New ideas about food and eating come my way naturally in Yugoslavia. I am accustomed to American breakfasts of toast, butter, and jam, eggs, or cereal, along with orange juice, as well as coffee or tea. The skimpiness of Svetlana’s morning meals astounds me. Breakfast consists of the same bland and strong black tea poured into elegant bone china cups from a delicate white porcelain teapot, toast biscuits the size of small hotel soaps, and locally made butter and fruit jam. Appreciating Svetlana’s generous hospitality, I consider it rude to comment on the sparse fare. I simply bring extra foodstuffs sufficient for two, and insist she accept dinar contributions for the general costs of my stay.
Sharing breakfast ripens into more than merely putting food into my belly. Svetlana’s meals go first to my heart. I relish watching her present the breakfast on a fine cotton tablecloth with matching napkins, as if I am a very special guest. The morning ritual expands my thankfulness for her kindness. Observing her also grants me the luxury of receiving private lessons in European graciousness. Not needing to rush out the door and get quickly to the Studio, where there is no time clock to punch and the workers stroll in casually, I emulate Svetlana’s slow dining.
She begins by using a silver-handled butter spreader, another inheritance from her parents, to smooth butter neatly onto the fragile toast-biscuits. It takes finesse to spread the butter without crumbling the biscuit that melts in the mouth. Using a matching demitasse spoon, she lifts jam from a porcelain pot and gracefully pats the fruity mix atop the butter. She limits her biscuit ration to two. I follow her example. Despite initial hunger pangs, after a while whatever I eat in Svetlana’s company proves to be enough, neither too little nor too much. Our conversations supply the most plentiful morning nutrition.
Svetlana never throws food into the garbage; she finishes everything on her plate. That is my habit, too, established in my childhood. At P.S. 56 elementary school in Brooklyn, I joined the “Clean Your Plate Club.” The membership encouraged me to put on my plate only as much food as I thought I could eat, or to eat all that my mother served, even when I had to smother the horrendous fried liver under a blanket of ketchup to get it down. My mother herself did not belong to the Clean Your Plate Club officially. Having weathered the economic depression of the 1930s, she cleaned her plate “because we can’t afford to waste food.” Often she added, “There are starving children in India.”
Svetlana knows the Western habits of waste. She has traveled widely in Western Europe, where an overflowing abundance of “beautiful, unique, and wonderful things” confronted her in fashionable shops. She still hankers for items her lack of hard currency prevents her from acquiring.
Svetlana confides details of her sufferings in England, desiring the foreign products she could not obtain. Once, while she toyed endlessly with a top brand fountain pen in the stationery section of a High Street department store in London, a man literally wearing a “Customer Service” badge asked what she was doing and loudly requested her to buy or to leave. “Shocking and humiliating!” Svetlana declares, screwing up her face in remembered pain.
By Yugoslav criteria, Svetlana enjoys good quality housing, clothing, and food. Her country’s policy of free health care, education, and full employment satisfies her. “We are comfortable,” she states. “Socialism takes care of our basic needs.”
Having encountered the Western horn of plenty, her country’s insufficiencies disgruntle her. “The economy needs to be run better.” Her society has failed to raise the material standard of living. Svetlana’s semiconsumer mindset contests her homeland’s bare lifestyle. She wishes to go shopping and have choice in her purchases.
Svetlana is as intrigued to know about my American life of plenty and comfort as I am to comprehend her existence of scarcity and hardship. She wants to hear my experiences of living in the racing heart of the world’s most exciting hometown. She listens intently as I relate my love of my Manhattan neighborhood and my apartment, situated in an old building on the Upper East Side.
To counteract another possible cycle of Svetlana’s frustrated yearning for the Western good life, I speak of the street violence and crime in New York and other large American cities.
“Being out alone late at night can be risky for a woman. Arriving home after dark, I rush quickly from the bus stop to the entrance door of my building. When it is really late, I take a taxi. Quickly I walk to my building, keys already in hand, unlock the entrance door, and dash in. Carefully I ascend the three flights of winding stairs, attentive to any movements or sounds. You never know if someone may be lurking in wait.”
“No way to live,” mutters Svetlana.
“Once inside my apartment, immediately I triple lock my door and place a safety bar across it.” To make the ritual sound less hair-raising, I add, with a laugh, “I am not interested in receiving uninvited visitors!”
Svetlana shakes her head in disbelief.
“My bedroom windows open to fire escape stairs extending the length of my building. That’s why my windows have iron bars.” To demonstrate the need for the bars, I narrate an incident that occurred in a previous apartment, in Greenwich Village.
“An unknown man climbed the stairs next to my third floor window and sat on the fire escape peering in. I noticed him, screamed, and he hurried away. I stopped opening the windows,” I admit. “A short time afterward, I relocated.”
This talk evokes the fears I knew in Manhattan before going to Stanford. “Some New Yorkers have been mugged several times.”
“Mugged?”
“Attacked or robbed at gunpoint.”
To pacify Svetlana’s alarm, I assure her that I myself never underwent such a frightening incident. I do say, though, that I was accosted one spring afternoon in Midtown Manhattan.
“I had just left my accountant’s office. Had my income tax papers in my attaché case. Walking to the bus stop, I passed a group of five or six teenage boys. They directed boisterous remarks at me. I felt a tap on my left shoulder. I turned around and one boy grabbed the case from my right hand and ran off. Sensing no physical danger, I raced after the boy who was gaily tossing the case like a football between himself and his friends. My awkward pursuit in heels greatly amused the boys, who laughed heartily and rallied each other, howling and yelping as they sprinted in front of me. Then one boy unfastened the case and saw it contained only papers. ‘Shit!’ he snapped, throwing it down. ‘Take it and run!’ a passerby yelled to me.”
“And?” asks Svetlana, absorbed by the story.
“On the street corner was a candy store. I burst in, huffing and puffing, causing the shopkeeper to shout: ‘Again? Don’t tell me! Those street bullies are constantly bothering passersby. The police do nothing. Not serious enough, they claim.’ ”
“Yes,” I answer Svetlana’s next question, “I did phone the police. They came and, no, they did not do a thing.” Again she shakes her head in disbelief.
“They called it bullying, and dismissed it as minor. But such incidents can escalate. Still, I do not let fear keep me from living my good life. It’s not that I deny fear. Maybe a bit of fear keeps me alert. For some reason, I feel protected. That gives me a sense of fearlessness.”
The origin of my fearlessness is a mystery to me. Perhaps it derives from the same place as the occasional blessedness. The blessed feeling makes me feel loved and protected, by whom or what I do not know.
“My sense of fearlessness is no protection if someone wants to hit me on the head,” I continue, “but it does make me more aware of possible dangers. I will walk out of my way to bypass a suspect situation not because I am afraid, but because I am intelligent. I am not going to hug a bear!”
“In Zagreb, as in the other socialist countries, criminal violence is no issue,” comments Svetlana. “We feel safe. Most people don’t even lock their apartment doors. Our women walk on the streets day or night without attack. Our children play on the streets without molestation.”
“Yes, I am astonished by the sense of overall safety I experience here. I could not have imagined a society free of the fear of crime.”
“Oh, don’t get the wrong impression,” responds Svetlana. “We have fear and crime, but of a different sort than yours. We have a low rate of violent crime, possibly also because our police are very strict and powerful. We have crimes of corruption. Our indoctrination into sharing has, ironically, given some of us selfish thinking. People pay off officials and store clerks to obtain items in limited supply, or to jump the long lines formed when shipments of scarce items arrive. Some people steal the scarce items.”
“Corruption, an age-old problem.”
“We promote our national slogan of Bratstvo i jedinstvo, ‘Brotherhood and Unity,’ in every conceivable manner. Most towns have a street or a bridge, sometimes both, named Brotherhood and Unity. And still we steal from each other and cheat.”
Apparently not all Yugoslavs embrace the “We-ideology.” The self-centered side of human nature persists. Old habits usually die a slow death.
“Don’t get a mistaken idea,” Svetlana adds. “Every system has bad apples. We do strive for brotherhood and unity. We have a collective goal; we want to build our country. Both children and adults volunteer to help in community projects.”
“Volunteer, or forced?”
“You may not believe it. We have waiting lists for volunteers who want to help build roads and tunnels, fix train rails, plant trees, and the like. Community service is very popular. We believe in solidarity, helping each other.”
At one point in our discussion, I mention: “New York lacks clean air.” I describe that no matter how often I dust my apartment, I find heavy black soot on my windowsills. “The soot even comes through the air conditioner.”
“At least you have an air conditioner,” Svetlana utters dryly.
Ignoring the sourness her words convey, and pursuing my own one-track thought, I grumble: “And the soot-laden air is the same air I breathe in!”
“At least it is free air,” remarks Svetlana.
The term “free air” reminds me of Matko’s reference to “Yu-go-slave-ia” and “Yu-go-slaves.”
In an acrimonious tone, Svetlana sums up: “Your complaints are petty compared to the various deficiencies we have to endure.”
“Deficiencies fit into my stereotype of life in a communist country,” is all I can manage to respond.
Svetlana corrects me when I use the word “communist.” As she contends, “The communist party rules Yugoslavia, but we are socialists.” She clarifies that Yugoslavia, and the East European countries that I consider communist are, in fact, socialist.
“Calling us communists shows ignorance of political theories and systems,” says Svetlana. “Since you have come here, don’t you have an obligation to know what the words ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ really mean? And whether ‘communist’ is an accurate label to apply to us? Look at the tragedies people in your country went through from unclear conceptions of communism.”
“Whether or not I understand what communism and socialism and even capitalism fully mean and intend,” I parry, “all political isms make us ask what values we hold and what values we wish to see upheld in our society.”
“At the very least, you can clear your misunderstanding,” she responds. “To refresh your memory of courses you had in school, I’ll use very simple, if simplistic, definitions. Both socialism and communism are based on the principle that the goods and services produced in an economy should be owned publicly and controlled and planned by a centralized organization. However, socialism asserts that the distribution should take place according to the amount of the individual’s production efforts, while communism asserts that goods and services should be distributed among the populace according to the individual’s needs.”
“From each according to his ability.…”
“… to each according to his deeds is socialism, and to each according to his needs is communism. In other words, socialism says we’re responsible for each other, while communism says government is responsible for you.”
“And capitalism says we are responsible for ourselves.”
“Communism is an ideal,” she continues. “Communism is a goal of a future social organization that has changed from the economic system of competitive private ownership into a cooperative governing system.”
Svetlana elaborates that citizens in the idealized communist state hold collectively, and share in common, all resources such as property, wealth, and the means and products of production. The rule of the few expands to include the many. Egalitarianism reigns. There is no exploitation.
“We and the other East European socialist countries are in a stage of social and economic development that is very far from the goal of the classless, equalitarian society,” she admits. “Comrade Tito is taking us on our own unique socialistic path to the goal of communism. Our country is forging a free and independent way in a totally Yugoslav system we ourselves have created,” she professes, emphasizing the “we.”
Her nationalistic spirit intensifies.
“Already in 1948, our country declared its independence and freedom from the Eastern Bloc of socialist nations led by Stalin. Tito rejected the role of Soviet satellite. Socialist Yugoslavia is not part of the Eastern Bloc. Never has been, never will be. Soviet socialism has nothing to do with us. We never followed the dictates of Moscow. We never imported a Stalinist form of socialism.”
I can only listen.
“Tito leads the Yugoslav Federation by the principle that to attain the ultimate goal of communism, Yugoslavia has to conform to the situation existing in Yugoslavia. The idea is not to adopt a pattern set by another nation. Our country has to walk its own distinct path.”
“Isn’t that the ideal of every nation? No other country tells you what to do and how?”
“Tell that to the superpowers!” says Svetlana, going on to explain the Soviets’ reaction to Tito’s independent stance. Tito’s choice for Yugoslav nationalism and national economic self-interest led to the expulsion of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia8 from Cominform, the Communist Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties. Nine Eastern European communist parties founded Cominform in September 1947 for mutual advice and coordinated activity. The organization became the center of propaganda efforts directed by the Soviet Union against the West. Because Tito resisted Soviet control and Soviet Marxism, Cominform expelled the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in June 1948.
“We are no other country’s puppet,” proclaims Svetlana. “Tito pulls our strings.”
“He certainly has a strong presence,” I state.
Before I left for Zagreb, I read an article about Yugoslavia that my mother clipped from an old issue of Reader’s Digest magazine. An arresting quote introduced the article: “ ‘Tito!’ Stalin once snarled. ‘I will shake my little finger, and there will be no more Tito!’ ”9
The threat did not manifest itself. Now, at seventy-six, Tito is Eastern Europe’s most dynamic leader and Stalin is fifteen years dead.
“One reason the Communist Party of Yugoslavia changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was to distance itself from Soviet-style practices,” Svetlana explains. “We are free from Soviet ideological, political, and military domination,” she emphasizes again, adding that in the Soviet system the Party is the sole repository of political power.
“Two years earlier,” she goes on, “Tito removed the ruling power of the League of Communists. Gave it more of an advisory role.”
Although Tito was once a dedicated Stalinist, wanting to bring Stalinist-style communism to Yugoslavia, he discovered in practice the weaknesses of hardline Soviet Marxist economics. As one example, Svetlana relates the changes Tito brought to the Marxist principle of nationalizing all means of production, including land.
In the beginning, the Yugoslav government partially nationalized the land and redistributed it to the citizens, and partially collectivized the land. Some landowners were required to surrender land for redistribution; small farmers had to give a portion of their crops to the state or face severe penalties. Svetlana recounts that during the first years of implementation, on seeing the system’s imperfections and its unpopularity with farmers, “Tito liberalized agricultural policy, dropping forced collectivization. Tito gave farmers the choice of choosing for socialist collective farming or private enterprise farming.”
“Was it really a choice?” I counter. “Doesn’t the state favor socialist farms by granting subsidies and supplies and higher prices and other benefits that private farmers do not get?” This information was also in the Reader’s Digest article. “And aren’t many farmers obliged to work with cooperatives because they lack farm machinery and other services?”
“Well, we are free from the ideological course dictated by the Soviet Union,” Svetlana rejoins.
“Free from, but not free,” I comment, alluding to her “free air” remark.
Svetlana nods in agreement. “All too true, yet we Yugoslavs are freer than the citizens of the East European socialist countries.”
“What about you as an individual? What does it mean not to have free air?”
Svetlana sucks in her breath and is on the verge of answering. She stops, becomes pensive, and takes another extended moment before replying: “Even in Yugoslavia, the freest of the socialist lands, we do not have real personal freedom.”
I am stunned when she discloses “the risks of having an interest in foreign things,” a risk applicable to herself. She gives an example. “It is not wise for Yugoslavs to go into a music shop and ask for Western phonograph records. Your name can wind up on a list.” She no longer dares enter a certain shop in Zagreb.
“Incredible!” I exclaim. There is no comparing this bizarre situation to my innocent Manhattan precautionary routine of stepping from a bus or taxi at night, house keys already in hand. “Does the list-making imply that an interest in foreign art or cultural products can divert one off the nation’s ideological path?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. So you see, all the East European countries may boast a degree of equality and justice in social life, but not real personal freedom.”
“Is it worth limiting freedom to achieve some amount of equality and fairness?”
Svetlana ignores my question. Although we sit alone in her apartment, she explains in a lowered tone that the League of Communists is organized in cells of three members, and no one knows where the headquarters is located. “Much about the Party is cloaked in mystery,” she whispers. “The police are very powerful and feared.”
Svetlana refers to a scandal two years earlier, involving Yugoslav Vice President Aleksandar Ranković. He was the chief Party organizer and head of the dreaded Uprava državne bezbednosti (UDBA), “State Security Administration,” Yugoslavia’s intelligence service, the secret police system of the Tito regime. Ranković, seventeen years younger than Tito and considered his heir apparent, had the police secretly watch everyone, including high government and Party officials. “Faithful correspondents” were planted in firms. Tito found listening devices hidden in his own office and in his home. Ranković lost his positions and was expelled from the Party. Ranković disagreed with Tito’s reforms to Marxist ideology, suggests Svetlana.
In the wake of the upheaval, Svetlana assures me, Tito downgraded the secret police, and a political culture of reform is developing. As one example, she says, the country has abolished exit visas for Yugoslav citizens.
“Allowing people to leave the country without needing official permission signals a liberalized police system,” she asserts. “All of the East European communist countries require exit visas, and they are not always easy to get.”
Svetlana’s understatement confronts me with a situation I do not know as an American: the lack of the right to leave one’s home country and travel to another. As an American, I have the right to travel freely, except to those countries on the government’s travel ban list.
A bit overwhelmed by the murky police state information, I wonder aloud if any “faithful correspondents” walk the halls at Zagreb Film. I have noticed mysterious-looking men wandering around. “Or has the public exposure stopped the practice?”
Svetlana does not know the answer, except to say: “You never know who is on the payroll of the secret police.”
Her attitude changes, as if she has revealed too much about the functioning hidden behind Yugoslavia’s dark curtains.
“You in the West may enjoy some amount of personal freedom, but little equality and justice. Your society may be more free; ours is more fair. Your system of economic battle and unbridled competition creates a huge obstruction to social order and peace. Competition is not good for society.”
“Competition brings out the best in people, pushes us beyond our limits,” I counter, repeating an American truism learned as a child.
“No,” objects Svetlana. “Competition is self-destructive, encouraging selfishness and egocentric behavior. If I want to win, the other person has to lose. My needs and wishes count most. When we compete, the result is much more important than the means. Competition implies working separately; there is no fundamental sense of brotherhood. Here we strive to work together, in cooperation, toward the end goal of a better society.”
“This sounds very good, Svetlana, but we both know that most people are selfish. We care for ourselves first. How much coercion does your government use to attain the cooperative ideal?”
“Individuals do tend to be selfish. In our system we work together for something greater than our own little lives.”
“How much force is involved?”
“It is true. We do enforce regimentation for the collectivist ideal. We sacrifice individual liberty to the principle of equality. Equality of opportunity and status for all.”
“What about the individual’s need for freedom?” I ask. “Are you condoning limitations on freedom for the sake of equality and fairness in society?”
“I admit that people will endure, for only a limited time, excessive regulation of their lives in exchange for collective order and equality,” responds Svetlana. “Look at Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia is forging democratic reforms, compromising between a forced communal life and freedom of the individual. If this lasts, we may see a socialist democracy combining freedom, equality, and justice.”
Svetlana is apparently referring to the Prague Spring, the political liberalization that is taking place in the Soviet satellite.
“In Czechoslovakia a new government is in power. The people want enhanced personal freedom, but I am not familiar with what exactly is going on there,” she says.
“The UN designated 1968 the International Year for Human Rights,” I mention.
“Let us hope it is prophetic!” she declares. “Tito’s reforms of de-Stalinization, de-centralization, de-collectivity, workers’ self-management, private enterprise, and other innovations to Marxist ideology are observed by our East European neighbor countries.” She bursts into a smile and remarks, “By the way, people in Czechoslovakia are now getting clothes of better design!”
Svetlana narrates again her visits to Western Europe. She neglects the sore subject of shopping to acknowledge the exhilarating atmosphere of personal liberty she had savored. “Mostly I said and did what I wanted, where I wanted. I did not feel watched—well, except in that department store.”
By the end of the sometimes-spiky discussion, we conclude that without personal freedom, there can be no equality and justice. Similarly, without social equality and social justice, there is no freedom. The means used by Tito’s government to reach the desired Third Way between Western capitalism and Soviet communism oppose the nation’s originally stated ideals. “Free air,” says it all.
“Do you long, as I do, for a society based on economic and social justice as well as personal and political freedom?” she asks.
Before I climb into bed, Svetlana knocks on the bedroom door. There is an air of conspiracy as she hands me a piece of folded paper. Baffled, I open it to see the name of a phonograph record and the address of a local music shop. Will I go to the shop and request the record? The phonograph record was manufactured in the West. “No suspicion will come to you,” she assures me. “You are free.”
One evening, as a token of thanks for her hospitality, I present Svetlana a bottle of French cognac I bought at the state-run grocery store for a hefty price. When I bring her foods and drinks I think she might like, or would be too expensive for her to buy, especially imported foreign items, invariably she poses the question: “Why do you do it?” In turn I respond, “Why do you do this?” when she insists on sharing the gift with me rather than her boyfriend, as I suggest. Svetlana’s translating job for Zagreb Film allows her to work in the office or at home. This flexibility gives her many opportunities to visit her boyfriend at a beach resort town in Dalmatia, on the picturesque eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea some hours away, where he has a full-time job.
“Opening tourism is another crucial thing Tito did after breaking with Stalin,” notes Svetlana. “Tito built all kinds of tourism facilities, especially in Dalmatia, to attract foreign tourists who pump hard currency into our economy.”
While Svetlana gets the cognac glasses from her liquor cabinet, I flash back to my lifestyle at home. Rarely do I drink alcohol except at a party or on a date. Yugoslavs seem to imbibe alcohol as a daily habit. At Svetlana’s, after the working day, I may drink a glass of wine at her prompting. Now I hold a low, spherical cognac glass in my hand. I warm it the way she does, then put my nose to the glass edge and inhale the fruity scent.
My very first sip encourages me to divulge: “Our conversations make me think more deeply about the freedoms I take for granted. If I interpret the word free solely in political and sociological terms, by such reckoning my country is a very free land. I grew up proud to be an American, citizen of the nation with the most freedoms in the world, as they taught us in school. Freedom of this, freedom of that.”
“America has a good constitution,” interjects Svetlana, well informed on many subjects.
“Yes, the privileges of my American nationality are guaranteed in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights that helped establish our great nation,” I affirm, exposing my own touch of national pride. “In the Declaration of Independence, the great founders of my country asserted certain truths to be self-evident. The phrasing is very beautiful. They said that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Happiness signifies different things to different people,” comments Svetlana. “As a Yugoslav, I maintain that happiness means everyone has enough food to eat, a home to live in, paid work, sufficient money, free education, free health care, and an adequate pension upon retirement.
“We have no huge economic divisions between people, though there are some low incomes in the southern part of the country.” She addresses the people’s right to the basic necessities of life. “Our system of free education is producing a generation of young people much better educated and more capable than those now in power.”
As Svetlana speaks, again I imagine her lecturing at Zagreb University, not on language but on social issues. Her social passions, and another sip of the cognac, have her trumpet: “I do not approve the policies of the rich capitalist countries that produce citizens who have nowhere else to live than on the streets! Morally indefensible!
“How degrading, to be dependent on the charity and spare change of passersby. You will never see our people living on our streets because they have no home. Capitalists may find our living conditions substandard, but at least all our citizens have a roof over their heads!”
“This may be so, but even if I were to become homeless and fated to sleep on the streets of an American city, I would possess a personal freedom to choose and follow my preferred lifestyle. Few Yugoslavs are allowed such choice,” I counter.
“Really? Do you really think you would choose to live on the street?”
I take another sip of cognac.
“The purpose of government is to represent all the people and not just the rich,” she declares. She accuses America of worshipping a religion of greed. “Capitalism convinces people who are victimized by the system to support the system, manipulating them as if to demand their own victimization.”
Svetlana presents so much for me to defend! Her view is so politically biased. She is indoctrinated by her country’s propaganda. I definitely have to correct her wrong perception. “People live on the streets in poor countries too,” is all I can retort. The cognac is fuzzing up my thinking process. “Look at India.”
“A totally different set of circumstances,” she says, dismissing my remark as irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Once in a while I cannot escape the feeling that the Cold War conflict enters into our conversations even though Yugoslavia is a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Tito helped develop a “Third Force,” giving Third World countries a way to cooperate and act globally and have more leverage with the superpowers while avoiding participation in the Cold War. In Belgrade in 1961, some thirty-five Mediterranean and Afro-Asian Third World countries agreed on a policy of nonaligning militarily or politically with the Cold War’s opposing power blocs of the US and the USSR and also not with the People’s Republic of China.
In my now cognac-wobbly brain, I rummage around for a calm response to Svetlana’s prickly remarks. Another sip of the brandy has me grant that our esteemed American Constitution is not always interpreted from the most generous, caring, and compassionate perspective. I admit, “It was a bitter pill to swallow when I learned that America’s Founding Fathers designed a system preventing females from voting in government elections. Of course, thoughts concerning the woman’s role in society were different then, but …” Again I take a sip of the cognac. “Not until the early twentieth century did American women step out of the shadows of male citizens and receive the right to vote.”
Carelessly, I have given Svetlana an opening for her to proclaim: “The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia made a good beginning by establishing itself on values of gender, ethnic, religious, and class equality. From the very first elections, in 1945, Yugoslavian women easily got the vote that women in other countries had to struggle to receive.” Her slightly sing-song manner indicates she may be repeating government propaganda memorized as a child. “To get the vote, you American women had to wait more than one hundred and thirty years after the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1787.”
“The second-class citizenship of women is changing,” I shoot back. “Taking guidelines from the Civil Rights Movement, women are demanding full and equal legal rights and social privileges.” I tell her that American women now publicly confront traditional patriarchal authority and attitudes; women are standing up to men in new ways.
“Maybe some influence will rub off on us,” she says as if conceding a point. “Men dominate our one-party system and we don’t have a women’s rights movement.”
Svetlana follows the women’s rights activities on the rise in America and other Western countries and stays abreast of international current events. She has a good schooling in history, her country’s and mine, knowledge unsurprising for the daughter of international diplomats. Svetlana grasps American history better than many Americans.
Discoursing on “equal rights for women and everyone,” she mentions that the signers of America’s freedom documents owned African slaves. “They fought a war against England for national freedom while allowing some people to remain the legal slaves of others?” she questions. “Surely your founders knew slavery was wrong. They did nothing to stop it as a reprehensible institution.”
I have to concur. It is a source of hurt to me that even our venerated American genius, Benjamin Franklin, passionate lover of freedom and signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, owned five African slaves.
“Repair and reform are in process,” I say apologetically, but I bristle when Svetlana challenges: “Don’t you see the connection between using humans as a commodity subject to buying and selling, and the system you have today? If a country is carved out of land grabbing and genocide of the aboriginal population, and built up on slave labor, can it last?”
Ouch—the truths relating to the early American settlers yield a mean slap. My face is red from a kind of nationalistic embarrassment. I try to stay composed. Unprepared for the assaults, I realize that, for all her worldliness, Svetlana is a product of her Third Way political system wanting to prove itself superior to either communism or capitalism. Mentally I formulate an all-inclusive reply defending my country. Before I can speak, Svetlana comments, in a conciliatory tone: “Hypocrisy exists here too. That’s why it is easy to become cynical. How else to protest in a monitored society?”
In my own attempt to smooth ripples, I ask: “How about protesting through the whimsy of the cartoon?” Still, I am not completely won back. “Doesn’t the financial support your government gives Zagreb Film automatically mean that the Studio has to adhere to governmental guidelines? Films, in some way, have to benefit Yugoslav socialism?”
She answers: “We are aware that in a monitored society the human tendency for self-preservation brings on self-censorship.”
We are both relieved when the Bach playing on her phonograph reaches a dynamic section overwhelming our talk.
One day, glancing through the English language books stacked on Svetlana’s bookshelves, I spot a large book simply titled Yugoslavia. Printed the previous year by the Workers’ Council of Zagreb, it has black-and-white photos. There is no page numbering. I read that Yugoslavia’s economy has grown in the past years at unprecedented high rates; the national per capita income is now around five hundred dollars. The low figure, so many times below America’s per capita income, sets me to wondering. I have not observed any dire poverty in Yugoslavia, at least not in the Zagreb area. The people in the gray and materially deprived Croatian capital appear well fed and healthy.
In Yugoslavia’s developing economy, the people are neither very rich nor very poor. By my American yardstick, they are very poor. Yet their basic subsistence needs are met—except, of course, the essential need for personal liberty and freedom. There is no hunger or starvation, and no one lives on the streets. Free health care, free education, and secure employment are available to every citizen, as Matko and Svetlana lose no opportunity to repeat.
In my own, rich country, a large minority of the populace lives below the poverty line in dismal circumstances. During a one-year job as a “social investigator,” or social worker, for the New York City Department of Welfare, predating my graduate studies at Stanford, I helped poor and disadvantaged Americans living at the low end of the American economic spectrum.
One of the families on my caseload comprised an unwed black mother and her three children, from three absent fathers. They lived crowded together in one shabby room in a low-rental tenement hotel serving poor transients in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem. My introductory visit I cut short, unable to tolerate the dwelling’s stench. The walls literally stank. Cockroaches marched boldly across the floor, and mice tried to get their share of the family’s limited food supply. The old and deteriorated building obviously received neither long-term maintenance nor daily upkeep.
I thought of this family when the Department asked the social workers to nominate one household as “most deserving” of a special Christmas. My essay won. Just before the twenty-fifth of December, I presented the prize, an overflowing gift basket containing festively wrapped holiday foods, toys, and clothing. “Mommy, mommy! Oranges! Oranges!” shrieked the four-year-old son, jumping up and down. “Slippers!” screeched the six-year old. “Slippers!” His very first pair. The mother shed tears and exclaimed, “Best Christmas ever!” Personal contact with the desperate poverty existing in my wealthy country exposed me to a reality that I had, until then, known only intellectually.
The conversations with Svetlana bring up significant contrasts between the American Way and Tito’s Third Way. I become more conscious of my country’s discrepancies, the disconnects between some stated principles and practices. The vast differences in rights, rewards, and responsibilities between white and black, rich and poor, powerful and weak, and male and female in American society make me ask myself: Is there a more fair and balanced way to live together as human beings? I am impressed that nearly all citizens in a “poor” country like Yugoslavia are secured of their basic subsistence needs.
But I do not envy the Yugoslavs; I deplore their loss of freedom, liberty, and privacy. Communist Eastern Europe has a reputation for its limitations and repressions. Now I am encountering these limitations and restrictions.
It is clear that both Svetlana and I have some fundamental criticisms of our respective societies. Equally obvious, neither Svetlana nor I can quite follow each other’s objections except intellectually.
Unlike Svetlana, I do not long for personal freedom and liberty because I already have them. Like most of my compatriots, I take American freedoms for granted, as if they always existed and will always endure.
The talk about political and personal freedom, and Svetlana’s longing for both, makes me aware of a deep longing of my own that seems connected with freedom. I think of the mysterious blessed feeling I get from time to time. I sense there exists a freedom I do not know. Specifics elude me. This yearning reminds me again of the “something” I have forgotten and need to remember. Every flower bud has its own right moment for blossoming.