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Ethnic Identity in Croatian-American Literature

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von

Ksenija ŠPIONJAK

am Institut für Amerikanistik Begutachter: ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Klaus Rieser

Graz, 2008

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I am grateful to my parents, Marko & Manda Špionjak, and to my sister, Katarina Špionjak, for their support, encouragement, motivation, patience and above all their belief they kept in me throughout my studies.

That is why I would like to dedicate this thesis to them: Mama, Tata, Katarina, Hvala vam na svemu.

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Josip Turkalj (1924-2007), “The Immigrant Mother”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION...... 1

II. THEORIES OF ETHNICITY ...... 5 II. 1. ETHNIC AMERICA...... 7 II.1.1. Assimilation versus Pluralism ...... 7 II.1.2. Race and Ethnicity...... 11 II.1.3. Religion and Ethnicity...... 12

III. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND...... 14 III.1. OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION...... 15 III.1.1. The First Croatian Immigrants ...... 18 III.1.2. The Experience of Croats on Ellis Island ...... 20 III.1.3. The Causes and Effects of Emigration from Croatia...... 24 III. 1.4. Immigration after World War I up to the early 1990s ...... 26 III.1.5. The Structure of Emigration ...... 28 III.2. CROATIAN AMERICAN HISTORY...... 30 III.2.1. Social Associations ...... 33 III.2.2. Cultural Life and Religion ...... 36 III.2.3. Politics...... 37 III.2.4. The Press ...... 39

IV. LITERARY APPROACH ...... 42 VI.1. ETHNIC AND MINORITY LITERATURE...... 42 IV.1.1. New Ethnicity versus Symbolic Ethnicity...... 44 IV.1.2. Croatian-American Authors in American Literature...... 46 IV.1.3. Ethnic writers, Exiles and Globalists...... 48 IV.2. EDWARD IFKOVIC IN SEARCH FOR HIS ROOTS ...... 49 IV.2.1. Anna Marinkovich ...... 51 IV.2.2. Anna Marinkovich as Ethnic Prose...... 53

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IV.3. VLADIMIR PETER GOSS...... 56 IV.3.1. From Both Sides of the Ocean ...... 57 IV.3.2. Dayton...... 63

IV.4. JOSIP NOVAKOVICH...... 66 IV. 4.1. Salvation and Other Disasters ...... 66

V. CONCLUSION...... 73

THESIS SUMMARY...... 76

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 79

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I INTRODUCTION

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”, preface (1855)

‘Ellis Island’, the port of New York, stands as one of the most important symbols of American history. It was the place where million of immigrants and forefathers of future Americans were confronted with American reality for the first time. Some of these immigrants meant to make their home in the new and strange land, but most of them just wanted to make some money to buy a piece of land in their homeland, to which they planned to return. However, just a minority managed to return home. The image these migrants had in their heads of America as the country of great opportunities, often faded when they passed through the gates of the ‘island of tears’. This was especially the case when they belonged to an unwanted group, like for example the South Slavs. Among the immigrants of Slavic descent entering the United States at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a little nation, which at the time lived in Europe under Habsburg rule. A nation which did not gain its independence till the early 1990s and were therefore often in history forced to leave their home and escape into distant parts of the world. Their little country nowadays is called Croatia and they were certainly among the groups who were most discriminated against at Ellis Island in New York. These people were recruited primarily to do hard labor, such as work in factories, steel mills and mines. Most of their lives were spent in hard work and mere adjustment to the new culture. In addition, they suffered immensely under the suspicion from Americans. Their lives and the lives of their descendants were enormously affected by the fact that they were different from the longer settled Americans. They, together with the other immigrant groups, completely changed the complexion of the already established population and culture of the US into a wide spectrum of diversity that it had never known before. The Americans were suddenly forced to deal with the practice of American democracy and not only with its theory, that is, they were forced to re-examine their concept of equality to which the nation had been dedicated at birth (Matulich 1971: 5). Loretta Matulich mentions in her dissertation A Cross-Disciplinary Study of the European Immigrants of 1870-1925 that the Americans whose ancestors settled in the United Stated before 1870 wrote texts in which they referred to the new immigrants as ‘hordes’ and ‘swarms’ and that although some credit was given to their contributions as laborers, artists

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and scientists, they were still often considered as ‘foreign stock’, as if most other Americans were of ‘native stock’ (ibid: 6). Immigration officials found many excuses for discrimination against and persecution of all Slavs in general on Ellis Island. Immigration laws, which were very vaguely written, banned immigrants from entering America, who were believed not to be fit to make good US citizens. But the American immigration officials applying these laws were often corrupt and exploited these regulations for personal profit. After an extensive examination of ethnicity and its correlation with various concepts like assimilation, pluralism, race and religion in the first part of my thesis, Chapter III will provide a short, but comprehensive summary of the most important socio-historical events that are linked with Croatian immigration, e.g. their motivations for emigration, the way immigrants have been perceived and how they have viewed the American people and how they have adjusted to and assimilated into American life. I want to give an insight into the background and circumstances that made these people leave their homeland for a distant place they had only vaguely heard about. This should not be the main focus of my thesis, but it is necessary as an introduction and a better understanding of the following chapter. After these two predominantly theory-oriented chapters, in Chapter IV I move on by defining Croatian-American literature and ethnic writing in general. Ethnic literature is a powerful force in the creation of images of ethnic identities and the ‘ethnics’ search for one’s own ethnic identity. Ethnic writing resurged after World War II when Americans deprived from their basic civil rights stood up against the ruling Anglo-Saxon standards. European American ethnicity experienced a revival after the black protest movement of the 1960s, when Afro-Americans began to refer to themselves in ethnic rather than in racial terms. Prominent Jewish-American scholars supported this kind of ethnic revival and gradually the American attitude towards ethnic writing changed and ethnic and minority literature became an important part of the American literary corpus. Some general patterns emerge in ethnic and minority writing, like the hardships and disappointments ‘ethnic’ and minority groups suffer and their perseverance in spite of this, the hopes they had and have for their future and the future of their children. The plot line of these novels usually evolves around the conflicts between parents and children, between the values of the often-idealized old country and the new American societal values. Life in the immigrant ‘ghettos’ is described, tragedies the family has to cope with, like a death or the abandonment of cultural mores by the children. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that ethnic writing is a transient phenomenon with a diversity of thematic concerns and histories of various ethnic groups, with each group having its own special characteristics.

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The primary aim of my thesis is to illustrate Croatian immigrants and their perception and experiences with America and American people as they are recorded in fiction written by immigrants themselves. I will try to demonstrate how they are characterized and mediated through fiction in order to portray the immigrant experience. Several authors and novels will be discussed and since the Croatian-American writers whose work I examine in this thesis are not widely known, I provide with each author a brief introduction to their lives and literary works. I chose to put my focus on Croatian-American literature because I have always been interested in the complex immigrant experience, since I am a child of Croatian immigrants in the Netherlands myself. Researching their experience I could identify with their struggle and it was kind of ‘researching myself’ and my own personal experience. Just like other first-, second- and third generation immigrants, a strong sense of ethnic identity, was already early in life imparted to me. Further its ambition is to contribute to scholarship in Croatian-American literature and to introduce its readers to Croatian-American literary studies, a field of ethnic scholarly research, which, unlike other ethnic literary fields, like for example Greek-American or Italian-American studies, has been rather unexplored and is practically unknown to the wider audience. This can be ascribed to several factors, like the fact that Croatia did not reach national independence until late twentieth century and throughout history Croats were identified as Austrian-Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Slavs and others, which is discussed in this thesis in the historical overview of Croatian immigration history. I begin my readings with Edward Ifkovich’s Anna Marinkovich (1980) to elaborate the question of ethnic identity, because I feel that his novel covers all the aspects of Croatian American ethnic literature. It deals with the complex relationship between first generation immigrants and their children. The first generation in immigrant novels are described as strangers in a new land who have difficulty adjusting to the new culture and the second generation often has no compassion for their struggling immigrant parents nor patience with their limitations. These immigrants were destined to live in social ghettos and endure constant struggle in hope for a better life. Other texts I will explore are Vladimir Peter Goss’s collection of short stories From Both Sides of the Ocean (2001) and his novel Dayton (1999) and Josip Novakich’s collection of short stories Salvation and Other Disasters (1998). By discussing these works I want to provide an insight into the historical and cultural background of the Croatian-American population. The one central theme that runs through all ethnic literature is the question of identity. The fictional characters as well as their authors are constantly trying to define their sense of ‘self’ and their place in society. They’re all

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confronted with one crucial question: “Am I American or Croatian, neither of them or both?” With my thesis I want to portray Croats as an ethnic group in America as they appear in fiction. I want to interpret the meaning of immigration for the immigrants, their hopes, experiences and achievements in their adopted country. Despite the hardships these people had to endure, they maintained a distinct humanness, homesickness and hope for a brighter future.

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II THEORIES OF ETHNICITY

“Once I thought to write the history of American immigrants, then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” Oscar Handlin

The range of discussions that have emerged recently within a variety of academic researches attests to the intricacy of the definition of ‘ethnicity’. This chapter will provide a series of various discussions of ethnicity and outline the relations between ethnicity and race, ethnicity and religion and explain the terms assimilation and pluralism. The discussion that follows is meant to function as a theoretical base for the exploration of literary creations of identities conducted in Chapter IV. The term ‘ethnicity’ is of recent origin and in America it was used for the first time by W. Lloyd Warner in 1941, who used ‘ethnicity’ in the sense of a trait that “separates the individual from some classes and identifies him with others” (Sollors, 1996: x). Although Warner’s definition of ‘ethnic’ often did not include ‘Yankees’, this term became a concept within which Yankee identity could also be discussed. The word ‘ethnic’ can be better understood when we examine its etymological origins, it has Latin and Greek origins. The noun ‘ethnos’, meaning nation or people, was used to refer to people in general, but also to ‘others’. ‘Ethos’ means custom, disposition or trait in Greek and taking these two terms together, we get the meaning of a band of people (nation), living together and sharing the same customs. The definition of ethnicity gained strong currency only in the 1970s, when Michael Novak introduced the term ‘new ethnicity’ for the first time. In ‘ethnicity’ the double sense of general peoplehood, which is shared by all Americans, and of otherness, those who are different from the ‘mainstream’ culture, lives on (cf. ibid: xi). One has to observe that there is a sense of pride noticeable when ethnicity is expressed, yet in America, ethnicity can be seen as characteristic of minorities and as typical of the country (cf. ibid: xi). This corresponds with Oscar Handlin’s famous above mentioned statement in his volume The Uprooted, the first major study of the ‘new immigration’, which is about the story of America’s immigrants, who are the story of America. He meant to say that immigrants and their descendants had somehow ‘made’ American history. As Dearborn puts it, “He reminds us that the central feature of American identity is the experience of migration, that Americans are in fact all descended from immigrants and that American selfhood is based on a seemingly paradoxical sense of shared difference” (Dearborn 1986: 3). She states that ethnicity allows us

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to see the ways in which difference or ‘otherness’ has always been an integral part of American culture in a new light (cf. ibid: 4). In order to understand American identity, it is essential to look to factors of ‘otherness’ just as those of ethnicity. Increased attention in the United States is paid to ethnicity and ethnic identity due to the growth of the numbers of individuals who claim to be of mixed ancestry and cultural heritage. Although ethnicity is hard to ‘define’, the following general and elaborate definition of ethnicity R.A. Schemerhorn has given will be sufficient and adequate to give a solid overview from my perspective from which I will try to analyze the concept of ethnicity: An ethnic group is….a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypal features, or any combination of these. A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group. (Sollors 1996: xii)

Anthropologist Fredrik Barth argued that ethnic identity was a way to establish boundaries that allowed a group to distance themselves from one another. He stated, “ethnic boundaries define the group and not the cultural stuff that it encloses” (Sollors 1996: xxii). He also mentions in his 1969 essay Ethnic Groups and Boundaries that ethnic identity corresponds with being superordinate to most other statuses, he said that “…ethnic identity implies a series of constraints on the kinds of roles an individual is allowed to play, and the partners he may choose for different kinds of transaction…” (ibid: 302). Only a few decades later America’s ethnic groups have been claiming their civil rights and demanding privileges that used to be denied to them. Also a more recent and widely used definition is the one used by Jean S. Phinney, which sustains that “ethnic identity is a dynamic, multidimensional construct that refers to one’s identity, or sense of self as a member of an ethnic group (Phinney 2003: 63). She claims that people who share the same ethic identity have a common ancestry and share at least a similar culture, race, religion, language, kinship, or place of origin. Furthermore she adds, “Ethnic identity is not a fixed categorization, but rather a fluid and dynamic understanding of self and ethnic background. Ethnic identity is constructed and modified as individuals become aware of their ethnicity, with in the large sociocultural setting” (ibid: 63).

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II. 1 ETHNIC AMERICA

Looking at the total diversity of ethnic America, it must be concluded that there is a considerable variation in the relationships between ethnicity and religion among its people. When the ‘new immigrants’ came, the British settlers had already constructed a white, Anglo- Saxon, Protestant culture. These immigrants from eastern and southern Europe outnumbered those from Western Europe and were more likely to be Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox and they transformed the ethnic character of the nation. These immigrants and their descendants had to adjust to a society that already had its own culture, its own social structure, language, religion and politics. The strange, dark-skinned, oddly named immigrants from the eastern and southern parts of Europe were seen as a threat to their established society. The ‘old immigrants’ were suspected of bringing dangerous radical ideas to their country. Among the earlier settlers the notion prevailed that these immigrants had to assimilate insofar that they had to loose their identities. The national consensus was xenophobic. The immigrant’s assimilation was considered of great importance if the society was to survive and remain intact. The new wave of immigrants could not be different from the ‘rest’; they had to loose all their bad habits and their strange customs. The ideal was that they would become like everyone else, that their differences would be ‘melted’ away.

II.1.1 Assimilation versus Pluralism

The two most popular terms used to discuss American ethnicity have been entangled in somewhat paradoxical interpretations of American identity. The first term, assimilation, or in its more popular form, the ‘melting pot’, focuses on the adjustment of two cultures to each other after their encounter. This theory was intended to wipe out the cultural heritages of the new immigrants and to instill in them what was thought to be real American cultural values. Milton Gordon distinguishes between ‘structural assimilation’, in which ethnicity is no longer relevant, and ‘cultural assimilation’ (or acculturation), in which cultural differences decrease but the tendency to nurture relationships from within one’s own group remains. According to Gordon, the latter is much more common in American society. Assimilationist theories presume that the tendency toward homogenization in modern society is so immense that an individual cannot resist it. Mass media, school and intermarriage are all factors that work towards the elimination of diversity

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in a society. The picture we then get of American society is, except for some minor differences, the merging of many different cultures in one ‘American’ culture. The question though here is, in a society where so many cultures have come together, to which culture should they all adapt? In this case, this would be the host culture, and the host culture is the one of the early colonists, the Anglo-Saxons. Milton Gordon calls this ‘Anglo conformity’, which connotes the fusion of the various ‘bloods’ of Slavs, Jews, Germans and many others into one similar tradition, language, culture and spirit, namely the one of the Anglo-Saxon stock. The assimilationist theory is indispensable though to create a realistic picture of American society, e.g. the German ethnic and the Croatian ethnic who are neighbors have far much more in common than their ancestors did, they share the same language, they are citizens from the same country but nevertheless they may differ more from each other than their grandparents. Their grandparents were more likely to be both peasants and they came to America for the same reasons, to look for a better existence than they had in their old countries. The assimilationist expects that social harmony is to come out of the establishment and reinforcement of a ‘common culture’. Critiques of this theory on the other hand call this ‘melting pot’ concept often racist. Anglo conformity was for many a synonym for racism. An important critique of the melting pot came from Horace M. Kallen, a prominent philosopher, who argued in his 1915 article Democracy versus the Melting-Pot: A study of American Nationality, that to reject ethnic cultures was anti-ethical to American democratic ideals, which their forefathers had subscribed when they underwrote their Declaration of Independence. He claimed that people who have no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race deserves the extinction that surely awaits it (Sollors 1996: 68). According to Kallen, self-identity was partly based on identification with one’s ancestors. With the term ‘cultural pluralism’, he urged the perpetuation and strengthening of one’s ethnic ties, where distinctive subcultures would be preserved. In another way, Randolph Bourne, in his 1916 essay Transnational America, criticized the ‘Americanization’ campaigns. This notion denotes the adoption of English speech, American clothes and manners, the American attitude in politics and the merging of the various bloods in the same background as the British colonists. He said that the foreign-born who missed the Mayflower, they came over on the first boat they could find, but these boats were not other Mayflowers, but they were called ‘Maiblume’, ‘Fleur de Mai’, ‘Fior di Maggio’, or ‘Majblomst’ (ibid: 94). He said that all Americans were foreign-born or descendants of

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foreign-born and the early colonists also did not come assimilate and to adopt the culture of the native-American Indian. They came to pursuit a happier and better life in the New World, just like their fellow-Europeans who came some hundred years later, and they all brought their traditions and background with them. The Anglo-Saxon was just the first immigrant to come and he was an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, just like the Slavs, the Italians, and the Jews who came on later boats. He urges the emergence of what he calls, a ‘trans- national America’, where immigrant cultures are preserved and integrated into the culture and where all immigrants contribute to a transformation of American culture. This was seen as a process where both the national culture and the immigrants’ culture would be receptive to each other and result in a new American culture. The next four schematic charts will abstract the perspectives on ethnicity, which I have discussed so far:

HOST HOST

IMMIGRANT

Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. presents the Anglo conformity perspective. The host and the immigrant culture are separate and through time (through e.g. education, mass media etc.) they become more and more like the hosts and finally they become one common “American” culture, the Anglo- American host culture.

HOST

COMMON

IMMIGRANT

Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 presents the ‘melting pot’. The movement is not completely of immigrant toward host but of host and immigrant toward each other, so that the common American culture that emerges is a combination of two cultures, though it is never clear how much and what the host absorbs from the immigrant. It must be emphasized though that the ‘melting pot’ perspective usually means Anglo conformity.

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HOST HOST

IMMIGRANT

IMMIGRANT

Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 shows the cultural pluralism position as expressed by Horace Kallen. The immigrant does become like the host to some extent, hence the line jogs upward. He becomes an American citizen, commits himself to American political values, learns the English language, and enjoys the common mass media as well as the media of his own group.

HOST HOST

COMMON

IMMIGRANT IMMIGRANT

Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4 portrays what Milton Gordon called ‘acculturation but not assimilation’1. This perspective sees the immigrant absorbing large numbers of cultural traits from the host and the host picking up a few traits from the immigrant. A common culture emerges that is shared by both immigrant and host. ‘Acculturation’ does not follow ‘assimilation’ though, because some cultural traits still distinguish host from immigrant. They both remain to keep some distance from each other, especially in the private spheres of their lives, like e.g. intermarriage does not occur often and the choice of close friends are likely to occur from one’s own background.

SOURCE, figures 1.1-1.4: Andrew M. Greeley, Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance, pp. 304-309.

1 Milton Gordon (1964). Assimilation in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

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II.1.2 Race and Ethnicity

The etymology of the word ‘race’ goes back to Latin words like ‘generatio’, ‘ratio’, and ‘radix’ to Spanish and Castilian ‘raza’, in Italian ‘razza’, and the old French word ‘haraz’. These words all have various meanings like generation, root, nobility of blood, patch of threadbare or defective cloth, taint and contamination or horse-breeding (Sollors 1996: xxix). Early race theories go back to ancient Egypt, where race differences were drawn in the portraits on the walls of tombs from as early as 1350 B.C. Four colors were used for the complexions of the people represented: red for the Egyptians themselves, yellow for their enemies to the east, white for people from the north, and black for Negroes. Color prejudice even then depended on which ethnic group dominated, in favor of the ruling group (Gossett 1997: 4). In physical anthropology this context that used to classify all human beings into three to five races is no longer tenable. From an anthropologist standpoint, no nation represents an ethnic type distinct enough to be classified as a race. Nevertheless, the term is still applied to numerous groups such as the ‘French race’ or the ‘Jewish race’, in these cases the term ‘ethnicity’ is preferable. Another context of ‘race’, as used by social scientists, is the one most appropriate nowadays and it “defines a human group as different from other groups (by the group itself or by other groups) by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics” (Sollors 1996: xxxii). The word ‘race’ is a few hundred years older than the term ‘ethnicity’. ‘Ethnicity’ was the term intended to replace the word ‘race’, a word that came to be associated with ‘racism’, a word coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1938 (ibid: xxix). Ethnicity has not come to replace ‘race’ entirely, although the two terms are related concepts in that they are both usually defined in terms of shared genealogy. The distinction between these two concepts is the ‘cultural’ one, that often includes shared linguistic, behavioral and religious traits, which are not inherited but entirely learned, and by contrast, ‘race’ includes the ‘physical’ differences, which of course are also a matter of ‘perception’. Namely physical differences are also affected by cultural perceptions of race. Furthermore, physical appearance can be culturally changed, e.g. by surgery and cosmetics and moreover hereditary particles and physical characters can fluctuate and often disappear in the course of time by geographic or cultural isolation. Already in the fifth century BC Hippocrates attempted to account for race differences on the basis of climate and geography and Aristotle thought that both physical and temperamental race differences were caused by climate.

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If we go back to the origins of the term, which I discussed earlier, then we could argue that these beginnings suggested that ‘race’ described people who were ‘tainted’, e.g. the Moorish during the Spanish inquisition, hence we could assume that ‘race’ was used in the ‘physical’ and ‘visible’ sense. Yet, the people persecuted by the Inquisition were not only visual different, but people with different political views or a different religion were also condemned. The colonists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in America justified the enslavement of Negroes and Indians because of their heathenism rather than their race. Thus, ‘race’ was hardly based on the ‘visible’ differences, but on religiously and politically, therefore ‘culturally’ defined distinction, which we would nowadays define as an ‘ethnic distinction’. So it can be said that our human ‘races’ are primarily cultural creations, which implies that people, not nature, create our identities. ‘Ethnicity’ and ‘race’ are largely cultural and historical constructs. Both terms are rather social than biological phenomena. This of course doesn’t mean that they do not exist; it means that we have to look further into culture and social interaction rather than biology to understand these concepts.

II.1.3 Religion and Ethnicity

For many ethnic groups, religion and ethnicity are integrally intertwined concepts. The relationship between religion and ethnicity was also significant among the new arrived immigrants in America. As they separated from the aspects of their old life, the more they clutched to their religion, which they brought with them into the New World. In their need to save something from home, the immigrants directed into their religion the whole weight of their longing to be connected with their old life. By establishing their church in the new environment they kept the belief of belonging to some group, of being part of a whole. By trying to do so, they stumbled upon the already established religions within the host society. These religious differences between the new immigrants and the already established Americans were compounded by cultural and linguistic differences and the altogether rather impoverished state of the newer immigrant. Hostility towards these immigrants intensified during the period prior to World War I. The new immigrant who brought his old religion with him was seen as a threat to American culture, a culture that hitherto had been defined by the ‘Nordic’ peoples. This meant that the righteous Protestant religion was under attack by papists

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from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were supposed to be hostile towards the dominant culture and their religious worldview. The immigrants on the other hand thought it was of immense importance to transplant their churches to the United States and they were eager to do so despite imposing obstacles. One of the obstacles was also the diversity of the new arrivals. Immigration from Italy and Eastern Europe brought newer groups of Catholics from different parts of Europe, which were historically distant and separate from each other. The newcomers brought with them different and already decided notions as to what the proper form of the Church should be. They all wished to continue the religious life they had practiced at home and each ethnic group insisted on recognition. The desire of so many different groups of people was to recreate the precise form of their old churches. The first Catholics to come were the Irish and they had already established a Catholic Church in America. As other Catholics from other parts of Europe came, tensions among different Catholic ethnic groups arose, as to what nationality the priest should have, which language should be used, which holidays should be celebrated, which saints should be honored or even which name the church should be given. Under such circumstances the need for independent churches for each ethnic group grew and all groups insisted upon their own churches. In the course of their settlement in the New World, the new immigrants found it very hard to establish themselves and the differences that divided them from the older settled Americans were to become an enormous obstacle to adjust themselves into their new environment.

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III HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

“The contribution of immigrants can be seen in every aspect of our national life. We see it in religion, in politics, in business, in the arts, in education, even in athletics and entertainment: There is no part of our nation that has not been touched by our immigrant background.” John F. Kennedy, “A Nation of Immigrants” (1963)

Two important waves of immigration can be observed when we look at the history of American immigration. The first wave of immigration brought the Irish, German and English peasants and laborers and some time thereafter the Germans and Scandinavians. The second notable wave brought immigrants from foremost southern and Eastern Europe, among who were among others South Slavs. They all came before the century was over. For the early settlers it was impossible to ignore the vast growing number of immigrants that entered the US during the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century the ‘new’ immigration from southeastern Europe soon exceeded the ‘old’ immigration from northwestern Europe. Among the first settlers prejudice against these new immigrants arose from quite different sources. Not only did they worry whether the new immigrants could ever be completely assimilated, but the workingmen’s organizations were also alarmed because the immigrants coming from countries with a low living standard were willing to accept low wages. The general idea prevailed that the immigrants would have a long-range bad effect upon American society. Therefore, the immigrants encountered more and more prejudice from every level of American society. Nevertheless, after all the hardships they had suffered, after their crowded and uncomfortable journey across the Atlantic, after inspection at Ellis Island was braved and passed, despite discouragement and disappointment and shattered hopes trying to find employment and encountering discrimination at the job and meeting living expenses, their love for the US grew. Trying to build a new life in the wilderness of a new culture on a new continent, they faced insult and exploitation and most times their life was tinted with human tragedy, but ultimately these brave strangers and victims became valuable members of American society.

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III. 1 OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION

South Slavic immigrants in the USA between 1880 and WW I were part of the so-called ‘new immigration’. During this time immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began to increase rapidly and to outdistance that from northern and western Europe. These people mainly had to bear the brunt of prejudice from the ‘older’ Americans. Most Americans were disturbed over the possible threat to the nation from the influx of inferior ‘stocks of people’. Woodrow Wilson declared in the 1880s as a young man that “no longer did the men of ‘sturdy stocks’ of Northern Europe constitute the main body of ‘foreign blood’ coming to the US, their place had been taken by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence…” (Gossett 1997: 292). Immigration slowed down early in the twentieth century because of World War I and it was finally brought to a halt with the restriction quotas of the early 1920s. Before World War I the United States had permitted all newcomers of whatever origin to enter the country unrestricted. Immigration had considerably increased national development. After World War I the fears and distrust, which were among others triggered by the war, acquiesced to a new attitude and suspicion of all that was foreign. The old Yankee families of New England viewed with hesitation and doubt the rising percentage of foreign-born all around them. The labor movement had become convinced that only a sharp restriction of the labor supply could protect its interests. In the first decade of the twentieth century the coalitions that consisted of Southerners, former Populists and Progressives, each for its own reasons, came to regard the continuation of constant immigration as undesirable (Handlin 1957: 74). New racist policies did not only want to restrict the number of newcomers, it also wanted to make a selection among them. The new policy discriminated the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and favored the ones that came from northern and western Europe. The longer settled Americans held the ‘scientific’ assumption, and actually devoted a great deal of time and energy to its investigation, that the national origin of an immigrant was a reliable indication of his capacity for Americanization. The immigration legislation of 1917- 1924 stated and was upheld by science, that some people, because of their racial or national constitution, were more capable of becoming Americans than others. In addition, it was argued that the ‘old immigrants’, who came to the United States before 1880, were drawn from the superior stocks of northern and western Europe, while those who came after that date were drawn from the inferior breeds of southern and eastern Europe (cf. ibid: 75).

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The Americans, who favored the new policy, were not so much against the total amount of newcomers, as they were eager to bring more of the ‘old’ immigrants and wishing to restrain the ‘new’. Prescott F. Hall, one of the leading advocates for the enactment of the literacy test, argued that the test furnished “an indirect method of excluding those who are undesirable, not merely because of their illiteracy, but for other reasons. After all, the hereditary tendencies of the illiterate abroad…cannot be overcome in a generation or two” (ibid: 76). It is important to determine how the notion originated that the peoples from the southern and eastern parts of Europe were inferior to those of northern and western parts. Handlin mentions that this assumption could be traced back to the racist beliefs, expressed at the end of the nineteenth century, that the peoples of the Mediterranean region were biologically different from those of northern and western Europe and that the difference sprang from an inferiority of blood and could be observed in certain social characteristics (cf. ibid: 77). Anthropologist Madison Grant supported this argument and adopted in his book The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the line of Gobineau and insisted that the new immigrants were not:

“Members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones… The new immigration contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish ghettos. Our jails, insane asylums, and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral, and political, has been lowered and vulgarized by them”. (cf. ibid: 77)

These theories seemed to obtain affirmation from reports that supported theoretical opinions with what seemed to be official and seemingly scientific proof. The first report, a detailed study by the Immigration Commission assigned in 1907, figured prominently in the deliberations that produced the Johnson Act of 1921. This report included an immigration quota that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 3% of the number of persons from that country living in the U.S. in 1910. Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, a well-known racist of the time, presented in 1922 and 1923 a second report, which was the basis for the legislation of 1924, a law Congress passed which brought it down to 2% (The Immigration Act of 1924 was based on the census of 1890). The conclusions these reports tried to proof was basically that the new immigration was essentially different from the old and less capable of being Americanized. This is clearly stated at the beginning of the report:

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“The old and the new immigration differ in many essentials. The former was… largely a movement of settlers… from the most progressive sections of Europe… They entered practically every line of activity… Many of them… became landowners… They mingled freely with the native Americans and were quickly assimilated. On the other hand, the new immigration has been largely a movement of unskilled laboring men who have come… from the less progressive countries of Europe… They have… congregated together in sections apart from native Americans and the older immigrants to such an extent that assimilation has been slow”. (ibid: 81)

Both reports contained a Dictionary of Races, where old and new immigrants were differentiated racially and the superiority of the old immigrants was indicated. It was indicated that the newer immigrants were less capable of becoming Americanized. For example the ‘Serbo-Croatians’, who had “savage manners” and it stated that: “All these peoples of eastern and southern Europe… give character to the immigration of today, as contrasted with the northern Teutonic2 and Celtic stocks that characterized it up to the eighties. All are different in temperament and civilization from ourselves”. (ibid: 85)

Furthermore the reports noted the emigration conditions in Europe and reported that most of the old immigrants had come with the intention to stay, in contrast to the new, who came merely with the intention to work for a few years and then to leave, and therefore the older immigrants made better citizens. Moreover, the commission tried to proof that the new immigration brought to the United States a considerably larger percentage of unskilled laborers than the old. In addition, the reports mentioned the causes of emigration, the economic effects of immigration, the new immigrants’ literacy quote, and crime associated with new immigration and even changes in bodily form among the descendants of immigrants were mentioned in the reports. The latter was important because it was thought that the characteristics of a race as bodily form were fixed and permanent and therefore the immigrants would not change in the course of immigration and that could affect the assimilation of the immigrants (cf. ibid: 103). The Commission did not found it necessary to prove that a difference between the older and newer immigrants insisted, because that was taken for granted. In most cases the reports did not contain material for a proper comparison between old and new. Nevertheless, these reports were enough proof to justify existing prejudices against the new immigrants and to validate the discriminations against them in the laws of 1921 and 1924. Historian John Higham said that although it was intended as temporary, the act "proved in the long run the most important turning-point in American immigration policy" because “it

2 Teutonism is a theory imported from England that stated the superiority of the Anglo-saxon race

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imposed numerical limits on European immigration for the first time and established a nationality quota system” (Higham 1988: 311).

III. 1.1 The First Croatian Immigrants

It is very difficult to establish when the first Croatians came to the American continent, because the history of the Croatian people in the United States has not been formally documented. The reason for this lies in the fact that Croatia was ruled, administered, conquered and federated with Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Turkey, the Republic of Venice, and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) for up to 900 years. When Croatians migrated they left their country as citizens of Austria, Hungary, Venice, Turkey or more recently as citizens of Yugoslavia. Ethnically they were Croatians, but they were identified as citizens of the above-mentioned countries. Croatians have migrated for over 300 years, their immigration started already with their participation in Spanish, Portuguese, and Venetian fleet and mercantile operations. There is proof that Croatians were among the first Europeans to establish contact with the American continent. Among the first Croatian immigrants was Vinko Paletin who joined the Conquistadors in the 1620s and he was soon followed by other seamen and merchants, mostly from Dubrovnik (Prpić 1997: 31). Croatian interests were first focused on the lands in Central and South America and North America was only visited infrequently, but then after one such visit one tree trunk on the shores of North Carolina bore the inscription CROATOAN. An Englishman, John White, one of the founders of the first British colonies in North America, reported this. It was also reported that the children he found among these Indians looked quite different from the native tribes, they had “fine chestnut-colored skin and hair”. The saga gets even greater weight when stories are told about the existence of the ‘Croatan Indians’, an Indian tribe living in North Carolina. However, there are no concrete historical facts that can confirm this mystery and therefore it stays a legend (cf. ibid: 24). The mass immigration of Croats to America began in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when they joined the great migration wave from Central and South-East Europe. They came from the southern areas of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Croatia was also a part at the time and which lasted until 1918. They arrived in America generally between 1880 and 1920. Owing to strong forces that drove people away from Croatia to

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America, the migration took on such proportions that Croatia was in danger of being depopulated. This wave was stopped by World War I and was never to be continued with the same intensity. Many immigrants were economic immigrants, while others considered themselves as political refugees. They looked for employment wherever jobs could be found. Many of them, mostly single young men, but also married men who had come without their families, settled in small towns as coal miners or in larger cities as steelworkers. Some inhabited Croatian colonies among relatives and friends, although generally the majority did not know where they were going. They were motivated by a desire to earn higher wages that would enable them to buy land in their homeland. They disregarded warnings of the dangerous ocean and they embarked on a month long voyage to the Promised Land. A new wave of Croatian immigrants arrived after World War II, most of them as political refugees, fleeing from Yugoslav Communist regime. The Croatian people have a long history of emigration. Croatia ranks among those parts of Europe that have taken part in all forms of emigration flows. For centuries they had to ran from the growing Ottoman Empire and inhabit parts of Austria, Hungary and Italy. Other than that, they had to protect themselves from all kind of invasions and occupiers. A lot of them bordered ships to cross the Atlantic and even some of them went to the Far East. From the beginning of the fifteenth century and onward into the next few hundred years, every tragedy, every war and foreign ruler in Croatia ended with a new wave of fugitives and migrations. Due to these tragedies, and Croatia’s geographical position, it borders the Adriatic Sea and Croatia is traditionally a maritime nation, the Croatians have become a nation known for their very large Diaspora. Among these Croatian Diaspora, dispersed on several continents, the largest group of immigrants and their ancestors live in America, around two and a half million. Only in the last fifty years over more than a hundred thousand Croats moved to America and today every third Croatian lives outside the Croatian homeland (ibid: 13). Among these Croatians deeply religious feelings prevailed and an even deeper national Croatian patriotism than among the Croats who had stayed in their dear homeland. Franjo (Frank) Zotti, a Dalmatian immigrant and the owner of Narodni list (a New York weekly established in 1898, which became America’s first Croatian daily in 1902) called these Croatians: iseljena Hrvatska (referring to Croatian Diaspora). Why did so many Croatian leave their homeland behind and decided to enter a ship which would lead them to a new, unknown world far away from their loved ones? Most of them

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were forced by sorrow, hunger and trouble to leave their dear home and find success in America. It was despair that made them leave their homes.

III. 1.2 The Experience of Croats on Ellis Island

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus (A poem graven on a tablet within the pedestal on which the ‘Statue of Liberty’ stands)

The America we now know, the country of unlimited opportunities and success, freedom and equality, has not always been like this. The representation of America as a land of freedom also prevailed among the immigrants that came to the new country at the end of the nineteenth century. This image quickly changed as they set foot on Ellis Island. As already mentioned in my introduction, Ellis Island was the place where immigrants experienced America for the first time. Ellis Island stands to reveal one of the nation’s most dramatic stories, namely the one of European immigrants entering the US. After being processed at Ellis Island and catching a first glimpse of America, namely the Statue of Liberty, these immigrants bought tickets that took them through the gateway of realization of their hopes they had of a fresh start in their land of dreams. This experience is widely represented in American literature, among which also the experience of Croats. Their experiences are particularly vivid because of the important role played by the immigrant organizations and their immigrant press, trying to expose the conditions that prevailed on Ellis Island (Cizmić in Debouzy 1988: 80). On March 24, 1900, Narodni list of New York (The National Gazette) printed an article that had been published by the News of New York. It dealt with an investigation into staff corruption on Ellis Island and included some sensational facts that had been uncovered. An organized group of immigration personnel had systematically blackmailed immigrants. The paper also described cases of “girls and women who had no money, but were beautiful, and were often attacked and dishonored” (ibid). It wrote about intrigues on Ellis Island “…against our poor brothers, forced by sorrow, hunger and despair to leave their dear homeland and find bread in America” (ibid: 81).

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Immigration acts were not clearly written and often an excuse for immigration officials to discriminate these people at their arrival. In 1903, Congress passed an act that prohibited the immigration of persons with physical or mental defects and those with a criminal record. Those convicted of political crimes were exempt, excepting anarchists, who were denied access in the country. Workers under contract as seasonal laborers were also banned from entrance to the US (cf. 1988: 82). The immigrant press criticized the stringent and unjustified application of limitations upon immigrants. On February 17, 1900, Narodni List published an article in English, The Immigration Authorities and the Croats. The paper criticized some American newspapers for their repeated criticism upon Croatian immigrants and the fact that they encouraged Croatian immigrants not to emigrate (cf. ibid). Religion was very important to Croatian immigrants and something they could always rely upon throughout their struggle for survival. The Roman Catholic religion was a sign of their identity and an integral part of their existence. The Church therefore played an important role in their lives. The Croatian Fraternal Union, then known as the National Croatian Society, tried hard to achieve better treatments for Croats who came to Ellis Island. The immigrant press together with prominent public figures in the immigrant community, appealed to their readers, insisting on support for the newcomers on Ellis Island. In this effort, Father Martin Krmpotić, pastor of the Croatian church in Kansas City, wrote a letter to the Croatian Diet in Zagreb, stating that immigrants from southern Europe were the most numerous but the least protected:

All the nationalities immigrating here are better organized than the Croats, and their home governments take care of them through consulates. Immigrants are also supported on the other side, and help is given to them at once. Besides keeping consulates in Washington, home governments also often spend special representatives to inquire into conditions among the immigrants. The Italian consul spends most of his time working on the colonization of his compatriots. (ibid: 83)

This was partly due to the fact that Austria-Hungarian authorities in general showed little concern for Slav immigrants. The discrimination against their fellow countrymen disturbed the public at home but they could little do to help them. Some immigrant newspapers began a campaign among immigrants to accept American citizenship. Narodni List stated that Italians and South Slavs were the groups most persecuted by immigration authorities, but unlike the South Slavs the Italians could organize. Most of them had gained American citizenship and had gotten the

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opportunity to become an important factor in election campaigns. The paper suggested South Slavs to do likewise. It was quite clear that Croats were moving to America due to bad economic conditions; many just wanted earn some money and sent it home. Narodni List recommended:

“When our man comes here, let him build himself into this land, let him adopt her customs, let him move here permanently. It is well and good to think about the homeland, but at the end of the 19th century some sentimentality must be put aside. Never forgetting in America our pride in our Croatian heritage let us be Americans. This land offers us her citizenship, gives us our living, lets us enjoy freedom, and treats us in the same way as she treats all her sons. Why then should we not move here permanently, when economic and political reasons make it impossible for us to live in our old country”? (ibid: 86)

There was much literature written by some intellectuals of South Slav origin that also described the hardships that immigrants had to go through on Ellis Island. Louis Adamič, a Slovene-American author and translator, described his road through Ellis Island in 1913 in his novel, Laughing in the Jungle. He showed a genuine account of travelers on the ship, mothers with little children in their arms, with their eyes focused on the Statute of Liberty and the shore of their new homeland. He recounts that the day he spent on Ellis Island was an eternity:

Rumors were current among immigrants of several nationalities that some of us would be refused admittance into the US and sent back to Europe. For several hours I was in a cold sweat on this account, although, so far as I knew, all my papers were in order, and sewed away in the lining of my jacket were twenty-five dollars in American currency. The minimum account required by law to be in the possession of every immigrant before entering the country. Then, having rationalized away some fears, I gradually worked up a panicky feeling that I might develop measles or smallpox, or some other disease. I had heard that several hundred sick immigrants were quarantined on the island. (ibid: 88f)

Adamič continued,

The first night in America I spent, with hundreds of other recently arrived immigrants, in an immense hall with tiers of narrow iron-and-canvas bunks, four deep. I was assigned a top bunk. Unlike most of the steerage immigrants, I had no bedding with me, and the blanket which someone threw at me was too thin to be effective against the blasts of cold air that rushes in through the open windows; so I shivered, sleepless, all night, listening to snores and dream –monologues in perhaps a dozen different languages. (ibid: 89)

Adamič also wrote about the uncertainty he felt when the cold and bureaucratic immigration officials asked him the usual questions. Their language was a “mixture of several Slav languages” and it was almost impossible to understand them (ibid).

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After years of exploitation of South Slavs and their having to live under difficult and unsanitary conditions upon their arrival on Ellis Island, the appeal for a foundation that would help immigrants upon their arrival in America, the Slavonic Immigrant Society was founded in 1907. Its task was to take care of all Slav immigrants, receiving them in New York and giving them all the instructions they needed. The society would prevent the exploitation of immigrants by some individuals who looked for a way to take advantage of the immigrants’ ignorance and helped them greatly. However, the Slavonic Immigrant Society was founded too late, namely most immigrants had already immigrated to the US before the foundation of the Society.

Immigrant Family, Ellis Island, New York Most immigrants came to urban America in networks of family and friends. International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House

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III. 1.3 The Causes and Effects of Emigration from Croatia

At the end of the 1880s the effects of migration started to take on enormous proportions and run the risk of growing into a serious economical-political problem. If we look at the causes and effects of migration from Croatia to the US, it could be said that generally the basic causes of emigration were of an economic nature. Nevertheless, looking into various periods of Croatian history in the past, it can be observed that these economic factors were often enhanced by various political and religious factors. The main reason for emigration was the new economic order of capitalism. What all immigrants shared was the need to confront this new economic order and to provide for their own welfare and that of their family. As Capitalism and the worldwide economy grew, so did the demand for cheap labor. Capitalism as it emerged in the US would have been impossible without immigrants, they were rather important for the complete industrial transformation. It has been estimated that industrial wages would have been eleven percent higher than they were in 1910, without European immigrants. Moreover, immigrants brought an amount of skills and knowledge, which were crucial to the growth of some industries. Croats as a traditional maritime nation made considerable contributions to American fishing and boating industry. Another primary occupation was winemaking. The production of wine was an economic foundation for a large number of Croats in their old country and they continued this tradition in their new country. Furthermore, the presence of a large group of unskilled labor attracted further investment. Without immigrants in the US in the first century of American Capitalism, American US work force would have been only seventy percent of what it was by 1940 (Bodnar 1987: xix). The large European agrarian crisis in the nineteenth century had considerable effects in Croatia from 1873 to 1895 and triggered a large emigration outflow. A socio-economic crisis, scarcity of agricultural land and agrarian overpopulation, were a fundamental driving factor of emigration and from the 1880s Croatians began to increasingly participate in overseas emigration. Such a mechanical outflow of the population could be characterized as a population hemorrhaging, with numerous negative implications to the structure of the population and to the demographic, economic and spatial development of the country. Due to agrarian overpopulation there was a lack of jobs and because Croatia was foremost an agriculture society, it was hard to find employment in industry and tertiary sectors or similar activities.

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Great political pressures and national oppression brought about a large number of political refugees. Undoubtedly, America attracted a lot of immigrants because of its new-established democracy and freedom. This was especially true for Croatians, who have lived for years under Habsburg rule. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy pursued the policy of ‘Germanization’ and German became the official language in most parts of present-day Croatia (Prpić 1997: 74). Croatia underwent during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, difficult political and social times. Other than that, the people at home got letters from relatives and friends how wonderful it was in America and they described America as a land where: “people eat meat every day” and “where ‘ordinary’ people do not have to take their hat off when a police officer or a ‘gentleman’ passes by” (ibid: 55). Ante Tresić Pavičić, a famous Croatian politician and writer, crossed the ocean to visit Croatian settlements in America. He noticed a lot of complete Croatian families on board of the ship. He asked them why they were leaving their homes and he always got the same answer: “That is an unnecessary question, poverty. There is no money to pay taxes, kids and old people at home are starving. There are no incomes or any jobs” (Tresić Pavičić 1907: 15). In retrospect on the causes of emigration, accounts of immigrants themselves have to be taken in consideration too. The National Gazette from June 1900 quoted an American immigrant from Croatia:

“We are American citizen and we have the same voting rights as all other American citizens, regardless of our social class… In Austria, on the other hand, they equal your voting right with the amount of tax money you pay… We are Croatians by birth and American citizens… Unfortunately, we do not have Croatian citizenship… If we had our own country, an united and free country, if we had employment opportunities in our own country and if we did not have to spend the best years of our lives in army that is led by foreigners…, the most of us would never have gone to America and not that many young people would have to cross the ocean to find prosperity. It is terrible that so many Croatians have to immigrate to foreign countries every year, but under those circumstances they have no other choice than to leave. Peasants and many other leave because of the bad economic situation caused by the government. Laborers too leave due to similar reasons and educated people have to leave because they do not want to become slaves of such a regime”. (Prpić 1997: 80)

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EMIGRATION FROM CROATIA BETWEEN 1890-1910 1890 1900 1910 1890 - 1910 Croatia and Slavonia 24.913 36.650 150.233 211.796 Dalmatia 13.845 12.499 31.814 58.158 Istria 15.000 40.000 Croatia Total 38.758 49.149 197.047 309.954 Source: M. Lorković, Narod i zemlja Hrvata (Zagreb, 1939), p. 9. J. Lakatoš. Narodna Statistika (Zagreb, 1914), p. 64.

III. 1.4 Immigration after World War I up to the early 1990s

At least thirty thousand Croats managed to leave their homes in 1914, just before the beginning of World War I (Prpić 1997: 185). Most of them were displeased with the Habsburg rule over their native lands and wanted to enter a union with Slovenians, Serbians, Montenegrins and Macedonians and form a united South-Slavic country where all South- Slavic nations would enjoy the same rights. Nevertheless, there were still many Croatians who were against merging into one state with Serbia and hence fought in World War I on Austria- Hungary’s side. After World War I, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of a new state, called the ‘The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, approximately thirty per cent of the pre war émigrés returned to Croatia (ibid: 199). These people returned to their homes believing they were returning to a land of freedom and democracy. Arriving there, they stumbled upon a regime that did not embrace the kind of democracy Europe was striving for and the emigrants who had returned home called upon their relatives in America to stay in America, as the conditions they lived under in this new-formed state were no better than they were under Hapsburg rule. Then in 1924 the Immigration Act was passed and America had closed its gates for millions of people. These laws were highly discriminatory and unjustly and disillusioned millions of Europeans who believed in America’s democracy. These discriminatory laws were applied for over forty years. The era of mass immigration from South-eastern Europe had stopped and after more than three hundred years of immigration, America had closed its gates for newcomers who were hungering for freedom and a better life.

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Most Croatian-Americans were fierce opponents of the new state. Relatives from home reported how chaotic the situation back home was and many Croatian-Americans started to buy houses in America without the intention of ever returning to Europe. Slowly they started to lose their interest for their old country and most of them were quickly assimilating to their new surroundings, knowing they were never going to return to their old country again. These Croatian-Americans started to see themselves as Americans and joined American everyday life. Between the two World Wars Croatia was undergoing tumultuous times and the emigration occurring between 1918 and 1939 was foremost of political nature. During this time period, Croatia experienced a period of political awakening and these years are characterized by chaotic political developments in Europe, the creation of new political frontiers and new European states. Croatia was no exception and it also had to endure turbulent political times. In the areas of Istria, which were annexed by Italy after World War I, Croatian inhabitants employed in public services lost their jobs and this era also stands out because the rise of Croatian politician Stjepan Radić, who was the founder of the ‘Croatian Peasant Party’3 and a strong opponent of the union between Slovenes, Croatians and Serbs. After World War II up until the 1970s, more than 45 000 Croatian immigrants entered America (ibid: 328), significantly different from the immigrants that emigrated before World War I. These émigrés emigrated foremost out of political reasons and the main difference with previous émigrés was the fact that these new émigrés were mostly intellectuals and academics. Among them were also craftsmen and mechanics, but in contrast to their forerunners, there were no illiterates. The fact that they were educated and had a lot of working experience helped them immensely with their fast assimilation, with which most of them had no problems at all. Other than that, during these times, America itself experienced a time of economic prosperity and therefore these people were able to earn enough money to buy houses and automobiles and achieve high living standards. They had no problems learning English and they soon prospered in American professional and everyday life. Since they had run from Communism, they were strongly anti-Communist orientated. They felt offended when they were called immigrants, as they preferred to be called political émigrés

3 After World War I and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, this party garnered significant popular and electoral support for its advocacy of an independent Croatian state, and its opposition to the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (which actually meant joining together the State of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with the Kingdom of Serbia) which the party claimed would be dominated by Serbia (cf. Internet Source)

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(cf. ibid: 329). During the 1970s immigration from Croatia, then a Socialist Republic of the ‘Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ continued intensively. The last wave of Croatian immigrants to the United States was in the last decennium of the twentieth century, during the Croatian War of Independence, which lasted from 1991 to 1995 and resulted in thousands of refugees to overseas countries like America. Most emigrants from Croatia belonged to the group of so-called ‘temporary emigrants’, that is, even before they left, they had the intention to return. However, conditions beyond their control forced them to stay abroad and remain there for the remainder of their lives. Nowadays a lot of elderly Croatian-Americans are returning to their old country, which they left as young people, they are returning to a country they finally can call their country, namely Croatia. Most of them are really old and they are often returning to their native soil to depart this life and to be buried on their native soil.

III. 1.5 The structure of emigration

All new immigrants in America were the ‘so-called’ children of Capitalism. Good times in America led to increased demand for labor, which in turn pulled laborers from areas stricken by poverty. When American unemployment rose, a decrease in arriving immigrants could be marked. During the Panic of 1907-08, a decline in immigration was evident among nearly every group. Croatian emigration, which measured over 22,000 in 1907, dropped to 2,800 during the following year (Bodnar 1987: 2). Nevertheless, between the periods from 1870 to 1920, American industry continued to expand and attract more immigrants. However, emigration from the heart of the ‘old emigration’ began to decline but on the other hand; South Slavs were leaving in a considerable number from Austria-Hungary. Persons hit by extreme poverty and repression made up the emigration of the late 1840s. After the 1850s those departing often came from the ranks of industrial workers. They were stimulated by industrial disputes, low wages and unemployment. A change in the composition of the emigrant flow was noticeable; the small landowner was replaced by lower orders of peasants. The dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary was a considerable source of emigrants, especially after 1880, but not all regions of the empire participated equally in the movement. Croats contributed above average rates to the empire’s emigrant total. Regions with an

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underdeveloped industry and agricultural regions with a wide distribution of land ownership had the largest outflow of emigrants. Lika-Krbava, a region with was characterized by small plots of land, low wages and low industry, was traditionally an area of intense emigration. Emigration rose farther inland as railroads drove deeper into the interior of the Dalmatian coast. The construction of railway lines resulted in a gradual expansion of the area of emigration. Budapest and Vienna did not encourage industrial development in Croatia and therefore thousands of struggling Croats had to leave to survive. Between 1902 and 1911 the largest categories of emigrants among the Croatians were agricultural day laborers and 30 percent of them were small independent farmers, who usually possessed a modest amount of financial resources (cf. ibid: 18). When they arrived in America, they often made a complete change of occupation, most of them found work as manual laborers in factories, in mines, in forestry, and on construction sites. Until the First World War, the intensity of emigration also depended on the various forms in which emigration was organized, either by various economic forces that needed work forces or through family relations between emigrants and inhabitants at home. The waves of emigration also varied in terms of the social structure. Initially, most emigrants were young and unskilled peasants, who were underemployed at home and sent to work abroad to earn money for the family, to repay debts, to build a house, to buy land and so forth. In later stages married men went abroad, who in most cases wanted to return home to his family when he had increased his holdings. Unmarried men who went away often brought native girls whom they then married abroad thus creating emigrant families. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and later on, entire family units were likely to move away or individuals who tried to reconstitute their family group as soon as they had settled in the new country. These young, unmarried individuals and entire families who emigrated created the first territorial cores or colonies of Croatian emigrants in the new country. Up to the Second World War most of the emigration population was predominantly poor and illiterate and after the war, increasing numbers of emigrants were skilled workers or academically trained persons who moved abroad either for a limited period or permanently. Those who changed their status from temporary to permanent emigrants were mainly skilled workers living abroad with their families.

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III. 2 CROATIAN AMERICAN HISTORY

"California Gold - Croatian Wine"

"God has blessed California with gold; Gold has exalted the land far and wide: Its rivers and brooks roll with treasures untold Its rocks conceal gold veins in their inside But from whatever you have had your fill You no longer-derive any joyous thrill ..."

"And you my brothers in Croatian parts, Keep on dancing, sing from your fullest hearts; Our wine is foaming, see it sparkle, my dear Let jokes be made-let everybody cheer, Propose a toast to too many a son Who lacks our wine beneath a foreign sun.....

August Šenoa, 1862

The first Croatian settlements were in and around New Orleans and other towns in Louisiana by the 1830s. Some of them moved up to the Mississippi River and settled in the interior. The first Croatian immigrants in those places included many Dalmatian sailors who jumped ship out of economic reasons, but also because of the rumors about war in Europe, the outbreak of various contagious diseases on ships, bad living conditions on the ships, but also friends, former sailors who were already settled in Louisiana, trying to persuade them to stay (Antić 1992: 121). By the 1850s most Croats in the South had permanently settled with their families. Most men married American women, which contributed to their fast assimilation. Among this group of Mississippi Delta Croats, one has to be mentioned. Luka Jurisich, a pioneer who established the large scale cultivation and marketing of oysters in the area. By the late nineteenth century Croats controlled the oyster business and had established a ‘New Dalmatia’ on the Mississippi. In 1893 a terrible hurricane killed many people and devastated entire communities, but the Croats rebuilt the oyster business and in a few years they continued to dominate it (cf. ibid: 122). In California there were also large Croatian immigration colonies even before the wave of new immigration, but even greater immigration occurred during the period of gold rush. In California they found a temperate climate similar to that of the Adriatic and Mediterranean regions. They loved the warm Californian climate that reminded them of their dear homeland

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they had to leave behind. Thousands of Croats joined the gold rush after 1848 and San Francisco became a permanent home for many Croats. Over the years a lot of them became prosperous as merchants and restaurant-and saloon owners. As the years passed, the Croats in California prospered. The most striking example of Croatian agricultural success in the Far West was ‘New Dalmatia’ in the Pajaro Valley. A group of Dalmatians started growing and selling apples in the domestic and foreign markets. They introduced new methods of packing, drying, and shipping, as well as ways to fight the diseases to which the apples and the apple trees were prone. They were so successful that Jack London described the success and ingenuity of these ‘ragged Slavs’ and how they managed to ‘squeeze out’ the Yankees in his novel Valley of the Moon (1914):

“Do you know what they call Pajaro Valley now? New Dalmatia. We're being squeezed out. We Yankees thought we were smart. Well, the Dalmatians came along and showed they were smarter. They were miserable immigrants, poorer than Job's turkey. First, they worked at day's labor in the fruit harvest. Next they began, buying the apples on the trees. Pretty soon they were renting the orchards on long leases. And now, they are beginning to buy the land. It won't be long before they own the whole valley, and the last American will be gone. Why, those first ragged Slavs in their first little deals with us only made something like two and three thousand per cent profits. And now they're satisfied to make a hundred per cent (…). They have a way with apples. It's almost a gift. They know each tree, its whole history, everything that ever happened to it, its every idiosyncrasy. They can look at a tree in bloom and tell how many boxes of apples it will pack, and not only that; they'll know what the quality and grades of those apples are going to be. Why, they know each individual apple, and they pick it tenderly, with love, never hurting it, and pack and ship it tenderly and with love. These Adriatic Slavs are long-headed in business. Not only they grow apples, but also they can sell apples. That's their way; while our kind let the crops rot knee-deep under the trees”. (Internet Source)

Two other Californian industries where Croats were quite successful were fishing and mining. Many hundreds became fishermen along the Pacific as they had been along the Dalmatian coast. A major place of settlement was San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, and still the largest Croatian fishing center in America. The Croats also settled in all the major mining districts in the US. A number worked in the California gold fields, but they were less successful in gold mining than in agriculture and fishing (cf. ibid: 125). In the 1890s Croats from all regions began to arrive in massive numbers together with other immigrants from Southeast Europe, as part of the so-called ‘New Immigration’. During this wave the largest Croatian communities were formed. Many of them started to work in coalmines. The largest Croatian mining settlement between 1881 and 1914 was in the copper fields of upper Michigan, centered in the town of Calumet.

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By 1880 most Croatian immigrants were settled in the West. Quite a few were well established in business and from time to time they were subjects to attacks from the already settled Americans who claimed that the secret of Croatian economic success was their clannishness. In reality, for Croats as for other ethnic groups, success, when it came, was the result of ambition, luck and years of hard work. After 1880 Croatian immigration changed. Firstly, Dalmatians no longer made up the majority of Croatian immigration, immigrants started to arrive from interior regions as well, like Inner-Croatia and Slavonia. Secondly, seafarers and fishermen gave way to a large number of peasants and finally, most immigrants started to settle in the East and Midwest, in urban and industrial areas. More Croats came to live in industrial Pennsylvania than in any other state, most of them in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County. Other than coalmines, they worked in steel mill, iron foundries, and factories, in building construction or on the railroads. In addition to Pittsburgh, there were large Croatian settlements in Cleveland, Ohio. There was also a considerable number of Croats living in New York, but for most of them, New York was merely a station on their way further into the US. This city became the most important center from which they moved into various parts of the US. Beginning in the 1890s Chicago grew to be the largest Croatian settlement in the US after Pittsburgh.

A young Croatian boy at an oyster farm in Louisiana

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III. 2.1 Social associations

Like other European immigrant groups, Croatian immigrants tended to maintain strong connections to one another since the day they left their home country, up to their arrival in the US and throughout all the years they spent abroad, which mostly lasted a lifetime. A feeling of solidarity among the immigrants and a strong feeling of sharing the same ethnic heritage and of course the fact that they shared similar occupations, had the same social status and religion, resulted in the creation of numerous mutual associations for charity, sports, politics and other purposes in their new country. Three institutions were especially important to the early Croatian immigrants, namely the fraternal organization, the saloon and the boarding house. The fraternal organization was likely to be a burial and sick-benefit society, like the first Croatian-Serbian fraternal organization founded in California, the Slavonian Illyrian Mutual Benevolent Society in San Francisco, in 1857, which still exists today and the United Slavonian Benevolent Association, founded in New Orleans in 1874. These first two organizations had both Serbian and Croatian members, but because of rising nationalism and constant tensions between the two nations, these organizations eventually became predominantly Croatian. These organizations had social functions as well, it was a place where the immigrants met and helped each other. Labor unions and other such institutions of the host society had achieved only a limited influence, and social service and government programs did not exist and so the immigrants had to rely on mutual assistance in cases of unemployment, widowhood, burial and even social activities. The earliest fraternal organizations kept close connections with the old country and involved leaders from the ranks of artisans and the educated in the old country. The cooperative tradition was deeply rooted in the experience of most peasant households and it served newcomers well in deciding how to confront the unpredictability of the new economic order in the new country. The first fraternal lodges rested on the cooperative traditions of the Croatian ‘zadruga’ or communal family structure. Even for those excluded from the joint communal family, they could rely on the ‘molba’, a tradition where thirty or forty friends gathered to assist in the harvest in return for food and drink. The coastal areas of Dalmatia had ‘Bratoustine’, fraternal brotherhoods from the thirteenth century, which provided assistance to families in time of illness or death (Bodnar 1987: 122). Most early immigrant fraternal associations were based on village and regional ties as they had been in the homeland. The meetings of lodges included gatherings like picnics, dances and other

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forms of social interaction. In addition, they also assisted newcomers in purchasing homes and rendered support at the workplace. Local lodges were concerned with the daily concerns of their members. Fraternal organizations also worked hard to sustain ethnic identity among the young people in immigrant groups. They also linked sports with ethnic identity in order to retain ties to the second generation. Saloons were another important institution for immigrants. It was a very popular informal meeting point. The saloon was a place where the immigrants could meet with friends, acquire the latest news from the homeland and read newspapers in their own language and even do banking. The saloon owner often acted as a banker and advised his clients on political and legal matters, he collected parish contributions, helped his patron to find employment and many other tasks. The third common institution was the boarding house or a modified form of it, the cooperative household. Most immigrants were unmarried men or men who had left their family behind. For these men, the boarding house was a surrogate home, where he could eat and sleep and whose members had the same background and spoke the same language. Boarding houses were often led by women whose husbands had saved enough money to open such a house with extra rooms to take in boarders. These women took care of all the boarders. These households were often an extension of the family tradition at home. In Croatian family tradition, decisions were usually made in the context of a family. Families were the focus of life and all areas of life, in religion, in work, in love, all decisions were made primarily in family terms. In Croatia, large ‘zadrugas’ were commonplace. Either one son, mostly the youngest, remained with his parents, and the other children received a settlement and moved away, or several sons stayed in the original household with their own families. ‘Zadrugas’ rested on the assumption that an abundance of manpower could strengthen the economic power of the whole family. In America they continued this tradition and often more men lived in one household and divided chores and expenses together. In most cases the household consisted of men of the same village who banded together to survive in a strange land until they had saved enough money to return home or to send for their family. Unlike the skilled fishermen and seafarers who came at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the immigrants who came at the end of the nineteenth century were foremost unskilled laborers, who ranked among the lowest paid of all immigrants and their unemployment rate was very high. A great number of them had a very hard daily routine, which consisted mainly of working and sleeping. That was the harsh reality of many young immigrants in America. Moreover, Croatians were even a minority group among other

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immigrants and many of them could not speak English, which made them the object of discrimination. They were often lumped together with other Slavs and were called derogatory terms like ‘Hunkies’ or ‘Dumb Polacks’. All these factors led to a great sense of insecurity and therefore they found security and comfort between members of their own ethnic group. Therefore, all these social organizations did not only help the immigrants to survive but were very significant in all areas of their lives. These organizations gave them the opportunity to meet and assist each other, to nurture cultural traditions and to work together on improving their living standards in a foreign country. How many immigrants lost their live working under such conditions, we can only guess, but with the coming of these organizations they became more than just numbers and statistics. Even today numerous social associations are still in existence. They do not have the same purpose as the ones founded at the early beginnings of Croatian immigration, but the essence is still there, namely they function as a meeting point for social, cultural and political gatherings. Picnics, social events, concerts, receptions, weddings, all kind of festivals are organized and held in such social associations. Those associations can be found in most places where Croatian-Americans are housed. Here they come together for some entertainment and relaxation, they meet friends and relatives, and they drink and dance, while listening to Croatian folk music. These societies have flourished during the last couple of decades, since second-and third generation Croatian-Americans have started to show increasing interest in their Croatian heritage and that distant overseas country, of which most of them have only heard about and have never visited.

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III. 2.2 Cultural life and Religion

The Immigrant Mother Raises Her Son for Industry, 1938 Maximilian (Maxo) Vanka4

Croatian Americans have strong feelings about their homeland and throughout Croatian emigration history in America they frequently demonstrated their devotion to their old country openly. From the early beginnings of Croatian emigration, Croatian immigrants felt that it was very important to cherish their tradition, customs and beliefs. It was of immense importance for them to preserve their ethnic-and cultural heritage. Their aim was to establish and restore various forms of cultural life, which they had left behind in Croatia. They felt a strong need to keep their culture alive and through traditional Croatian folk music and dances they found a way to keep the traditions alive and flourishing in their communities. They formed bands and organized dances and concerts. The earliest musical ensemble was ‘Zora’, which means ‘Dawn’, founded in 1902 in Chicago (Holjevac 1968: 110). The instrument most closely connected with Croatian music tradition is the mandolin-shaped ‘tamburitza’, which the immigrants introduced in America. It became one of the most popular Croatian national instruments in the US, not only among Croatian immigrants but also among other immigrants. Among the earliest Croatian musical ensembles also a very important role plays the one founded in Pittsburgh, ‘Javor’ (Maple), which performed for the first time in 1906 in front of

4 The walls and ceilings of St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church (established in 1894) are decorated with paintings by Maxo Vanka, they were Vanka’s gift to the US. The murals tell the story of Croatian peasants who left their native farms lands to seek a better life in industrial America. Today they stand as a moving tribute to the Croatian immigrant and all immigrants in the US. This particular mural is based on a mining accident in Johnston (Internet Source)

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a broad audience. The number of members constantly increased with the coming of more Croatian immigrants in Pittsburgh and this resulted in the establishment of a Croatian cultural center under the same name. This meant a great deal for Croatian immigrants and children of Croatian immigrants successfully carried its activities on. The real strength of these Croatian musical groups lies in the devotion of Croatian immigrants to hold on to their cultural roots, their language and the need to maintain a strong tie with the old homeland. Even more important than the perseverance of old traditions and customs, was their faith. Croatians are devout Roman Catholics and among the hardships of American capitalism the Roman Catholic religion was their only untouched privilege and a sign of their identity since birth. Their religion was an integral part of their existence. In spite of this, relatively few Croatian priests were among the first Croatian immigrants in America and because of this the Croats were slower than other Slavs to find their parishes. The first Croatian priests were true spiritual leaders and missionaries. They traveled from place to place, depending on where their people settled. They preached parish missions and organized religious, cultural and benevolent societies. They had to take on leadership roles, since they were often the only educated members in the Croatian colonies. They were the first to learn English and served often as interpreters. Nevertheless, disagreements between the priest and his parishioners appeared quite often. This was mainly because the priests often did not understand the position of the Church in America, given that the Church and State were separate institutions in America, which was not the case back in their mother country and which caused some opposite perspectives between the cleric and his churchgoers (cf. Prpić 1997: 102). That is why their first ethnic parish was established when well over 100,000 Croats were already in America, it was located in the city of Allegheny and established in 1894 (ibid: 141). Some parishes eventually became elaborate cultural centers with schools and recreational facilities where not only the Catholic faith was nurtured but it was also a place where the Croatian language and customs were preserved.

III. 2.3 Politics

Politics among Croatian Americans have been divided between concern for Croatia and the involvement in American democracy. Early immigrants were more focused on political happenings in the homeland and this lasted for many generations. This interest has not deterred Croatian immigrants from acquiring American citizenship, performing military

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service and voting, but they had very strong feelings about their homeland and demonstrated this openly and frequently. Croatian organizations were formed for political goals abroad and they ranged from conservative to radical. Their interest dates from the very beginnings, during the years of the Great Migration, the early 1900s, when organizations like the National Croatian Society (NCS) and the Croatian League of Illinois contributed funds to help in the struggle against the Austria-Hungary rule over Croatia. In 1912 a new political group, named the Croatian National Alliance, was founded (Holjevac 1968: 128). They wanted complete Croatian independence from the Habsburg monarchy and to establish a new federal South Slave state, which included the Serbs and Slovenes. However, when World War I began, most Croatian Americans remained loyal to the Hapsburgs in spite of their opposing Habsburg rule over Croatia. Yet, as the war continued and it seemed that Austria-Hungary would be defeated, Croatian Americans moved rather towards the idea of the formation of a new South Slav nation. Hence, in 1915 the South Slavic National Council of Chicago was founded, with its main goal to advocate the creation of a South Slav or Yugoslav state (cf. ibid: 130). When the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed after World War I, Croatian Americans were dissatisfied with the ethnic representation in the government, which consisted mostly of Serbs. As a result, more Croats immigrated to the US and this would have continued was it not for American immigration restriction starting in 1924. Anti-Yugoslav orientation continued to grow, but as time passed, they became less involved and in the 1930s they were too preoccupied with surviving the Great Depression. During World War II Croatian Americans found themselves in a very difficult position, because the ‘Independent State of Croatia’5 declared war to the United States. The US decision to support the partisan movement of Marshal Tito persuaded many Croats in the US to support the partisans. Consequently, Croatian Americans actively took part in Americans Army. However, after the installment of Communism in the new post-war Yugoslavia, reports and rumors of mass killings of Croats by Tito’s command changed their views and started to express strong anti-Communist sentiments. Croatian Americans united in opposition to the regime. Most immigrants to America at that time included many political refugees, who were expelled from Yugoslavia. During the last war in the 1990s, the Croatian American community showed incredible unity. The majority strongly supported a sovereign and independent Croatia and expressed

5 ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (NDH) was a puppet state of the Axis powers, controlled by the governing fascist movement (Ustaše) (Internet Source)

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deep patriotism during the war. Many of them rushed to aid their distant old homeland with letter campaigns and fund raising events to support the creation of a new government, although many of them even never have been in Croatia. They urged the American government to recognize the new Republic. Furthermore, they raised funds for war relief, health care and political action groups. The establishment of a new free and democratic Croatian state brought about changes in the presence of Croatian Americans. They were finally equalized to other ethnic groups and were given the chance to give expression to their ethnic identity, their history, language and culture. The creation of a sovereign Croatia gave them national pride. However, although interest in the homeland and its politics continues, the intensity of this interest has gradually diminished and today Croatian Americans are an integral part of American life, devoted to America as their home country.

III. 2.4 The Press

In the live and consciousness of the immigrants in far overseas countries, their emigrant press as a medium of public information has exercised a decisive influence and were of immense importance. They reported changes concerning immigration laws and regulations, they informed the immigrants about their rights and obligations, carried employment opportunities and kept up with major events from the home country. Moreover, they were a rich source of art, music and literature produced by immigrants to maintain the cultural heritage of the ‘old country’. Most immigrants could not speak, read or write English, thus immigrants newspapers were usually published in their native tongue. One of the major purposes of immigrant newspapers was also language retention, since they allowed immigrants to read in their native language on a regular basis. Today newspapers and other periodicals published by immigrants in their mother tongue in the nineteenth and twentieth century, provide one of the best historical sources for the study of the history of American immigration. The founding of numerous social associations was followed by the initiation of various newspapers. There were many obstacles before the launching of these newspapers could be realized. Many Croatian immigrants were illiterate and thus it was difficult for the editors to gain widespread support for this cause. Consequently, these newspapers were high in price, because they got no financial support whatsoever but had to finance themselves. The absence

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of education among immigrants also contributed to the fact that no new editors and journalists could be hired, because there were almost none. Therefore most of the time it was one person, who was at the same time the owner, the editor and the author of most articles, who often started newspapers. Thus, many early attempts to start an immigrant press were short-lived, although some have never disappeared from the American scene. This did not improve until the beginning of the twentieth century, when more intellectuals decided to immigrate to America. Coming from a country where no press freedom existed, Croatians, like many other ethnic groups, found in America the opportunity to set up their first free uncensored Croatian press. This is one of the reasons why most newspapers were focused on political events in the home country rather than on the lives of the immigrants in America. The immigrants felt that they could influence the political events back home through their immigrant press. These newspapers were often so politically engaged that they were often prohibited in the home country. This went so far that during Communist regime the possession of immigrant newspapers was a felony (cf. Antić 1992: 236). The first Croatian immigrant newspaper in the United States was published in 1859 in San Francisco, initiated by Velimir Chielovic under the name of L’ecco della patria, followed by Slavensla citronika in 1869 and Slavjanksa Sloga in 1885 (ibid). Due to the fact that these first newspapers were very short-lived, there is very limited information available about them. The first newspaper we know more about was initiated by Juraj Skrivanić in 1891 and was named Napredak. It was dedicated to the Croatian immigrant worker in the United States, and its main focus was to draw attention to Croatian history and culture and its people in and outside the home country and introduce them to the American public. In 1892, Hrvatska Zora and Chicago were published in Chicago, the latter dealing mainly with the assimilation of Croats in American society. Both were short-lived. In 1893 Dalmatinska zora was initiated in San Francisco and it was the opposite of Chicago, namely its concerns were to emphasize the contribution of Croatian immigrants in California and to propagate devotion to the homeland. Similar intentions had Pittsburgh’s first Croatian weekly Danica, with its main objective to promote Croatian patriotism and it appealed to the Croatian immigrants to unite and oppose against Habsburg rule (cf. ibid: 237). The most popular and one of the most important newspapers among early immigrants was Narodni List, the first Croatian daily in the United States, published around 1895 in New York. In 1898 Narodni List was taken over by Frank Zotti, one of the most interesting as well as one of the most controversial characters to emerge in the history of Croatian immigration.

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From street cleanser, to banker, shift carder and ship owner, he eventually became the richest Croatian immigrant of the time. In the end he died as a poor man. He was often attacked in immigrant papers for fraud and corruption, but others praised him and emphasized his good deeds for Croatian immigrants in America (cf. ibid). After he experienced his greatest financial setback, he paid great attention to Narodni List. Zotti’s tabloid featured gutsy political reporting, melodramatic fiction and popular peasant poetry, which made it accessible to the wide immigrant audience. It also took a stand against the exploitation of Croatian immigrants in American capitalism. In addition, it advocated Croatia’s freedom from Habsburg rule and it greatly opposed the standpoint of pro-Yugoslavian papers in America. Further, it stated that its main objective was to serve the interests of Croats in America. The paper was “foreign in language only” and “American in spirit” and this was sympathetic to most Americans. By 1915 it was a daily with 24, 000 subscribers (ibid). Another newspaper worth mentioning is Zajedničar (Unity), which dates back to 1904 and is still published. It is published in both English and Croatian, since most Croatian Americans cannot read Croatian. Most immigrant newspapers have disappeared for one reason or another, with the exception of a few. These newspapers, which have circulated from as early as 1859, illustrate the history of the Croatian immigrant and his accomplishments in America through their articles and news. These newspapers are a bridge between the immigrants and his children and their old homeland. The establishment of an independent state in 1991 would perhaps not have been possible without the efforts of devoted Croatian American immigrants in, among others, the field of journalism.

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IV LITERARY APPROACH

This chapter deals with the approach taken by Croatian immigrant writers toward their new homeland and their ethnic identity through literature. Literature attempts to be a mirror of the world we are living in and thus provides an understanding of many things encountered in our lives. Literature is a powerful force in the construction of images of ethnic identities. Literature makes it possible to investigate the cultural, social and historical variables that influence the development of identity in general. Such an investigation is crucial to the ethnic narratives explored in this study. When we talk about Croatian literature, usually the literature which has been developing in the home country is meant. Another Croatian literature exists, namely that of the immigrant writers. The immigrant newspapers, periodicals and almanacs, which were developing outside the home country, were for a long time the only news Croats abroad had of their communities. They not only provided the immigrant with news from the old country, but in addition they were also a rich source of literature. It did not take long for its publications to include literary works of its fellow countrymen. This led to a new development in literary production. The almanacs, filled with poetry, written in the ever-present decameter, were the wellspring for the start of a genre we call Croatian American literature. These literary beginnings were often very hard for immigrant writers, since they had no financial support and were largely deprived of an audience, given the fact that most immigrants were illiterate at that time. Nevertheless, they continued to publish.

IV. 1 ETHNIC AND MINORITY LITERATURE

In the history of American literature, the works of women and minority groups have always been treated in a similar way. The mainstream American literature was adjusted towards the ‘White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-Male’; everything that was not adjusted towards these male- orientated, Anglo-Saxon standards was excluded from the literary canon. Since the 1950s a growing number of so-called ‘ethnic’ writers have been making their mark on American mainstream literature. In the last decades the terrain of American ethnic literatures has expanded significantly. Ethnic identity, which has been lost by immigrant children, is taken up again, re-evaluated and to a degree re-established by their children. As

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early as 1938, Marcus Lee Hansen has discussed this phenomenon in his popular essay The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant. He claimed that ethnicity would inevitably erode with each succeeding generation. In his essay he claimed that “what the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember” (Sollors 1996: 206). Second generation children find themselves in a difficult position, namely “whereas in the schoolroom they were too foreign, at home they were too American” and they “wanted to forget and lose as many of the evidences of foreign origin as they could shuffle off” (ibid: 204). By contrast, the third generation shows a “curiosity, which is projected back into the family beginnings” (ibid: 207). This search for one’s ethnic identity reflects itself in the literary canon and led to a new development in ethnic writing as well as in literary production. Various ethnic groups, like Poles, Italians, Porto Ricans and Croats, successfully addressed their ethnic identity, how they viewed themselves and even more, how they placed themselves within American society and what it meant for them to be an ‘ethnic’. This change became an important theme in literary writings. The resurgence of ethnic awareness in literary writings became more evident after World War II, when Americans deprived from their basic civil rights stood up against the Anglo-American standards. Prominent American scholars like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti supported this cause and thanks to some Jewish-American novelists like Philip Roth, Mary Antin, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, the American attitude towards ethnics considerably changed for the better. These literary geniuses turned the Jewish ethnic experience into an American experience and thus made it possible for other ethnic groups as well to do so. Consequently, ethnic and minority literature became a part of the American literary corpus. Ethnic literature is a transient phenomenon and is undeniably heterogeneous. It has a diversity of thematic concerns and histories. Each immigrant group passes through a chronological sequence of generations, each with special features. Common to all first- generation groups before World War I was the fact that most of them were peasants and they intended to stay only temporarily in America. They wanted to return to their villages or small towns and return to their original agricultural way of life. Most migrants had little schooling and were employed in the industrial business. Missing in immigrant groups were the creative talents in literature and also missing was the audience who would appreciate this kind of writing. That is why the bulk of immigrant literary works springing from the first generation immigrants’ experience was of low quality from an aesthetic point of view. Most immigrant prose writing is to some extent autobiographical and full of odes to the old country and the traditional way of living. The early ethnic writers complained about the harshness of life and

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the problems they encountered in America. The second-generation immigrant writers tried to distance themselves from their ethnic identity and wanted to be a part of the mainstream American literature. Most of them have forgotten to use the language of the old country and show no interest whatsoever in its tradition and customs. Following third and fourth generations, as already mentioned above, try to pick up their ethnic heritage and ethnicity becomes an issue again. They actively try to seek to learn the language of their ancestors and insist on using the language of the old country, or at least a nostalgic and mostly cosmetic use of random words or phrases throughout their English, just as a sign of their renewed and re- found ethnic identity. The presence of ethnic writers has in particular in the last decades met with growing interest, due to the fact that many books were realized on screen. The release of films brought the existence of ethnic writing and culture to the attention of audiences in many foreign countries. This has made it possible to popularize ethnic literature among a broader audience and to show the diversity and beauty among various ethnic cultures. Thus, nowadays ethnic and minority literature are an unavoidable component of today’s mainstream American literature and have made it possible to learn about different cultures, nations and languages and among other about European American history. Nevertheless, some European American ethnic groups remain almost invisible, with a few exceptions; this is the case with Croatian- American literature.

VI. 1.1 New Ethnicity versus Symbolic Ethnicity

In the late 1970s new theories of ethnicity, most often referred to as ‘new ethnicity’ developed, which emphasized the ethnic sentiments of white European Americans. This movement paved the way for the ‘multiculturalism’ of the late 1980s. The revival of European American ethnicity followed the black protest movement of the 1960s, where American blacks began to refer to themselves in ethnic rather than racial terms, such as ‘African- American’. Their success encouraged many American white ethnic groups, specifically Catholic ‘ethnics’, to renew their ethnic memories and re-establish some of their distinctive cultural traits, which their forefathers had abandoned in order to become ‘white ethnics’. To define the social theory of ‘new ethnicity’, we have to go back to the ‘melting pot’ theory, discussed in Chapter II. The melting pot anticipated that all immigrants, independent of origin and culture, would eventually become Americans, which had been formulated in the

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theory known as ‘assimilation’. The ethos of assimilation expected the minority to adapt to the larger Anglo-Saxon society. Various European immigrant groups, such as Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles and many others, gradually became ‘white ethnics’. The restrictive immigration law of 1924 marks the beginnings of a redrawing of racial lines. America had closed its gates in order to reduce the number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants and to exclude the immigration of Asians. However, by 1924 already large numbers of South-East European immigrants had come to America and millions of immigrants had settled in the United States. America was confronted with questions like what does it mean to be an American? Who are the real Americans? In the decades to follow theories of ethnicity would be challenged again and questions about defining ethnicity would be raised. What is the role of ethnicity and ethnic identity for American ‘ethnics’? How is ethnicity to be understood? The ‘new ethnicity’ discussion was introduced with Michael Novak’s significant work Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in American Life. Novak’s book points to a revived ethnic consciousness, and an emergence of a new political and intellectual movement in the 1970s. This ‘new ethnicity’, the term under which Novak conceptualized this renewed ethnic affirmation, was a movement of self-knowledge on the part of individuals of the third and fourth generation of southern and eastern European immigrants in America. According to Novak, these ethnic groups grew tired of the melting pot ideology that was prevailing in American society during most of the twentieth century. They were discontented because their identities were not “mirrored, objectified, rendered accessible to intelligent criticism and confirmed” in American social structures and institutions, education, and literature (Novak 1996: 352). It was a movement, Novak explains, imbued with feelings of new possibilities and creativity, of hope and liberation. Novak states that, the new ethnicity “recognizes that every human being is ‘rooted’” (ibid: xviii). It is “a form of historical consciousness”. “Who are you? What history do you come from? These are its questions” (ibid: xlii). The same questions have in fact informed Novak’s individual process of ethnic identification. Novak’s says that his background and cultural origin, a Slovak and a Catholic, and lower middle class, seems to become more important for his understanding of himself as an ethnic. Novak’s work about ethnic revival has been severely criticized. One of its critiques has been Herbert J. Gans, an American sociologist, author of the essay Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America (1979). In the essay he gives voice to his distress with these new ethnicity theories and the fact that America was undergoing a renewed interest in ethnicity. He argues that he doubts the fact that an ethnic revival is in fact

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happening, because he has seen no evidence of it, and that acculturation and assimilation are still continuing and if anything is happening it is “a new kind of ethnic involvement among third-and fourth-generation European ethnics that emphasizes a concern with identity” (Sollors 1996: 425). He suggests the term ‘Symbolic Ethnicity’ for this new form of ethnic behavior, to distinguish it from how ethnic identity is viewed by previous generations. Gans states that the third generation “has grown up without assigned roles or groups that anchor ethnicity, so that identity can no longer be taken for granted” (ibid: 435). Consequently, third generation immigrants are less interested in ethnic organizations or cultural practices, given the degree of assimilation among them. Instead, they are looking for nostalgic ways of expressing their ethnic affiliations and this form of ethnicity involves freedom of choice. So, one of the author’s main arguments is that today’s young ethnics are finding new ways of feeling and being ethnics (cf. ibid: 432). Thus, when ethnicity loses its instrumental function in people’s lives, their ethnic behavior often includes the use of symbols. However, symbols used by third-generation immigrants differ greatly from symbols used by first-and second- generation immigrants. Gans’s study suggests that the meaning of ethnicity differs from one generation to the next and ethnic affiliations have different meanings for different generations. Most important is that today, American born have a freedom of choice; they can choose to view themselves as completely American or to retain some of their ethnic heritage. Most of them, in spite of the fact that they are completely assimilated and fused into a single European American mass, remain to some degree culturally ethnic.

IV. 1.2 Croatian-American authors in American Literature

The first poet to publish his collection of poetry in 1900 was Josip Marohnić, who remains up to this day one of the most influential Croatian emigrants in the United States and is called “the founder of popular Croatian literature”. His first book of Croatian poetry in America is called Amerikanke (Prpić 1997: 257). Other literary forms like prose fiction also soon started to develop. Among these were S.R. Danevski’s Tales in 1911, a collection of short stories where the life of Croats were portrayed in both their old and their new homeland, with both worlds rich in elements characteristic of the old country, like traditional folklore and songs (cf. ibid: 258).

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After World War I the second generation of Croatian immigrants had already embraced the English language as its own and the literary production during this period is characterized by its realistic approach towards the process of integration of immigrants in the mainstream society, a process that unfortunately often failed. Collected Stories from American Croatian Life by Stjepko Brozović typically represents the production of this time after the war (cf. ibid: 260). Gabro Karabin, born of Croatian parents, was another promising young author, whose novel Honorable Escape was published in Sribner’s Magazine in 1937. His father and brother were killed in industrial accidents and he was so aghast by this that he decided to leave the industrial business. The rest of his life he would feel like a traitor as he managed to escape the exploited world of factory workers, but unfortunately had to leave his countrymen behind. By disassociating himself from his community of origin, he describes a growing sense of loneliness and fear coupled of being alien to both worlds in his novel. He manages to portray vividly the life of immigrants working in the steel mills, of which he had been a part for so long, and their attempts of joining the American way of life, but still trying to hold on to traditional Croatian values. His work shows the problems concerning his generation, how to adapt to the American lifestyle, to which they actually belong, without losing their sense of belonging to the tradition, the language and the way of life their ancestors brought with them from the old country (cf. ibid: 261). Another author, who takes a strong interest in ethnic writing, is American born Edward Ifkovich. His 1980 published novel Anna Marinkovich tells the story of a young girl from a struggling Croatian immigrant family during the bleak Depression of the 1930s in America. The focus of the novel is on the internal struggle of a little American girl between two worlds, the romanticized old country of her parents and the harsh reality in industrialized America. This novel can be characterized as one of the most complete examples of ethnic prose fiction in Croatian American literature and therefore I have chosen this text to discuss how ethnicity and ethnic identity are displayed through ethnic texts. Referring to these authors as Croatian-American, instead of only Croatian or only American, I explore their efforts at self-definition as well as their coming to terms with their ethnic identity as is represented in their fiction.

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IV. 1.3 Ethnic writers, Exile writers and Globalists

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge . . . that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1982)

The approach taken by the immigrant writers toward their new homeland and their ethnic identity can be seen best through their literary achievements. They not only reflect their own perception of the new country in their writings, but are also often a representation of the whole immigrant society and their view towards their new surroundings. The immigrant is either eager to blend into the crowd and leave their old identity behind or he is reluctant to join the often proposed ‘melting-pot’ and expresses the need to preserve the traditions and language of the old country and cluster together with people from his own country or region. There are various ways in which immigrant writers treat their ethnic identity and in order to analyze ethnic identity in Croatian American literature, it is necessary to take a look at immigrant writers from various angles. According to Kalogjera, immigrant writers can be grouped into three categories, namely ethnic writers, exile writers and globalists. The authors I have discussed so far in the previous section of this chapter fall in the category of ‘ethnic writers’ (Kalogjera 2003: 5). They are ethnic, because their interest lies in the in the problems arising from two clashing cultures. Their focus is on how they used to live in the old country and how they are trying to adapt and assimilate in the new and all the difficulties arising during this process. Their inspiration and themes evolve around their own ethnic group. The second group, the exile writers, ignores the fact that they live and work in a new country and their thematic focus stays with the largely political issues of their native land. Exile writers are mostly intellectuals and already established writers, who have fled from their country from religious persecution or political oppression and with the intention of returning one day. The main difference between an ethnic and an exile writer is that ethnic writers are in fact American writers of, in this case, Croatian descent. They are part of the American literary corpus. Exile writers are Croatian writers who belong to the Croatian literary corpus. Ethnic writers write in English and they consider America as their home, Croatia is nothing more than the country of their predecessors, they themselves have no intention whatsoever of returning. Their interest lies foremost in complex social issues concerning the immigrant

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society to which they, or their ancestors once belonged, but without any political connotations in their work (cf. ibid: 7). Most exile writers came to America after World War II, among who were Ivan Meštrović6, Antun Bonifačić and Bogdan Radica. Those are just a few, but since this is not the main focus of my thesis, I will not elaborate on their literary achievements. I will only mention that although these people were far away from their homeland and often their beloved ones, they made an enormous contribution to Croatian literature and its cultural heritage. Finally, Kalogjera (2003) prefers to call the third group of immigrant writers, globalists. They are part of Croatian as well as of American and of world literature. They are cosmopolitan intellects, their themes are universal and they do not have a minority status anymore in the new country (cf. ibid: 7). Josip Novakovich and Vladimir Peter Goss are part of this third group. Josip Novakovich came as a twenty-year-old from Croatia to America. He has found his way to the very top of contemporary American writing. He is the author of several collections of short stories, which will be discussed in my thesis, as well as Vladimir Peter Goss’s short story collection From Both Sides of the Ocean and his novel Dayton.

IV. 2 EDWARD IFKOVICH IN SEARCH FOR HIS ROOTS

Edward Ifkovich was born as the in a little village called North Branford, in Connecticut. His father was also born in Branford, as the son of Croatian immigrants. Edwards’s grandfather came to America as an immigrant from Croatia around the year 1907. His grandmother came around the same time, they both headed to America in search of a better life. During the 1950s there were approximately around sixty Croatian families in Branford who tried to nurture their language, their customs and their ethnic identity by socializing together in the church and the Croatian Fraternal Organization. Ifkovich’s grandfather was a very traditional man; he considered the family to be the single most important institution in life and believed in the old concept of ‘zadruga’. He intended a small piece of land for each of his children, under the condition that they would all stay and live together in a small community. Thus, Edward Ifkovic spent his childhood in that village, which was split in two parts. On one side, there were the Anglo-Saxon protestants and on the other side the ‘newcomers’, mainly Poles and Italians. Later Ifkovich moved with his family to the part of

6 Ivan Meštrović (1883-1962) was above everything a sculptor, but he was also a literary and many of his poems, stories, aphorisms and memoirs were published

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the village where the ‘old’ Americans lived and there they were the only Croatian family in that part of Branford village. Their fellow-citizens called them, because they knew no better, Polacks, and since they lived on a small hill, they called them “those Polacks on the Hill” (Kalogjera 1997: 44). Edward Ifkovich had an ordinary childhood, he was a good student and he liked to read. Since his family was a member of the Croatian Fraternal Organization, he anticipated with joy meetings with other Croatians, where they talked about Croatia, where they taught Croatian, where they celebrated Croatian holidays and where they cherished the Croatian traditions. In the 1950s when U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy began his anti-Communism witch hunt, he accused the Slavs to be pro-Communist and thus the Croatian community was under pressure to stop with their social activities, which had very negative effects on the maintenance of the Croatian identity in America. Slavs had to be Americanized, if they wanted to show the government that they were loyal American citizen. This was the reason why Ifkovich lost track of his Croatian roots during his growing up and was raised in the American spirit. He now reminisces that when he told somebody that he was Croatian, many Americans did not know what that meant (cf. ibid: 45). Edward Ifkovich is part of the third generation European immigrant, who wants to go back to his roots, to explore where his ancestors came from, in search of his ethnic identity. He was determined to find out more about his Croatian heritage and he remembered his grandfather’s words: “You need to be whole, and your children. Some day, you gotta go there-to see” (ibid: 47). Coming in Croatia in 1971, he felt like nothing more than an American tourist and then during a visit to the American consulate, he stumbled upon an old lady, who told him in broken English, that she had lived in America for 47 years, her story was a typical immigrant story, her arrival on Ellis Island, the hard work in American mines and factories, it was a story about a women torn between two homes. Then he asked her why she had returned and she said that: “I am an American citizen. But age is a funny thing. The older I get the more I think of my childhood and my parents. It all comes back. I find myself a girl in my min” (ibid: 48). The old lady had told him that she was proud that she was part of the creation of a ‘new’ American generation, that she had left her family behind in America, but now that the time had come to die, she wanted to be buried alongside with her parents and her childhood friends, she felt that the ‘old’ country had called her to return. The old lady with her story is one of many immigrants, who are torn between two countries, often not knowing where they belong and Edward Ifkovich, as a third-generation

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immigrant child, remembered what his grandfather had told him and understood that he had to go back to be whole, he now knew what his grandfather had meant.

IV. 2.1 Anna Marinkovich

Edward Ifkovich’s Anna Marinkovich (1980) developed as a result of family stories, which he had to listen to during his growing up. His novel is mostly based on the author’s childhood memories and in order to create the Marinkovich’s, he shared his parent and grandparent’s immigrants experience to create a homogeneous and authentic Croatian-American family (Kalogjera 1997: 77). The novel is an elegiac story about a Croatian-American young girl, Anna, growing up in a rural area near New Haven. The story is set in the dreary period of the Great Depression. The novel can be called ethnic prose fiction, because it describes the harsh and confusing experience of first-and second generation Croats in an industrial America. The third-person point of view makes the reader identify with Anna, from whose perspective the story is told. The story evolves around a series of agonizing deaths in the Marinkovich family and their close friends. The story starts when Anna’s little brother is burned in boiling water. This is only an introduction in a series of tragic events during the whole course of the novel. The novel shows a realistic view of the ruthless life immigrants often experienced in America. Ifkovich manages to describe very detailed the suffering and pain, which immigrants had to go through in order to assimilate in an already established American society, which includes the loss of the mother tongue, the loss of their customs and traditions, and the roughness the immigrant family had to endure during the acculturation process in a new social environment. In spite of Anna’s little brother death, the beginning of the novel is characterized with the hopes the family has for a better future. Then, slowly as the novel progresses the characters start to change, the self-confidence and the joyfulness the characters feel in awaiting a better future, starts to fade. The mother, with her conservativeness and her religious intolerance, is responsible for a lot of misfortunes the family encounters. On the other hand, she is the one who retains much of the traditional spirit in the family and she manages to preserve the old country’s customs. Nevertheless, she triggers a lot of grief in the family because of her prejudice against her daughter-in-law to be, who is of Irish descent, as she wants a Croatian traditional girl for her son. She does not want any ‘foreigners’ in the family. One of the rare

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events the family looks forward to, are the picnics, which remains the family of the old country:

“He ushers the family into the picnic where Papa and Mama spotted recognizable faces, Croatians all, this was the yearly picnic of immigrants and their children. Miltown, an hour-long ride from North Farms, had a small colony of Croatians, attracted there first by the presence of a rickety iron mill, which could use their cheap labor. The autumn picnic, held in one of the ill-kept parks, was a throwback to the old country, a sentimental touchstone: the celebration of an autumn harvest, the reaping of the crops. There were often no crops here now, no journeys into the marketplaces, backs humped with produce. The factory with its dust and sweat and iron pipes and molten lead furnaces was not the farm of recent memory. So they gathered in the park, like birds returning home, to pretend a bountiful harvest (…)”. Most of the women were dressed like Mama, their dresses homemade, flowered embroidery on the hems. Two of the older women, the first travelers from the old land in the 1880s and 1890s, still wore the peasant costume, faded now and torn, but saved for this one day of the year. Anna loved the wild clash of bright colors, the intricate sewing, and the layer upon layer of red and white cloth (…). (Ifkovich. Anna Marinkovich: 36f.)

These gatherings were not well received with the older Americans. They viewed them as foreigners, they were called ‘Polacks’, and this brought them in an awkward situation, because they could not become Americans and appreciated by other Americans and they could not be Croatians, because they were in another country. In one scene, when Anna starts to go to school, without any knowledge of the English language, because they spoke Croatian at home, Anna feels like a complete outsider. She tells her older brother Joey, that she could not understand what her teacher was telling her:

“I couldn’t understand,” she said. Joey laughed. “You will. Don’t worry. Same thing happened tome. But now I can speak English like the teacher.” He lapsed into English. “Whadda ya say about that?” “I was afraid,” Anna said. “You couldn’t speak English. She thinks we’re Polish.” “Polish?” “Like Mrs. Lupinski, you know.” “We’re not?” “Croats. But Papa said we should say Yugoslavians because it’s a country now, Papa said we used to be Hungarians or Austrians. But we’re Croats. He said the people here used to write down anything like that. Sometimes they call us Hunkies.” Anna tried the word out: “Hunkie.” “But Mr. Bradley calls us the Polacks on the Hill.” (30)

Ifkovich tries to demonstrate the struggle between the first and-second generation immigrants. The second generation accepts American values and they want to be Americans.

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The first generation is disillusioned by America, as much as they strived to come to America, now they have become shocked by its cruelness. Therefore they try to stick to Croatia as much as they can by trying to preserve their ethnic identity. This is made much more difficult by the fact that their children go to school where they learn English history and language and where they want to fit in with the other American children. Joey becomes the victim of the American way of life. In his attempt to become American, he starts to decay morally and physically, from being a dear, joyful, happy little kid, he becomes an old drunkard. His dream shatters when his mother tries to dissuade him from marrying a ‘foreign’ girl and tries to keep him tied to the traditional Croatian way of life. Although they gradually start to accomplish the American dream, they own a farm, have a car, the family is falling apart. Joey is sinking lower and lower, the older sister Maria moves to the town and Anna spends most of her time alone in her room. The mother and father are constantly fighting and they are slowly losing control over their lives. Ifkovich has managed to render the bravery, the suffering and the conflicts that immigrants went through, while they were trying to assimilate in American life. In spite of the tragic ending, there remains still hope for a better future. Anna manages to keep on to the house and thus will keep the memory of her family alive. For third-and fourth generation Croats in America, this novel shows an insight in what their ancestors had to go through some hundred years ago. Hence, Anna Marinkovic7 becomes a symbol, which stands for the sufferings and the pain the immigrants had to endure to find their place under the big American sky.

IV. 2.2 Anna Marinkovich as ethnic prose

Edward Ifkovich’s novel contains all the elements ethnic prose should contain, according to Enriko Molnar Basa’s standards. According to him ethnic prose should contain:

● ethnic experiences of certain ethnic groups in America ● ethnic literature must be written by a representative of such an ethnic group ● ethnic literature must be written in the English language or the language of the ethnic group in question (Kalogjera 1997: 87)

7 Edward Ifkovic renamed his book later in A Girl Holding Lilacs

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Anna Marinkovic satisfies all three conditions, the novel deals with the ethnic experience of the Croatian ethnic minority group in America, the novel is written by a third-generation Croatian-American and the novel is written in English. The elements, which this novel make really ethnic, are the factors that are closely tied to the Croatian experience of immigration and assimilation in a new capitalistic society. Ifkovich has strived to put in elements that emphasized the family’s Croatian ethnic background; he throws in aspects like some Croatian phrases, customs, periodicals, societies, characters and the old country’s mentality. For example, when Anna starts to go to school and her teacher asks Joey why Anna does not understand her, he tells her that she has got to speak Croatian: “Hrvatski”. The author also shows that he has a solid knowledge of Croatian culture and history. When some man at one of their social gatherings makes a toast to Yugoslavia, another man answers:

“I will toast to no Serbs, to Croatia!” “We are the same blood” someone said. But the man was fierce. “There was no Yugoslavia when we all came here. It was Croatia under the rule of Austro-Hungary.” (Ifkovich. Anna Marinkovich: 45)

The novel was written in 1980, when Yugoslavia still existed as a country and not many people differentiated Croats and Serbs as a separate people. Doing so, Ifkovich emphasizes the existing of Croats as an ethnic group. He also does not neglect other components of Croatian culture and tradition, as he mentions the Croatian kitchen and its well-known features. Moreover, he also does not ignore some influential Croatians, who had realized the American dream:

“Maravich, who owned a small bar-restaurant in New-Haven, though everyone called it a saloon-talked with Papa. He was dressed in a dark black suit and everyone knew he was a prosperous man. An early immigrant, he had opened his saloon and had served as a man of all those functions for the incoming people. A letter writer, an interpreter for those who knew no English, a banker, a lender of money.” (40)

The issue of language is also discussed in the novel. The novel is interwoven with Croatian words and phrases and the mother tries to hold on to their language, one of the few connections she has left with the old country. She refuses to give her language up, because giving her language up would mean to give up a part of her being, of who she really is, which again shows the difficulty of assimilating and fitting in the mainstream: “Mama spoke

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sharply: “I do not wish to give up my language in my own home.” (…) “Must I choke out words from my throat for the rest of my days and lose the tongue of my mama?” (31) In spite of the children’s wish to speak English, in family circles a strange mixture of Croatian-English prevails, but in which Croatian id definitely the inferior: “Laku noc, Mama, Good night” she said (93). The brother, Joey, although he completely controls the English language, when talking with his father, he often talks in Croatian, especially when the conversation is filled with emotions: “Papa, don’t hit me. Papa, please don’t hit me. Not this time. Not this time. Papa, molim, molim, Papa, molim” (79). In the novel America is also often compared with the old country and not in a positive way. This is mostly done through the mother’s view of America. She is a strong advocate of the ‘old ways’ and fiery opposes the ‘new ways’ of living. She holds on to the traditional way of life, life how it was in the old country, but since she is a woman with very little education, her vision of the old country is quite biased in comparison with her vision of America and the live they are leading there:

“We will be buried in America, this strange land, our graves so far from the graveyard of Jurovski Brod. I am always tired in America, and it isn’t the work. The work was harder at home. It’s just the struggle here, the moving, the fighting against things I don’t understand. Little things like buying food in the grocery store. The fights to built this house and pay the bills. To wake up in the morning and watch you go to work in the quarry, you who never knew of factories but the land, the soil, things growing.” (32)

However, though the mother’s view of America is prejudiced, it is not far from the truth. Immigrants were living under these kinds of conditions, but it is just that she idealizes the old country, because if life in Croatia had been so great, they would not have gone through the enormous trouble to come to America. Nevertheless, that is typical in ethnic writing; often the old country is described as that far-away destination where everything is still pure and ideal, what of course is far from being the truth. Perhaps the part in which the Croatian picnic is described, is Ifkovich’s most impressive description of the Croatian ethnic identity, how Croatian celebrated and nurtured their traditions from the old country and brought them with them thousands of miles across the ocean:

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“Anna watched as folks heaped with food were passed along and the kegs of plum brandy and homebrewed beer were emptied. The ‘tamburica’ band began to play: five old men, half in peasant costume, half American, their faces hot and flushed from too much drink. The men strummed the small, banjolike tamburicas, strummed the quick, intense, lively music. The bass fiddle beat time. And the accordion stretched out the sound. As they played, they yelled and screamed and sang, their voices commonplace and breaking. But the joy was there. The people listening sang along with the old songs, holding one another, toasting one another with the never empty glasses. The old man never stopped playing. When they played polkas the people put down their dishes and whirled across the grounds, the couples flying, feet stomping, singing voices punctuating the rhythm, arms waving up and down, up and down. Anna stared at the blaze of faces spinning past her, the couples going round and round. The clapping of hands, the high, piercing laughter. The breaking of a glass. The swooning of an old woman.” (…) “Then a soft song, a sentimental one. Far away is my village, where the blue skies flow and the hills are green. ‘Daleko je moj Split’. Where the river runs through the hills. And across the way an old man sat down and wept. The melancholy mood continued and the songs, as always, turned to mother. ‘Moja majka’. Nursed at her breast, beaten with her stick, touched by her hand, humble at her grave.” (…) “But it was too early for tears and someone called for a lively dance. The ‘kolo’, the dance so much a part of the village on a Sunday afternoon when they boys were allowed to meet young girls (…) . A mating dance (…).” (128)

This text is also full of ethnic elements, for example, the ‘tamburica’ is mentioned, a typical Croatian instrument and the ‘kolo’, a dance, typical for Croats and other Slavs as well. Ifkovich has managed to describe Croatian immigrant history in America in a prosaic way, and he has successfully shown the Croats and their ethnic identity in America’s multicultural society. They are there, as a part of American history, a part of the cultural pluralism that is present in America; he has separated them from other ethnic groups, like Poles and Serbs and has given them their own ethnic identity.

IV. 3 VLADIMIR PETER GOSS

Vladimir Peter Goss (1942) falls in the category of globalist immigrant writers, according to Kalogjera (2003). He considers himself to be both a citizen of Croatia and the United States and hence he can be classified as a Croatian-American writer. He left former Yugoslavia in the late 1960s as Vladimir Gvozdanović. He changed his name to Vladimir Peter Goss, even adopting the Anglo-American tradition of pronouncing middle names, so that he could be effective and establish himself as a writer and academic in the United States. One of his main themes in his fiction is the culture clash that arises between two different societies. According to him they are often simply not able to understand each other and he doubts that they will

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ever be. Kalogjera says that “immigrants like him are considered exotic and intriguing, while they in turn consider Americans juvenile and amusing”. She points out that “it makes one think of a zoo in which everyone is at the same time a spectator and exhibit, but nevertheless divided by strong, if transparent, walls” (Kalogjera 2006). As a globalist, Vladimir Peter Goss belongs to the Croatian, as well as the American literary corpus. It has to be mentioned however, that most of Goss’s writings, including some of the texts analyzed in this study, are published only in Croatian and therefore some of the passages include my translation of the texts discussed. Some would argue that because of this, these texts should be excluded from the American literary corpus, if they have not been published in English. This is far from being the truth; Vladimir Peter Goss is indeed part of the American literary corpus. The themes he discusses in his writings make him an American author as well as a Croatian. His themes are American and Croatian; they illustrate Goss’s belonging to both countries, to both cultures and to both literary corpuses. His stories do not cover the typical immigrant story, which I have discussed in Edward Ifkovich’s writings, but Goss remains an immigrant, a foreigner, who will never fully integrate and who stands on a complex ‘middle ground’, somewhere in between, not completely American and not Croatian anymore. The texts examined, From Both Sides of the Ocean and Dayton will show Goss’s affiliation with his current as well as his old homeland (cf. Kalogjera 2006).

IV. 3.1 From Both Sides of the Ocean

Goss’s short story collection From Both Sides of the Ocean depicts the author’s experiences of Croatia and America. He approaches both of his homelands with simultaneous interest and enthusiasm. His collection can be divided in three parts, from which one deals with his encounters with his pre-American fatherland, the second part illustrates his vision of the American way of life and the third part shows the reader the atrocities of the war in his homeland Croatia in the 1990s. His stories are for the most part based on his own personal experiences, namely his childhood and adolescence memories from Croatia, followed by his encounters with American lifestyle and his adjustment to it and finally his contribution to the war in the country he left behind many years ago. Due to these obvious autobiographical elements, his book can be classified as an autobiography, next to the genre of family memoirs and short stories.

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His early memories include his growing up on the streets of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which he vividly describes in one of his stories through the character of his protagonist ‘Miš’ and his friends ‘Vili’, ‘Sova’ and ‘Milan’. Meanwhile, Goss never fails to find a chance to describe colorfully and intensely Zagreb and vicinity, showing thus that the landscape is an important factor in his stories. In the stories where he describes his American experience, we can find a line of autobiographical elements. All these stories lead us through America, the American way of life, its traditions and customs seen through the eye of a stranger, a newcomer. At first sight the plot lines seem rather trivial, but in fact he tries to depict some important segments of typical American lifestyle through his eyes, a foreigner. Such as in his story Resurrection, a parody on the celebration of an American religious holiday, where he displays his vision of the celebration of a traditional Easter Sunday in an Anglo-American home. Resurrection tells the story of a fifty-year-old Croatian political immigrant, Dany Costel, who immigrated to the United States during the Croatian Spring8 and who is married to an American woman, Edith. They have a twelve-year-old daughter, who “luckily has inherited his quasi-Mediterranean skin color and not the white protestant” (Goss 2001: 140). He starts his narration by telling how he and Edith are now married for fifteen years and how although he loves and respects his wife, there are some days, usually around Christmas or Easter, when he has to visit her parents, when he is overcome by some kind of “malice” (ibid: 138). He does not know why, since Edith’s parents are nice people. He then asserts that this happens because he has to put up with the dull Anglo-American Protestant tradition of celebrating Easter. He describes how his father-in-law, after the “Quaker practice of silent prayer, cuts the meat and serves one small slice with one burned potato to each of us, pours every one, one glass of wine, exactly the same amount”, but the worst thing for Dany is the visit to the church, some kind of “godlessness Methodist Church (or is it Presbyterian?)” (ibid), he claims that he will never learn the difference. Then he goes on with describing the church inside and the ceremony itself. He makes it clear to the reader that he thinks that the church inside is ugly and the ceremony boring. During the mass, staring around out of boredom, he marks an interesting woman, with whom he will start a short affair. Goss came to America as an immigrant predisposed to succeed in his new homeland, given the fact that he came from a milieu of intellectuals and next to being well educated himself too, he also had a substantial knowledge of the English language. Nonetheless, since most of

8 A political movement from the early 1970s that called for greater rights for Croatia which was then part of Yugoslavia as well as democratic and economic reforms (cf. Internet Source)

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his work is autobiographical, we can presume that his protagonists reflect the author’s perspective of America, which tells us that Goss has never embraced America as his new homeland, that he has never accepted the American way of life as his own. Although marrying an American woman, having a child with her and working in the academia, the need to return to his old homeland has never left Goss. His character Dany Costel often mentions that he loves going back to Croatia, “Three weeks in the old hole. Thank goodness!” (ibid: 144), and when he comes back in America, he can’t wait to go back to Croatia again: “With the money earned on the seminar, I can jump on a plane to Croatia!” (ibid: 145). The journey back to the homeland is a recurrent motif in Goss’ writings, which shows his attachment to Croatia, in spite of his life in America. Goss remains cynical about some aspects of the American way of life, which he illustrates with considerable humor and satire in his work. Most of Goss’s stories are seen through his point of view, but in the story Square Piano, he uses his wife as the first-person narrator, to give a picture of how it is for an American woman to be married to a foreigner, despite the fact that he is a ‘successful’ immigrant, he remains a foreigner in the eyes of many Americans:

“People sometimes ask me why I did marry a vagabond, a foreigner, a guy from one of those weird countries recently invented to spite high school teachers and textbook publishers. I did not marry a vagabond, or a foreigner, or a guy from a weird newly invented country, but Andy! When I met him and got it into my head to marry him long time ago when we jointly toiled at a miserable Mid-Western school I did not even know that he was Croatian, or where was that Croatia. Andy did not seem to care either. All he cared about was to be very American, in which he, luckily, failed. For Andy knows nothing about baseball, and proudly claims he has never been to a football game. With women he is never violent, but he graciously allows them to seduce him. Come to think of it he is a bit like our own Very European Peter LeCoq! Andy can switch careers on a dime. Once you cross the Ocean once, he used to say, everything else is a peanut. Andy has a very rich imagination. It is kind of cynical, not to say apprehensive. He always expects traps and conspiracies, and he smells them miles ahead. This is, he says, because his folks have had nasty history and are paranoid by nature. Andy sees evil everywhere, and handles it with relish.” (Goss. From Both Sides of the Ocean: 155)

The third and last section of his short story collection From Both Sides of the Ocean, deals with the war in Goss’s fatherland, which raided his native soil. The authenticity in his stories is on a very high level, which can be ascribed to the fact that he worked as an U.S. correspondent for the largest Croatian daily in the 1990s, the Večernji List, in which he reported regularly on the ongoing Dayton Negotiations9. As a correspondent, Goss was able to

9 The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton-Paris Agreement, is the peace agreement reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio in November

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talk and to interrogate people who were involved in the war and as such, he became very familiar with the ongoing violence in his old country and its neighboring countries. Goss remains unbiased in his writings and depicts the war from various angles. His characters represent all sides that have participated in one way or the other in the war. Next to Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, there are also soldiers from other countries and UNPROFORS10. By using different points of view, the reader gets a more complete picture of the combats in former Yugoslavia. The horrors and brutality of war is best displayed in The Valley of Dogs. Its plot is intriguing, indicating the consequences war brings, like corruption and revenge. The story line evolves around the Canadian Noel Cleeves, who is send to the so-called ‘Valley of Dogs’ to lead Gavro Šenica, a Bosnian Serb accused of war crimes like rape and murder and captured by Bosnian Muslims, in front of the International Crime Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in the Hague. One commonly used motif in Goss’s stories is the landscape, which sets the atmosphere prevailing in his stories. The opening scene in this story is dominated with elements like the mountains, the snow and the coldness, which reflects the dimness of war. Also, the sound of howling, when Noel comes near the Valley, adds to the dark effects as well. When Noel enters the Valley, he is welcomed by a beautiful woman, which is also a recurrent motif in Goss’s stories. In most of his stories, the main character encounters an interesting woman and is fascinated by her beauty. In The Valley of Dogs, in spite of the shocking storyline and its war theme, Goss tries to show that despite the war, his characters have not lost their human side and are still interested in common everyday things like romance. Then, after being welcomed, Noel is led to the captive, who is imprisoned in a cave under inhuman conditions and who is behaving like a dog and it is as if he is also slowly transforming into one. At this point Noel and the woman, Fatima, agree that ‘a dog’ cannot be indicted and that it will be better if Noel just tells his superiors that Gavro has died. Nobody will miss a rapist and a murderer. This is the point where Noel becomes involved in a web of lies, he does something that he would not do normally, lie to his superiors, but in war rules change. He will tell them that Gavro Šenica has died. The end is rather surprising, Fatima’s father, Hassan, tells Gavro he can leave, provided that he pays a large sum of money. Gavro gives him the money he has stolen from his victims and says: “Come on Hassan, don’t whine.

1995, and formally signed in Paris on December 14, 1995. It put an end to the war in Bosnia, one of the armed conflicts in the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (cf. Internet Source). 10 UNITED NATIONS PROTECTION FORCE Initially established in Croatia to ensure demilitarization of designated areas. The mandate was later extended to Bosnia and Herzegovina to support the delivery of humanitarian relief, monitor “no fly zones” and “safe areas”. The mandate was later extended to Macedonia for preventing monitoring in border areas (cf. Internet Source).

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The war is over. Aren’t we all friends and neighbors again?” (ibid: 136). Then he gets up and leaves, but he does not get far, Fatima shoots him, justifying her act with the fact that if they had sent him to Hague, he would have gotten a couple of years only. Noel on his way from the Valley hears a gunshot, but he tells himself, it is just the wind. In normal circumstances, Noel would never go against his orders or in normal circumstances Hassan would have never let Gavro go or taken blood money from him. Nor would Fatima kill a person. War has changed them all and has made them vindictive and dishonest. This story demonstrates how people change under such horrifying conditions. In spite of these changes, Goss manages to portray his characters humane. Fatima is not just a cold-blooded killer and we can understand why Noel decides to lie about Gavro. Goss tries to approach the war with a certain distance, the war is there, in the center, but he tries to portray his characters as human beings with feelings and in spite of the war they are still able to feel and to live their life according to their situation, the best they can. This is also shown in two other war stories, The Moon Hill and Travels with Julie. Both stories give a picture of the war, but again the war is not in the center, but a love story. In The Moon Hill his protagonist is Marie-Claire, an American woman driven by her faith that there can be put an end to the war by negotiating. When she came she was not prepared for the war, not knowing what awaited her:

“When the first grenade fell, some two hundred meters away, Marie-Claire trembled. Squeezed between Captain Zelić and Captain Spahić in the cabin of an old army truck, she tried hard not to show her fear but her body betrayed her.” (116)

Naively she thinks that she can help and go and negotiate between the two combating sides:

“While observing the landscape and wondering how anyone could ever fight over this naked rock, Marie-Claire made her plans. She would agree as fast as possible to everything the Serbs might ask. What they wanted was a peaceful removal of the people from Vranja, who would surely be eager to leave. She would offer to stay, as a guarantor of the agreement, until the operation was completed. Then she would return to the bridge and tell Satnik Zelić that the bridge was needed no more. Not a single shot, not a single drop of blood.” (120f.)

In the end she stays and falls in love with Captain Zelić. Next to the atrocities of war, the love between Captain Zelić and Marie-Claire dominates. Again Goss vividly describes the landscape, but contrary to the Valley of Dogs, where coldness and snow dominate, in The Moon Hill there are everywhere “almonds in bloom” (ibid: 109). Almonds in bloom represent the spring and the spring represents flowers blossoming and flourishing, spring represents a

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new start, the transition from winter into summer, just like Marie-Claire, whose love for Captain Zelić starts to blossom. Spring in this story indicates brightness and new beginnings. In Travels with Julie again the heroine is an American woman and again she falls in love with a Croatian army officer, who rescues her from the combat zone and takes her into safety. When he finds her in the midst of falling grenades, he is captivated by her beauty and in spite of his orders to explore the situation; he decides to desert his colleagues, which is an act of high treason. He justifies himself by convincing himself that he is “rescuing an U.S. citizen” and “America recognized Croatia a few days ago”, thus it is “his duty to take her into safety!” (ibid: 87). In order to do this, he has to take her to the Croatian border, which is 35 kilometers far-off, a journey of three days by foot. Goss describes their journey again with intense and vivid elements from the Bosnian landscape and just like in many of his other stories; sexual tension between the two main characters prevails in most of the scenes. Just like Marie-Claire, Julie is naïve too and does not realize the severity of the hostilities and at first she is not afraid and in no hurry to go home: “I came here of my own free will, and I will not be chased out by a handful of grenades. At least, I am not going to run” (88). However, when they come along a river, so crystal clear, that she can not withstand the temptation to jump into the water and wash herself after a two-day long journey, she finds herself in an ambush:

“Plop! With a thud a grenade landed in the mud a dozen meters downstream from Julie. "Julija!" Julie had turned around and with her arms in the air ran toward me. She threw herself around my neck. This time her face did not bear the print of anger, but of fear. Tears rolled down her cheeks. "They tried to kill me!" (96)

Her fear though does not prevent her from risking being captured and killed when it comes to standing up for the person who has risked his life and career for her:

“In that bog we stood no chance. Two-three spats from the machine gun and we are gone! Whoever was in that trench, some twenty meters ahead, won't wait forever. "Who's there? “ Like a lightning Julie sprang up to her feet, and before I could pull her back down into the mud, screamed: "Americans!" I froze. She stood in the middle of the field, upright, aimed at by hundreds of barrels, her copper-golden head an ideal target.” (102)

Travels with Julie is a story about two people falling in love with each other, but we can not call it a love story, it is a story about the killings and the evils of the war. The stories thematic focus is the war, but even in war love is not rare in everyday life. The characters are not just preoccupied with the massacres happening daily and next to their struggle to survive, they are

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still able to divert their attention on ordinary things, such as love. Goss shows his readers how love is universal, even in the middle of such horrifying conditions like war.

IV. 3. 2 Dayton

In order for a better understanding of some important segments of Goss’s novel Dayton we have to take into account the fact that Goss worked as a reporter for the Večernji List in Dayton, where he covered the negotiation process between the leaders of three former Yugoslav Republics to put an end to the war in Bosnia. These accounts motivated him to write a novel, using them as the basis for his writings. In the preface of his novel he mentions that all accounts mentioned in the book are accurate with little or no changes at all. Nevertheless, he points out that his book is not a chronicle about the Dayton peace agreement, but the negotiations are merely used as a framework around a perspective on human relations, especially those whom fate has “given more than one homeland” (Goss 1999: 13). The novel’s hero is Andy Basic (born Andrija Basić), an American journalist and university professor of Croatian descent, who left Croatia a quarter of a century ago. Andy is, like many of Goss’s male characters, married to an American woman and they have two children, who in order “to please him, have learned some Croatian phrases” (Goss. Dayton: 42). In Dayton he arrives as a correspondent for a Croatian daily, but at the same time with the reputation of being a very pertinent and successful American journalist. Arriving in Dayton, he resides with Miss Lea Rainer, also of Croatian descent, living in the United States approximately twenty years. He encountered her at some Croatian-American assembly a few years before, they stayed in touch occasionally by phone, but up to then there had been nothing sexual between them. It is quite obvious that Andy’s character (which can be found in many Goss’s stories) is based on Goss himself. However, the autobiographical elements in the novel are not essential here, but the fact that Andy Basic is Croatian is for Goss of immense importance, as well as the fact that he is married to an American woman. Goss makes an effort to capture the life of the Croatian people in America, who left Yugoslavia many years ago and have become American citizens. These people have kept and nurtured their ties to their homeland Croatia, not Yugoslavia, but Croatia. Goss managed to give a picture of the difficulties these people have to endure daily, like being captured between two homelands and having to break some of the typical stereotypes Croatian-Americans have to deal with regarding to their distant

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homeland. Moreover, Goss tries to illustrate how the war changed the Croatian-Americans. Up to then Andy had been “a man without a native soil” (19), then when Croatia declared its independence, he became a committed supporter of the Croatian cause:

“Then at Neda’s eleventh birthday, 25th of January, Croatia declared its independence and the war started. A Croatia, from which he did not came, because it did not exist…” “Croatia was forced upon him, quickly. Nobody had asked him. Just like many new-found friends, mainly cyber friends, he started to ‘work for Croatia’, write for Croatian newspapers…” (21f.)

So, the war changed Andy, from being a tranquil university professor, he became a devoted lobbyist, lobbying the Croatian cause and trying to convince the American public of its correctness. Goss introduces in his novel many Croatian-Americans, some more, some less devoted to Croatia. Most of them are just flat characters and are just there to actualize and inform the reader of the current situation in Croatia. The novel can be characterized as an autobiographical novel, but because we do not know this for sure, we just know that the main character has a lot in common with the author himself, it is better to label the novel as a Political-Thriller. Andy is faced with foreign diplomatic offices, which try to bribe and black mail him into sending a corrupt account, which would discredit the Croatian negotiators in Dayton. Finally, Andy becomes a participant, without knowing it, of a secret operation, which goal it is to prevent possible sabotaging of the Dayton peace agreement. Another important theme is Andy’s love life, just like in many of Goss’s stories, love and women are an integral part of his novel. The two key characters Andy is surrounded by are two women who play an important role in his life, namely his spouse Joyce and Miss Lea Rainer, a jurist of Croatian descent. There are several other female characters in the novel, among who is Melinda, a young and ambitious journalist, with whom he will have a short affair. All women are in love with Andy, and Andy despite the fact that he loves and respects Joyce, he falls in love with Lea. Joyce, although she plays a significant role in Andy’s life, the reader does not get to know her very well. Goss describes her as a successful good-looking middle-aged woman, who is very much in love with her husband. Joyce represents Andy’s life in America, his successful career as a college professor and journalist and father of two children, but during the plot-line she remains somehow in the background. On the other hand, Goss provides the reader with more insight into Lea’s character. Her character is complex and realistic and sometimes she becomes entangled in her own interior moral conflicts, like for example her dilemma whether she should allow herself to fall for Andy and agree on being

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the other woman in his life. Lea has been fully developed by Goss, emotionally as well as physically. Goss describes her attractive physical appearance and the reader learns that Lea is a very successful jurist, who has left Yugoslavia as a young woman and achieved success in her new country, America. Just like Joyce represents the American home and Andy’s life in America, Lea represents Croatia and Andy’s youth. They both left Yugoslavia many years ago, without the intention of going back: “He had left Yugoslavia and he did not want to return there” (26) and then all of a sudden, this country they left, did not exist anymore, but a new one, which gave them a new identity and aroused feelings of patriotism in them: “Luckily. We have Croatia now, and we will never give her up anymore!” (27). There are times though when they both ask themselves what Croatia means to them: “Croatia, Andy, what is Croatia? What does Croatia means to us?” (41). They left Yugoslavia without the intention of going back, but what about Croatia? When Croatia declared its independence, Andy started to reconsider his identity again:

“He left Yugoslavia intending never to go back there. Lea left too and she too never went back. He became an American citizen, the spouse of an American woman and the father of American children. Then, when Croatia came, he became a Croatian citizen. However, in the first place he was an American! Did that mean that Croatia was his second, his final home? How to become a Croat if you were not allowed to be born as such, that is to grow up as such?” (42)

Andy Basic is torn between his devotion to America and his new-found love for his new homeland Croatia. When he left many years ago, he left another country, a country he did not much care for, like many other people from Croatia. Just like he is torn between his two countries, he is torn between Joyce and Lea, who respectively represent America and Croatia. Finally, Lea agrees to be the second woman in Andy’s life, she satisfies herself with two, three visits a month from Andy. In some way Andy’s and Lea’s agreement is just like the Dayton agreement in Ohio, all three sides11 have accepted the agreement, but neither of them is really satisfied, but in the end they took what they could get. Goss has successfully managed to capture the life of Croatian-Americans, their feelings and hopes, their battles, their anxieties, the way they cherish their heritage, how they feel about being stuck between two homelands and finally how they became the proud citizens of a new- found country, Croatia.

11 Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia

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IV. 4 JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

I began to write stories in the States out of nostalgia when I dodged the Yugoslav Federal Army and could not go home. ‘Nostos-algia’, the Greek components mean return + pain: the pain that drives you to return. But I could not return, because in addition to the politics, time banned me. I missed the times and places and people of my boyhood. I thought I could stay in touch at least with the people and the place, if not the time. I wrote a long letter a day, under the illusion that I was reaching beyond the ocean and plugging my spirit into my native soil, through that bit of a tree, the page, which contained traces of being rooted in a moist black soil. In return for the long letters, if I was lucky, I'd get a few postcards. I thought I might just as well give up on the lousy lot of my friends and brothers. But by then I was addicted to remembering through writing, and so I wrote to the wall in front of me. I described the places of my childhood in more than a hundred pages, and my fingers walked and ran, barefoot, as I used to in summer days...

Josip Novakovich, from his essay "Revising Memory"

Josip Novakovich is another Croatian-American author, who was raised in Croatia, then a part of Yugoslavia, in a Baptist family, which was quite unusual, since most Croatian families were Catholics. He became already early in life interested in America and her culture, since he had a grandmother in Cleveland, one of Croatia’s largest colonies in America, who had emigrated from Croatia when it was still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His grandfather, just like many Croatian immigrants in those days, had returned to Croatia after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Croatia had become a part of Yugoslavia. Soon after he had visited America and his grandmother, he decided he wanted to move to America and so he did in his early twenties. He finished his college education in America and just like Vladimir Peter Goss married an American woman.

IV. 1 Salvation and Other Disasters

Josip Novakovich writes in English, he writes for an American audience, in contrast to Vladimir Peter Goss, who focuses primarily on his Croatian audience. Novakovich’s prose is written in such a way that it is understandable for the average American, who does not know much about the war in former Yugoslavia, its customs, its culture, its political situation. He writes in such a way that he makes it clear and readable to his reader, whom he presumes has no background information whatsoever about the situation in former Yugoslavia. Goss, on the contrary, assumes that his reader is familiar with the situation in his home country. When we

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look at all those facts, it is perhaps difficult to label Novakovich as a Croatian-American writer, and he himself once stated in an interview:

“If we look at the language I write in, if we look at where my books are published, where people read me the most, where I have dialogues with other authors, I am in every sense of the word an American author, but perhaps it would be better to say Croatian-American. Since in America everybody is hyphenated, “Irish-American, “Jewish-American”…because in America it is natural to have a double identity.” (Kalogjera 2003: 36)

This double identity inspired him to chronicle his ethnic experience. Novakovich does not reject his Croatian identity, but is rather inspired and intrigued by it and by his immigrant fellow countrymen and their destinies. The literary text considered here is a collection of short stories, Salvation and Other Disasters, published in 1998. A collection of stories have been selected and translated and published in Croatia in the year 2000 in one collection, called Grimizne Usne. This collection can be classified thematically in three parts, the author approaches the most recent Balkan conflict in war-torn Croatia and illuminates the lives torn apart by this tragedy, and many of his protagonists are survivors of the war. The author also deals with various aspects of the immigrant experience in America and he also touches upon his childhood memories from his homeland Croatia, describing how it was to grow up as a little boy in a Baptist family in a country where most people were Catholic and where his religion was looked upon as something strange and odd. Novakovich’s stories are not stories that happened to faceless crowds, faceless Serbs or Croats, but individual stories of individual people whose lives were forever changed by the war and its aftermath. There are no ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’, no aggressor and defenders, just war victims, people who are suffering from cases of post-traumatic stress syndromes. He criticizes both sides; he tells us that war crimes cannot be justified, no matter which side you are on. The first story of this collection Sheepskin, starts with a first-person narrator, who cannot be trusted and is very unreliable, since he is a Croat survivor and victim of a Serb invasion of the town of Vukovar12. He was tortured while lying in the hospital by a Serbian officer. He was saved but he emerged from the ordeal psychologically distorted and obsessed with the idea of revenge. After the war he spots one of his former tormentors on a train. He calls him ‘Miloš’, since he does not know his name. Obsessed with the idea of taking revenge,

12 Vukovar was completely devastated during the Croatian War of Independence. The city was destroyed almost beyond recognition. It is estimated that 2,000 defenders of Vukovar and civilians were killed, 800 went missing and 22,000 were forced into exile. Vukovar is notorious for the devastation it suffered (Internet Source).

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he follows him and kills him. Later he starts to think that he may have killed the wrong man, because he spots other men that also look like Miloš, then when he finally realizes that he indeed has killed the wrong man, he tries to justify himself by reasoning that he now has even more reason to hate and to kill Miloš. He blames Miloš for the fact that he killed an innocent man and he finds him responsible for it. The narrator soon finds out that he has killed a husband and father of two, and a high school teacher. He becomes obsessed with the deceased and his own feeling of shame, and guilt that tortures and haunts him. He desperately tries to get close with the dead man’s family and he seduces his wife, running the risk that he gets caught and extending his violation to the family of the late man. The victim now becomes the victimizer and as he gets closer to the widow, their conversations evolve around her late husband and in an atmosphere of dishonesty; he who was a sheep has become the wolf, wearing sheep’s clothing. In these war stories questions like, who is your friend and who your enemy, what is a sin and can this sin be justified, are raised. It is very hard to make a distinction between these definitions. Like for example in the story Out of the Woods, where the author makes an effort to show his reader how strong a victim’s urge for survival can be. Dana is here the main protagonist, a rape victim. She is raped by an officer, but he wants her to enjoy the act, and if she does not show him that she enjoys having intercourse with him, he will make sure that the whole brigade rapes her. She has no choice and for the next two months she is constantly raped by him, having to prostitute herself in order to survive and to save the life of her son, who is also being kept by him, but he does not harm the boy, he treats him as if he is his own son. After the war Dana meets an eye doctor, whom she marries. When her husband hears that she has been prostituting herself in order to survive, he changes his view of her and calls her a whore, not wanting to understand what she has gone through. Their marriage is falling apart and they are only brought together again when their son is nearly killed in a mining accident. The author tries to mirror the human suffering, the ordeals someone is ready to go through in order to survive. The narrator distances himself from the tragedies; his voice is objective and cold, his depiction of the war brutal, written in a way that the American reader can understand the atmosphere of life in wartime Croatia. The author has experienced the war from a distance, which can sometimes be even more difficult than when you are in the midst of the atrocities. Novakovich also uses a lot of irony and provocation in his narration, showing the reader how he despises human ignorance and destruction and the fact that the war was useless and unjustified. In America, these stories and this kind of standpoint are widely accepted, but in Croatia, where people justify the war because they fought for their independence, this kind

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of attitude is not appreciated. This shows that the author intended these stories for the American audience, which will start to read these stories without having a clear opinion about the war, beside the fact that it was useless and unnecessary. The fact that the author approaches both the Croats and the Serbs as individuals and not as nameless soldiers who are fighting on the wrong or the right side, shows that Novakovich looks at identity as something useless. At one point he even mentions that: “When we were surrounded by the Serbs, I felt strongly that I was a Croat. I was proud of it… Now I am not proud of it anymore or for that matter ashamed of it. Identity is just useless for me. It does not bring me anything…” (Novakovich. Salvation and Other Disasters: 82). The approach Novakovich has towards his identity, the fact that he ignores his Croatian identity in his stories, makes him a good example of a globalist immigrant writer. Novakovich extends his stories to those Croatians and Serbs, who like himself, have moved away from Croatia, seeking for a new life. The immigrant theme is closer to him, since he is one himself and he has experienced it himself. His stories about the immigrant are no stories about successful immigrants, but rather people who have experienced everything but the ‘American dream’. His characters are frustrated, disorientated in time and space, unstable, scared, alone and often sick because of the hard jobs they have and the circumstances they have to live under, living day by day. They are the lowest class on the social ladder, not integrated in American society, marginalized and not accepted by other Americans, the displaced persons, who ran from the war in their country, and are still fighting with their own inner demons of war and destruction and death. The Enemy, the closing story of Novakovich’s short story collection is perhaps one of the most striking examples of the exile experience. It tells the story of a Serb, a Pole, a Croat, an Albanian and a Bosniak, who are living together in exile in America and have developed a friendship, which scenario would have been very strange, if not impossible, if they were living in their own respective countries. In America though, they have lost their identity, their nationality, their tragedies connect them, their alienation, their loneliness and their urge for survival in a new country and a whole new culture. The war in Croatia and Bosnia is somewhere in the distance, but there where they are it is not important anymore, here they are all exiles, immigrants, displaced persons, illegal laborers without a home and without any money. Omar, the Albanian, was working in an ‘Italian’ restaurant, but all the people there working were Albanians, they had no connection with Italy whatsoever, as a matter of fact, most Italian pizzerias in New York were owned by Albanians. As for the Serb, Drago, he was a professional gambler in Atlantic City and he played chess for money in Central Park. Drago

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had hepatitis, B or C, he was not sure, since he did not want to go to the doctor, because he was scared that they would deport him to Belgrade, Serbia. When he got that sick that he could not walk anymore, he married an American girl, she did that to save his life. Only then, with his marriage certificate, he had the courage to go to the hospital. Adam, the Pole, made the most money of the entire group; he worked as a gravedigger in Brooklyn. The Croat, Igor, was afraid that he would not be granted asylum, because it looked like the Dayton Agreement would be signed and that would mean that it would be safe for him to return to his country, and that was the one thing he feared most. Igor then marries a Russian girl, Nataša, who has a green card, so that he can stay; he said to her that he would rather die than have to return to Croatia. Soon after their marriage, Nataša gets pregnant and Igor gets sick. They both fear that he has AIDS, but when he goes to the doctor, the doctor tells him that it is a case of post- traumatic stress syndrome, since he had been in the war and he needed a psychiatrist. Igor tells the doctor: “That is an American disease. We do not get that kind of diseases, just like we do not have any allergies; those diseases are American privileges” (156). Then he goes to have an AIDS test and he explains the reader how afraid he was, it was even worse than hiding in basements and trenches during the war, but ‘luckily’ he founds out that it is only a highly contagious form of TBC. He has to stay in the hospital, where he sees death all around him again, just like in the war, but here they are not dying of bullets, but of diseases. After being diagnosed with TBC, he could not see his wife anymore or his newborn child, which he had seen only on pictures. No one wanted to live with him and he could not stay in the hospital anymore, so he moved in again with Drago. When Drago found out that Igor had TBC, he just said that: “What harm can it do me? If you Ustashas13 haven’t killed me, so won’t a little bacteria” (160), and so Igor’s alleged enemy, became in fact his only friend. The narrator describes the exile experience and America, stating that:

“I used to think that I being and living in America would make me happy, but now I know better. The American poet W.S. DiPiero once said: “America is just a bunch of sorrow, which is represented outside as luxury and abundance.” I would rather say that America is a disease that is represented as health. Wherever you look, you see joggers, white teeth, youth, smiles, but when you talk with people, you hear about cancer, heart attacks and AIDS. My parents don’t give up on America as a picture of pure joyfulness. I haven’t told them that I am sick, I can’t. I even don’t send my dirty laundry anymore to my mother. I just hope that I will outlive them, so they won’ find out how miserly my life ended.” (61)

13 A Croatian racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement, which engaged in terrorist activity before World War II and ruled, under protection from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in part of Yugoslavia after that country was occupied by the Axis powers. Nowadays it is used as a pejorative, offensive term for Croatians.

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The narrator’s lamentation upon America shows the reader a nice insight about how America is experienced by these people. The author tries to bring the immigrant’s world to the reader, the way he deals with his new country, the way he sees his new country and the way this new country treats him. The painful truth is that these people often do not fit in and assimilate in this new society, and this new society does not help those people to try to fit in his new surroundings. These people do not climb upon the social ladder, they stay in their social ghettos, marry American women in order to get a green card, but are still excluded from the American way of life. In the end, not only are they excluded from the American society, but they have become outsiders in their old country too, and so they are stuck between their old and their new culture, not really being a part of either. It is interesting to see how the author shows his reader that in a Western country, far away from the battlefield, a Serb, a Croat, an Albanian and a Bosniak can live as friends together. The narrator concludes: “My roommates and I, did what our Eastern European totalitarian systems failed to do: develop a workable Communist system” (188). Immigrants, who come from countries of traditional feuds, come together in a country like America, because of their inability to merge with the dominant Anglo-Saxon society. There, in New York, it is not important who is a Serb and who is a Croat, since here they are the same, they live in the same ghetto, they do the same kind of jobs and they have to help each other in order to survive. Rye Harvest is another realistic immigrant story, which tells us the tale of an immigrant who is desperately seeking refuge and when he finally reaches the US, it is only to learn that he will be deported immediately. Our narrator is a Croat who had to flee his Croatian village after he had set free a non-combatant Serb, one of his childhood friends. When he arrives in America, he has to deal with a xenophobic American immigration court. The narrator was tortured and nearly killed by his fellow Croats for freeing his friend and he manages to escape on a borrowed passport. In America, a judge denies him asylum, although the narrator tries to explain what danger he would be in if he would return to his native village. He is denied asylum just because it is the courtroom’s opinion that America has invested enormous resources to make sure that the peace in the Balkans would hold and therefore the narrator should be safe when returning. In other words, if America has gone through such trouble to make sure that peace would last, why should they care about the people who cannot go back? The official peace agreement is signed, so refugees have no business to be in America anymore and it is none of America’s business what will happen with the refugees when they eventually return.

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It is not all tragedy in Novakovich’s stories, we can also sense some amusement in some of the stories and the situations the characters find themselves in, like in The End, when Novakovich portrays a funny situation when his character has to take the American citizenship test:

“During the test Danijel practically did not understand any question. The lady working there asked if we wanted to wait. “You have to know English if you want to be a part of our democracy. How do you want to vote if you don’t understand our language? From all five questions, you only answered one right and that is that our president is Bush.” “Know. Study,” said Danijel. “Ask more.” The lady, a middle- aged Afro-American woman, said: “Fine. Who is the governor of Ohio?” “Voinovich?” Danijel squealed. He knew, there weren’t many people from ex- Yugoslavia who were in politics, and Voinivoch was one of them. Although he was a Serb, Danijel was proud of him, it was kind of easier in Ohio to have a last name ending with –ić. “And Kucinich was mayor of Cleveland”, he said. “Currently we’re not interested in Cleveland”, said the lady and carefully looked at him. “Alright. You passed. Welcome to the United States of America.” (129)

Just like many American ethnics had already chronicled the Italian, the Greek, the Polish, the Cuban and many more, ethnic experiences, Novakovich found inspiration in his ethnic background to do the same. Despite the fact that Novakovich feels that his homeland is America and that Croatia is just a country where he was born by chance, he does state that he feels Croatian when he is in America. At the same time, he also feels American when he is in Croatia and he feels that “a hyphen connects those two cultures which will never merge in him, but will leave him forever suffering with multicultural schizophrenia, or bicultural psychosis” (Kalogjera 2006).

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V CONCLUSION

The immigrant experience in fiction has been a prominent theme in twentieth century literature and continues to be in the twenty-first century. Immigrants have found a way to express themselves through literature, their hopes and fears, social boundaries and their everyday obstacles. Today many first-, second-, and third generation immigrants are heard outside their ethnic ghettos, they have climbed the social ladder and have chronicled their, or their parents or grandparents, immigrant experience. Ethnic writers were given the opportunity to talk about their ethnicity and they turned their ethnic identity into a theme in their works, as has been demonstrated in this thesis. Ethnic writers do not have to depend on old stereotypes anymore that the dominant Anglo-Saxon society once had about immigrants among other from South-Eastern Europe, but they still have not found a way to eliminate stereotyping completely from ethnic writing. The dominant Anglo-Saxon society still expects minorities to change, to assimilate and to integrate in the mainstream culture, therefore their urge for an ethnic revival continues to be a struggle against rooted, and often racist, stereotypes. Assimilation remains to be a slow process for many immigrants and the fact that many immigrants form their own social ghettos, in which they tend to stay, does not make it easier. In the mainstream Anglo-Saxon American society, after many years, fear for the unknown, still prevails. Among immigrant writers, factors like their formal education in Europe and America, their financial status and the frequency of interaction with other Americans, often determined their opinions about America and Americans. The one thing they have in common though is their immigrant experience. They were motivated to come to America in search for a better life, ‘better’ of course, defined in personal terms. Eventually, they became a new cultural type of individuals, not completely American and not completely belonging to their old culture anymore. They became a hybrid cross between their old homeland and their new homeland, between their old culture and their new culture and between their old fellow countrymen and the longer settled Americans. In this study I have explored the question of ethnic identity and ethnic self-definition mediated through four Croatian-American literary texts, published between 1980 and 2001. These texts include different generations of Croats in America and different immigrant experiences, from those born in the US to those born in Croatia and who arrived to the US

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under different circumstances than just the desire of gaining economic prosperity, like for example immigrants in exile, who had to escape the horrors of violence, caused by war, which is an often mentioned theme in the texts considered in this thesis. Important to note is that observations presented by each immigrant writer are personal and each experience is unique. The writers examined in this study are Croatian-Americans in various ways. Their generational belonging and their Croatian heritage vary, Edward Ifkovich belongs to the third- generation of immigrants, and Vladimir Peter Goss and Josip Novakovich came to America as already established intellectuals and academics. The connecting link between them and their literary texts is the fact that they are occupied with ethnicity and their ethnic identity. These authors have invested in different ways in their Croatian ethnic heritage in their literary productions. Their ethnic heritage and family histories have served as sources of inspiration in the process of writing the narratives and constructing the fictive or autobiographical situations and characters for analysis here. All selected texts represent ethnic identity formation as a self-conscious process, which is shaped by individual experience. My analyses have focused on themes such as family genealogy and relations, generational differences, ethnic language acquisition and the process of adjusting and assimilating. I have attempted to bring the texts into dialogue with theories of ethnicity in Chapter II and historical accounts of Croatian immigration to the US in Chapter III. Anna Marinkovich emphasizes the concept of a proud sense of ethnic identity. Family, especially the mother, takes on an important role in developing in the American-born characters generational knowledge about their ethnic heritage and nurturing an ethnic sense of identity. However, the mediation of an ethnic identity through the family, often very traditional, is rather complicated. The patriarchal patterns, upheld by first-generation immigrant parents and grandparents, often coincide with second-generation immigrants. Intergenerational tensions over issues like education, individual freedom and ethnic intermarriage arise. A good example of the latter is the fact that Joey’s dreams are ruined when his mother tries to keep him from marrying a ‘foreign’ girl. Joey becomes a drunkard and the whole family is slowly falling apart, while the mother tries to keep on to her traditional way of life, and out of fear of losing her Croatian descent, she becomes responsible for the family falling apart. From Both Sides of the Ocean and Dayton display both the complexities and resistances involved in the process of assimilation and adjustment to the American way of life. In both literary texts the protagonists show affiliation to their pre-American homeland, but at the same time illustrate their belonging to both countries. The author himself shows his

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attachment to his homeland by describing his childhood experiences in his ethnic homeland in several stories. The texts display certain ambivalences informing the character’s traveler’s process of ethnic identity formation and the tensions that arise from seemingly contradictory positions such as Croatian and American, foreigner and native, insider and outsider. Bewildering though, these contradictions bring about moments of personal transformation and cognition for the characters. Goss’s texts too, like Ifkovich’s, emphasize the protagonists belonging to Croatia, in a time when Croatia as a country still did not exist. Novakovich shares the concern with the experiences of travel to ethnic homelands by reminiscing his childhood experiences that characterize several of Goss’s stories. Just like From Both Sides of the Ocean, Novakovich’s story collection Salvation and Other Disasters, also deals extensively with a theme with which both authors are preoccupied, namely the war. Both authors experienced the war from a distance, but nevertheless were devastated by it, which can be seen through their war depictions. Novakovich though, unlike Goss, shows his reader another side of the immigrant experience, as for most of Goss’s stories are based on some autobiographical facts, like the fact that his protagonists are well-educated college professors, Novakovich deals with the more common immigrant, namely the one which are not that successful, the exile. It deals with the immigrant theme, where immigrants are struggling to make ends meet. The individuals depicted in these texts occupy different social locations, which in turn produce different life experiences. In different ways each of the novels examined in this study raises the question of assimilation and cultural transformation as implied in the theories of assimilation. Ethnic identity may be rejected and re-claimed again or re-invented, but will never completely fade away. Anna Marinkovich for example shows that although the family depicted cannot resist forces of assimilation, none of the characters manage to perceive themselves as completely American or completely Croatian. I have already mentioned before that literature is a powerful medium to produce images of ethnic identity and indeed the writers whose books are subject to close examination explore the process of ethnic identity formation and the effect it had on immigrants.

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THESIS SUMMARY

At the end of the nineteenth century prior to World War I millions of Europeans left their homeland and moved across the ocean to find a place in the new economic order of capitalism. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had included many of the ethnic groups which contributed greatly in the immigration population in America in the years before the war. Among these ethnic groups were also Croatians, yet it is difficult to generalize about Croatian emigration because of the fact that the land was so long under Habsburg rule and these immigrants were registered at the time as Austrians or Hungarians. Many had fled in order to flee economic hardships, but also to escape from political and religious persecution. Arriving upon American soil, they soon found out that the ‘Promised Land’ was not what they had expected it to be. These immigrants, although being hardworking laborers, were received with skepticism and hostility by the already established American population. They were seen as anarchists who took to labor violence and radicalism (Gossett 1997: 288). Therefore, the immigrants stumbled upon more and more prejudice from American society and they were ranked as second-class citizens. This thesis starts with a conceptual analysis of various definitions and assumptions about ethnicity on which my readings in Chapter IV are based on. In Chapter III of my thesis I deal with the most important historical facts linked with Croatian immigration, in order to give the reader a better insight into the background and circumstances that made these people leave their homeland for the lure of American prosperous economy, which was praised by friends and relatives who had preceded them. They wrote about the freedom, high wages and comforts of living in the US, often ignoring the gloomier reality. This chapter also gives an account of the social, cultural, religious and political life of Croatian émigrés and how the Croats in America maintained their Croatian heritage through song, dance, food, sport and literature. Many immigrant communities were founded and as a result of this, many immigrants’ descendants even today proudly emphasize their Croatian heritage, looking for ways to identify with their Croatian roots. In Chapter IV, I move on by defining the role of ethnic and minority writing. Ethnic literature was long ignored by the American reading audience, be it as a literary theme or with regard to the producers of ethnic literature. Literature has been a device through which Croatian immigrant writers have referred to their ethnic experience and their ethnic identity, as well as those of their fellow immigrant countrymen. Focusing on the theme of identity, the

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present thesis is concerned with the question of how contemporary Croatian-American writers belonging to the American community depict the Croatian-Americans’ historical and social destiny in their novels. In order to analyze ethnic identity in Croatian-American literature, it is necessary to divide immigrant writers in several groups. We have exile immigrant writers, ethnic immigrant writers and globalists. These groups often overlap and they offer us an insight into a mind that is torn between two homelands. The exile gives us an overview of the political Diaspora, the ethnic one of the old Diaspora and the globalist represents the professional Diaspora, but they all have one thing in common and that is the way they try to illustrate their personal ethnic belonging. This thesis examines the following four ethnic novels published between 1980 and 2001: Edward Ifkovich’s Anna Marinkovich (1980), Vladimir Peter Goss’ novel Dayton (1999) and his short story collection From Both Sides of the Ocean (2001), and Josip Novakovich’s short stories collection Salvation and Other Disasters (1998). Edward Ifkovich belongs to the ethnic immigrant writers and the latter two can be defined as globalists, since they belong to the Croatian and the American literary canon. The question of ethnic identity emerges from all the above mentioned novels. For example, was it means to be an immigrant, what an immigrant has to deal with, which problems occur and how are they to be solved? Regardless of the fact if the author uses fictional characters or uses his own life story as a basis for his characters, one central theme is expressed in all novels, namely the search for one owns ethnic identity and his place in society. My goal is to show how Croatian-American ethnic identity is expressed in these novels and how generational conflicts and the family structure are deeply anchored in most immigrants. The novels clearly attest to the existence of a strong sense of ethnic identity among Croatian- Americans. Ifkovich’s ethnic novel focuses on the changes the typical immigrant family is undergoing. Set in the 1930s, the family appears no longer able to provide the individual with security, orientation or a set of values. This serves also as a mirror of society in the 1930s. Family life, as the parents knew it, are destroyed. Through the example of typical role-conflicts’ between parent and child, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, the author shows traditionally sanctioned structures of power that lead to the destruction of the family and bring forth individuals with problematic behaviour. Vladimir Peter Goss and Josip Novakovich belong to the Croatian and the American literary corpus, they are globalists (Kalogjera 2003) and consider themselves American, as well as Croatian, and they certainly do not deny their Croatian roots. They write about the

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problems that arise when two different cultures merge and their stories certainly do not cover the typical immigrant story that most ethnic writers deal with. They both vividly describe their childhood memories from Croatia; portray their vision of the war in their former homeland, and how they experienced it from a distance. The writers share roots in the tradition of literary realism. This is reflected in a common aesthetic approach: the portrayal of reality that takes claim to documentary truth, realistic details, emphasis on everyday ordinary life, and to social universal themes. The novels and short stories show a clear preference for scenic representation with its aesthetic effect of authenticity. Particular aspects that are discussed include the aesthetically effective harmonization of content and form. Several stories serve as examples in the discussion of how specific narrative perspectives and points of view are found suitable for the representation of reality and, especially, the treatment of ethnic identity as a literary theme. Multiple perspectives conveyed through a combination of first-person narrative, third-person narrative, interior monologue, direct speech and free indirect speech, appear as a tool in the authentic and direct representation of a subjective world view. First-person narrative with its closeness to autobiography and inherent scope for self-reflection is shown to be especially apt for the description of problematic or shattered identity, a recurring theme in Goss’s literary production. The contribution made by ethnic writers to modern American literature has up to now been largely overlooked by modern literary studies. This thesis is limited to the evaluation of a small group of ethnic Croatian-American writers. A fuller examination is left to further studies, nevertheless it can be concluded that in attempting to depict an honest portrait of the history, social situation and everyday-life of Croatian immigrants in America, the authors discussed here have introduced a new theme into contemporary American literature and made an important contribution in the current debate on ethnic identity in America.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Literature

Goss, Vladimir (1999). Dayton. Zagreb: Naklada Jurčić.

Goss, Vladimir (2001). From Both Sides of the Ocean. Zagreb: Naklada Jurčić.

Ifkovich, Edward (1980). Anna Marinkovich. New York: Manyland Books.

Novakovich, Josip (1998). Salvation and Other Disasters. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.

Secondary Literature

Antić, Ljubomir (2002). Hrvati i Amerika. Zagreb: Hrvatska Matica Iseljenika.

Barth, Fredrik (1996). “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries”. In Werner Sollors, ed. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Bodnar, John (1987). The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bourne, Randolph (1996). “Transnational America”. In Werner Sollors, ed. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Dearborn, Mary V. (1986). Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cizmić, Ivan (1992). “The Expreinec of South Slav Immigration on Ellis Island and the Establishment of the Slavonic Immigrant Society in New York”. In Marianne Debouzy, ed. In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic 1880-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Gans, Herbert J. (1996). “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America”. In Werner Sollors, ed. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Gossett, Thomas F. (1997). Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Greeley, Andrew M. (1977). The American catholic: A Social Portrait. New York: Basic Books.

Handlin, Oscar (1959). Immigration as a Factor in American History. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Handlin, Oscar (1957). Race and Nationality in American Life. New York: Doubleday and Company.

Handlin, Oscar (1973). The Uprooted, Second Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Hansen, Marcus Lee (1996). “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant”. In werner Sollors, ed. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Higham, John (1988). Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925. New Brunswick and London: Turgers University Press.

Holjevac, Većeslav (1967). Hrvati izvan Domovine. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska.

Kallen, Horace M. (1996). “Democracy vs. the Melting Pot: A Study of American Nationality”. In Werner Sollors, ed. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Kalogjera, Branka (1997). Hrvatski korijeni etničkog pisca Edwarda Ifkovica. Rijeka: Hrvatsko filološko društvo.

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Kalogjera, Branka (2006). Inside Out: An Insight into the Immigrants’ Perception of Their New Homeland. Facta Universitatis, Series Longuistics and Literature, vol. 4, no. 6, University of Rijeka, Rijeka.

Kalogjera, Branka (2003). Pisci između dviju domovina. Rijeka: Hrvatsko filološko društvo.

Lakatoš, Josip (1914). Narodna Statistika. Zagreb: vlastita naklada.

Lorković, Mladen (1939). Narod i Zemlja Hrvata. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska.

Matulich, Loretta (1980). A Cross-Disciplinary Study of the European Immigrants of 1870 to 1925. New York: Arno Press.

Milton, Gordon (1977). “Assimilation in American Life”. In Andrew Greeley, The American catholic: A Social Portrait. New York: Basic Books.

Novak, Michael (1996). Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in Political Life, Second Edition. Somerset, NJ.: Transaction Publishers.

Phinney, Jean S. (2003). “Ethnic Identity And Acculturation”. In K. Chun, P. Ball, and Marin G. eds. Acculturation: Advances in Theory, Measurement, and Applied Research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Prpić, Jure (1997). Hrvati u Americi. Zagreb: Hrvatska Matica iseljenika.

Sollors, Werner, ed. (1996). Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York University Press.

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