Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  Zora had lost everything she owned twice in her life. As an infant, her parents fled Istria and left behind all their material possessions. All they brought with them was a large family and a common language. Zora promised her own mother she would pass that legacy of love and language on to her children.

  Little could she imagine, as Katarina lay dying, how challenging this might be. Zora married a man who was Russian, and who had his own beloved language to pass on. And then she was forced to flee her country with little more than her clothes one more time. But she held to her promise, passing on her love of family and language—speaking po našemu, in our way, with her children. She did so even though she was the only person in our lives who spoke that language.

  Because we could speak po našemu, in our travels Sasha and I learned a lot about life in those countries and many new stories about our family. And we learned that our grandparents’ respective families—Rojnić and Marinović ancestors—were involved in a feud over houses and land in Medulin.

  “I suppose we might have expected something like this,” said Sasha. “This is the Balkans, after all. Why should our family be any different?”

  I again looked up the word “Balkanize” in the dictionary and was reminded that it means the break up of a group into smaller and often hostile units.

  There was one moment in history when things were different. Most people know little about this land, but unfortunately even those who have given the area more than a passing thought often believe that Yugoslavia, like many countries of the Middle East, was cobbled together by the Allied Powers in the aftermath of World War I. But I had heard about its creation from my mother and had studied the subject at university.

  All the countries, and Croatia in particular, were vitally interested in the union in 1918.

  Croatia, under Austro-Hungary, until that empire crumbled with their loss in World War I, was then threatened with falling under the domination of Italy. Slovenia was in a similar situation, and only Serbia had its own independent government, which became the foundation of the new Kingdom. The Southern Slav union, Yugoslavia, was their creation, and it was devastating to the Slavic people of Istria—and my mother’s family in particular—when their home was instead given to the Italians. Zora’s parents fled to the safety of the union of Slavs, hoping to raise a family under its protection.

  That safety was unfortunately transitory. Yugoslavia fell apart in World War II, pulled itself back together for about forty years under the Communist government of Josip Broz Tito, and then tore itself up in the Yugoslav wars at the end of the twentieth century. My grandparents and their descendants repeatedly lost everything because of the endless conflicts that just wouldn’t let go of their homelands.

  Sasha and I started life poor in possessions, but, in the end, we gained everything. We were fortunate both in our parents’ character and in their decision to wait for acceptance by America. Growing up in this country, the land our parents paid such a price to reach, allowed us, like many Americans, to be both fully integrated and yet able to hold onto our roots and our parents’ languages. It is a unique gift, but one that is acknowledged and accepted in this country of ours. Without question we are Americans in every sense of the word, and comfortable in that skin.

  In fleeing her country for the final time as an adult in 1950, Zora left behind not just family and possessions. She left behind her native land’s conflicts. She taught us love for all of its people. We feel tied to a larger family in the Balkans and have the joy of connecting to people and stories that enrich our lives because of who Zora was, because she refused to let conflict dominate and ruin our lives.

  It was in 1992, while visiting her place of birth after almost fifty years in America, that I watched my mother both blossom in her original culture and acknowledge her deep adoption of her new homeland. It was going back to her first home that let her recognize where home really was. It was where she lived, where she raised her children, where she would stay until she died. It is that sense of home that she passed on to us, a place that had nothing to do with land that was fought over or old battles. It was a place where she would feed and nurture us. A place where we always knew we were loved, and where we would build our own families in the framework of that love.

  Mama developed dementia and eventually forgot English and Russian. She would chatter away in Serbian to anyone who would listen, understanding them and assuming they could understand her. In the end, it was only Sasha and I who could speak with her.

  So for a final time, just before she died, my mother once again lost everything but her language—everything that mattered. When material possessions became irrelevant, as they inevitably do, it meant more than we could have ever imagined. This time it was her own mind that robbed her, but fortunately she chose the precious legacy of voice to pass on to me. It lets me tell her, wherever she is, po našemu, that I love her. Always.

  Ljubim te, Mama. Uvek.

  About the Author

  Tania Romanov Amochaev was born in Belgrade, Serbia of two displaced émigrés—a White Russian father and a Croatian mother—and spent her childhood in San Sabba, a refugee camp in Trieste. After arriving in America on the SS Constitution, Tania attended San Francisco’s public schools. She earned a degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, graduating while the school was on strike in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. She then forged a successful business career in technology and was serving on the board of advisors to her College when the formal graduation was finally held.

  Tania has climbed Mount Whitney and Mount Kenya, circumnavigated Annapurna, trekked through Bhutan and Kashmir, and sailed along remote rivers in Burma. In 2013 she landed in Nairobi the day of the terrorist attack and proceeded on a walk across that country from beneath Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean.

  She watched, from afar, the disintegration of the country where her life story began. Those bitter Yugoslav wars of the 1990s put her mother Zora's sisters onto opposing sides of a battle, and not for the first time. Fluent in the languages of her parents, she visits her homelands to study her past. In her book, Mother Tongue, she explores, in a highly personal saga, the causes and consequences of Balkan struggles over the last hundred years.

  Tania is the author of tales of travel to lands as diverse as Russia, India, Japan and Morocco. She is currently writing a book that starts with her father's flight as an infant from Russia during the Revolution of 1917, follows him through life in Serbia, and to San Francisco’s Tsarist Russian community. The essay on her visit to her father's home village in the deep heart of Russia during repressive Communist times was published in The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10.

  Tania resides in San Francisco, using that city as her base for her worldwide travels.