Mihajlo Orlovic

A TALE ABOUT THE POWER OF MEMORY

If I say that I binge-read all two hundred plus pages of The Burden of Conversion in Glina, without even taking a water break, it speaks volumes about just what kind of read this is. It’s more than an interesting story! A story about fate and power of one to face a multitude of misfortunes and rise victorious with all their moral values intact. Amazing messages! Milka Kajganic has found them in her ethnos where the values of courage and empathy always come first, and she simply transferred them to us.
In the backstory of The Burden of Conversion in Glina lies a shadow of an unwritten but always vibrant and indestructible storytelling which is simply called “from one generation to another.” It is the most enduring and important work of a people, which has existed since its very creation, and which will last as long as the world exist. It cannot be forbidden by any forces in the world, nor by the dark tailors of history and human destinies, because it is in its essence stronger than them. This “from one generation to another” novel draws its strength from truth, from its depth, meaning, breadth, and permanence. It is a novel of retelling, which is more credible, and will always be credible, because its content has been lived through, truthful, and engraved in the eternal stone of DNA. Useless was the entire satanic machinery of miscreants, bootlickers and who knows who else, who wanted to cover up the Ustasha crime in Glina – a disgrace and shame, if they even know what those are. Clues were removed, people who dared to mention it, or remember it, were killed, and all this for something that never existed, but the crime could not be covered up. It was passed on in secret “from one generation to another”, to the ones to come with a vow to forward it on. Thanks to the courage of those people, who risked their lives and their comfort, the truth has been preserved.
Milka Kajganic is an extremely prolific and widely-read author. Numerous books have been released from her literary workshop to date: The Kordun Reader, The Brave Health Inspector, Traces of Childhood, Escape from Madness, The Stories of a Kordun Old Man, The Storm in the Eyes of the Miserable, The Voice of the Foreign Land, and others. There is a long list of her works, in which this zealous creator expressed truthfulness, a sense of justice, and the chivalrous, fighting morals of the people of the region from which she came. All these works are a true monument, testifying to the existence and resistance of a people in Kordun, against whom a unique sort of crime and persecution has successively been taking place. Milka Kajganic was born in the village of Kozarac, not far from Vrginmost, in the proud Kordun region whose fate has always been in harmony with the name it bears – restless, difficult, inevitable. With her novels and stories, Milka Kajganic has established herself as a creator whose name occupies a special place in Serbian literature, especially in that created in the diaspora.
Milka has a unique writing style. She writes as if she were embroidering on a canvas. She skillfully weaves, untangles, and then weaves the colorful threads of her story together again. The reader has no dilemma about whether to read or not, but rather rushes to the end, eager to find out what will happen and how. They cannot skip a single paragraph or even a sentence. They would immediately think that they had lost their way or missed something important, so they would have to return to where they left off.
The synopsis of the novel The Burden of Conversion in Glina is as follows: in a village in Kordun, lives the Serbian family Lokic, who suffered everything at the hands of the Croatian Ustashas during the war: massacres, persecutions, arson, destruction of property, and much more. When peace came, they hoped that the suffering and troubles had come to an end. But alas! They had to keep quiet about everything that had happened to them, keep their lips sealed, or else… But regardless of the injustice and fear, they continued to be guided by what is written on a building in Uppsala: “It is a serious thing to think freely, and even more serious – to think justly.”
Milan’s wife, Danica, who is innocent of any crime, is arrested by the UDBA and separated from her three young children – one, little Mico, was a few days old, and the oldest had just started school – and taken away in an unknown direction. All trace of her is lost. It will later be learned that after interrogation and torture, and to cover up their crime, they placed her in a psychiatric hospital. Her husband, Milan, not knowing where his wife is, is left with three small children, who replace dolls and toys with hard work in order to survive. There is also the grandfather, Djuro, the mother’s father, who helps them and tells his little granddaughter Mica about what happened in the church in Glina, where the Ustashas killed Mica’s paternal grandfather, Petar. The Ustashas took them away by deception. “They loaded them into trucks and took them to Glina. They locked them in the church. Their Catholic priest came there and started converting them. As they, Orthodox Serbs, were now being converted, taking the Catholic faith. It was all organized by a Glina lawyer, Dr. Mirko Puk. He also brought a camera. They filmed it, so they could go around Croatia and show the people a film in which we, Serbs, voluntarily switch from the Orthodox to the Catholic faith. One thousand five hundred and sixty-four Serbs were slaughtered then. All of this happened, as grandfather, Djuro, remembers: “on Bloody Tuesday, July 29, 1941.” The summary of this entire story is reflected in the sentence:
“I fight for honor, light, and justice. It is slow, but it will come. From Glina to Sombor, my dead will rise. My voice goes to God, he will hear my prayers, for he sees my watchful eyes and the raised hand that writes all this.”
The novel The Burden of Conversion in Glina, as the author emphasized in the introduction, is inspired by true events, which suggests that in addition to its literary value it also has documentary value, and this is confirmed by the very convincingness of the grandfather’s narration to his granddaughter Mica, and hers again to her granddaughter, and so on, “from one generation to another.” Very little has been written about the suffering of the Serbian people in Croatia, especially in the earlier period, when it was a taboo topic. This novel is a small grain in shedding light on one of the most monstrous crimes of World War II.
Each character in this novel has their own life story, and they intertwine with each other. Little Mica’s childhood is slowly integrated into her adult life. She grows up too quickly and learns about the world around her. She could not have survived otherwise. Childhood for little Mica was a time of deepest impressions and fundamental life lessons. In the struggle for survival, all these characters – little Mica, grandfather Djuro, father Milan, mother Danica – experience various hardships, traumas and harassment, and, despite their misery, they remain moral and honest people, just like their ancestors were, in accordance with the folk saying: blood is thicker than water. Even though they find themselves in hopeless situations, Milka’s characters do not react aggressively but rather subordinate their behavior to “that’s how it has to be.” This psychological characteristic stems from their dignity and awareness.
Milka’s heroes speak their own language, without any twists or turns. What is in their hearts is also on their tongue. Milka has preserved the dialect of the region where this story originated. In her text, one can find old, forgotten, but beautiful words such as: zlichnjaci, grotulja, vrslog, kezmad… These words, with their mysterious sound, radiate around them the breath of antiquity and past ways of life, which are rapidly disappearing. In her novels published so far, as well as in this one, Milka not only preserves the language of her region from oblivion, which has special characteristics, but also makes it living, dynamic and important for new generations scattered around the world. What’s more, in diaspora, where the language is often in the minority, Serbian literature becomes a powerful tool for preserving the language and developing a sense of belonging. By reading literature in Cyrillic, which is used by our writers, young people in the diaspora can develop a closer relationship with their heritage but also connect with the language on a deeper level. Milka’s sentences are short, concise, unobtrusive. They are floaty and simply flow, like milk over a flat surface. There are no superfluous words. Sometimes she gets carried away by the story, and goes into descriptions of details, without which, again, the story would not have the persuasiveness and strength.
Milka, from the very first pages, builds the story with the hope that it is possible to live with the truth, and that there is empathy and understanding in the world. But life experience claims otherwise. When she decides to write this story, the heroine of the novel, somewhat skeptically, thinks: “It is a painful fate. I don’t know who cares here in the West about what it was like back then. And what wounds I carry from that time.” Yes. They may not care, but our descendants do. It’s painful to learn from our own mistakes, but if they’ve already happened, they must not be repeated. That’s, actually, the meaning of the unwritten but enduring book “from one generation to another,” which lives and preserves dignity. It’s our Bible.
The novel has an extremely interesting plot and summary, so it can be classified as a so-called novel of events, in which the plot is the backbone of the novelistic structure. There is a series of events that make up the core of the story, or rather its skeleton. In the novel, we follow several generations, who are not only connected by blood but also by fate. We cannot classify it solely as a historical novel, because it contains psychological and social segments. What will make this novel stand out from the average is its rare and extremely interesting topic, as a surprising dimension, full of unexpected perspectives and storytelling that gets under the skin and into the very soul. Of course, there is also the time, which still suffers from various half-truths and perceptions. What particularly distinguishes this novel is the way in which the entire story is composed and “tied up” into a complex narrative, linguistically sophisticated and stylistically precise, and it also seems historically convincing.
Milka Kajganic can be congratulated on her courage, on this excellent and in many ways unique novel, which will, I hope, quickly win over readers.