MY MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS were born in the former Yugoslavia, a nation bloodily dissolved in 1991. I was one year old. A decade later, on Easter, I brought potica, a babka-like Slovenian pastry my mother always made on holidays, to my Indianapolis elementary school. “Hey,” I said. “Here’s some Yugoslavian holiday bread,” because that’s what my family still called the former Republic at home. Of course I’d chosen to bestow these gifts—potica, my ignorance—on my geography class. My teacher guided me to the newly minted map across the room.
Interrupted childhood—the shock of realpolitik as filtered through a child’s eyes—lies at the heart of Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf’s work. Born in rural Hungary in 1934, Kristóf fled after the 1956 Uprising to Switzerland, where she remained until her death in 2011. Her stories and novels are set during unnamed wars in unnamed countries once known as something else, amid shifting borders and toppled regimes. They often feature children, who report these upheavals with brutal clarity. The ruthless twin boys at the center of The Notebook (1986) made her famous, and undoubtedly constitute one of the most powerful child perspectives in the European canon. When adults, her protagonists are forever searching for the nations, families, and cities in which they were born, or, as Kristóf wrote in her own autobiography, for those years before “the silver thread of childhood [was] severed.” It’s a doomed kind of search. For those who succeed, lost kinships and homes, once recovered, turn out to be mostly unrecognizable. {read}