Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  I could tell that just saying that was confirming its truth for Zora. To Harold and me, it seemed that Zora blossomed in this place where everyone spoke her language. But in spite of her comfort in this environment, being here reaffirmed the depth of her love for her home in San Francisco.

  “I can’t imagine leaving here,” Milan said, sweeping his hand over the town, over the sea. “It’s part of who I am. I will be buried here.”

  “You know, Milan,” Zora said, “sometimes the choices that are forced on us end up being the right ones after all. I am so happy not to be living through one more war. It is remote and incomprehensible. And my children thank me all the time for where they live. They are truly Americans.”

  “And I am an American,” she finished the discussion firmly, and with a clear pride.

  “But they speak our language!”

  “We do, Milan,” I said. “But everyone in America comes from somewhere. We like to remember where we came from, but we don’t want to go back.’

  “I understand,” he said. “But I often wonder what that is like, to leave everything behind. It feels terrifying. I was still young when you left, Zora, but even then I had nightmares about someone else moving into our house. I promised myself that my children would live in this house no matter what it took!”

  “And my mother gave up her home but made me promise my children would speak her language.” Zora said. “I agreed long before I knew I would marry a Russian, or that he would be persecuted in his adopted land, or that my children would leave their country as infants. But I have lived up to my promise, as you have lived up to yours. The future is in their hands now.”

  “But wouldn’t you like to live here?” Milan asked Harold. Clearly in his eyes there was no place more beautiful than his little village on the Adriatic coast.

  “I love being able to visit such a beautiful place, and to meet wonderful people like you,” Harold replied, tactful as ever. “And I’d love to come back and play basketball with your grandsons!”

  As I continued translating for Harold during the entire visit, I blessed his ability to make everyone feel that their opinion was valid while retaining his in a way that didn’t offend. We had figured out, by then, that their impressions of America were not necessarily very positive. Eliot Ness and gangs, racial tensions and dire poverty in inner cities populated their version of our country, interspersed with pop music and Hollywood interpretations of life. And here, where we saw senseless wars, they saw a battle for freedom and equality.

  We all saw a beautiful landscape, and we all understood that a unique way of life had been sacrificed all those years ago. But we now lived on disconnected shores, separated by a history that could not be restarted like a Hollywood movie. Perhaps the strongest thing our common genes had provided was the positive outlook on life that made each of us believe we had the preferred life.

  As we walked back to the house, I reflected on what I had just learned. A language and a country of birth created a unique link between Mama and me, a uniquely powerful gift. But home would always be something we carried inside us. It would always be with us.

  No one could take our home away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  San Sabba secrets

  Our discoveries on that trip were not limited to Istria or to Zora’s early life. On our last night in Istria, Zora, Harold and I went to dinner at a small restaurant near the hotel. We sat on a beautiful patio, grapevines covering the arbor, a lone musician keeping us company. Tourists had been frightened away by the wars and the locals couldn't afford to eat out. The platter of fresh shellfish we were served was among the best we had ever eaten. The rest of the Mediterranean was getting fished out, but the crises here had created a unique culinary opportunity that we savored.

  We talked about all we had seen, heard, and learned on our visit.

  “How wonderful that we found your Cousin Milan, Zora, and were able to celebrate his birthday with him! It’s an evening I won’t soon forget,” Harold said.

  “And I am so glad I got to see the house I was born in and visit the cemetery,” said my mother.

  “It is all quite incredible,” I said. “We’ve been gone less than a week and so many things are not what we thought they were just a few days ago. Starting in Trieste and then continuing here.”

  “I know,” Zora said. “Harold, remember you asked me if I knew my uncle’s name and I laughed at you?”

  “Yes,” Harold said. “I felt incredibly silly at the time.”

  “And now I learned that not only did I not know his name, I didn’t even know mine!” She turned to me and continued in Serbian, “Bože moj! Dear God. I thought I was coming home, but instead I feel like I entered a different world.”

  “Mama, do you really not mind finding that your name was recorded as Albina?”

  “I don’t care about that, but I am sorry I didn’t understand how much it all must have disturbed my father.”

  “And speaking of learning things weren’t all they seemed, the things we heard and saw in Trieste were pretty shocking as well,” I said.

  “Oh yes, we haven’t had much time to talk about that, but I am still stunned,” Zora said.

  While Zora, Harold and I were in Trieste, we wanted to visit Campo San Sabba, the refugee camp my family had lived in for four years, from 1950 to 1954. I was almost five years old when we left, and had very vivid memories of it. I think part of the reason for that was just the vast change in our lives after we left the camp. If you lived in one town or one house for a long time, I suspect it would be hard to remember details of the timeline of your early life. But for me, everything changed. There was the drama of departure, of leaving a place my parents couldn’t get away from fast enough, but which to me was filled with people I loved and whom I had no wish to leave. Then there was a new country, a new language, new friends, a whole new world.

  Campo, or logor and lager in Serbian and Russian, was kept alive through conversation. In San Francisco, we lived in a house that was peopled with friends and relatives from the camp.

  When I was in college, I took a summer to travel in Europe. Of course I went to Trieste. I was traveling very cheaply, and stayed at the youth hostel next to the Miramare Castle, on the coast just west of the city, toward Venice.

  I made my way to the center of the city, and immediately recognized the old Savoia Palace Hotel, right on the harbor, where the sea meets the city. Then I had to find the camp—Campo. But I wasn’t worried, I knew the name, after all. I hadn’t thought about the simple fact that the word Campo just means camp in Italian, and that I actually had no useful identifying information. None.

  I just followed my mental image of where it would be, heading past the stadium, toward the port. I found it in a rundown industrial neighborhood.

  In that summer of 1968, the entire camp was still there, and was still recognizable. The large red brick factory building that my aunts and uncles had lived in, across the street from the barracks where we resided, was boarded up and abandoned, in a state of serious disrepair. The wooden barracks were also still there, although severely run down, with warped siding, missing doors, and garbage strewn all over. I was reluctant to approach the people who were hanging around; it somehow felt private. I didn’t feel comfortable intruding—something I have had time to regret.

  I was later told it was populated by gypsies—a throwaway name for the dispossessed and homeless in that part of the world. It was an encampment the city wanted to eliminate. It all looked much as it had in my mind, and I was too young to feel the deep curiosity and nostalgia that another twenty years would develop.

  Our visit to Trieste in 1992 was very different. I was no longer a college student traveling on the cheap. I was a successful executive bringing her mother back to a place she had left as a homeless refugee, dependent on others for her very survival.

  “Harold, I think we should book the Palace Hotel in Trieste for our visit,” I said as I explored the Internet on my lapto
p computer.

  “The Palace? What's it like?”

  “Well, it's not the most expensive place in town, but it's pretty close. It's certainly the most ostentatious. It's right in the center of town, on the water. I remember it from when I was a kid.”

  “Tania, do you really remember it? You were pretty young when you left.”

  “Well, I'm not really sure. I’d like to think I do. But it looks like an old Austro-Hungarian palace for wealthy travelers. I have this incredible desire to make sure Mama goes back in style. She left on borrowed money, and they traveled in third class or worse. I want her to go back in first.”

  “Will she be comfortable in such a fancy place?”

  “I don't know, but I think so.”

  “I'm not so sure,” he said. I knew Harold was thinking of his own mother, secure in New Jersey near her place of birth, uncomfortable unless she was in familiar territory.

  But Zora was different. For someone who showed up in America with nothing, she had an innate sense of style about her. She was always perfectly groomed, while I, her daughter, was a true child of the 1960s who dressed properly only when it was required for business. In her seventies, Zora still wore heels because they looked sophisticated. She lived off a modest pension from my father, but didn't spend it all, still in the habit of saving money every year, na svaki slučaj, just in case. She had learned never to trust life to provide a predictable future, and she was taking no chances.

  My childhood vacations with my parents had been spent in converted chicken coops on the Stanislaus River and later in tents on a mountain lake in the Sierras. After my father retired, they had taken a few longer trips. But since he died, Zora never went anywhere, which was why we wanted to make sure this trip worked.

  “Well, first class is fine with me!” Harold said, grinning. He had always teased me about my fiscal prudence.

  “Now that we can finally afford it, I’m getting her the best room. I'm going to call and see if the one with a balcony overlooking the sea is available. It's really not that expensive, anyway. September's a bit off-season.”

  I booked the room, organized a few more hotels and cars, and a few weeks later we flew to Italy.

  The taxi from the Trieste airport dropped us off at the front entry of the Savoia Excelsior Palace Hotel. A uniformed doorman came out to get our bags. Zora, seemingly immune to jet lag, bounced out of the car and swept up the stairs as if this were her normal practice; as if she were used to fancy doormen and quiet grand spaces, to people anticipating her every need, as if she had never been bothered to open her own door.

  I walked up to the front desk, ready to use the Italian I had been studying for the trip.

  “I have two rooms for you. I see you specifically requested the balcony room, the best room in the house,” said the front desk clerk in perfect English. “I assume that is for you and your husband?”

  “No, actually, that one is for my mother,” I explained.

  The elegantly dressed clerk looked at Zora, perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit. She nodded her head, and a large smile broke out on his face. You could tell he decided right then that she must be the one paying the bill. “May I have your passport, please, Madame, and we'll show you immediately to your room.”

  Zora graciously allowed him to fawn over her and was swept away from us toward the elevator, not troubled at all about staying first class on her return trip to Trieste.

  We explored Trieste, but our most important goal was visiting campo. This time we had come armed with the name: Campo San Sabba. We asked the concierge for directions.

  “Ah, you want to see the memorial at the Risiera di San Sabba.”

  “What memorial?” I asked, wondering if I had misunderstood.

  “Well, the Risiera has been made into a memorial to the people who suffered there during the war. But were you there during the war?”

  “No, we lived there after the war.”

  “After the war?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We lived there from 1950 to 1954.”

  “I believe the Risiera was closed at the end of the war,” he said.

  “What is a risiera?” I asked.

  “A rice factory. It was an old rice factory.”

  “That’s right,” said Zora. “I remember. The big brick building was a rice factory, I knew that!”

  We ended the confusing conversation and made our way in the direction of the Stadium and down the hill to the camp. The barracks were gone; a large warehouse for the grocery store COOP had been built in their place. But most amazingly, the old rice factory building had a newly built brick entryway.

  We walked through the new passage into a building Zora and I had known intimately. She and I made our way to the open courtyard, and stood staring at the walls that surrounded us. We both instinctively faced the direction that led to the rooms my aunts and uncles had lived in, up an internal staircase to the second floor. But the upper floors had crumbled and were shut off. There was no way to enter them.

  We learned that the camp's previous use was as a concentration camp during World War II. The only one in Italy with crematoria, it had been occupied by Jews, Serbian partisans, and others considered undesirable by the Nazis and Fascists.

  Horrific things had happened in this place, and our family had spent years living with the spirits of that horror. Zora and I were both crying by the time this sank in. As hard as the memory of that time might have been for her, it paled in contrast to what those people had experienced. We felt shell-shocked. Instead of retrieving memories tempered by the passage of time, we were encountering new horrors: unexpected, unwelcome, and almost impossible to absorb.

  We also learned that the Displaced Persons camp set up in this place after the war had sheltered two primary groups of people. The one we had been part of were those, mostly Russians, who were displaced by the post-war spread of Communism.

  The others were Italians displaced when Istria was given back to Yugoslavia.

  A few years earlier I had bought my brother an old copy of LIFE magazine from the week of September 11, 1947—his birthday. Incredibly, the cover story was about the return of Istria to Yugoslavia from Italy that very week. It turned out that the land taken from my mother’s family at her birth was returned to her country at the birth of her son.

  Just as my family had been persecuted twenty-five years earlier by Italians, the Italians were then persecuted by the Yugoslavs. Many lost their homes and fled the country. The issue was still so raw at the end of 2013, as I was researching this story, that Wikipedia temporarily froze their articles on the subject because of contention and disagreement.

  That same peace treaty of 1947 established the Free Territory of Trieste under the protection of the United Nations. Its official languages were Slovene, Italian and Croatian, and the government was administered by American and British forces. Those were the politics that made it possible for our family to flee to Trieste a short time later. Those were the politics that settled my family in the same refugee camp with the Italians who now had to wait for homes in Italy.

  Our conversation over that memorable shellfish dinner was wide-ranging and lasted long into the evening. We finished our trip in Istria the next day, and headed on a ferry to Venice and the rest of our voyage. The war that was tearing up Yugoslavia kept us from heading deeper into the country to visit Mama’s sisters, but had inadvertently created the opening that allowed us to visit the place of her birth instead. Thus we had visited the home Mama was born in, met her relatives, learned about Daro and Albina. We finished our dinner in a place that was deserted and just waiting for another war to end—a place that might once have been familiar and dear to my mother was now someone else’s troubled homeland.

  For me, visiting her homeland with my mother opened a door to the countries of her birth and mine. It started a search that was to continue for many years, and added a depth to my life that I could not have imagined as I set up the travel plans for five short days in Istria.r />
  It also brought me a new mother—a woman who was different from the exile, the foreigner with a heavy accent who had raised me in America. A woman confident of belonging, and one who consciously owned her home. A woman who now knew she was no longer a refugee, but a woman choosing to live in a land that had given her, and all of us, refuge.

  A woman who shared her heritage and her language with me. A woman who taught me my mother tongue, taught me to speak po našemu.

  Mama blossomed there in a way we hadn’t experienced since the death of my father. She was in her element, leading the way, talking, laughing, almost flirting. As she told Harold, this was not a foreign country, this was her country.

  The words that will stay with me from that trip, however, were the ones Zora said to Milan: “My home is with my family, in America.”

  We had an incredible journey to her country. A journey that taught us that her homeland was deeply important and precious, but it was no longer home.

  Tania and Sasha with their cousins in Novi Sad, Serbia.

  Tania and Sasha with cousins in Medulin.

  Sasha with Zagreb cousins.

  Epilogue

  Some years after Mama’s death, when Yugoslavia was little more that a memory, my brother Sasha and I returned to explore and learn more about our past. We wanted to visit Medulin, the place where Mama was born, and also to see our cousins in Zagreb and Belgrade and Novi Sad. We organized parties to bring them together, only to realize that we, the Amerikanci, were the only ones maintaining the links to the past. For the two of us, who grew up with stories about this extended group of cousins, our lives felt tightly linked. We knew how much my mother regretted having to leave her sisters behind and how tied she felt to all of them. From America, Yugoslavia looked like a small country. We just assumed they had all stayed close.

  But for them, life moved on. They had far bigger issues than staying in touch with relatives in Serbia or Croatia. Other than the sale of some land in Medulin, there was no reason to communicate. Half the cousins, after all, now lived in countries that had fought vicious battles against each other—devastating wars that had impacted all of them. They were not raising their children to have deep connections to the families of their grandparents. All of Zora’s generation were gone, and our own were getting into their sixties and seventies.