Diaspora Voices 10: Before the War

Diaspora Voices is an occasional series of conversations with ex-Yugoslavs living abroad.

With David Rodich (Chicago).

Listen: “Diaspora Voices 10” (Episode #130)

Bonus Extras: “Diaspora Voices 10” (Episode #130)

Ad-free version of “Diaspora Voices 10” (Episode #130).

Transcript: “Diaspora Voices 10” (Episode #130)

PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and have access to extended and bonus episodes.

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[JINGLE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your host, Peter Korchnak.

Diaspora Voices is a segment on this show featuring conversations with ex- or post-Yugoslavs living abroad. Today’s yugodiasporan emailed me a poem he had written twenty years before about what Yugoslavia meant to him. “If you ever want a perspective of someone who grew up in the Chicagoland Serbian subculture, I’m always open to chat,” he added. And so we did. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: David Rodich is an educator and writer. He was born in 1979

in the Indiana part of the east Chicago area. His father was born in the US to parents who had immigrated from the former Yugoslavia. His mother is American.

DAVID RODICH: Everyone was where I grew up because of the steel mills, right? And so the Serbian community, they were a bunch of steel mill workers, never had a ton of love for, you know, mainstream America, other than the sense of, oh, you can come here and, you know, make a living. You know, my djedo came over and raised a family of five, and he  fought World War Two at 15, so I can’t imagine he had much of an education past probably sixth, seventh grade.

But it was also a lot of suspicion about what they’re trying to kind of sell you, in mainstream America, what the, you know, this goes quote, unquote American dream, because I think they already saw the other side of that, despite the economic opportunity, people that were trying to find a more honest way of living, like within, you know, mainstream America. 

Our culture, along with my, you know, American upbringing, the Serbian side, I look back, and it was kind of a culture in a bottle situation, right? So my Djedo came over in the 1950s, he’s from the mountains of Bosnia. Like imagine you’re learning about American culture from someone who grew up in the mountains of Kentucky, fought a war and then emigrated someplace. There’s no value judgment within there, just you’re getting a very old fashioned version of that culture . 

It was, you know, Serbian people, I’m sure, as you know, the church is kind of a cultural capsule, right? And so I grew up very much in a Serbian Orthodox Church, and it was, along with being religious, it’s, you know, much more than that, like I said, it’s a cultural hub, the music groups, the dancing, the sports teams, everything. For that community it serves a broader purpose. 

As a kid, it was just part of my life, right? It’s like one side of the family was just boom, that, that’s what you heard, that’s the music you heard, that’s the food you ate. It was just life, right? 

And so my whole life, I wanted to just see and meet this family that I had over there. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The dissolution of Yugoslavia had a strong effect on Rodich.

DAVID RODICH: Then, when the war hits, you know, I’m like what I don’t know, 10, 11, years old, or something. And this world that you only new as the most beautiful, loving world possible, of people from that part of the world, right, just welcoming and gregarious and just want to feed you. And, you know, be hospitable. You know, it’s just falling apart. 

So really, that sets me off on searching, right from mainstream newspapers. At first, just headlines, oh, my God, what’s happening, right? And then as a teenager, digging in everywhere I could.

PETER KORCHNAK: Popular history, academic history, early internet, then college courses…

DAVID RODICH: Really, just trying to piece together what’s happening. Just always just trying to learn, you know, the effect of the war that had on my psyche and my parents’ really volatile divorce and just grew up in a lot of violence around me…

PETER KORCHNAK: Like every young man with a dream, Rodich got a job—at an oil refinery in his case—and saved up for the trip to his ancestral homeland. In 2002, aged 23, Rodich spent six months with his paternal family in Bačka Palanka, a town in Vojvodina.

DAVID RODICH: It was just long enough that it was almost like living there, right? There, long enough to, you know, visit a relative in jail. I went to a wedding, I went to a funeral,, you long enough that they get annoyed with you. You get annoyed, right? You get bored. And all the things of life that happen, which makes it a lot deeper looking back and and like everything, as I look back and just, I’m just so thankful I was able to do that, and that they were so sweet and kind to me. 

 It was like the warmest, welcoming, most welcoming environment. We were just left to just run wild and have fun and then just come in, eat these big meals. And it was just so beautiful, warm and welcoming.

I didn’t know anything about Yugoslavia, but that’s how I saw the place that my people were from, right, that this side of my family was from, and it was just like this, this dream, like, Oh my gosh. It was so beautiful. 

PETER KORCHNAK: And formative. 

DAVID RODICH: Being over there made me want to just collect stories and write. You know, I walked around with a little at the time, was a mini disc player and just interviewing relatives. It’s funny, I listened back to him now, and they’re all just, you know, they’re just, I’ll just talk trash to each other the whole time. That’s what it’s basically, kind of sums it up over there, you know, which is exactly when I got there. It’s like, immediately they just aggressively were nice and welcoming and trash talking to me. And that’s just what it was the whole time. I’m like, I found this is my people. This makes sense to me, this was my language, you know, like shoving a bunch of food in my face the very first day I got there, they’re trying to feed me, just everything in the kitchen, you know. And so I’m just, you know, gonna be rude, so I’m just eating. 

My language skills are pretty poor, so I’m understanding a little bit here and there,  

And then they make fun of me that like, oh, you drink a beer right after you drink a glass of milk. That’s crazy, like you just shoved it in my face. How could I say no? 

I kept on moving the return ticket back. They wanted me to stay here. You know, they wanted just to fatten me up, you know.

PETER KORCHNAK: When he returned stateside, Rodich finished his undergraduate studies, moved to New York, met a girl, got a teaching job… All along, he kept writing. Find his work at DavidRodich.com.

DAVID RODICH: So as I got older, you know, I started to, like, I said, continue to write. And I started to write about my family, my experiences, trying to find ways to express those, those things artistically and, you know, as a sense of expression, as a sense of healing and making meaning of the world. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Rodich has yet to visit Serbia again.

DAVID RODICH: Actually my cousin’s a priest over there, we send each other pictures and stuff, it’s kind of neat. You know, I was 22, one was 17, one was 19, I think, when I was there. And now we’re in our 40s, and the fact that we’ve kept touch, you know, once in a while, we’ll call each other and also end up crying because, you know, my gosh, we miss each other and the time…

PETER KORCHNAK: During that 6-month stay nearly a quarter century ago, 

Rodich also traveled around the Balkans.

DAVID RODICH: But everywhere I go was the same feeling, right? It’s the same beautiful vibe of aggressive generosity. Come in and we’re gonna just shove food in your face and it’s gonna— We’ll have a good time, you know, pour a drink, whatever. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The experience of traveling around the area just a few years after the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the NATO bombing of Serbia carried some lessons for him.

DAVID RODICH: Life can be really intense, and we can carry a lot of anger, and I know I have in my life, but to know there’re solutions that are not violent. Because the violence is violent to the other person, the other side, but it’s also done to yourself, right? If we’re all one, then if I am violent towards you, that’s to myself too, and I carry those wounds as well, and it just pushes us further back from from healing, right? If we all want the same thing, which I call that near and dear to my heart, that everyone on Earth really has the same basic needs. We all want to belong to something. We all want to feel like our voice matters. We need food, water, shelter, right? We want our loved ones to be okay. All those basic things. Well, if we all are going to achieve that, then you know, we have to find a way  to solve things that are violent, right? 

And so, you know, what a what better of a place to try to make sense of all that than to be bouncing around the Balkans?

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Rodich wrote the poem “Before the War” while still in his 20s.

DAVID RODICH: It’s part of me processing the world through writing. In my 20s, probably, like a lot of people, you start to look back and reflect a little bit. 

Yeah, looking back at and trying to make sense of my childhood, of growing up, trying to make sense of where my family was from, or half of my family (my mom was American, my dad Serbian), and just growing up in that community.

Just trying to make sense of of all these, you know, these beautiful things about that area of the world, and these contradictions and and I guess the poem for me as I read it now, and I look back, it represents my family before my parents split up.

PETER KORCHNAK: …just before Yugoslavia disintegrated.

DAVID RODICH: Looking back from this perspective of being this age now in my 40s, I feel like it represents this relationship with, in my mind, with myth and reality, right? During my teen years, I really had some painful myth breaking, of like, Oh, that was actually my upbringing. Oh, my gosh, that actually happened? Man, that’s so dark, that’s sad, that’ s whatever. Along with all the beauty too. It doesn’t negate the beauty, but it is like, first just shattered that, that that myth. 

Now I look at it as this, like math equation of myth plus the reality can equal possibility. I’m trying to be a father in a way that raises the raises my son up to to find ways to shine the light of peace, love and unity, right, and all of that within learning the realities of history. So I kind of have now seen this as, that could be for our own families, that could be for, you know, a place like Yugoslavia, anywhere in the world, in any scale of of like, okay, we could, yeah, there was some myth in that, and let’s take the beautiful parts of that and the beautiful parts of the reality and see what we could build going forward. So that’s the optimism in me to kind of look at it that way.

PETER KORCHNAK: “Before the War,” by David Rodich.

DAVID RODICH: Before the war Yugoslavia was a T-shirt – a heavenly place on the map – the first country I looked at on a globe. Tambura music on Sunday mornings in the Cutlass on the way to church where we lit matches and shoved oranges and potatoes into tailpipes – where we collected bullet shells on Badnje Vece that were fired away into the cold Indiana air after the choir sang and Father John (Jovan) blessed us all standing around the giant bonfire of crackling oaks in our winter coats and our dad’s work gloves because we forgot ours at home.

Yugoslavia was being able to drink as a kid alongside old men with crusty hands and loud, out-of-tune voices at homemade bars in basements and garages in Milwaukee or South Chicago or out in South Bend.

Before the war, Yugoslavia was nothing but a full belly and three kisses on my cheeks – skills on a soccer field, and holidays that I had to explain to teachers when I’d miss school. It didn’t matter what I said. They didn’t know what Slava was. And no matter the holiday, it all ended up the same – everyone stuffed and drunk around a long table making jokes with their cousins and kumovi and aunts, uncles, moms, dads, and brothers and sisters too.

Yugoslavia was an acre of land behind my Baba and Djedo’s house in Hobart, Indiana, out on Liverpool Rd. The forest where me and my brother would be wary of quicksand and look for snakes and dig through old bricks and rubble that my Djedo dumped back there when he built the place because that’s what they did back in the mountains. I saw it with my own eyes.

Yugoslavia was mysterious relatives “over there,” one of which had my same exact name. 

Yugoslavia was a dream of some deeper meaning, a semi-mythical holy land where we loved each other in an ancient, romantic, unrealistic way.

After all, I was just a kid, still dreaming.

PETER KORCHNAK: A few notes for listeners. Tambura is a string instrument. Cutlass is a make of the Oldsmobile brand car. Badnje veće is the Serbian Christmas Eve, Slava a celebration of a family’s patron saint. Kumovi is godparents. Baba means grandma and Djedo grandpa. 

What does Yugoslavia mean?

DAVID RODICH: Growing up, Yugoslavia was just, it was almost like an address, right? That it’s like, oh, well, I’m Serbian and where Serbian people live is Yugoslavia, it’s like, has may as well been like a street address or something. I never really thought about it. It just wasn’t even in the fabric of my growing up, I just no one really had much to say about it. It wasn’t anyone bashing it. It wasn’t anyone promoting it. 

It wasn’t until the war that it became, the Yugoslavia is dissolving, that it became a thing to learn about. I came at it from apoint of view of a students right, of having to kind of teach myself what that was.

Hearing about the negative sides are heartbreaking, right, that people, like had certain things about themselves felt like denied.

And then on the beautiful side, it’s that, hey, we could live together and we can make something that’s better than just what one of us has. 

And when I was over there, I would hear the old timers talk about Tito in a way that was like, they would bash him in one second, and then five seconds later be praising him.  And that was very common, like over and over again, no matter where I was, if someone could say, God, Tito did this. Blah, blah, blah, oh, but Tito, we all had this. Hey, we never had to worry about our health care. Oh, we had this. No one was, you know, no one went without that kind of stuff. 

And so it’s a very mixed legacy, and for me, I see it again as well. What can we learn from that as a project?

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this tenth Diaspora Voices episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.

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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!