Mother Tongue: A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women - Hardcover

Romanov, Tania

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1609521528 ISBN 13: 9781609521523

Publisher: Travelers' Tales, 2018

Synopsis

What is your mother tongue? Sometimes the simplest questions take a book to answer. Such is the case with Tania Romanov’s story.

Mother Tongue is an exploration of lives lived in the chaos of a part of the world known as the Balkans. It follows the lives of three generations of women―Katarina, Zora, and Tania―over the last 100 years. It follows countries that dissolved, formed, and reformed. Lands that were conquered and subjugated by Fascists and Nazis and nationalists. Lives lived in exile, in refugee camps, in new worlds.

What language did you speak with your mother? What language did you speak with your father? What language did you speak with your brother? For Tania Romanov there are three different answers to those questions.

Did you speak your mother tongue with anyone except your mother? That is the most bizarre question of all. But for Tania Romanov, the answer is no. She spoke a unique language with her mother, one in which she is still fluent. And by the way, it was not her mother’s native language.

The language is Serbian. Tania’s mother was Croatian. Her father was Russian. Tania was born in Serbia, but left when she was six months old. She and her brother grew up in San Francisco speaking English. She didn’t speak any language until she was two.

Tania doesn’t know why she spoke Serbian, rather than Croatian, with her mother Zora. It never occurred to her to ask until she started writing her memoir. And by then, her mother was gone.

The country of birth listed on Tania’s American passport changed four times in four successive renewals. Until the first time, she believed your country of birth was a fixed point. Today she knows better.

Go with her as she journeys through time and history looking for answers, and finding some.

About this title

About the Author

Tania Romanov Amochaev was born in Belgrade, Serbia of two displaced émigrés―a White Russian father and a Croatian mother―and spent her childhood in San Sabba, a refugee camp in Trieste. After arriving in America on the SS Constitution, Tania attended San Francisco’s public schools. She earned a degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, graduating while the school was on strike in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. She then forged a successful business career in technology and was serving on the board of advisors to her College when the formal graduation was finally held. Tania has been the CEO of three technology companies and took the final one to a successful turnaround and IPO. She also earned an MS in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and received an honorary PhD from Saint Catherine University.

Tania is a founder of the Healdsburg Literary Guild and the educational non-profit Public School Success Team, which mobilizes community volunteers to reduce public high school dropout rates. An award winning photographer, her work helped fund her nonprofit efforts.

She has climbed Mount Whitney and Mount Kenya, circumnavigated Annapurna, trekked through Bhutan and Kashmir, and sailed along remote rivers in Burma. In 2013 she landed in Nairobi the day of the terrorist attack and proceeded on a walk across that country from beneath Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean.

Tania watched, from afar, the disintegration of the country where her life story began. Those bitter Yugoslav wars of the 1990s put her mother Zora's sisters onto opposing sides of a battle, and not for the first time. Fluent in the languages of her parents, she visits her homelands to study her past. In her book, Mother Tongue, she explores, in a highly personal saga, the causes and consequences of Balkan struggles over the last hundred years.

Tania is the author of tales of travel to lands as diverse as Russia, India, Japan and Morocco. She is currently writing a book that starts with her father's flight as an infant from Russia during the Revolution of 1917, follows him through life in Serbia, and to San Francisco’s Tsarist Russian community. The essay on her visit to her father's home village in the deep heart of Russia during repressive Communist times was published in Best Travel Writing, Volume 10.

Tania resides in San Francisco, using that city as her base for her worldwide travels.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part I: KATERINA

The baby who wouldn't wait

“Ova ne čeka. This one won't wait,” were the words that always got Zora listening, because that story was about her.

It was the summer of 1922, the grapes were still green, the figs just ripening, and the fish were hiding farther out at sea than usual as Katarina struggled with the approaching birth of her seventh child. The First World War was over, and new babies had already come tumbling into their world. Four girls filled the house with noise; the two lost boys were still missed.

In their small town of Medulin they perched on a hill overlooking the Adriatic, a sea she would never tire of watching, even when the Bura winds howled over it toward Italy. She knew the massive stones used to build their houses would keep them warm and safe from the fiercest storms.

Prokleti Italiani, she thought. It was the damned Italians, not the winds, threatening them now. Just a few years ago it had been the Hungarians, and before that the Austrians. It was always someone. Endless wars. Perhaps the beauty of their homeland was so irresistible the fighting over its control would never end.

This baby, the seventh she would bear, wasn't due until August, but Katarina had known she wouldn't wait. She always knew when they would be girls, and it was no different with this one.

“Ova neče dugo čekati, Martin,” she had said to her husband as he was getting ready to go out to sea a few days earlier. “This one won’t wait much longer.”

“Luckily Roža can help when you need it,” he replied. They were at home, across the road from Katarina's childhood house, where her brother Bogdan lived with his wife Roža and their young son. Martin was happy that Roža was a good midwife. She had taken care of Katarina through Slavica’s traumatic birth after the war’s end. He knew she would take care of Katarina now, while he was gone. “I really have to go out for a few days on this ship, you know.”

“Yes, I know, but I still worry about you going out, Martin.” Every time he left she felt uneasy. “It's not over yet, is it?”

“Not really. And no ships will protect us . . .” Martin caught himself. He didn’t need to talk about it just now. “I’ll be back soon, duša, my soul. Everything will be all right.”

Martin knew it wasn’t looking good. World War I was long over, yet the spoils were still being fought over, and their home was in the middle of it all. But he didn’t want to worry Katarina just now. She had been slowly getting over her personal tragedies from that last war, going forward day by day, remembering anew how wonderful their life here had always been. He couldn’t bear to have her frightened again. There would be time to talk about it when he returned. He had some plans to work out in the meantime.

Katarina was right. The baby really couldn't wait to get out. A few days after Martin left she sat in Roža’s kitchen, looking out the window at her own home. Martin was still out to sea; Bogdan was at work. Babies and children ran around outside in the open courtyard, near the vegetable garden. She could hear the pig grunting and the chickens pecking in their enclosure. The jezva, the old copper Turkish coffee pot, was on the wood stove, still hot from the midday meal. Aromas of strong coffee mingled with ripe fruit smells. A bee buzzed in through the open door, mistaking the flowers in the old clay jug for the ones growing outside.

Katarina had grown up in this kitchen; she still knew it better than Roža did. How many generations of women had cooked Turkish coffee the same way on that same stove? How many had waited here for their babies, imagining the lives to come? She was just slipping into a gentle reverie as Roža bustled back in from picking tomatoes.

That was when she felt the first pains. She gripped the table before her, its wood polished by her own mother’s hands, its edges rounded from years of use. The olive tree out in back, the one that had replaced the one this table was crafted from, was already ancient in its own right. It felt good to hold on to something she had known since childhood, to ground herself as this new baby pushed her way into the world.

July 21 it was, the heart of that warm summer of 1922. Roža got her across the road to her own bed, the one she shared with her beloved Martin. The place where she had given birth so many times already, and where he himself had been born.

The new one was born a few hours later, before her father came back from his voyage. Of course it was a girl, and she literally burst into the world, as if she knew her parents were counting on her to bring in a new dawn.

“Pa koliko je ljepa. My, she's so beautiful,” breathed Martin a few days later, when he saw her.

“You think they are all beautiful,” Katarina said, happy he was home. Back with her. Safe.

“That's because they are all beautiful.”

My beautiful wife and my beautiful babies, he thought. I should feel like the luckiest man in the whole universe!

If only it was that simple.

Edition details

• Publisher: Travelers' Tales
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1609521528
• ISBN 13: 9781609521523
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 340