MY BEING FROM CROATIA has been a source of much painful misunderstanding. During the recent war, many people felt sorry for me, and others were ready to treat me as a mass murderer. And now, a decade later, they treat me as a tourist guide.
In 1991, when the war in Croatia started, my sister was gravely wounded by shrapnel in Vinkovci and operated on without electricity. Vukovar fell with three thousand people slaughtered by Serbian and Yugoslav forces in a couple of days. Yet in the American press there was little sympathy for Croatia, and a lot of simplified history vilifying Croatia. I had many conversations where I was on the defensive, and this is what I remember from one of them, during a Thanksgiving dinner, where a literary critic asked me, When did you escape from Croatia?
I haven’t escaped from anywhere. I’ve lived in the States for twenty years and haven’t escaped yet.
Are your relatives still there?
Still? They don’t plan to come here. Do you think everybody wants to come here?
Can you explain the war to me and all that ethnic hatred? This has been going on for centuries.
It hasn’t. Just now and then there is a war, but usually it’s imported from abroad—bigger countries fighting for the terrain. We oscillate, a few years of war, then twenty-thirty of peace. We forget fast and then we suddenly remember. This is our first original, un-imported war. Actually, Milosevic and his generals exported the war to Croatia to create Greater Serbia.
But wasn’t Croatia helping the Germans in World War Two, and you killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs?
I didn’t kill anybody. True, the puppet regime in Croatia committed a lot of atrocities. On the other hand, Tito, who led the liberation war against the Germans, was a Croat, as were many of his partisans. It was a civil war, fought in a defeated country, Yugoslavia, whose Serbian king had signed a pact with Hitler.
Croatians as Catholics, didn’t they collaborate with Mussolini? And Tudjman, isn’t he a fascist?
Who isn’t? He was Tito’s youngest general and he contributed to defeating the Germans more than any current head of state in Europe who enjoys labeling him. But I thought we were talking about the current war, not the old wars! What about protecting Croatia and Bosnia now? Bad historical analysis won’t accomplish that!
My academic friend regarded me with what appeared to me a mix of cynicism, pity, and suspicion. He probably didn’t mean it that way, but I was irritated enough to feel hounded.
I got used to treating Croatia as some kind of burden—so when people asked me about where to travel in the Balkans, I usually advised them to go to Slovenia and Greece. And then, suddenly, Croatia became tourist destination number one for the Lonely Planet and many tourist journals. Nevertheless, I wasn’t ready for the conversation I had a few days ago in Murmansk, Russia. A professor of linguistics asked me, You left Croatia for the United States? How could you do that?
What do you mean, how could I? America was the place to be.
I just came back from Croatia, and it’s the most beautiful country in the world.
I wouldn’t go that far. What about all those sharp rocks and sea urchins that end up in your feet if you take a step away from the beach?
All those islands, and the old towns, which look like Italy, but are better because they haven’t been ruined by commercialism. It’s heaven on earth! The cheap country wine, the figs! The men and women are so tall…
Sure, they spend too much time in the sun and eat sardines with small bones in them.
And you have all those tennis players and skiers.
Yes, there’s not much economy so people excel at hobbies.
The people were really friendly.
All the unfriendly, hateful, and aggressive ones got killed in the war.
You are joking? If I were you, I’d be very proud to come from there, I’d go right back. America is a desert compared with Croatia.
I am not going back.
She looked at me as if I was a madman. I was struck—first my relatives seemed to be crazy for not leaving Croatia, and now I am crazy for not living in Croatia.
I was sunk in gloom for the rest of the day, thinking maybe I had spent most of my life in the wrong place.
What difference a mere ten years make! I wish people had a bit more memory, so they wouldn’t present a mono-dimensional picture of the country. During the war, it wasn’t all horror: those islands were still there, and weren’t much affected by the war. And now, there’s still complicated history with unresolved ethnic problems. I am always a bit out of step. I praised the country when it was under attack, and now that it’s praised, I am such a pessimist that a critic in the Croatian press said that I seem to remember only the worst things about Croatia, which in my stories turns out to be a gloomy, drunken, and murderous country. True, I am tired of all the tourist praise the country gets now as I was tired of all the venom it got before. It is a complex country deserving of no reductionism.