“It is we who changed. Everything else remained the same,” the Croatian waiter at Monte’s Trattoria in New York City told me as he poured champagne into my crystal glass, barely able to hold back the emotional flood rising inside him. He was probably in his late 60s, with warm eyes behind thick black-rimmed glasses. Wearing an old-school black jacket, he looked more like my grandfather, the kind I might have come to visit for Sunday lunch with my All-American boyfriend, making sure that we were both eating well and genuinely wanting to know how I was. He had been living in New York City for 36 years with his Danish wife who, by his own confession, did not speak a word of Croatian.
Although he rarely went back to his native country, he still remembered Yugoslavia and the time when we were still one country — the sisters and brothers of the great Tito who said no to Stalin in 1948. He still remembered our vanished homeland of army parades and obedient Pioneers, a social experiment in peoplehood whose citizens, almost overnight, turned against one another because someone had suddenly decided that we — the comrades of six united republics — were enemies. That was how we found ourselves in the middle of our own war of roses, setting fire to the house we had all been living in.
Across from me, my All-American boyfriend — who would later become my husband — kept asking why I was suddenly on the verge of tears in this romantic vintage restaurant he had brought me to in the heart of bohemian Greenwich Village.
We were sitting in a place that seemed to transport us to Old World Europe, through the delicate flavors of home cooking and delicious Italian wine. A place where an accidental encounter with a Croatian waiter had opened a jar of memories — personal stories of war, disruption and the violent disintegration of the country of my birth. Two decades later, or however many years it had been — I had lost count — I could once again feel the rustle of the wind moving through the ruins of Yugoslavia.
In all my travels around the world, there has always been some accidental encounter with the citizens of a nation that no longer exists. We were no longer Yugoslavs. We were Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenians. And yet there was always a quiet happiness in being able to speak in our native tongue, even for a moment, through the simplest words: “Thank you.” “How are you?”
We were the expats who had scattered across the world in search of better opportunities, through adjustment and hardship, through our voluntary or forced exile.
The wounds of war were not forgotten and yet, we were like old lovers who had found themselves on opposing sides, vacillating between the greatest love of all and the violent rupture of brotherhood and unity.
If we were really a product of cultural and ethnic hatred, as the official reality dictates, how can our warm and nostalgic encounters be explained? Why this innate sense of belonging to something we had gone so violently to demolish? What was it we were fighting so desperately for? Have we defended our dreams?
Through all our personal trajectories, we went in search of something better. Countryless and marked by war, accustomed to violence, tolerant of fracture and able to move forward when everything around us was falling apart, we, the people of Yugoslavia exiled from our homeland, could give the best masterclass on the repercussions of warfare. We could teach a life class on survival through those earthquakes and ruptures that shake you, break you and throw you onto the cold, wet ground. We, who survived, we who were exiled in search of a center-of-the-world, a better place for us, have we defended our dreams?
We, the witnesses to an epoch of brute force engraved in our hearts and minds, the proud citizens of a brave capitalist world, successful in our new homes, have we found what we were looking for?
What did my generation experience? Cruelty, disorder, rioting and ferocity. Disobedience — well, some of us. Bombs and shelters. Empty supermarket shelves. The uncertainty of not knowing what the next day would bring. During the 1990s, the revolution against Milosevic became our newfound place of freedom. We believed ourselves to be a fearless generation, standing against police cordons, the last bastion in defense of ideals that the leaders of war had tried to burn to the ground. We were willing to suffer, even to sacrifice, for the generations that would come after us. But when it was all over, on Oct. 5, 2000, we packed our suitcases and left what remained of our country, knowing that — as the Croatian waiter at Monte’s had told me — everything would remain the same but us.
After that Sunday lunch at Monte’s, I could not sleep for three nights, haunted by the realization that my generation was not the only one to have lived through the horrors of war.
In Yugoslavia, there was always some war to wage and to survive
In Yugoslavia, there was always some war to wage and to survive. My grandparents used to tell me how fortunate I was to have been born into peaceful times, while they had lived through the Nazis. No one could have predicted the war of the 1990s. But before that, there had been communism, the Informbiro, the repression of freedom of speech and the authority of the Communist Central Committee.
Then there was the story of my parents, who belonged to no political party and were buying their own apartment at a time when many others received theirs through political affiliation. Growing up, this was something I could not understand, and I blamed my parents for refusing to fit in. I begged them to stop being dissidents and simply become part of the majority. Only later in life did I begin to understand the uncompromising personal and social fight for freedom and independence.
My mother was determined not to subject herself to the moral-political evaluation of the Communist Party, nor to those who, as an express ticket to success in life, had pledged their allegiance to the left. Communism was one great hypocrisy. The stories of fighters for national and workers’ rights that Tito’s party advocated publicly ran counter to the luxurious lives enjoyed behind gated villas in the most exclusive parts of Belgrade. These were the lounge communists, sipping champagne over brunch, derby hats on, all in the name of the proletariat.
Each generation in former Yugoslavia had some social struggle and some great political question to confront. Unlike the college undergraduates I later taught at Yale University, who spent their summers interning on Wall Street, I could not list many “extracurricular activities” from my high school and college years beyond my own personal struggle through the war, which culminated in the revolution against Milosevic.
Departure or expulsion?
Every generation in the Balkans had to create its own liberation movement and write its own chronicles on freedom. The ruthless plunder of our hopes and dreams — the story of greed, betrayal and exile — remained hidden behind the deceitful ideals of Milosevic. What lay behind the forbidden pages of our history? The lives spent fighting the regime? The romanticized dreams of a carefree Serbia somewhere in the West?
For decades, storytellers and foreign correspondents imposed their own readings on what we, the people of Yugoslavia, had actually lived through. War crimes. Ethnic and religious hatred. Ideology. Greed and grievance theories of civil war. I had heard them all.
I sat in the ivory tower chambers of some of the world’s most prestigious political science departments and watched American scholars of war run regression analyses to explain our personal dramas and tragedies. Simplistic explanations that could justify the theory of X, Y or Z on the cover of a prestigious academic journal. But who knew us better than ourselves?
Thrusting a finger into the eye of the official decrees of the newfound realities that followed the fall of Yugoslavia, on that late afternoon in New York City, moved by nothing more than an accidental encounter and mere curiosity, I was about to write my own chronicles on freedom. The story of all of us who found ourselves outside the boundaries of the country that had abandoned us. The story of all of us, the children of Yugoslavia, a country that disappeared almost overnight in a bloody fratricidal war. The story of all of us, displaced or misplaced, who felt rejected and ruthlessly discarded by our own motherland under the subject line of voluntary exile. A grain of sand in a foreign desert. The truth about our past, present and future seemed to have been defined by those who stayed behind in the dismantled country, trying to reposition themselves on the right side against the enemy.
Foreign correspondents were ready to record the testimony of anyone willing to speak on the record, for one reason or another. The interviews for the BBC, CNN, AP, the Voice of America. The arbitrary conclusions reached through grand political agreements, washed down with whiskey and pork roasts and commemorated in group photographs with the rulers of the free world in Dayton, or any other city for that matter, merely ticked the “to-do box” on the foreign affairs agenda. They did not really explain anything. They did not help us heal. And judging by what has unfolded since in Syria, Egypt and across the Middle East, it is difficult to believe that the lessons were ever truly learned.
The hard lines of ideological division between the pro-Milosevic and pro-democratic forces of my generation were, in fact, false, and sustainable only in the midst of revolution. Every victory produces its own political defectors, those who overnight change into new uniforms, learn new lines and confess a sudden change of heart in favor of human rights, European integration, NATO and democracy. All of it in ruthless pursuit of new opportunities, while allowing people to believe they were acting in the name of justice and the dreams of democracy.
We, the perpetually dissatisfied nomads who left the country on our own, still cannot quite decide whether our leaving was departure or expulsion. With no government scholarships, and no idea how any of us would make it on our own, we found ourselves in uncharted territory with nothing certain but the dream.
