Zagreb is forcing me to look at my old ideas afresh. Caught between my American priorities and new concerns beginning to form, I am almost desperate to find someone who might understand my struggle between West and East. Interestingly enough, the person I find, while being found, is someone I would have ignored as a conversation partner had I any choice.
One morning, Matko calls me into his office and introduces me to “Herr Stern.” He emphasizes the “Herr” in the same way he lays stress on the third syllable of “Yu-go-slave-ia.” As he pronounces the German word for “Mister,” a chill shudders my body. Perhaps, like me, anything German reminds Matko of Nazi atrocities. Is Matko viewing Herr Stern through an anti-German bias?
On March 25, 1941, one and a half years after the start of World War II, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the Tripartite Pact of the Axis Powers, the military alignment of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. Preferring to join the countries opposed to fascist expansion, the Yugoslav people protested violently, provoking a coup d’état in Belgrade. Yugoslav Air Force General Dušan Simović led the bloodless coup, threw out the Pact-signing government, and rejected the Pact.
In early April 1941, an outraged Adolph Hitler sent Nazi planes into Yugoslavia during a revengeful “Operation Punishment.” At night, while people were sleeping, the Nazis dropped bombs on important Yugoslav towns. Roughly ten thousand people were killed or injured, and nearly ten thousand houses and public buildings were destroyed or badly damaged. The Axis forces of Germany, Italy, and their ally, Hungary, invaded Yugoslavia, aided later by the Bulgarians and Romanians. Yugoslavia quickly capitulated. The Yugoslav government and the reigning king, Peter II, fled abroad. Although Yugoslavia was partitioned among the Axis allies, the German military assumed virtual rule.
Yugoslav troops retreated to mountain strongholds where they separated into two rival resistance groups. The Chetniks remained loyal to the Yugoslav monarch, who set up a government-in-exile in England, as did other European countries under Axis occupation. The Partisans, made up of workers and peasants, followed the military command of Josip Broz Tito, an experienced communist warrior.
Josip Broz had, during World War I, fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He distinguished himself to become the youngest sergeant major in the service. Sent to the Russian front, he was seriously wounded and captured by the Imperial Russian Army. In a prisoner-of-war camp, his fellow prisoners appointed him camp leader. Broz became a Bolshevik, joining the communist organization founded by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov to effect a workers’ revolution against the Tsarist autocracy. In 1917, Broz participated in the October Revolution, which brought the Bolsheviks to power during the several revolutions making up the Russian Revolution. Eventually the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Three years after the overthrow of the repressive Tsarist regime, Josip Broz returned to his native Croatia. Before World War I, Croatia had belonged to the old Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Postwar Croatia was taken up in the newly formed Jugoslavija (Yugoslavia), a kingdom of Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs ruled by the Serbian king, Peter I.
Broz became an active member of the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia, founded in 1920. For his activities as a prominent union organizer and political agitator, he was arrested in 1928 and jailed for six years. In 1934, he adopted his code name “Tito” for underground Party tasks. He also used the code name “Walter.” In 1935, the Party sent him to the Soviet Union where he worked as a member of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet secret police (NKVD). The following year, “Comrade Walter” was sent home to purge disloyal members from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. After the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Walter-Tito emerged as a military leader in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
In June 1941, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia appointed Tito as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslav National Liberation Army. In 1943, his troops gave Tito the title “Marshal of Yugoslavia.” Despite the Nazi occupation, before the end of the year Marshal Tito declared a provisional democratic Yugoslav government based on a federation of the diverse Yugoslav peoples.
Under the difficult conditions imposed by the Occupation, Partisan acts of sabotage occurred daily. In retaliation, the German occupiers, with the collusion of Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces and the collaborationist, profascist puppet governments in Zagreb and Belgrade, conducted the burning of villages, mass executions of the population, forced labor, and transport to concentration camps. Tito led the Partisans, the National Liberation Army, using insurgent activity to oppose the Axis occupation.
In the liberated areas, People’s Liberation Committees collected arms, food, and clothing, recruited new Partisans, and organized economic, social, and cultural life. Developing over the course of the war into permanent bodies, the committees became the foundations of the postwar socialist system.10
In 1945, the Partisan Army totaled over eight hundred thousand men and women. Yugoslavia had largely liberated itself by its own armed forces. At war’s end, many non-Yugoslavs acknowledged the Partisans to have been Europe’s most effective anti-Nazi resistance movement.
As in any war, where even one fatality is one too much, World War II took the lives of up to one million seven hundred thousand Yugoslavs. This toll included over sixty thousand Jewish Yugoslavs who were rounded up and perished in accord with lethal Nazi thinking, as well as local Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) murdered by the Ustaše (Ustasha) fascist Croatian puppet regime, and Croats and Muslims killed by the Chetniks pursuing ethnic cleansing. Three and a half million people were left homeless; the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
The new Yugoslav government purged noncommunists and held an election limited to only one party, the Communist Party–dominated National Liberation Front. War hero Tito was elected the governing chief. His postwar government faced the mammoth work of rebuilding the devastated country.
Matko is old enough to remember the wartime sufferings caused the Croatians by the Nazi Germany and fascist Italy occupiers and the Croatian collaborationist Ustaše government, all despised as ruthless. From 1941 to 1945, the “Independent State of Croatia” (NDH), set up after the Axis invasion, was an unimaginably cruel Nazi puppet regime that sent hundreds of thousands of “Enemies of the State” to their deaths in German concentration camps or in Jasenovac, the infamous Yugoslav concentration camp.
In my case, a dislike of the dominant Axis Power at the root of the wartime horror had inscribed itself on my tabula rasa as a child. Born into an American Jewish family that lost its East European members to the Nazi Holocaust, I inherited an anti-German attitude. Growing up, the more I learned about Nazi Germany’s diabolical strategy leading to the murder of minority peoples on an industrial scale, the stronger became my predisposition to react negatively to things Germanic.
“Herr Stern is a distributor of East European films in Western Europe,” Matko tells me. The German businessman arrived unannounced in Zagreb to view the Studio’s latest films. “My packed schedule prevents my hosting Herr Stern during the screening,” Matko pronounces. “You will sit in for me.”
“Certainly,” I reply, by now accustomed to my lack of choice in Yu-go-slave-ia.
The chill I experienced at Matko’s crisp articulation of the German word “Herr” evidenced my anti-Germany attitude. And yet, when I booked the journey to Yugoslavia, I accepted an itinerary at odds with my prejudicial thinking.
“No airline flies direct from New York to Zagreb,” the travel agent says. Sudflug International can fly me to Frankfurt, Germany, I am told. Arriving in the morning, I can get a flight to Zagreb the next day. The alternative, catching a late afternoon train to Zagreb, seems to me a better option than staying in Germany, albeit only overnight.
Landing at Frankfurt Airport, I say to myself: “It is twenty-three years after the war. The past is the past.” But traveling into my future through Germany calls up my past, at least that past stemming from my heritage as a second-generation American of Jewish ancestry.
I go straight into the center of Frankfurt, to the railroad station. Buying a ticket goes smoothly. Helpful Germans point me in the right direction to the train. Once on board, sitting at the window in the close quarters of the train compartment, three people to my left and four across, I converse with two young German passengers who speak English. The subject of my religion does not arise, and I do not bring it up. We part in Munich, where I have a two-hour stopover. “Success in Tito’s Yugoslavia!” they say. I avoided mention of my Jewish background quite purposely. This is no novel behavior. For similar reasons, I do not speak of my Jewish heritage in certain situations or among certain people in America.
During the travel pause in Munich, I explore the shopping area outside the train station. A new thirst to know about Germans and their customs pulls me into a Bierstube, a traditional German beer hall. Finding a picture postcard of this particular Bierstube on a table, I read that it is one of sixteen such establishments in the city. Each has four thousand seats and serves nearly fifty thousand liters of beer every day.
The people gathered around the wooden tables imbibe the foamy brew from exceedingly tall steins. A band of musicians, wearing lederhosen, the leather shorts with suspenders that are traditional men’s wear in southern Germany, play bouncy tunes and sing in German. Many drinkers sway to the oompah-pah music, waving their steins in the air. I cannot avoid assuming that the older people in the beer hall crowd had supported, or at least had not resisted, Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler. In this very city, Hitler’s adopted hometown, and in a beer hall no less, the Nazi Party held its first meetings, in 1923.
My mind takes me on a disastrous tour, leading my thoughts to the Nazi concept of Aryan superiority. Based on a theory claiming the supremacy of an Aryan race of white-skinned people of German or Nordic descent, and to protect the purity of this “Master Race,” the Nazi government instituted its infamous “Final Solution” plan. More than ten million “racial inferiors” and “undesirables” were exterminated, including six million Jewish people plus political dissidents, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, Roma, homosexuals, communists, and other minorities.
In the Munich Bierstube, it is difficult to associate the Nazi atrocities with these Germans who look so harmless while merrily enjoying their beer and the music. A stein-swinging man waves to me. “Come on, sing,” he gestures. “No, no thanks,” I motion. There is a barrier between us caused less by language and culture than by my German antipathy.
To lighten my reflections and tune to the sing-a-long, I order a beer. The beer brings up thoughts of my maternal grandfather, Noah. He was named for the Old Testament flood-and-ark patriarch, representing righteousness, regeneration, and the continuity of life. The biblical Noah indulged in the intoxicating grape; my grandfather Noah also had a penchant for beer. His favored beverage he bought at a local brewery near his residence in Ridgewood, a German neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City. When Prohibition became American law from 1919 to 1933, and alcoholic drinks were illegal except for permitted small amounts that folks could make for home consumption, Noah turned his basement laundry room into his own private brewery and winery. Grandpa Noah’s first name actually was Abraham, after the biblical patriarch, but he always called himself Noah.
Abraham Noah Silberberg was born in 1871 in Latvia when it was part of the Russian Empire. He first came to America as a young man with his wife Ernestine, most likely at the end of the nineteenth century, exact date unknown. For some reason, they returned to Russia where their first daughter, Rebecca (Betty), was born. In 1904, they reentered the US at Ellis Island. They took up residence in Biloxi, Mississippi, in the heart of the Deep South, where Ernestine’s father had a retail store. Ernestine died of malaria, and Noah returned to New York with their children, by then numbering two.
Quite soon Noah met my maternal grandmother, Mary Fischer. Born in Warsaw—Poland was, at the time, part of the Russian Empire—Mary entered America with her parents in 1872, at six months of age. When she and Noah married in 1907 or early 1908, she was a widow raising five young children. The couple opened a women’s clothing store and brought six more children into the world.
Knowledgeable in the Talmud, a central text of Judaism, Grandpa Noah helped found a synagogue. Simultaneously, he participated in neighborhood civic affairs. He also joined the Free Masons, the mystical international brotherhood of ancient origin, rising to the thirty-second degree, the next to highest rank. Alas, I never had the chance to know him. He breathed his last when I was eight months old.
My travels down an ancestral memory lane continue after I re-board the train. We ride past the outskirts of the Dachau concentration camp, the first of the Nazi extermination camps opened in Germany. I think of my Hungarian family, perished in the Holocaust.
My paternal great-grandparents were potato farmers born in Hungary in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whether they were “large potatoes” or “small potatoes” as potato farmers I have no idea, but they apparently provided the funds for three of their teenage children to migrate to America. At the very beginning of a mass exodus of Central and East Europeans to America between 1900 and the 1914 outbreak of World War I, an older son of the potato farmers crossed the Atlantic Ocean all alone. At age seventeen, in 1901, my grandfather-to-be, Schmuelhersh (later Americanized to Samuel) Eisner left behind his parents and siblings in his quest for religious safety and a better life in America. A brother, Joseph, and a sister, Esther, followed later on.
Dvorah Braun (later Dora Brown), the eldest daughter of twelve or thirteen children in a Jewish shoemaker family, also dared to leave the Hungarian homeland for the unknown. At age sixteen, traveling alone, my future grandmother endured the seven or eight days’ voyage across the sometimes perilous Atlantic Ocean. As her ship entered New York harbor in 1903, I can only imagine her joyous awe at beholding the magnificent Statue of Liberty. Always an inspiring sight, the colossus represents the Roman goddess of freedom extending aloft the torch of liberty.
My paternal grandparents would not see their Hungarian relatives again. It pains me to imagine the horrors my Holocaust-murdered East European relatives must have suffered. This explains my visceral reaction, my antipathy, to Germans, despite my intellectual awareness that a minority of non-Jewish Germans actively opposed Nazism. The Nazis, and those whose silence allowed them to thrive, robbed me almost entirely of my European family heritage and traditions. Nazi anti-Semitism prevented that inheritance from being passed to me. I feel uneasy in Germany. Despite America’s own touches of anti-Semitism, I do not fear that my government will torture, shoot, or gas me because of my ancestry or religious background.
As my Zagreb-bound train approaches Yugoslavia, the German passengers depart, leaving me on my own for the last stretch of the trip. I have to admit that in Frankfurt, in Munich, and during the train ride through Germany, I appreciated the agreeable exchanges I had with German people. Inexplicably, I muse: “The only thing worse than any lingering anti-Semitism by the German people will be my prolonged dislike of them and their country.” My mind knows it is unfair to consider all Germans collectively guilty for Nazi crimes.
“Miss Green, are you ready?” Matko asks, breaking my reverie. My attention returns to today’s distasteful assignment, navigating the German businessman through the Studio’s films. Despite my aversion, I try to give this task a positive spin. Helping Herr Stern offers me another chance to work toward the goal of releasing old and negative thoughts.
I face a full day in the company of Herr Stern. A middle-aged man of slight build, he is smartly attired in a finely tailored gray suit of shiny material. Svetlana would value his care for stylistic detail. A black silk handkerchief emerges daintily from his breast pocket, matching his tie; small golden cufflinks of a circular design close the sleeves of his blue and white, thin-striped cotton shirt, and he wears black leather loafers enlivened by perky tassels.
Stern and I take our seats at the kinoteka. “Zagreb Film lacks screening facilities of its own, and …”
“I know the Yugoslavs and their limitations,” states Stern, cutting me off. He pronounces English with the characteristic German accent. “I know their sense of timing, too,” he adds as we wait, and wait, for the film showing to begin. The lights finally dim and on the screen appear 35 mm color slides that are—upside down.
Resigned to the unpredictable Yugoslav ways, Stern simply utters, “I wonder if they are upside down, or are we upside down?”
“Beg pardon?” I have been attentive to his Germanic delivery rather than to what he is saying.
“It is only by habit that we see images as we do. I know people who have stood on their head for fourteen days. When they turned right side up, their images were upside down.”
The topsy-turvy remark shatters my fixation on the rise and fall of his vocal pitch.
“Images upside down? Would that induce in someone a new kind of thinking?” I ask. “Just because you look at something from a different angle doesn’t mean anything changes.”
“Correct,” replies Stern. “An image does not change because one’s perspective changes, yet a changed perspective can alter one’s quality of life.”
Strange. He speaks to my present concerns. This German man’s ability to tap into my thoughts, and instantly, completely surprises me. I return the conversation to Stern’s original comment.
“You know people who have stood on their heads for fourteen days?”
“Indian friends,” clarifies Stern. “Yogis.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of yoga.”
What an unusual start to a business meeting!
“Stanford is a half-hour drive to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the center of America’s flower power, hippie counterculture,” I say to Stern. “People are trying out yoga and various self-knowledge techniques as part of a nonviolence ideology.”
“And you?” asks Stern.
Confide my personal matters to a German? Still, he is a Westerner.
“Once a week I attended a non-Stanford encounter group. We were students and nonstudents in our twenties, except for the group leader. He was an older flower-power hippie type, very open-minded as we spoke of our experiences. Probably I could have benefited from the sessions had I been really honest.”
“Meaning?”
“In the spirit of progressive California, one women related going to bed with her brother. She quoted his off-color praise that she was his best lover ever. Slang words interspersed her otherwise intellectually rich vocabulary. Her story shocked me, her actions disturbed me, but I admired her frankness. Why am I telling you this?”
“Because you are being honest.”
“So I kept a straight face. I did not want to reveal my upset; I did not want to be labeled uncool by these California free thinkers. I did not mean to be a hypocrite. My views were not as broad as theirs. I wanted to be accepted by them.”
“Dishonesty is always a misbehavior, especially when the one you are being untrue to is yourself,” asserts Stern.
His simulating thoughts compel me to listen intently.
“A shame,” he declares. “Missed opportunity. Being really honest in the encounter group could have helped you uncover hidden things in yourself.”
“I know. Guess I was not ready. I dropped out of the group the night the leader announced our next session would be a nude encounter on the beach.”
Stern laughs. As if on cue, the room goes dark and Zagreb Film’s recent cartoons and a few documentaries pass Stern’s review. His filmic comments segue into questions probing my life at the Studio and in Zagreb itself.
“I work long days from eight in the morning, and they keep giving me new tasks and longer hours.” Narrating a typical day, I mention my increasingly heavy workload.
“All that for thirty-two dollars a week!” exclaims Stern. “You, an educated American woman, willing to work for slave wages in Yugoslavia?”
“I am not a slave. I am here voluntarily,” I reply defensively. “And my salary is considerably high. That’s what Matko told me. He said workers don’t earn much. They live well because they enjoy social benefits of personal welfare and security.”
Stern raises his eyebrows and smiles skeptically.
I repeat Matko’s avowal: “Your salary may be low compared to American standards but, because you are American, we have given you the third highest salary in the company.”
“Back home, you could earn many times that amount.”
“I didn’t come here to get rich,” I make clear. “Moneymaking has never been my main goal,” I emphasize.
“What about your work on the scripts and the voiceovers you have recorded? Are you at least earning screen credits?”
“I did not ask.”
“And they did not offer,” interjects Stern.
“I am carrying out an experiment, investigating a lifestyle,” I explain. “Although I would not want to earn less, I feel a little uncomfortable at the inequity my salary represents. Third highest salary for what is essentially an internship?”
From the time of my first paying job, at age thirteen shelving books in a local public library after school, I relate, I never reckoned my payment solely by the wages received. I point out: “I go by the popular proverb, ‘Experience is the best teacher.’ Really, always I care less for economic gain than for the richness of ‘another experience,’ as if my experiences are the provider of my life’s education and prosperity.”
“Well and good,” states Stern, “if you can really take the timely benefit.”
This talk has become prickly. Stern’s remarks suggest that the Studio is mistreating me. Stern falls silent. Reaching into his jacket, he removes a pack of top-brand American cigarettes. Undaunted by his failure to light the cigarette using Yugoslav matches, he asks me: “Wouldn’t you rather have matches that strike?”
He refers to the creature comforts unavailable in a communist economy.
“I wound up here without matches,” he says, “and had no choice but to buy this substandard product. Few consumer items are imported, and Yugoslav national production is of limited range and unreliable quality.”
Stern is describing what I have already experienced.
“At least the shoddy products made by the nationalized enterprises are no longer subsidized,” he adds. “The incentives of profit and loss are replacing state subsidies and supports. Tito abolished the subsidy practice a few years ago to increase efficiency and better product quality. So, if people can buy an alternative to this company’s matches, the factory will go out of business, just as in the competitive West. Tito has introduced elements of capitalism. Perhaps a balance between the two systems could work better than the one or the other alone.”
“Curiously,” I observe, “the less I have here, the less I seem to want.”
“It’s 1968. Rejecting materialism is politically correct among some people.”
“I’m not hostile to materialism,” I clarify. “Wealth and material possessions constitute a great achievement.”
Do Stern’s statements on consumer niceties suggest I go on treading the given path of consumer abundance? Thoughts coming to me in Yugoslavia intimate the opposite advice. The Western economy promoting the excessively consumptive lifestyle is based on the acquisition of a wide array of things deemed necessary but, I find myself asking, “Are they really indispensible?” Circumstances in Zagreb compel me to buy from my needs rather than my wishes or wants. Despite initially loathing Yugoslavia’s scarcities, I am starting to accept this unaccustomed simplicity. Then again, what choice do I have?
A silence descends. Stern’s vibrantly intelligent eyes gaze inward. He surprises me again by declaring: “Love one another with compassion and charity.”
This assertion is certainly a non sequitur. In a New York instant I follow him into the next area of conversation.
“Your Christian-based homeland rightly honors Jesus,” Stern says. “The majority of your country’s elected or appointed leaders are Christians. Yet they run the country as if Jesus transmitted moral, ethical, and righteous principles to be studied, not practiced. Do you ever ask what happened to values and norms based on truth, goodness, and love?
“The situation is the same in my country,” he continues. “Many people give persuasive lip service to Christ’s commandment, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Still, often we take actions that go against this noble principle. In our self-absorption and social apathy, sometimes we take no actions at all. How many of us really follow Christ’s teachings? In fact, what religion does not espouse the Golden Rule? And what applies to us as individuals, applies to us when we are in governing positions. A society that professes one thing and does another is not moral.”
After this unexpected outpouring, and before I can respond, Stern goes on: “And what about, ‘Blessed are the poor?’ Don’t you think Jesus favored the basic necessities of life for all? The essentially socialistic instructions of Jesus are as little practiced in socialistic Yugoslavia as in the capitalistic Christian countries.”
“If Jesus was a socialist, why do the modern churches and most Christians follow the path of capitalism?”
“Imperfect people cannot make a perfect world,” Stern sums up. “Institutions and governments cannot create the future society of higher ideals. We individuals have to believe in, and strive to realize, our highest human possibilities. We have to initiate the changes we yearn for. The ideals of understanding and friendship between peoples and nations demand to be brought into practice.”
Stern glances at his watch. Another silence ensues. I imagine an America where more of the Christians, and other people of faith, and nonfaith, really practice the noble qualities exemplified by the loving, simple, and truthful Jesus. What kind of a world could we have if more of us walked, and not mainly talked, the values preached by the great spiritual leaders? If we integrated into our own lives the nonkilling mindset of visionary trailblazers like Jesus, Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, and all the peace pioneers unknown and unproclaimed? Speaking with Stern has an inspirational effect.
“I also consider this stay in Zagreb as a way of learning about myself.”
“What have you learned so far?”
To answer requires thought, and Stern does not press me for an instant response. Finally I say, “Being out of my comfort zone has forced me into different behavior.”
I explain that in America I have a habit of comparing myself to others. In the strange Yugoslavian society are no people to whom to compare myself. I cannot look at Yugoslavs and judge my success and myself by their accomplishments. Too many differences exist. “Their lives are no yardstick by which to measure my own life.”
“How is your way inside?” asks Stern. “How are you on the inner planes?”
“I am looking into that too.” Intuitively I decipher his language.
“Tell me, do you know your limitation?”
“What do you mean? Intellectually? Emotionally? As a worker, an American, a woman, or what?”
“I mean,” says Stern, “if there is a circle, and at the core are all the things and layers that make up you, what is the outer definition of the circle?”
“I don’t know,” I respond.
“You see,” he goes on, “if the core is strong and all your energies are radiating from it, the circle is endless. It has no outer boundary. You can really do whatever you wish to do, anywhere.”
“But.…”
“Yes,” says Stern, cutting me off. “You must know what you want.”
“Easy,” I immediately respond. I relate that, since childhood, I have loved writing words on paper through my pencil, pen, and, later, my typewriter. Still, something is missing. Not yet have I discovered the purpose and content of my communication skills, much less of my very existence itself. It bothers me that I do not know what is really worth doing. Where am I going? What is my direction, my highest goal?
“Is it not ironic that Yugoslavia’s material scarcity and deprivation have caused me to brood over my abundant American good life?” I say aloud.
“You are starting to walk on the path of sandals,” proclaims Stern cryptically. He stands and announces his departure.
I catch my breath. “Will I meet you again?”
“If you want to enough, you will. Wait and see if there’s a need. My plane leaves tonight and I must be on it. I’ve accomplished what I had to here.”
“It’s really quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” I reflect. “I’ve been crying inside for a right person to talk to, and you just happen to pass through on a business trip you had put off and off.”
“There is no such thing as coincidence,” replies Stern. “I had a feeling to come here now. Maybe you did too.”
Like most people, I am familiar with the phenomenon of coincidence. Inner and outer events meet in a significant way that cannot be explained. A good number of times I have experienced instances of meaningful coincidence, the amazing conjunction of seemingly unrelated, unexplainable but purposeful, inner and outer events or circumstances. Although the events or occurrences appeared to be taking place by mere chance, all worked out as if planned or arranged.
“People will consider something a coincidence because they don’t know the future,” declares Stern. “What will happen, will happen. Some people call this God’s grace.”
“Isn’t this what Carl Gustav Jung spoke of?11 Life is not just a series of random events. Life is, rather, the expression of a deeper order?”
“True. He believed that coincidence, or synchronicity, shifted a person’s egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.”
“Are you suggesting that behind coincidence a cosmic cause could be operating?”
“This is something for you to seriously consider.”
“I feel confused,” I admit.
“A sign of growth,” concludes Stern.
10 As reported in Yugoslavia, a hard cover, coffee table–size book compiled by the editorial board of the Yugoslav illustrated magazine REVIEW and published by Grafički Zavod Hrvatske, Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 1966. The book has no page numbering.
11 Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology.