Croatian-American Master Josip Novakovich's Second Short Story Collection, "Yolk" (1995)

Josip Novakovich ( born in 1956 in Daruvar, in central Croatia) emigrated from what was then the Croatian part of Yugoslavia to the United States at the age of twenty. He had studied medicine in Novi Sad (on the Danube in northern Serbia, the second largest Serbian city), studied theology at Yale and literature at the University of Texas. He started writing stories out of nostalgia for his homeland, and made regular visits there through the paroxysms of the breakup of Yugoslavia and independence that was less than utopian, thought about repatriating, and (as elaborated in some of the essays in Plum Brandy and a few of the short stories in Yolk ) concluded that just as he was a Croatian in America, despite being a native speaker of Croatian (which used to be distinct from Serbian primarily in orthography, but is diverging), he is regarded as an alien (in particular a rich American) in Croatia. (Most definitely, he cannot go home again to the communist, Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in which he grew up, and where his father died when the future author was young.)

In April Fool's Day , Novakovich wrote what is to date the great novel about ordinary soldiers in the savage breakup of Yugoslavia. (Téa Olhert's new and mesmerizing The Tiger's Wife is set before and after those paroxysms and does not deal with those doing the fighting and ethnic "cleansing").

Novakovich's family was Baptist, which not only made him stand out as suspect to the official atheism but as different (which for children always means "deviant") from most Croatians (who are Roman Catholics), as well as from the Serbians (Serbian Orthodox). Many of the stories in Yolk allude to this difference in religion, though Novakovich and his autobiographical narrators ceased to believe. In the communist state, he became an atheist.

Baptists splinter off following their own light. In "Honey in the Carcase," which seems less autobiographical than many of the other stories in Yolk, has a character, Ivan who "had excommunicated himself from the Baptist church. Like-minded Baptists and Pentecostals, for whom their churches had not been pious enough, used to worship in the shack with Ivan and his family, until they discovered they were not like-minded." This is a good example of Novakovich's wry style (understated Slavic pessimism, I think).

In "Hats and Veils," Vadim, a Bosnian guest-worker in Switzerland cannot get used to being identified as "Muslim": "He'd never been religious, he'd been raised a Marxist atheist, as was nearly everyone else his age in the former Yugoslavia, and so what was all this sudden religiosity about. He could not change identities-just as he could not be a good Communist before, now he could not be a Muslim, or a Swiss. He was no good at identities."

Ethnic backgrounds that had not been salient for identities became matters of life and death in the violent fission of Yugoslavia, which Novakovich watched from a safe distance (but imagined keenly in April Fool's Day and in the stories in Salvation and Other Disasters and Infidelities). Psychological discomfort at sharpened and narrowed "us"es and "them"s pervade the writing of Novakovich, as well as Ohlert, Slavenka Drakulic, Jasmina Tesanovic, and other writers who were born in a united Yugoslavia, whether they lived through the chaos of fission or watched with horror from exile and recollections of those who were on-site.

Though there were no stories that I thought I had wasted my time reading in Novakovich's 1995 collection Yolk, there seemed to me to be fewer gems than in the later collection Infidelities. "Apple" seems to me loved by others, but for me the best stories in Yolk were The Burning Clog, Yahbo the Hawk, Rust, The Address, Dresden, Hats and Veils, Honey in the Carcase (the first three and the last are set in Croatia; "The Address" in Hungary and Cleveland, Dresden in Dresden, Hats and Veils in Switzerland; -these three involving Yugoslav diaspora).

Novakovich now teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. I have not seen his short (107-page) Canadian publication from last year, Three Deaths, nor have I read his first collection of short stories, Apricots from Chernobyl .