kids—they have another girl, Arijana, now twenty—returned to Sarajevo, the streets were already blockaded and the atmosphere ominous. Little by little, the city was tightening up: barricades, checkpoints, people demanding to see papers, military planes swooping overhead. In March, 1992, he heard shots around 3 or 4 in the morning. Looking out the window, he saw people already falling in the street. He saw Bosnian defenders, running around, “playing like it was cowboys, firing at everything.”
“I called to them. I said, ‘Hey, guys, I’m a former military officer. Can I help you?’ They asked me if I had a gun. I told them I’d turned mine in. ‘Then fuck you,’ they said.”
He got pretty much the same reaction the next day at the main Bosnian military base. The city wasn’t being bombed from the sky, and an aerial demolition expert wasn’t really needed. (He did eventually disassemble a Valencia X cluster bomb with 147 bomblets in it.)
“But information, this, I knew, they would need.” He got permission to organize a newspaper, ISTO, which stood for Information Coverage for Territorial Defense. Bosnian journalists contributed to it and they, his former staff sergeants, big-name journalists now in Sarajevo, still write for him at Sabah. But back then, Suki was just a deputy press officer in the Bosnian army. And a photographer.
“I took pictures. I organized the first photo exhibit under the siege, called ‘Stop the Barbarism.’” And often, he says, he passed his pictures to Western photographers who passed the photos off as their own, trading him for food and rolls of film. When the electricity went out, he turned a car into a giant enlarger by using its battery and putting the lens where the light should be. When he ran out of film, he cut up movie reel film. But it was too high a contrast.
Soon, Sarajevo was hell. The family house was right on the frontlines. They were starving. Mirsada, whose English is rougher than her husband’s, tried to describe to me what they ate. I wasn’t following. We looked at weeds on the Internet. It turned out that they were eating stinging nettles, which she said she had made into pies.
Suki cheated death several times. Once a bullet meant for him went through his windshield and lodged in the headrest of his front seat, an inch or two from his head. On another occasion, Mirsada looked out a window and saw six children playing in a cherry tree. A moment later, artillery cut them to shreds.
The family hung on until the day a sniper shot through the window into Ertana’s chair. Suki, Mirsada, and the girls fled the next day, through the tunnel the Bosni
ans had dug under the Sarajevo airport. Six months later, after a period of living in Germany, they arrived in New York. Suki had two brothers there; one was a hairdresser, Gigi, and the other a building superintendent, Lazlo. He borrowed a set of car keys from Lazlo, and drove, he said, listening to jazz, going as fast as he felt like driving “until I had driven off the map.” He found himself on the tip of Long Island. He spoke no English. An agent at a gas station drew him a picture, and that’s how he knew where he was.
Coming to America from a Communist country, says Suki, was like landing on the moon. With his excellent technical skills—chemistry, physics, engineering, electronics—Suki found work in New York as a darkroom technician, boiler repairman, and building superintendent. The last was an especially good job, because it gave them free housing and a bit of time. But he was restless. He learned English. Mirsada was miserable, cleaning houses and crying. One day, while Suki was at a soccer game watching a Bosnian team clobber a local club, he thought it was a sad thing that only twenty or thirty people had seen the game. On the way home, he stopped at a Queens electronics store and asked for credit to buy a computer, printer, and scanner. He had fifty bucks in his pocket.
“Can I see your license?” the salesman inquired.
“Don’t want to drive,” Suki snapped. “Want equipment.”
The salesman returned with a credit card for $1,800.
“This doesn’t buy me even one piece of what I want,” Suki barked. “Give me credit for all of it or I take nothing.” So the technical works at Sabah were acquired. You can get a lot of work done when you are a building superintendent at 109th and Broadway, your apartment is free, your wife is away, and your kids are in school. He charged $1.50 a copy, same price as he charges today.
But his fellow Bosnians let him down: after 300 copies, he couldn’t give it away. The press run ran a minimum of a thousand issues, so he subsidized the paper. For years. He worked the same way as he does today: all the time.
In 2005, when a famous Bosnian author touring America invited Suki to accompany him to St. Louis, Suki jumped at the chance. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“St. Louis, after New York, was like being let out of prison,” he said. He packed up his family and moved, buying two homes in the old German neighborhood of Bevo Mill, one for his daughter Ertana and her husband (the sports editor) and the other one for Mirsada and himself. Bevo Mill was in transition; older folks were dying off and their kids had left. Now, says Suki, “we are winding back the clock.” Or rather, he says, “the clock is going to be set again.” We headed to Gbrics restaurant for a plate of sausages called cepac.
Gravois Street (pronounced grah-voize) is the main thoroughfare of Bevo Mill, which has a restaurant of the same name started by the Anheuser-Busch company, with a windmill on it. On Gravois Street there are now many Bosnian establishments, including the Eerya Market, where you can get Bosnian flour, chocolate, wine, honey—even Bosnian laundry detergent. Some of the women say their husbands have PTSD from the war, so the wives learn the language and work as everything from accountants to hairdressers. The men drive trucks. So far, only about 1,000 of the Bosnians here are United States citizens. But more become citizens each day. Missouri politicians know the community is here, and come courting.
Suki did something else other immigrant forebears have done: Everywhere he went, he proselytized about the virtues of Missouri, and more people began to come. In Flushing, Queens, says Suki, you get 1,300 or 1,400 square feet for $290,000. Here, one can buy a four-bedroom house with three bathrooms for that money. Suki claims that when he left New York, 50 percent of the Bosnian community came with him to Missouri. I have no way of knowing if this is true.
“When I left,” he said, “they had no more representation.”
The last time I saw Hannibal, Missouri, was in 1993, when I was reporting on an epic flood that would eclipse thousands of miles of farmland from Iowa to Tennessee. It looked like the forty-dayer out of the Book of Genesis. Hannibal itself saw seventy square miles of farmland go underwater—in a single day. At the time, Suki was under siege in Sarajevo.
As Suki and I approached it, through gorgeous fields and bronzed woodlands, the river played off in the distance, and Suki talked about the time he and Mirsada answered an ad for farm help. They thought it might be nice to live in the country. Because he was Bosnian, he said, he was hired almost over the phone. When he got there and realized he would have to operate farm machinery, he blanched. No way!
As we laughed, I read a sign: ETERNITY IS LIKE MONEY IN THE BANK: WHERE ARE you GOING TO SPEND IT?
“Hell,” said Suki. He talks politics. He doesn’t like the Dayton Accords, thinks Bosnia gave up too much. He talks America. “Branson is great. I love it. I love Silver Dollar City, Ozarks, and the lakes. Whereas Phoenix is ashtray on a table. But for me, best place in country is San Diego. I love old downtown, old-fashioned restaurants, mellow urban scene.”
His voice trails off. There are more church signs. The Mississippi riverbank has attracted religious evangelism since the beginning of American exploration. Twain’s own father was of a stern religious bent. When we enter Hannibal, it seems both sunlit and depressed, still the place Mark Twain described as “a white town drowsing.” A man wearing bib overalls strolls out of Kay’s Diner and Truck Stop as if he has all the time in the world.
“Now,” says Suki, surveying the scene and looking at me with a wicked grin, “I’m going to kill you.”
“Why?”
“Because I like action. And I am going to be bored. Also, I think I am luckier than Mark Twain. When I come to America, I come to New York. And he has to start from nowhere.”
Hannibal’s dilemma is the same as ahundred towns along the Mississippi: how can a once-thriving river town forge a new identity in a country that has largely turned its back on its greatest waterway? I point out the old courthouse. Marion and Ralls County had so many civic matters once, it built two courthouses. A stunning federal building on Main Street, a former post office hewn out of limestone, was for sale for only a half-million. I point out the way the city sits nestled between two bluffs. And we make our way to the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. There are, one must admit, far too many businesses in Hannibal using the name Mark Twain, from a ready-mix concrete company to a counseling center. But then, I’m not trying to make a living in Hannibal.
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum’s curator, Henry Sweets, runs Suki and me through the early chapters of Twain’s life. Sweets mentions the terrifying financial instability brought about by Twain’s father, Judge John Clemens, who died before Twain was twelve. After leaving school for an apprenticeship, young Sam Clemens went to work for his older brother Orion as a printer. The two started a paper, the Hannibal Journal, and in 1853, Clemens was writing an occasional column called “The Rambler” about goings-on about town. After a fire in their printing shop, the brothers were forced to move the printing press into the house.
Henry Sweets shows Suki a typical type box of the time, and how you would have to arrange all that moveable type with a justifying stick. Suki looks wan at the thought.
Henry takes us to the tidy white clapboard house on Hill Street where Twain lived after coming to Hannibal. As many as eighty thousand visitors a year come here from all over the world. (The log book at the museum’s Interpretive Center proves it—fifty-seven separate countries in 2007, from Australia to Ukraine.) But on this quiet day, it is just us in a small house with period furniture. What really gets Suki’s attention is the tiny stove in the Clemens’s parlor.
“Just like a sheet metal one I made from cans of peppers in Sarajevo,” he says, “in which we could burn the furniture when we were under siege.”
Finally, Henry Sweets takes us to a beautiful overlook called Lovers Leap, where it seemed some boys had come to harm. There is also a story about a town forebear who suspended his daughter in a crystal casket after she had died, inside a local cave. Clemens had lots of great anecdotal
material before he ever got out on the Mississippi.
After the tour, Suki and I stop at the Jumping Frog Cafe for a homemade lunch, and look at a copy of the Hannibal Journal. One of Clemens’s “The Rambler” columns from 1853 mentions a girl Sam is obviously smitten with—and he doesn’t sound much like Mark Twain—
Love Concealed
To Miss Katie of H—!
Oh, thou will never know how fond a love
This heart could have had for thee—
Suki says a girl in Bosnia sent him a letter after reading Tom Sawyer. “Dear Editor,” the letter began, “I am a Bosnian girl who has never seen the sea. But I believe that the sea exists because I live in my imagination a lot. As a writer, even if someone has never seen the occasion, you can give them a good opportunity to dream.”
“I mean, try to imagine this city without Mark Twain,” says Suki, as we got back into the car. “This person whose town did not support him and his brother and buy their newspaper so they went broke. This would just be a rest stop on the highway, maybe not even that, if not for Mark Twain. It would be in fragments. But now, look at all these businesses: Huck’s Taxi, Mark Twain Hotel, Mark Twain Restaurant. Twain’s name got passed to their children and grandchildren.” (And that’s only the places named for Twain, Tom, and Huck. There’s also Becky Thatcher stuff. But not too many establishments named for the fleeing slave, Jim.)