Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision.

Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.

Release date: June 15, 2021

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 877

Sample

Where Other People Live: A Presentation My father and two uncles went to the same high school in Sarajevo that I did. Despite the nearly fifty years that had passed since my elder uncle was enrolled in the school – back in 1934 – the interior had remained the same. The person whonoticed this was my grandmother, who came to the parent-teacher conferences
for both him and me. My father and younger uncle were taught by the same arthistory professor, whom I would eventually have as well. When the old professordied at the beginning of my second year, all three of us attended his funeral.

From its founding in the 1880s it had been an elite school for the bourgeoisie. The Bosnian author and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić graduated from it, after considerable torment, about which he would later speak with horror and disgust.

This is probably why his name was never mentioned at school functions, when the director would enumerate all the distinguished personages and celebrities who had attended the school. In my own days communist revolutionaries were considered the most noteworthy graduates, in addition to the assassins of Franz
Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Gavrilo Princip himself, who fired the shots that struck Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, did not graduate from the school, because he had moved to Belgrade by then, but several of his
close associates did.

Our professors often told us that we must model ourselves after these figures – we lived in a socialist society, after all, which held especially fast to its bright and shining examples. Among them our parents and uncles were often held up to us
as paragons of sacrifice and heroism.
Around the subject of my elder uncle there was silence. He never received
any grade lower than the very highest. He had pen pals in other countries with whom he corresponded in Latin, he solved unsolvable math problems, he played the guitar, and he wrote an essay on Paul Valéry. In photographs, tall and fragile,
with his blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like a young aristocrat in a Thomas Mann novel, someone who will die by the end of the book, from meningitis or gaping caverns in his lungs, but his will not be an ordinary, quotidian death for in it will be gathered the destiny of a family or even that of an entire generation. I
should say that while this is how my elder uncle looked, nothing else about him was like in Mann, except that I’d have been happy to reproduce on his gravestone the words with which the doctor of philosophy Serenus Zeitblom takes leave of his own friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn: “May God have pity on your poor soul, my friend, my homeland.”

But I’m not at all certain what my uncle’s homeland would have been. What’s clearer, at any rate, is that I don’t have one, which means in the end that I wouldn’t really know what such an epitaph on his hypothetical grave would even mean.

He was born in Usora, a small town in central Bosnia, where his father, my
grandfather, was employed as a railroad stationmaster. He grew up along the tracks built by the Austro-Hungarians, changing homes and friends often. From his father he learned Slovenian, while his mother tongue was Croatian, but his first
language was German. This he learned from his grandfather, my great-grandfather, a high-ranking railroad official, a Swabian German from Banat, who was born in a town that’s now in Romania and went to schools in Vršac, Budapest,
and Vienna. He too spent all his working life along the tracks of Bosnia.

You must understand, then, that my elder uncle – let’s call him Mladen
because things will get too confused if we keep this up without names – lived
in complex surroundings and a complicated linguistic web. It is possible for language to determine a person’s destiny. Mladen’s grandfather Karlo was a nationally
minded German, and he spoke only German to all four of his children until
he died. Not once did he ever speak to them even a single Croatian word. With his daughters’ husbands – two Croats and a Slovene – he spoke Croatian, despite the fact that all three of them spoke perfect German. With his grandchildren he
spoke both languages, but only after he had been addressed in German. If anyone greeted him in Croatian, Opapa pretended not to hear.

They say the weekly meals at which the whole family would gather were quite something. There was a strict language protocol of the sort that today probably only exists at the headquarters of the European Union, though no one seems to have wondered why it had to be that way. Karlo’s Germanness was especially important to him, everyone else around him would have to adapt. In return, no one, least of all he, prevented them from being something other than who they were or from speaking whatever languages they pleased. My great grandfather loved his sons-in-law, and it didn’t bother him that they weren’t German; rather, he was proud, I should note, of their civic calling. Belonging to the railroad workers’ trade was for him something like being in a secret society, a Masonic lodge of sorts, whose members differed from other people by their understanding of the world and their own role within it. A German rail man and a Croatian rail man enjoy a brotherhood that allowed them greater mutual understanding than any members of a single nation among themselves. Opapa was a leftist, and in the early 1920s he ended up in prison and later lost his job for backing a rail men’s strike. It wouldn’t have been a scandal if he had not been a stationmaster and a German among the barbarous Slavs. He was harshly punished by the royal government for the betrayal of his caste and his nation. But at home we were raised with the belief that all people have the same
rights, regardless of their faith or economic status. The poor little country of Bosnia, where nearly 90 percent of the people in the 1920s and ’30s were illiterate, where epidemics of typhus and cholera would take over with alarming
frequency, and where an endemic syphilis ravaged generation upon generation without respite, like some kind of evil tradition, this Bosnia was – for Opapa
Karlo and his ideas – the ideal place to be living. He never had any notion of returning to the Banat or of moving to Vienna or Germany. Those were foreign countries to him. When asked about it, he would quietly answer that he wouldn’t ever be able to live in those places because that was “where other people lived.”

As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a more precise definition for the opposite of one’s homeland. Uncle Mladen was more like his grandfather than the other grandchildren were, even though one wouldn’t have said he resembled him physically. The elderly Karlo had dark hair and a long gray beard; judging by his photographs, he looked more like a Romanian rabbi, or at least a learned Jewish man, than a German. But Mladen, with his Nordic blue eyes and his bearing, took after the Slovene peasants of his father’s side. When I look at the two of them in the faded black-and-white photos, I wonder what their lives might have been like if German had not come so easily to Mladen, if he hadn’t so willingly listened to his grandfather play the violin, if he had been seated farther from the old man during the Sunday meals. I wonder what might have been if the old man had hated the Slav in his grandson even a little bit.