The Native’s Return E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

“Early in the spring of 1932, when I received a Guggenheim Fellowship requiring me to go to Europe for a year, I was thirty-three and had been in the United States nineteen years. At fourteen—a son of peasants, with a touch of formal “city education”—I had emigrated to the United States from Carniola, then a tiny Slovene province of Austria, now an even tinier part of a banovina in the new Yugoslav state.
In those nineteen years I had become an American; indeed, I had often thought I was more American than were most of the native citizens of my acquaintance. I was ceaselessly, almost fanatically, interested in the American scene; in ideas and forces operating in America’s national life, in movements, tendencies and personalities, in technical advances, in social, economic, and political problems, and generally in the tremendous drama of the New World.
Events and things outside of America interested me but incidentally: only in so far as they were related to, or as they affected, the United States. I spoke, wrote, and read only in English. For sixteen years I had had practically no close contact with immigrants of my native nationality. For three years I had been a soldier in the American army. After the war I had roamed over a good half of the United States and had been to Hawaii, Philippines, Central and South America. In the last few years I had become an American writer, writing on American subjects for American readers. And I had married an American girl.
To Stella I had told but a few main facts about my childhood and early boyhood in the old country; and what little I had told her of my parents, and the village and house in which I was born, had seemed to her “like a story.” She scarcely believed me. To her I was an American from toes to scalp.
Now, because of my Guggenheim Fellowship, we were going to Europe.”

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1934

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

PART ONE

Home Again in Carniola

Chapter 1

After Nineteen Years

I

Early in the spring of 1932, when I received a Guggenheim Fellowship requiring me to go to Europe for a year, I was thirty-three and had been in the United States nineteen years. At fourteen—a son of peasants, with a touch of formal “city education”—I had emigrated to the United States from Carniola, then a tiny Slovene province of Austria, now an even tinier part of a banovina in the new Yugoslav state.

In those nineteen years I had become an American; indeed, I had often thought I was more American than were most of the native citizens of my acquaintance. I was ceaselessly, almost fanatically, interested in the American scene; in ideas and forces operating in America’s national life, in movements, tendencies and personalities, in technical advances, in social, economic, and political problems, and generally in the tremendous drama of the New World.

Events and things outside of America interested me but incidentally: only in so far as they were related to, or as they affected, the United States. I spoke, wrote, and read only in English. For sixteen years I had had practically no close contact with immigrants of my native nationality. For three years I had been a soldier in the American army. After the war I had roamed over a good half of the United States and had been to Hawaii, Philippines, Central and South America. In the last few years I had become an American writer, writing on American subjects for American readers. And I had married an American girl.

To Stella I had told but a few main facts about my childhood and early boyhood in the old country; and what little I had told her of my parents, and the village and house in which I was born, had seemed to her “like a story.” She scarcely believed me. To her I was an American from toes to scalp.

Now, because of my Guggenheim Fellowship, we were going to Europe.

One day early in April, Stella said, “We’ll visit your folks in Carniola, of course.” She evidently thought that would be the natural thing to do.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course,” I repeated inaudibly to myself, then added aloud, “Just a short visit, though—for an afternoon, perhaps.”

She said, “I suddenly realized that you told me you have people over there—in Carniola (I like the sound of the name)—and now I’m curious about them—what they’re like.”

“So am I,” I said, though actually, I think, I wasn’t; not in any deep, vital sense, at any rate.

None the less, I wrote to my family in the old country that my wife, who was an American and spoke no Slovenian, and I should, in all probability, visit them on Sunday afternoon, May 15th. The ship that we decided to sail on was scheduled to arrive in Trieste on the 14th, and I figured that we might as well get the visit over with the first thing; then we should immediately find a place in the mountains somewhere in Italy or Austria and I should begin to work on my new book dealing with America.

II

Three weeks later, in mid-Atlantic, I said to Stella, “I’m a bit scared of this visit home.”

“I thought something was bothering you,” she said. “Why?”

“Well,” I began to explain, “although in a way it seems like the day before yesterday, it’s a long time since I left home. I was very young and I think I’ve changed a great deal—fundamentally—since then. All my emotional and intellectual life now seems to be rooted in America. I belong in America. My old country, somehow, is a million miles away—on another planet—and my old country includes my people.”

Stella listened sympathetically.

“Of course,” I went on, “I remember my parents as they were before I left home, but now my memory of them is seriously blurred by the idea which abruptly intrudes itself upon my mind, that in these nineteen years, which have been a drastic, turbulent period for everybody in Europe, they, too, must have changed—not merely grown older, but changed, probably, in their characters. This adds to the distance between them and me.

“I have four brothers and five sisters in Carniola. Seven of them were already in the world nineteen years ago. Of the two born since then, I have, of course, no notion, except that their names are Yozhé and Anica, and their ages seventeen and fifteen, respectively. The other seven I remember but dimly as they were in 1913. I was the oldest (three children before me had died). My oldest sister, Tonchka, was thirteen. My oldest brother, Stan, was ten. My youngest brother, Francé, was a little over a year. Now he is nearly twenty-one. Tonchka is thirty-two, married, and has two children. Stan is twenty-nine. Another sister, Mimi, was four when I left. Now she is twenty-three, a nun in a hospital, and her name is Manuela. Why she became a nun is more than I know. Then there is my brother Anté and my sisters Paula and Poldka—barely more than names to me. In fact, I have to strain my memory to tell you their names. And now I’m going to visit them because that, somehow, seems the proper thing to do.”

“It’ll probably be very interesting,” said Stella.

“Probably very awkward,” said I. “During the last fifteen years my contact with home has been exceedingly thin. For two years after America’s entry into the war I could not write to my people because I was in the American army and they were in Austria. We were ‘enemies.’ For two or three years after the war my circumstances were nothing to write about to anybody; so I didn’t. In the last eight or nine years I wrote home, as a rule, once in six months—a card or a short note, to the effect that I was well and hoped they were all well, too. I could not write much more. For one thing, I could not begin to tell them about America and myself; how I felt about America, what a wonderful and terrible place it was, how it fascinated and thrilled me. They might misunderstand something; something I’d say might disturb them; then I’d have to explain, and so on; there would be no end to writing—to what purpose? At the end they would really know nothing or very little about America or me. One has to live in the United States a long time to even begin to know it. Besides, if I got them interested in America, some of my brothers and sisters might want to come over—and I did not want that. I had troubles enough of my own. And they were possibly as well off in Carniola as they would be in America… Another thing: of late years I could express only the most ordinary things in my native tongue. I could not write in Slovenian of involved matters, such as my life in America.

“At home, of course, they did not understand me, what I was up to in America, why I wrote so little; and they, with their peasant patience and pride (which, as I recall, does not break down even before members of their own family)—they, in turn, asked me for no explanations, and their letters to me were almost as brief as mine to them. They—mother or one of my sisters or brothers—usually answered that they were well, too, thank you. Occasionally they added some such information as that Tonchka had married or had had a child, or that Stan or Anté had had to go into military service, or that Mimi had become a nun—bare facts, nothing else.

“So I don’t know what I’ll find. I have no idea how they stand economically. When I left for America my father was a well-to-do peasant in the village. Now, if one is to believe American newspapers, all of Europe is in a bad way, and I don’t know what’s happened to my people lately. Then, too, you must remember that I’m coming from America, and when one returns from America one is supposed to bring with him a pot of money and help those who have stayed at home—while all I have is a Guggenheim Fellowship, barely enough to keep you and me in Europe for a year!”

Stella was optimistic. “Chances are it won’t be so bad as you think. Perhaps your people are as scared of you, what America has done to you, and the kind of girl you married, as you are of them and what the nineteen years have done to them.”

“Maybe,” I said. I felt a little better, not much, and not for long.

III

Our ship stopped for a few hours each at Lisbon, Gibraltar, Cannes, Naples, and Palermo. Save in Cannes, everywhere, on getting ashore, we were mobbed by ragged youngsters, crying, “Gimme! Gimme!” and making signs that they were famished and wanted to eat. In the streets (especially in Lisbon) women with children in their arms approached us and made signs that their babies were hungry. Most of these, no doubt, were professionals, dressed and trained for begging; but even so it was depressing.

“In Yugoslavia it may be even worse,” I said.

On the morning of May 13th we began to sail along the coast of Dalmatia, once also a province of Austria, now a part of Yugoslavia. We passed tiny islands and bright little towns along the shore line, and gradually I began to feel better. I scarcely know why. Perhaps because the hills ashore looked so much like the hills from San Pedro to San Diego in southern California where I lived for years. Perhaps also because the Adriatic Sea, with the sun on it, was even bluer, lovelier than the Mediterranean.

But even so, I was hardly prepared for Dubrovnik, or Ragusa. From the ship, as we approached it, it appeared unreal. “Like a stage set for a play,” Stella remarked. And another American, leaning next to her on the rail, said, “One expects a bunch of actors to appear out there at any moment and begin to sing, ‘We are the merry villagers… ’”

The boat stopped for three hours and we went ashore. Here we were not mobbed by beggars. Some of the young boys on the pier were almost as ragged as those in Lisbon and in Palermo, but they looked anything but starved or sick. Their grins reached from ear to ear. Their white, strong teeth flashed in the sun. Their faces were brown. Locks of straggly dark hair hung over their blue eyes.

To one of the ragamuffins Stella offered a coin. He looked at her, startled. “Zashto? (What for?)” he asked. I explained to the youngster in Croatian (which, to my surprise, I suddenly began to speak with very little difficulty) that my wife wanted to make him a present of the coin. He scowled: “Hvala liepa! (Thank you!) No alms!” Then, as if something just occurred to him, his sun-tanned young features lit up. “If you and the lady wish to be friendly and generous,” he grinned, “please offer me an American cigarette if you have one and see if I’ll take it.”

He got several cigarettes; then his mouth and eyes—his whole face—broke into a smile that I cannot describe. “Hvala liepa!” he shouted and dashed off. Several other boys, all shouting, followed him.

I felt grand. “My people!” I said to myself. “‘No alms!’” I could have run after the urchin and hugged him. “My people!” I said, aloud.

Stella laughed. We both laughed.

We walked through the ancient, sun-flooded, and shadowy streets of Dubrovnik, whose history reaches back to the fifth century. Many of the streets were not streets at all, but twisty stairways running from the main thorough-fares up the steep grades. Some of the people we saw were obviously foreigners—visitors or tourists from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Francé, and England—but the majority were native Dalmatians of all ages, many in colorful homespun costumes, and Serbo-Moslem laborers from near-by Bosnia and Herzegovina, wearing opanke, Serb sandals, with upturned toes and baggy Turkish breeches, close-fitting jackets, and red fezes. On one street we saw two veiled Mohammedan women walking on one side; on the other side were two Catholic nuns. In the doorways sat mothers, giving their breasts to infants. There were swarms of children everywhere.

“Such faces!” exclaimed Stella every few minutes. “Even the homely ones are beautiful, they’re so healthy and brown.”

In Dubrovnik—unlike in Lisbon, Gibraltar, Naples, and Palermo—no one forced himself upon us to sell us something. Here no guides were offering their services; there were no shifty-eyed peddlers of obscene photographs. In the little bazaars, where business evidently was poor, the men and women in charge of the stores seemingly did not care whether the passers-by stopped to look at and buy their handmade peasant embroidery, jewelry, and earthenware or not. They talked and laughed among themselves or sat still and dozed in the warm sun.

On the way back to the pier, going down a steep stair-street, we came upon a tall, splendidly proportioned girl, dark-haired and blue-eyed, clad in an agreeably colorful medley of several south-Dalmatian costumes, among which the local Ragusan dress predominated. On her head she balanced a great basket of something or other; perhaps of wash for one of the modern houses above the old town. The basket seemed a part of her. She walked and swayed from her hips. Her arms were bare and firm. One of them she held akimbo. In the other hand she carried a bunch of golden-rain blossoms. She slowed her pace to look at us; possibly Stella’s American dress interested her.

I said, “Dobar dan! (Good day!)”

“Dobar dan!” she returned, smiled—again one of those smiles to which words cannot do justice—and stopped. “Are you nashki? (of our nationality?)”

“I was born in Slovenia,” I said, “but went to America as a young boy. My wife is American.”

“So!” said the girl, eagerly. “An uncle of mine is in America. He is a fisherman in Louisiana, where the great river Mees-sees-seep-pee,” she syllabicated, “falls into the ocean.” She smiled all the while.

“She is beautiful,” said Stella. “What a body!”

I translated, “My wife says you are beautiful and you have a fine body.”

The girl’s smile widened and deepened, and her face and neck colored. “Hvala liepa!” she said. “Please tell your American wife that she is beautiful.”

I told Stella what the girl had said. Then from the bunch she carried the girl handed her several twigs of golden-rain and, without saying anything, went on up the stairs.

“That is what I call nice,” said Stella, looking after the girl. “Such a simple, sincere gesture.”

I had a sudden feeling that I would like Yugoslavia, her people; that, perhaps, even my visit home would be more a pleasure than an ordeal.

IV

Fifteen hours later—Saturday forenoon—the ship docked in Trieste.

Before we got off, there came aboard a Slovene gentleman, overwhelming in his eager politeness and courtesy. He bowed, shook my hand, bowed again and kissed Stella’s hand. Then he proceeded to inform me, in most precise, formal, and yet not unbeautiful words, that he was the personal representative of the ban (governor) of Dravska Banovina (now the official government designation for Slovenia), and that his special duties were to officially welcome us to my old country, to see that at the Italo-Yugoslav border the Yugoslav customs and immigration people would not disturb our luggage or cause us any other annoyance, and generally to see, so far as was within his power, that our stay in the banovina would be the essence of comfort and delight. He was at our command—and he bowed again. Thereupon he bowed once more and said that Slovenia—indeed, entire Yugoslavia—was honored and overjoyed by my homecoming.

All this I tried to take matter-of-factly and thanked the gentleman in as good Slovenian as, in my embarrassment, I could command after not having spoken it for sixteen years. Then I told Stella what it was all about.

Wide-eyed, she said after a moment: “But why? Because you’re a writer?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“The boy who went into the big world and made good comes home!”

We laughed and the Slovene, who understood no English, politely joined in our laughter. Of course, I did not explain to him why the thing was funny to us. I did not tell him, for instance, that the two books I had published in the United States, while praised by the critics and reviewers throughout the country, had had tragically unsatisfactory sales; that in America I was a nobody—one of many young scribblers living in eternal dread of the rejection slip; that in America no writer draws much water; that for the government to officially honor an author was almost inconceivable in the United States.

Out of his briefcase the gentleman then produced a batch of Slovene and other Yugoslav newspapers of recent date. Here were long articles about my “wide fame” and “great achievements” in America, containing translated quotations from favorable reviews of my books. In addition, some of them carried brief editorials which ended: “To our distinguished countryman and visitor: WELCOME HOME!”—in capital letters.

“As you see, sir,” said the man, “the whole country is agog. The newspaper men in Lublyana,” the capital of the banovina, “are extremely eager to interview you, but since the first thing you doubtless wish to do is rest after the trip and visit your people, I have warned them not to disturb you, say, until Monday or early next week, when and if it shall please you to talk to them.”

“Oh, thank you very much! It was very nice of you.”… Interview me! On what? I had never been interviewed in my life.

At first I could not understand how all this publicity had broken loose on the eve of my return. I recalled that I had sent copies of my books to my parents, but surely they had not engineered the ballyhoo. I recalled, too, that now and then my people had enclosed in their letters one or two little clippings about me from the Lublyana papers, but that could not be the genesis of all this.

Then it occurred to me that a week before we sailed a man had telephoned to me who said he was the American correspondent for several journals in Yugoslavia, and that he had read in New York papers about my getting a Guggenheim Fellowship and my forthcoming trip to Europe, which he hoped would include Yugoslavia. Would it? I said that it would. What ship was I going on?—and a few other such questions, which I had answered. Then he said that he had followed my “career in America for years” and, now that I was going home, he would write “a little article” about me. And these columns of stuff in a dozen papers printed in Lublyana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Split, Sarajevo and one or two other cities of Yugoslavia were the “little article.”

But the real reason and significance of all this, which had little to do with me, I learned much later.

V

The short train ride from Trieste to Lublyana was a delightful experience, especially after we crossed the Italian border, when I was in my old country at last.

It was a perfect mid-spring afternoon, and most of my misgivings of the week before had vanished. Carniola, to all seeming, had not changed a whit. Here was the same river Sava with the same tributaries; the same little lakes and waterfalls; the same thickly wooded hills and mountains, with the snow-capped peaks above them; the same fields and meadows; the same villages and little churches, with crude frescoes of saints painted by peasant artists on the outer walls; and the same people, toiling in the same old way—slowly, patiently, somewhat inefficiently (to my American eyes) with semi-primitive tools and implements, on the same fertile black soil. The World War (although some of the worst battles were fought within hearing distance of Carniola) and the drastic political change, in 1918, from Austria to Yugoslavia had had no effect upon its essential aspects, its exquisite and wholesome beauty.

I do not mean to say that the regions of Carniola by themselves, with all their congestion of lovely valleys, lakes, rivers, hills, woods, and mountains, are more beautiful than other regions I have seen elsewhere in the world. I know of vastly grander places in the United States, but houses and towns in America, a new country, often spoil a natural scene. If not houses and towns, then outdoor advertisements and heaps of tin cans and discarded machinery. In Carniola, however, the simple peasant architecture of the small villages seems to enhance the beauty of the countryside. The houses and villages belong. They appear to have grown out of the soil. They belong exactly where they are, both aesthetically and economically. Most of them have been where they are for five, six, seven hundred years. They are harmonious with the woods, the fields, the lakes. They are in the pattern of the country as a whole, an elemental and sympathetic feature thereof.

The same goes for the people. The peasants driving the oxen on the dirt roads; the women, young and old, in their colorful working-clothes, weeding or hoeing in the fields and now pausing in their work to smile and wave to us in the train; the girls by the riverside, with their up-drawn petticoats, washing the heavy homespun linen by slapping it on big smooth rocks; the woodsmen floating freshly felled logs down the river; the barefoot, sturdy children playing before the houses—they all seemed to me inextricably and eternally an important, indigenous part of the scenery, the beauty-pattern, the deep harmony of Carniola.

I was glad to be back. My reaction to the beauty of Carniola, of course, was enhanced by the fact that it was my native land. I felt like shouting greetings to the peasants in the fields along the railroad.

There was another general impression that I got on the train. Carniola seemed so very, very small. I remembered, for instance, that in my boyhood a trip from Lublyana to Trieste was considered a long journey, an event in anybody’s life to make it. And here Stella and I were coming from Trieste to Lublyana in a couple of hours by a slow train, humorously called an express, and we thought it was a short trip. The train stopped every few minutes in villages and small towns, which I suddenly recalled at least by names. With my consciousness of distances in the United States, and with the tens of thousands of miles that stretched behind me over the American continent and over two oceans, the distances in Carniola now seemed scarcely one-tenth of what I had thought them to be nineteen years before. Carniola had shrunk from an Austrian province to hardly more than a big Western ranch or a small national park in America.

When, toward evening, we arrived in Lublyana, which once upon a time I had considered a large city, it, too—with its 75,000 inhabitants—impressed me as a very small place; for I had behind me New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Chicago.

I had an impulse to go from Lublyana right on to my native village, not far from the city, but since I had written to my people that we would not come till Sunday afternoon, we let the ban’s representative put us up for the night at one of the hotels.

After dinner, Stella went to bed, but I couldn’t.

I went out and walked in the dimly-lit, quiet, almost deserted streets till past midnight, and discovered, to my great satisfaction, that, like the rest of Carniola, Lublyana, too, had not changed in its essentials; indeed, hardly even in its superficial aspects. The World War and the change from Austria to Yugoslavia did not touch it.

The old Roman wall seemed a little more crumbled than I remembered it, and in the middle of the city a twelve-story nebotichnik (skytoucher) was being built. But there were the same bridges over the River Lublyanica; the same nine-hundred-year-old fort and castle on the hill, now lit up at night; the same five-hundred-year-old City Hall, except that in place of the statue of the Emperor Francis Joseph in front of it there was now a new statue of the late King Peter of Serbia. There were the same old churches and monuments to writers, grammarians, musicians, orators, and poets; the same old stores, with the same old signs over the doors. Here, I remembered, I used to buy paper and pencils while attending the Gymnasium in my early teens. And here I used to buy rolls and apples for my midday lunch; here, my occasional piece of cake or chocolate; here, in this two-hundred-year-old bookshop, my books; and here my mother used to come shopping for dry goods once in a fortnight. (“She probably still does,” I said to myself.) And here was the school I had gone to; here the house I had roomed in for two years; and here the theater where I had seen my first Shakespearean performance. Everything came back to me, and once more Lublyana was an important, vital part of my life.

Here were street-sweepers, old men with long birch brooms, sweeping the streets at night in the same old way. Here was a lamplighter with his tall pole, now, toward midnight, putting out some of the lights. Here I almost bumped into a black little fellow, a chimneysweep! and, amused at myself, I swiftly grabbed a button on my coat, for in my boyhood I had shared the folk superstition that to hold onto a button when meeting a chimneysweep meant good luck.

Here glowed the curtained windows of an old coffee-house. I entered and ordered a coffee, just to make sure its tables were occupied by the same types of men as nineteen years before, reading newspapers, playing chess and dominoes, talking, talking, talking in low tones so as not to disturb those who read or played chess… Here was stability; or so it seemed.

I returned to the hotel tired, inwardly excited, deeply content.

VI

Tired as I was, I didn’t fall asleep till after daylight. A tenseness, not unpleasant, from which I could not relax, held my body, and my mind throbbed with new impressions, newly stirred memories, thoughts of tomorrow… My mother—how did she look? This, suddenly, was very important. When I had left, she was still on the sunny side of middle life, “rather tall,” as I described her in my autobiographical narrative Laughing in the Jungle, “with a full bust and large hips; long arms and big, capable hands; a broad, sun-browned, wind-creased Slavic face; large, wide-spaced hazel eyes, mild and luminous with simple mirth; and wavy auburn hair which stuck in little gold-bleached wisps from under her colored kerchief, tied below her chin.” That was how I remembered her. Now she was in her late fifties; she had borne thirteen children, raised ten, and worked hard without pause all her life… My father? He was over eighty… Our house? It was over six hundred years old, but with the possible exception of a new roof it probably was unchanged since I last saw it…

On coming down the next morning, Stella and I saw two tall young men in the middle of the otherwise deserted hotel lobby. They did not see us immediately. One of them nervously paced up and down. The other was furiously smoking a cigarette.

“They must be your brothers!” breathed Stella. We stopped on the stairs. “They resemble you terribly,” she added; “only they’re handsome—Lord, they’re handsome!”

Then the boys saw us, too. They recognized me, and their broad, bronzed faces split into big, white-toothed grins. They rushed toward me, I rushed down, and we collided at the foot of the stairs. Shaking hands, we began to laugh, all three of us at once. Then Stella joined us, too. We didn’t say a word for minutes; we just laughed.

They were Francé and Yozhé, my two kid brothers, Gymnasium students; only, unlike myself in my time, they did not room and board in Lublyana, but came in daily by train. Basically, however, beneath the thin crust of city polish they were young peasants, strong and healthy, exuding vitality, each with a pair of enormous hands. Looking at them, I had a weird-happy feeling. It was as if I looked in a magic mirror and saw myself at once twelve and sixteen years younger. Stella and I could not take our eyes off them. They spoke a little German and some French, and Stella could exchange a few words with them. But at first they could hardly talk at all, due to excitement only partly under control.

By and by they explained to me that mother had sent them to Lublyana on the early-morning train with orders to find us in the city and fetch us home on the first afternoon train without fail.

Francé said, “The whole village—the whole valley, in fact—is excited as it never was before. For a week now nobody in the seventeen villages of our county has talked of anything but your homecoming, and the talk has already spread to other counties. In our valley the circulation of city newspapers has increased a hundredfold. Everybody has read about you. Everybody wants to see you. The girls and women want to know what sort of girl you married. You’re the first from our valley to marry an Amerikanka. It’s a sensation… At home, in our house, of course, they are all beside themselves. None of us have had a decent night’s sleep for a week. Mother, Paula, and Poldka—they sleep in the same room—scarcely closed their eyes for three or four nights, talking, speculating. Last night they spoke of killing our newest bull-calf to celebrate the return of the prodigal, but the calf, poor thing, is only two weeks old and as yet not particularly ‘fatted’—so they decided to wait a week or two, till it gets a little closer to the scriptural weight.”

We laughed for several minutes. I was unable to translate Francé’s words to Stella till later.

I began to realize that during these nineteen years I, in America, had meant much more to my people than they, remaining in the old country, had meant to me. In the excitement of my life in America, I had lost nearly all feeling for them and for the old country in general. To them, on the other hand, I had been their own intrepid Marco Polo who had ventured from tiny Carniola into the big world at the age of fourteen. Now, after long years, I was coming home! And according to the newspapers, I had become a great man in the big world. I had become “famous,” and thereby I had brought renown to their hitherto unknown, microscopic Carniola!

In the afternoon, going home in the train, Stella and I talked about this.

“It’s very funny!” she said.

“Of a sudden,” I said, “I’m a big frog in a tiny pond!”

At the little country railroad station, which is in the village next to ours and which seemed ten times smaller than I recalled it, stood a crowd of people—elderly peasants, women, young men, girls, children, all in their Sunday best, some of the men in coat-sleeves, some of the girls in costumes of the region.

They stood in silence, save that some of the girls giggled. I didn’t know any of them; only a few faces seemed faintly familiar.

It was a grand, sweet, painful moment.

Here and there, as we walked from the train, one of the young men stuck out his paw to me and said, “Pozdravlyen! (Greetings!) Remember me? I’m So-and-so.”

I remembered him, then we laughed, and there was a loud murmur in the crowd.

Then two young men who looked very much alike and resembled Francé, Yozhé, and myself stepped out of the crowd. My two other brothers, a little older than Francé and Yozhé, and even a little taller. One of them was better-looking than all the other three put together. Stella let out a little shriek of delight. We shook hands.

“I am Stan,” said the older one, grinning. He had a tremendous hand, but his grip and the look in his eyes with which he greeted me had the gentleness of a truly strong person.

“I am Anté,” said the other, also grinning. He was the handsomest, but, like Stan, a young peasant without city education or polish.

Then all five of us brothers and Stella laughed for all we were worth, and the crowd joined in.

“Where are mother and father and the girls?” I asked.

“At home, all of them,” said Stan.

And, I don’t know why, but we all laughed again, and we walked home through the fields and meadows, with a mob of young boys and many dogs behind us. The valley seemed very, very small to me, and very beautiful. Spring was late and things were just beginning to grow. In the bright green of the meadows were big splashes of yellow buttercups and purple clover ahum with bees. Along the ditches grew forget-me-nots in great abundance, and in the shade of a row of hazel bushes I noticed more lilies-of-the-valley in one spot than I had seen during all my nineteen years in America.

For a minute everything threatened to go soft in me and I barely managed to hold back my tears.

In Blato, our village, was another, smaller crowd. I recognized a few faces. There were two or three uncles, and as many aunts and scores of cousins, some of whom had come from other villages, but no one said anything. With deep innate tact, they let me hurry on to our house.

VII

The sight of my mother, who waited for me (as I recalled in that instant) on the same spot in the courtyard of our home where I had said goodbye to her in 1913, gave me a sharp sting. She had aged and her body had shrunk; her hair was gray and thin, her eyes and cheeks were sunken, but her hug told me she was still hale and strong.

Suddenly I was sorry that I hadn’t written to her oftener. I wanted to say something, but what was there to say? What could anyone say in a moment like this? She herself said nothing. She smiled a little and, holding my hands stiffly in front of her, her body swayed a little, right and left, in sheer, unwordable happiness.

My father, also gray and shrunken, offered me a trembling, wrinkled hand, but on the whole, despite his age, was well and in full possession of his faculties. He smiled and said, “You have come at last. We greet you, son.”

And there were the girls. Four of them stood against the wall of the house.

“I am Tonchka,” said my oldest, married sister, who had come from Belgrade to be home when I arrived. She looked like a young matron.

“I am Paula,” my next-to-the-oldest sister. Great coils of brown hair were wound around her head. A tragic love-affair, of which I learned subsequently, had etched into her face, which was lovely before, a beauty that now causes a crisis in my vocabulary.

“I am Poldka,” my third sister, a vivacious, open-faced human being in national costume. Two thick light-brown braids hung down her back. She was the only one who gave way to emotion and cried a little. “I’m so glad!”

“I am Anica,” my youngest sister, the baby of the family, a reticent, shy young girl whom, like Yozhé, I had never seen before.

Finally, a nun appeared in the doorway above the stairs—my sister Mimi, now called Manuela. This was her first visit home since her ordination a year before. A victim of confused feelings, I ran up to her. She said nothing; she smiled; a young Madonna face, if a face was ever entitled to be called that. We shook hands. I had been told a moment before that because she was a nun I could not embrace or kiss her. I could shake hands with her only because I was her brother. I looked at her—at the oval, smooth, serene face, with its lively blue eyes and glowing red cheeks, under the broad starched white headgear of her order—and couldn’t (and can’t yet) understand why she became a nun.

After a while we all trooped into the house, in which all ten of us had been born, and before us our father and grandfather and our ancestors for I don’t know how many generations back. But for some improvements here and there, the house had not changed; only, of course, with my consciousness of the Empire State Building and the interior of the Grand Central in New York City, it seemed much smaller to me than I had thought it was.

I noticed that mother and sisters used the same sort of utensils in the kitchen as were used in 1913. There were the same old tile stoves downstairs and upstairs; the same beds, tables, chairs, benches, and chests; the same pictures and ornaments on the walls. Upon the window-sills were flower-pots with flowers just beginning to bud. Throughout the house new curtains, bedspreads, and table covers had been spread and hung for my homecoming. They were my sisters’ handwork—lace and embroidery, exquisite designs and color combinations… (Later I learned that my sisters were members of the Yugoslav Peasant Handicraft Institute, which sold the products of their hands to Belgian lace merchants and English curio-dealers in Egypt, who then sold them to American importers and foreign tourists as Belgian or Egyptian native handwork. One of my sisters showed me lace she was making with Sphynx and Pyramid designs. She said, “Some American lady will probably buy this in Alexandria or Cairo next year!”—and we all laughed.)

In the large-room, the big table was set with a great bowl of forget-me-nots in the center. There was food and wine for all of us, and we sat down and tried to eat and drink, but, to mother’s dismay, none of us was very successful. We were all too excited and happy, too full of emotions for which we had no expression.

In the middle of the meal, apropos of nothing in particular, my sister Paula, her sad face all in a big smile, silently pinned a few lilies-of-the-valley on Stella’s jacket and a few on my coat lapel.

“They’re lovely,” said Stella, which I translated to Paula.

“Yes,” said Paula; “there are so many of them this year that one could take a scythe and mow them like grass or clover.” She smiled again, “I guess it’s all in your honor, and your wife’s.”

Stella, understanding almost nothing of what was said, found herself in an awkward position. I translated some of the conversation to her. Everybody looked at her and tried to please her. I was discreetly questioned as to her family. Of course, unable to speak her language, it was as awkward for them as for her. But after a while she and they developed a system of hands-and-eyes language with which they managed to communicate some of their simpler thoughts to one another without my aid.

Essentially a simple, straightforward person, Stella won my people from the start. My sister Poldka said to me, “You have no idea, we were all so scared that you—a famous writer—would come home with some stiff, haughty foreign dame, and now, I guess, you can imagine how relieved we all are. How I wish I could talk with her!”

And Stella said to me, “It’s almost unbelievable, this family of yours—the sort of family one could write a saga about… I thought that, having let you go to America at fourteen, they were and would be indifferent to you. But now I see they love you without being possessive. I suppose that, peasant-like, they accepted your going to America the same way as they accept any other trick of fate, without changing their basic affection for you; when you didn’t write for a long time, that was another trick of fate for them to accept; but it really made no difference so far as caring for you was concerned. I think it’s wonderful to be that way… Please tell them I love them all.”

I told them.

“Hvala lepa,” said mother and Poldka. The others said nothing. They grinned and lowered their eyes. Poldka, who, as I say, is the most free-spoken in the family, said, “Tell her for us that we love her, too. We could just hug her, even though we have no practice in hugging.”

I translated this to Stella. We all laughed again.

VIII

In the courtyard and in the apple orchard people began to gather—people of our own village and of near-by communities, neighbors, relatives, friends of the family’s. “I guess they want to see you,” said mother, “and since we can’t ask them all into the house, you will have to go out.”

So out we went, Stella, a few of my brothers and sisters, and I. Then there was much sincere handshaking. “Pozdravlyen!… Pozdravlyen! Welcome home!” The men made some reticent remarks, asked a few hesitant questions. “I remember well when you went to America… After all these years, how does the old village look to you, eh?” Some acted embarrassed, as they thought peasants should act in the presence of a man who was written up in the newspapers, but after a while this manner broke down, whereupon there was a lot of good, simple talk, punctuated by bursts of honest mirth.

I became acquainted with a young peasant, now married and the father of five children, who claimed that he had once whipped me in a fight over the possession of a whistle, and now that he mentioned it I seemed to recall the occasion.

Another young fellow, now also married and the father of several kids (one of whom was wrapped around his leg), admitted I had beaten him up several times and recalled to my mind the causes of our frequent battles.

One old peasant woman insisted I come to her house, a stone’s-throw from ours, and there she showed me something I had scrawled on a wall about another boy in the village when I was ten or eleven years old.

I talked with Uncle Mikha, my favorite uncle, who is in his seventies, slightly bent and shrunken but still hale, with a hard peasant intelligence. Till lately, he had been mayor of our county. He and I had been good friends in my early boyhood. First we exchanged a few conventional remarks, then he drew me aside, cleared his throat, shifted the weight of his body from one leg onto the other, and said, “You may be a big man in the world, as the newspapers have it, but I am going to give you a piece of my mind anyhow. I think it wasn’t at all nice not to write to your mother oftener than you did. She talked to me about you when you didn’t write for a long time. She worried. At night she couldn’t sleep, thinking maybe you were in trouble or dead. I am telling you this because I have liked you ever since you were knee-high and because your mother herself won’t say anything about it to you—and when you go back to America I want you to write to her oftener.”

“I will, Uncle Mikha,” I said.

“But don’t feel bad about what I said,” said Mikha. “Now that you’ve come home, she’s forgotten all about it.”

Then there were the several Amerikanci—men who had been laborers in America for a few years and had returned home to stay. They each knew a few words of English and tried to parade their knowledge before their fellow villagers. They asked me about America. Was the kriza (the economic crisis) really as bad there as the papers said? Were there really so many people out of work? Was the depression hard on the Slovenian and other Yugoslav immigrants?

Other questions: Were the buildings in America really so tall? Was it true that there was a tree in California so thick that they had bored a tunnel through it for an automobile road? How did the American farmers till their soil? Was it true that most of the work on the land was done by machinery?—that New York had a population of seven million?—that there were ranches in the West bigger than entire Carniola?—that there were underground railroads in New York?—that there was a tunnel under a river in New York?—that Henry Ford was worth a billion dollars?—and how much was a billion dollars, anyhow, in Yugoslav dinars? And this man Seenclair Levees (Sinclair Lewis)—was he the biggest writer in America? Did I know him personally? Were these books Arovsmeet and Babeet, which have been translated into the Yugoslav, his best?…

Stella went walking with my brothers through the village, and the women, especially my cousins and aunts, commenced to ask me about her, at first discreetly, hesitantly, then more boldly: How old was she? How long were we married? Were her people well-to-do? How much dowry had she brought me? Had she sisters and brothers? Did she make her own clothes?… Which led to questions about American women in general: Did they all buy their clothes in stores? Did any of them bake their own bread, do their own wash, do fine needlework? Were houses in America very different from houses in Carniola?…

No end of questions, naïve, foolish, and sensible, which I found pleasure in answering, nevertheless. But I was glad, too, when, toward dusk, mother came and said I should come in to eat and drink something. “You must be starved and tired, talking all afternoon,” she said. “And where is Styelah?”… I loved the way she pronounced her name…

In the house mother said to me: “Yesterday I had a million questions to ask you, too, but now I forget them all. It doesn’t matter. You are back and have a nice wife. Why ask questions?… Come now, eat something.”

We sat down.

“Mother,” I asked, “how do you all manage? I mean, what do you use for money?”

She laughed a little. “There’s this kriza, of course, which does us no good, but now and then we sell a little of what we produce, so we can buy some of the things we need and can’t produce at home. Ours is a big family, but Poldka and Paula make the clothes for all of us, and the clothes they make are better made than those one can buy in the city. Anté is handy with tools and he can make or repair almost anything. He can build a wall. Last year he and Stan put a cement bridge over the creek; you’ll see it. The year before they dug the new water well, which you saw. Stan is a plowman second to none hereabouts. They are all healthy and capable, thank God. We don’t need to employ help even at harvest time… We manage, more or less.”

That night, after a supper of home-cured ham and mildly spiced cooked wine which came from one of our relatives’ vineyard in Bela Krayina, I slept, between sheets of rough homemade linen, in the bed I and all my brothers and sisters had let out our first wails.

IX

Stella and I wanted to stay in Blato a couple of weeks (and my people wanted us to stay forever), but that soon became impossible.

The Sunday papers had reported my arrival, and on Monday morning reporters from Lublyana and other cities came to the village. Would I tell them my impressions of the old country and about “the social, economic, political, and literary life in the United States.” On Tuesday the newspapers carried columns reporting my impressions of Carniola, my views of America, and the fact that Stella, who was also delighted with Carniola, already knew a dozen Slovenian words.

The same day there began to come to Blato letters and telegrams by the handful. I was welcomed to my native land by literary and cultural clubs. One magazine writer requested “a comprehensive interview about America.” There were invitations to house parties in Lublyana and elsewhere, to picnics and “evenings,” to excursions into the mountains and the lake region of Upper Carniola.

To accept at least some of the invitations, we moved back to the hotel in Lublyana.

We no sooner re-registered than the gentleman who had met us in Trieste appeared, in semi-panic. Breathless and wiping his brow, he spoke about some hammering that was going on in the house next to the hotel and begged us to let him transfer us to another hotel where he was certain no noise would discomfit us. We laughed and told him that, used to the din and tumult of New York, we hadn’t even noticed the hammering next door!

X

We were taken to Bled Lake by a group of young journalists, most of whom were also poets. All afternoon we drifted around the little island in the middle of the lake in a huge rowboat, which, besides us, contained several paper bags of sausages, loaves of black bread, containers of thick sour milk, flagons of red and white wine, an accordion, and two or three stringed instruments. By the end of the picnic my head whirled in consequence of our hosts’ insatiable curiosity about America which, in my lame Slovenian, I tried to satisfy with such information as I had.

On Thursday was our first “evening,” at the home of Slovenia’s leading living novelist, who is also a Gymnasium professor, an editor and publisher, and a grand person. It was like two subsequent “evenings”—one at the home of Slovenia’s foremost living poet and the other in the house of the editor of Slovenia’s oldest literary review.

There gathered a dozen or more of Slovenia’s literary and cultural lights and their wives. Fortunately some of them spoke or understood English and helped me with my Slovenian when I tried to answer a thousand and one questions about Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Robinson Jeffers, James Stevens, Walter Winchell, and the new trends in American literature; about the depression, racketeering and Al Capone, the labor movement, the race problem, Henry Ford, the new woman in America, and the future of the United States.

Stella sat between a minor poet and a promising young novelist comprehending not a word, except my occasional bursts of English when I could not express myself in Slovenian. I answered questions from nine in the evening till three the next morning.

Then, according to custom, the host, the hostess, and all the other guests—some thirty people—walked Stella and me to the corner nearest to our hotel. Before we said good night to all of them, dawn was breaking over the mountains.

There were ten days of this sort of thing, and opera, theatrical performances, and concerts, for all of which tickets were sent to us.

XI

Gradually, I realized what I had dimly known in my boyhood, that, next to agriculture, Slovenia’s leading industry was Culture. It was an intrinsic part of the place. In Lublyana were seven large bookshops (as large as most of the hardware, dry goods, and drug stores in town), two of them more than a hundred years old.

Every year, I learned, bookseller-publishers and the book clubs, of which there were eleven, published hundreds of books, few of which failed to pay for themselves. A “failure” was a book which sold less than 1,000 copies! Besides, each bookstore carried a selection of the latest German, French, Czech, Serbo-Croat, and a few English and Italian books. The publishers did almost no advertising, for in Slovenia nearly everybody—merchants, peasants, priests, teachers, students—bought books anyhow, or subscribed to book clubs. One book club had over 40,000 subscribers, another nearly 30,000, two over 20,000, and the rest had between 2,000 and 15,000. One juvenile book club distributed nearly 100,000 books every year among 23,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen. And it must be remembered that there are only 1,100,000 Slovenians in Yugoslavia, with about 300,000 more in Italy and some 250,000 scattered as immigrants in the United States, various South American countries, and elsewhere; and over half of those in Slovenia live in villages with less than 500 population.

In two years, I was informed, there had been forty-eight performances of Hamlet in Lublyana. Most of the city’s streets are named after poets, essayists, novelists, dramatists, grammarians. The largest monument in town is to a poet, Francé Presheren, who was at his height about a hundred years ago. When students take hikes into the country, their destinations usually are the graves and birthplaces of poets, dramatists, and other writers.

The year before I returned home there had been a hundredth-anniversary celebration of the birth of a writer, Francé Levstik, in the town of his birth, Velike Lasche, not far from Blato. It was the greatest event in Slovenia that year. Nearly 100,000 people attended the festival.

Shortly after I came back I happened to see a piece in a Lublyana newspaper that the village of X (the name now escapes me), somewhere in the mountains, twenty kilometers from the nearest railway, was about to unveil a modest monument to one of its sons, the late So-and-so, who a century ago had had a hand in the working out of certain rules of Slovenian grammar. The committee in charge of the occasion was frank in announcing that the village was very poor and the people would be unable to entertain the guests in suitable style; the peasants, however, would provide all visitors with such transportation from the railway to the village as they had, namely hay-wagons; and cherries, due to ripen by then, would be free to all comers.

In 1928, as I was told some time after my homecoming, Slovenia’s foremost living poet—Oton Zupanchich—celebrated his fiftieth anniversary, and on that occasion, which was a special holiday for the entire province, nearly one hundred delegations from all parts of the country called on him. Most of them were peasant delegations, some from remote mountain villages and counties. All of them brought him gifts. Women came with exquisite national handwork. Some presented him with bags of potatoes, hams, sausages, and other peasant products. Nearly all of them brought him money which had been appropriated by their respective county or village councils. Singing societies came from country districts to sing under his window. Student quartettes from Lublyana schools sang his poems set to music.

Most larger villages and all towns have public libraries, reading-rooms, and little theater groups. My brother Anté and sister Poldka belong to one of the latter, in the town of Grosuplye, which is near Blato. Most homes, city and village alike, have bookshelves with books on them.

In the coffee-houses most of the talk I heard was about plays, paintings, sculpture, architecture, books and music, and social and economic ideas. Most of the questions I was asked about America had to do with cultural and social problems, and among the people who asked them were a young priest, an army officer, the wife of a bookbinder, and a veterinary whom I met casually. Their interest, evidently, was not of a dilettante nature. It was definitely an intimate part of their lives, of Lublyana, of the country.

The fact that I had written a few things in America, and received some recognition there, impressed my native countrymen much more than if I had come back, say, a millionaire industrialist or a champion wrestler or pugilist. Hence all this publicity, this whirl of hospitality.

There were other reasons for the ballyhoo and excitement.

One was politicial. Slovenes, as I have stated, are a tiny nation; if I am not mistaken, the smallest in Europe; and for nearly a thousand years they have not had any sort of independent politicial or economic life. In recent centuries they have been a minority group under Bavaria, then under Austria, and now, inevitably, are a minority group in the new Yugoslav state. Economically, they are almost utterly dependent on Belgrade (as they formerly were on Vienna) and, as I discovered after a while, none too happy about it. All these centuries they have had but two things which they felt were completely their own and which gave them the status of a nationality—namely, their language (which is similar to the Serbo-Croat) and their culture. And of these two things, along with their lovely country, they are immeasurably proud. They are immensely patriotic, but not offensively so. Therefore, whenever one of “Slovenia’s sons” achieves anything, either at home or in the outside world, they make a noise about it. If he achieves something in a cultural way, they are naturally impelled to make their noise even louder. They exert their utmost to make the Serbs and Croats take notice of him. This happened in my case.

Another reason was emotional—or perhaps I should say politico-emotional. Here I cannot begin to explain it in detail and in all its ramifications. The details, I think, will gradually appear in this book. Here I shall merely state that when I arrived in Yugoslavia, the country had been for over three years under the ruthless military dictatorship of King Alexander, which I knew but vaguely before I came there. I did not know what that really meant. I was not interested. I did not fully realize till months later that dictatorship meant that thousands of people were in prisons because they believed in such socio-political concepts as democracy, liberty, and economic justice, and dared to talk and act accordingly; that every city swarmed with secret agents; that newspaper, magazine, and book editors and publishers were under strict censorship; that public meetings, except those organized by henchmen of the dictatorial regime, were forbidden; and so on.

Anyhow, that, roughly, very roughly, was the political situation in Slovenia, in the whole of Yugoslavia, when I came there, although I did not see it at once. For three years and longer nearly everyone there had been living under an oppressive and suppressive government. I met people who whispered most of the time. Afraid to talk aloud in restaurants and coffee-houses or in the streets, they had been whispering ever since the dictatorship was established; now they whispered even when they asked me what kind of trip I had had or how I liked spring weather in Slovenia. At first I did not know what was the matter with them.

But to them, as it occurred to me later when I began to understand them, I was a rare and exceedingly welcome apparition. Here I came, by origin one of them, from distant America, from the great, free world across the sea, from beyond the horizon, where I lived a free man, a free citizen in a democracy; where I said what I pleased and no one put me in jail; where, in fact, I was paid money for writing what I wanted to write. And they clustered about me, scores and scores of them, full of “unemployed emotions,” as George Bernard Shaw called them; full of eager questions about everything under the sun, semi-vicariously experiencing through me, by having contact with me, liberty, democracy, and everything else they were denied in Yugoslavia.

The papers were “playing” me up because the censor would not let them print anything else that was interesting. To make me interesting, they exaggerated my “success” and “importance” in America.

After I became better acquainted with some of my new friends in Lublyana, I tried to tell them that they had an exaggerated notion of me, but by then it was too late. Some of them accused me of modesty.

XII

Off and on, during the first ten days of glory, Stella and I managed to run to Blato for a few hours in the afternoon. We became better acquainted with my family, our relatives, and the other villagers. My brothers Francé and Yozhé taught Stella to say whole phrases and long sentences in Slovenian, which gave our family and the village much satisfaction and cause for merriment.

We were all very happy. We laughed a great deal. The spring was beautiful. Momentarily, somehow, it did not seem important whether Yugoslavia was under a dictatorship or not.

The young calf in our barn was gaining weight, and the family council at home decided that the feast of the fatted calf would occur on the second Sunday after the prodigal’s return. My father sent for wine. My sisters and mother schemed for a week as to the sort of cakes they would bake. My brothers Stan and Anté took some lumber and improvised tables and benches under the apple trees, just then coming to full bloom. All our relatives and family friends were invited.

Then it occurred to me to invite all my new friends, the literati and their wives. The idea startled my whole family. But would they come? For a son of our family to invite to Blato the foremost living poet, the leading living novelist, the editor of the oldest literary review in Slovenia, and other writers potentially as great, was as though a farmer’s son in Pennsylvania got the notion to invite to a Sunday dinner such people as Henry Ford, Will Rogers, Calvin Coolidge, Al Smith, John Barrymore, and Gene Tunney. It must be remembered that literati are the biggest people in Carniola, especially to peasant folk.

But I invited them, in my father’s name, and they came with their wives—so many of them that Stan and Anté were required to hurriedly build another table.

It was a bright, warm Sunday afternoon, with a light mountain breeze blowing through the valley. The literati mixed with the villagers, praised the village, exclaimed over the beauty of the fields and the meadows, and raved about the prodigal’s sisters and brothers.

The foremost poet was pleased to the verge of tears when a little peasant girl, urged by my sister Poldka, stepped before him and recited his most famous poem. Pleased, too, was the leading novelist when a peasant woman brought him a copy of one of his books and asked him to “write something in it with your own hand.”

My sister Paula and mother were in the kitchen, both happy beyond utterance. Francé and Yozhé, coatless and beaproned, brought out the plates (borrowed from the whole village) and platters heaped with pieces of the fatted calf. (“Poor thing!” said Stella, who, three days before had seen it alive in the barn.) Stan and Anté poured the wine. Poldka pinned forget-me-nots and lilies-of-the-valley on the garments of the guests. My youngest sister, Anica, brought on the bread and the cakes. Tonchka and Manuela had had to return to Belgrade.

The feast lasted all afternoon. The mountain breeze shook the apple blossoms upon the tables and the heads of the guests. There was much light, irresponsible talk and laughter around the tables. No whispering. Dictatorship or no: it did not matter that Sunday afternoon. By and by, the villagers and the literati began to sing Slovenian national songs about love, wine, and beautiful regions.

Stella exclaimed: “I wish my mother were here! And my brother, and Seren and Meta”—the whole crew of her girl friends in America.

“And Ben and Kyle and Carey…” I began to enumerate my friends back in the United States.

During a lull in the singing, the poet rose, glass in hand, and everyone became silent to hear him. He spoke awhile of the fine afternoon, the breeze from the mountains, the apple blossoms, the fatted calf, the wine in his glass, into which the petal of an apple blossom had fluttered as he talked. He eulogized the village, its people, and especially my mother and father, and referred to the fields and meadows around the village in words of sheer poetry. Finally he came to “the prodigal” and spoke of his departure for America and his return. It is not possible for me to give his words. It was all I could do to hold back my tears.

The poet ended, “Let us drain our glasses!”

The glasses were drained and someone began another song.