Section:GDN 1J PaGe:5 Edition Date:190830 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/8/2019 18:39 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Fr iday 30 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •
5
English, charged with looking after me while the adults
arranged the funeral, made me spaghetti with a single
streak of oil. I was befriended by a gang of children
who’d learn ed English from fi lms. I played with them
beside the empty beach and on my last night one boy
wrote me a love letter, making good use of a dictionary.
It was delivered with a crystal from a glass chandelier,
addressed “Dear Lydia ”, begging me not to leave. “THIS
IS YOUR HOME NOW,” he wrote in vaguely threatening
bubble script.
I went back to Serbia and Montenegro several
times in the intervening years, but it was only when I
began writing that I started asking questions. Just as
I began work on a novel partly set in Sarajevo, I found
a yellowing paperback called Teach Yourself Serbo-
Croat on my shelves. I had no idea my grandmother,
who died when I was 18, became a published author
in 1963. On opening the book, I found a shaky
handwritten dedication to me: “To my granddaughter,
hoping she will learn some Serbo-Croat ”, dated my
11th birthday. Even by that time, the language had ceased
to exist.
Though I spent so long anglicising my surname,
hoping my heritage wouldn’t come up, Yugoslavia
has found its way into much of my writing. For
my next book I’ve been thinking a lot about Misa.
He was born in 1912. His parents had migrated to
Arizona a few years before. After his father’s death,
Misa and his mother came back to Petrovac
in what was then still Austr ia-Hungary.
He became a communist and met my
grandmother, also a member of the party but
from Belgrade. As students they were both
arrested during a riot at Belgrade University
for smashing up Nazi-funded labs.
My grandmother got a scholarship to
study at Edinburgh University just beforethe outbreak of the second world war. Misa went
with her and then the Communist party suggested
they spend the war in London. In 1946 they returned
to Yugoslavia, this time with my two uncles in tow.
Private property had been nationalised and a policeman
billeted to live in the Petrovac home.
Misa prospered, but non-party people went hungry.
They decided to return to the UK, where my father was
born. It was a continuous struggle without citizenship.
Misa found himself selling non stick frying pans at
fairgrounds. My grandmother got jobs teaching and
translating Serbo-Croat and in the Harrods homeware
department. When his British passport came through,
Misa got a job with a travel company taking tourists to
Yugoslavia.
He moved back to Sveti Stefan , the next coastal
town along from Petrovac, where he worked in a hotel
surrounded by the Adriatic but became an alcoholic
and was hospitalised. My uncle brought him back to
Scotland. He recovered enough to get a job as a security
guard in a Kirkaldy shopping centre. Just in time. It
wasn’t long before Yugoslavia collapsed. I didn’t know
any of this when I went to his funeral.
The last time I visited the region I went to Sarajevo. I
hadn’t expected the experience of being there to feel so
shattering, reading personal testimony, seeing shelled
buildings and the mouth of the escape tunnel. Every
day I went to the War Childhood museum , an initiative
set up by a man exactly my age but who grew up in the
siege. Studying the exhibits – personal items donated
by those who were children during the confl ict – I was
struck not only by the horror, but by how familiar their
parallel lives seemed. One letter in particular stopped
me in my tracks. Th at bubble script.F
or a long time I didn’t know much
about my father’s family history. Any
details I had gleaned made it sound
mercurial. Tempers fl ared the night
before his grandfather’s wedding, for
example, and two of the party were shot
dead, but the nuptials still took place
the next morning. I sensed it always
moving, national identity was always shifting; the
places they came from in Yugoslavia were constantly
renamed and redrawn. I saw images on the news as a
child and it seemed better to look away.
The fi rst time I went there, we buried my
grandfather Misa in Petrovac. It was 1997 and the
Bosnian war had just ended. The supermarket shelves
were thick with dust. A kind, elderly woman with noA sense of place is a series in which writers refl ect on a
place that shaped their thinkingI was
struck not
only by the
horror, but
by how
familiar
Sarajevans’
parallel
lives
seemedYugoslavia has
gone, but still
lives within me
A sense of place
Olivia
Sudjic
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