The Native's Return : An American Immigrant Visits Yugoslavia and Discovers His Old Country

Rating:
Summary: A window into the past
Review: Louis Adamic, a native of what is now Slovenia, emigrated to America as a young man, became a fairly well-regarded writer, and in 1932 received a Guggenheim fellowship to write in Europe. He decided to pay a brief, dutiful visit to his family, whom he hadn't seen in 19 years and who had never met his American wife. But he ended up spending the full term of his fellowship traveling through the (new) country of Yugoslavia and writing this book about his impressions. It's well worth reading if you have roots in this part of the world, or want to know more about the background of the present crisis. Adamic's comments on the relationships and the differences between the various peoples who share the country are telling, and he successfully avoids the Serbian romanticism that mars many other books on Yugoslavia (e.g., Rebecca West's "Black Lamb, Gray Falcon"). The photographs are occasionally hokey, but contain many fascinating details of costume, architecture, and daily life. Yugoslavia in the 1930's was in an uneasy state of equilibrium under an incompetent King, and it's sadly apparent how this state of affairs contributed to the country's many cataclysms later in the century. This isn't a "scholarly" work, it's impressionistic and opinionated, but as an "insider's" perspective it's extremely valuable.