What People Are Saying . . .
“Mother Tongue is a story about identity in the context of history. Romanov was born in just one place but the country she came from keeps changing as the tides of history keep sweeping over the Balkans. Framed as a journey to her family’s hometown in what is now Croatia, Romanov’s story is really about tracking the improbable line that led to who she is, down through her own life, her parents’ lives and the lives of her ancestors. The Balkans are a tangle many of us tend to gloss over because we can’t get inside it. With this fascinating memoir, Tania Romanov takes us there.”
—Tamim Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York
“In Mother Tongue, a story for our times, writer, photographer and world traveler Tania Romanov follows the life journeys of three generations of women (Katarina, Zora and herself) as she pieces together a complex picture of the fragmentation, war and upheaval that has tormented the people of the area known as ‘the Balkans’ for centuries. As she digs deeper, painful truths are revealed, truths that lead her back to the refugee camp of her infancy and the losses and collateral damage of war.”—Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Namako, The Hand of Buddha and Dead Love
“This is of historical and cultural significance. In a way, Romanov has done a service to every emigrant, to all the displaced persons out there, to the current refugee crisis, and done it by affirming the great value of “a melting pot.” The forces that shape a people, that shape an individual person are so complex, and so easy to misunderstand—even by those they affect most deeply.” —Gay Wind Campbell, photographer, All Hands Volunteers, and author of Images Par Deux
“I loved reading Mother Tongue. I absolutely devoured it, often reading in the middle of the night. I was always anxious to discover the next turn in the story and everyone's lives. I was totally engaged and every time I started asking myself a question, it was answered a few pages later. I really enjoyed the way the chronology came together, coming full circle at the end, with so much depth created throughout by the interwoven stories. I enjoyed not only learning more about Tania Romanov’s family, but also gaining more insight into the complex political circumstances of these countries/peoples through time.”—Barbara Lannin, world traveler and business executive
“I devoured Tania Romanov’s Mother Tongue and wish I had read it before going to Croatia. I was drawn deeply into the turbulence of their lives along with the triumphs of overcoming obstacles, being reunited and finally flourishing. It made me a bit jealous of the strong ethnic identity and family bonds which I missed out on in my life. I will definitely return to the Adriatic coast, Croatia and more. Lots of memories flooded back as I read this book, although at the time I understood little of the lives of the people I encountered there, of the politics, or the history.” —Susan Cornelis, author of Conversations with the Muse: The Art Journal as Inner Guide
“Mother Tongue is a book that successfully combines entertainment and education. Ms. Romanov tells the saga of her mother's family beautifully and with passion. I love the way she uses languages as an underlying theme of the book, tying the story lines together with the language she spoke only with her mother. It is a compelling tale full of interesting historical fact based on the author's research and her own knowledge and experiences.”—Judith Hamilton, author of Animal Expressions
Copyright 2018 by Tania Romanov Amochaev
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Travelers’ Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc., Palo Alto, California.
Travelerstales.com | solashouse.com
Cover design and interior layout by Ruth Schwartz,
aka My Book Midwife, mybookmidwife, com
based on a template © BookDesignTemplates.com
Cover photo: Katarina Marinovič's seven daughters, including Zora Amochaev
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Amochaev, Tania Romanov, 1949-author.
Title: Mother tongue : a saga of three generations of Balkan women / Tania Romanov.
Description: 1st ed. | Palo Alto : Travelers' Tales, An imprint of Solas House, Inc., 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057379 (print) | LCCN 2017044333 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609521271 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781609521288 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Amochaev, Tania Romanov, 1949-| Amochaev, Tania Romanov, 1949---Family. | Mothers and daughters--Yugoslavia--Biography. | Mothers and daughters--California--San Francisco--Biography. | Immigrants--California--San Francisco--Biography. | Refugees--Yugoslavia--Biography. | Yugoslavia--Emigration and immigration. | Yugoslavia--Biography. | San Francisco (Calif.)--Biography.
Classification: LCC CT1458.A56 A3 2018 (ebook) | LCC CT1458.A56 (print) | DDC 306.874/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057379
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
To my mother,
Zora Marinovič Amochaev
Acknowledgments
This is a story based on memory about the Balkans, a land where even facts disagree. It reflects one version of a history of conflict, war, and exile.
As I write this, my adopted country struggles with issues of acceptance of immigrants and refugees, and conflicts between radically differing beliefs.
I am grateful to the people of the United States of America for accepting my family and giving me the opportunities to forge a life I cherish.
Table of Contents
1: Going home
PART I: KATARINA
2: The baby who wouldn't wait
3: Surviving the First War
4: Balkanization
5: Post war crises
6: Finding another way
7: Starting over
8: Haven in Yugoslavia
9: World War II
10: Zora finds her way
11: Visiting their homeland
12: Medulin farewell
13: Losing Katarina
PART II: ZORA
14: A best friend's wedding
15: Meeting Tolya
16: Belgrade and marriage
17: The golden child
18: Cold War threatens
19: Tania born to crisis
20: Exiled again
21: Campo San Sabba
22: Campo family
23: Sasha in Italian Hospital
24: Zora's ultimatum
25: Babusya's last stand
26: Leaving Zhenya
27: The SS Constitution
28: San Francisco, home
29: Speak Serbian, Tania
30: The Greg
31: Life in America
32: Taking Zora to Medulin
33: Finding Cousin Milan
34: Visitors from America
35: Zora learns her real name
36: San Sabba secrets
Epilogue
About the Author
PART I
Katarina
CHAPTER ONE
Going home
“Of course I can find the home I was born in!” Mama exclaimed, in response to his question.
Climbing a hill that rose sharply from the Adriatic Sea, we three seekers wandered, lost, on rough roads past ancient stone houses in the nearly deserted village in Croatia.
One of the pilgrims, Zora, my seventy-year-old widowed mother, was in a town she had left as an infant.
She was searching for the home she was born in, for the house in which she believed her uncle still lived. I walked with her, able to communicate with the people, for Mama had always insisted that her language was my birthright and would not be lost to me. My American husband Harold—the third pilgrim—spoke only English but was first to understand the challenges of our situation.
“Well, where is your house then, Zora?” he asked.
“It is near here; I am sure of that. I just need to look a little longer, Harold.”
“Zora, we’ve walked up and down every road in this village . . .”
“I know,” she interrupted, “but I can see it in my mind as clearly as if it were yesterday.”
“Okay, Okay, I give up.” Harold smiled and put his arm around her. “If you aren’t tired, we can keep going.”
Mama looked at my tall husband with a bemused expression. She always insisted her height was five feet and a half. That half was only half an inch, but Zora was anybody’s equal. English was her third or fourth language, depending on how much of a language you needed to know to count it. She spoke it well, but with a Slavic accent.
He was blond, blue-eyed, six feet six inches tall without shoes. English was his first—and only—language. He didn’t really know where in Germany his family had come from, or when. It had never seemed important.
Personally, I was afraid we were at an impasse. I knew that in Mama’s mind, the house of her birth was a sacrosanct memory. I knew because it had been featured in so many of the stories she had told me of her life and her childhood. I felt that I could almost find that home myself.
But this was her search for her past, and nothing was jelling. I was staying out of this phase of the discussion. Harold knew how to avoid pushing the buttons that I always seemed to land on. Ours was a mother-daughter friction developed over the stresses of a lifetime, while theirs was a uniquely close relationship for a man and his mother-in-law.
This trip represented an important turning point in our lives. Zora had been struggling since the death of my father a few years earlier. Diminished and listless, her step had lost its bounce; her eyes their challenge. She rarely went out, and didn’t want to venture far when she did.
Then, unexpectedly, she decided it was time to reconnect with her family home. “Ti znaš, Tania” she said to me, “ne možemo više čekati. You know, Tania, we can't wait forever for this war to end.” That sentence of Zora’s was a key milestone, and Harold and I quickly moved to support her desire.
Unfortunately, Zora’s personal struggles had come neither at the beginning nor the end of the problems for her troubled Balkan homeland. At the time of our visit, in 1992, the Balkans were once again at war. It seemed this one would destroy the country of Yugoslavia for good.
A few months earlier Harold and I had been sitting in the kitchen where I had spent my childhood. Mama served her personal version of doboš torta—a dessert she had baked for Harold—while I translated a letter from my Aunt Slavića in Serbia. Mama’s six sisters and their families were spread throughout Serbia and Croatia and she watched in horror, helpless, as their world crumbled around them. But Slavića closed her letter not with her loathing of the war, but with the joy of being close to her family and her many grandchildren. That, more than anything else, seemed to reach Zora.
Of course we did not want to head directly into the war zone, and would have to wait a few years before we felt it was safe to visit Mama’s sisters deep in the current battlegrounds. But after significant consideration and discussion, we decided we could safely explore the northwestern tip of Croatia—Istria—a peninsula just across from Venice. It was a part of the country that had not seen any fighting. More importantly, it was also where Mama was born.
We would go see the house where her parents—my grandparents—had lived. We would try to find her uncle, and reconnect with a part of her family that she had left as an infant.
“Remember, Tania,” Mama reminded me, of my own journey to the place we had lived when I was a baby. “How you found Campo, that awful refugee camp in Trieste, where we all lived? It was when you were in college and went back to Trieste. Now I can show you where my family lived when I was little.”
I started thinking about the possibility of experiencing her country, her homeland, with Mama. I found myself wondering why we had never done it before. After all, I was already in my forties, and she was seventy. Now that we were going, I could hardly wait to see it through her eyes, and share her stories while in her home. I also hoped it would help pull her out of the deep sadness she had fallen into with the loss of my father.
A few weeks later Harold and I sat in the back of a taxi, with Zora and the driver in front. We were heading south from Trieste along the Adriatic Coast on the Istrian peninsula, perhaps the most beautiful part of Croatia. The small village of Medulin, our destination, was located near the city of Pula, at its southern tip. We were in a taxi for the hundred-kilometer trip because no rental car company was willing to let us cross the border from calm to chaos in their vehicle. Croatia had declared independence from what remained of Yugoslavia, the place once listed as the country of birth on my passport. The war of dissolution was ongoing.
Yugoslavia was a land that might well have been overlooked based only on size and population, but instead it ignited the spark that had led to World War I. It played a role in Germany’s loss of World War II, and it was closing this same century at war with itself. The taxi driver quickly made the complexity of the situation we were heading into more personal.
He told us that he was himself a Serb who had fled the wars, one of many who had landed in Trieste. He and Mama spent the entire trip discussing the situation. Mama talked of her sisters in Serbia and Croatia, for both of them had families still in the midst of the fighting. I translated sparingly for Harold, afraid he might not be entirely confident of our decision to make this trip. The driver confirmed that our destination, in Istria, was remote from the embattled areas and was removed from the direct crisis. He, at least, was confident we would be safe in our search for Mama’s roots. In that taxi, we didn't yet know that the challenges would lie in the search itself.
The taxi dropped us at the Hotel Brioni, in the city of Pula. Perched on the coastline, it was near the summer estate of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980. In its glory the Brioni had reigned proudly, but now, rundown and nearly empty, it was a far cry from the Old-World grace of the Savoia Palace in Trieste, where we had started the journey. Nothing here had been maintained in a long time; perhaps not since the communists took over Yugoslavia after World War II, and certainly not since the present conflicts had started in the late 1980s. Things looked grim as we then headed out to rent a local car. No tourists were interested in taking a trip into this unsettled situation. No crowds would stand between us and our idea of finding Zora's house.
The town of Medulin was just a few miles from Pula. We at first encountered scenes that had certainly not existed at Zora’s birth. What had once been a charming beach was now littered with Communist-style dilapidated buildings, hotels that looked like high-rise slums. The people milling around clearly weren’t on holiday. We learned later that many Croatian refugees from the conflict had been given shelter at this waterside resort area, and that it had become an informal refugee camp.
We continued along the waterfront road, then turned inland, toward the old town.
Zora had come to life as we traveled south from Trieste. When we approached the center of Medulin, she told me which way to turn, when to keep going. She had suddenly been transformed back into the strong woman I used to know—energized and confident.
The town, in contrast, was quiet and nearly empty. It was seemingly untouched by the uncontrolled development and crowding near the water. Continuing upward along the hill, we parked the car near the top and started exploring, relying on Zora to lead us to her home.
The houses around us were built of local stone; vines grew on ol
d wooden arbors and gates. The roads were no longer all dirt, as they had been when Mama was young, but they were run-down, crumbling along the edges, merging with weeds and rocks. A cemetery surrounded the small church at the top of the hill. Mama’s parents grew up thinking they would be buried there, as would their children. But it didn't happen that way.
Zora led us up and down several roads, sometimes pausing with a distant look in her eyes to touch a wall or stare at a door. She had left there as an infant and was searching for the house she was born in, one in which she believed her uncle still lived.
She kept looking. Many houses matched the image in her mind, but she was searching for her home. Had she assumed that she would breathe the air as she approached her mother's house, and, like a baby calmed only by her mother's milk—unique, unlike any other mother's milk—she would recognize it?
But she didn't.
Harold started feeling uncomfortable. We were, after all, in a war-torn country, one that didn’t seem warm and friendly to him. It felt strangely abandoned, almost derelict. He was the first to acknowledge the challenges of our situation and question Zora directly.
“Weren’t you just a baby when you left this area?” he asked as it became clear we were not going to find the house.
“I was, Harold. We escaped after the First World War, when Mussolini took over. But I went back with my mother, just after the Second World War, in the late 1940s.”
“How long did you spend here on that visit?”
“Oh, I only had a few days off from my work. It was short.”
“Zora, even that was almost fifty years ago.”
I could feel her mind sifting through a lifetime of events.
Everything had changed.
Nothing had changed.
Here she was, back where it all started: a widow with her own daughter and son-in-law, visiting a country that was again at war. Her country—splintering back to the divisions that last existed at the time of her birth.
“I remember it was a short walk,” she said. “Straight up the hill from the center of town. The church was at the top of the road, the sea at the bottom. We just have to find the right road.”
Mother Tongue Page 1