Bazala, Razvigor

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RAZVIGOR BAZALA Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 19, 2011 Copyright 2015 ADST INTRODUCTION The following narrative evolved from six two-hour interviews I had with Charles Stuart Kennedy of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training conducted in the fall of 2011 at its facility on the campus of the National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia. PERSONAL BACKGROUND My father Borislav Bazala was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1910, the son of a Croatian father and a Bulgarian mother. He passed away more than a century later in 2011. His father, Maximilian, was the youngest of six children in the somewhat rigidly structured home of my great grandfather who specified precisely the careers he intended his four sons to pursue. They were to become a doctor, a military officer, a professor of classical studies, and a Roman Catholic priest; his two daughters were only expected to marry well. Having no interest whatsoever in becoming a priest Max rejected his father’s will, left home and went to Paris where he mastered seven languages. Ultimately, after settling in Bulgaria, he became a professor of linguistics. After he returned to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, Max became involved with an effort to create a federation among south Slavic peoples, a yugo Slavia (‘yugo’ in Serbian and Croatian means south). He had become an adherent of the idea propounded by Roman Catholic Bishop Josef Strossmayer who was a leading politician in late 19th and early 20th century Croatia. Strossmayer’s objective was to encourage Slavic populations in Southeast Europe to form a federation, initially under the aegis of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire to replace the Ottoman Empire, whose grip over the Balkans had diminished significantly in the decades prior to World War I. Unlike other similar movements prior to and during World War II, however, Strossmayer’s neither espoused nor engaged in violence. Rather he promoted religious unification in the region, an objective that would have the largely Orthodox populations of the Balkans accommodating Roman Catholicism, a proposition that posed a major limit to the advancement of his ideas for a yugo Slav federation. Furthermore, unlike the 19th century pan Slavic movement promoted by Russians that presumed all Slavic peoples west of the Ural Mountains shared a collective destiny and 1 would willingly coalesce under Russian leadership, Strossmayer’s focus was on the Balkans. His vision foresaw fragmented ethnic Balkan populations having enough in common to establish some form of federation among themselves that would strengthen the region as World War I brought the Ottoman Empire to an end. Boiling down a half century of my grandfather’s life into a single sentence, his role in the scheme of things was to promote Strossmayer’s thinking in Bulgaria. To do that he moved to Sofia, met a Bulgarian woman named Ivana Pashmakova, fell in love, married her, settled down and raised a family with two children, my father, and his sister. Father always took pride in the fact that his father had moved independently to shape his own future, and he followed a similar path under very different circumstances. Arriving in the U.S. from war-torn Europe in 1947, he had a brief career as an accompanist for an operatic soprano and later was self-employed for more than 30 years as a classical piano soloist, occasional accompanist, music producer for a television program, a university adjunct faculty lecturer, and teacher of piano performance. Father studied piano and earned a doctorate in orchestra conducting at the University of Leipzig during WWII. He studied in Berlin with Wilhelm Furtwangler, arguably among the finest orchestra conductors of the 20th century. Because Bulgaria was allied with Nazi Germany, father was able to travel to Germany for his advanced studies. In Berlin, he met a German woman who was a secretary for the German-Bulgarian friendship society or student association. They married in 1941, and I was born in Berlin in July 1943. We left Germany permanently five months later, moving first to Vienna and then, in 1944, to Olomouc, Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the U.S. in 1947. Mother on several occasions credited me with saving my parents’ lives by providing them the motive to leave Germany. Nightly air raids rained Allied bombs closer and closer to their apartment in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin as summer transitioned into fall. Because he was a citizen of an allied nation, father was free to leave Germany. Whether a German citizen spouse could obtain permission to depart with him apparently changed from time to time. In any event, in December 1943 mother and I were able to accompany my father to Vienna where he worked in the classical music division of State radio in Nazi-occupied Austria. My parents spent only a year there while he completed his doctorate. Father then accepted the position of conductor of the Olomouc Opera Orchestra in Czechoslovakia in 1944. An uncle who was an officer in the Austro- Hungarian army and then a general in the Czechoslovak army provided him a recommendation for the position. The war prevented public performances during and immediately afterward; and the orchestra gathered only for rehearsals through late 1947. Father’s socially prominent position in Olomouc provided a comfortable income and a spacious apartment. My brother Michael was born there in November 1945. We had a housekeeper who father said was a sister of Albanian Communist Party first secretary Enver Hoxha who ruled Albania brutally until his death in 1985. Despite the fact that ours was rather a good life in Olomouc, there were postwar hardships and shortages. Toes on my left foot became permanently misshapen because my parents could not replace shoes I had long outgrown. 2 In October 1947, our departure from Czechoslovakia ended my father’s conducting career. Months earlier, with his good Fingerspitzengefuhl (intuitive feeling), father figuratively applied saliva to the tip of his forefinger, raised it in the air, turned it into the breeze and concluded that the wind was coming from the east, that Soviet power would soon replace the government in Prague. Prior to the end of the war, on September 9, 1944, Soviet forces entered Bulgaria and installed a communist government there. My grandfather told father he should not even consider returning to Bulgaria where his time in Germany during the war could lead to his apprehension, detention, trial and possibly imprisonment as an anti-Soviet activist. The course of political events in Czechoslovakia less than three years later convinced father that it faced a similar fate and that he might have to face the same problems he would have in Bulgaria. He just sensed that Soviet power was intent on expanding westward beyond lines established at the end of WWII, and for four decades he held President Roosevelt accountable for doing nothing to prevent that. As someone who was becoming a prominent member of Olomouc society, father was pressured to join the communist party. This was the catalyst that led him to contact his mother’s sister, Helen Rylla, who had settled in East Orange, New Jersey in the 1930s. She agreed to sponsor the travel of our family to the United States. Mother, in the meantime, acquired a U.S. immigrant visa. I do not know on what grounds she qualified, but she said she had initially applied for a U.S. visa years before in Berlin when she became disenchanted with growing Nazi power in Germany. Fortunately for father, he got the only U.S. immigrant visa allocated in Czechoslovakia for a Bulgarian that year under the old quota system. Children qualified based on the parents’ eligibility. With visas in hand we departed by train for Paris, arriving during a strike of some sort that brought public transport to a standstill. I actually remember as a four-year old riding in a truck that replaced a Paris municipal bus. We crossed the English Channel and transited the Atlantic aboard the HMS Queen Elizabeth, and I recall our arrival in New York harbor where Aunt Helen was waiting for us. We arrived at 160 Halsted Street in East Orange, New Jersey, our new home, late in the afternoon on Oct. 31, 1947. I remember being troubled by children who appeared to have the heads of rabbits and other creatures that appeared every so often in my dreams for maybe a year. That ended when it occurred to me that the rabbit-headed youngsters were actually trick-or-treaters out early on Halloween evening. Aunt Helen had been a cabaret or light opera performer of some sort in her youth in the Balkans. I still have some picture postcards of Elena Pashmakova in costume for a performance back then. I do not know what brought her to East Orange, or how she acquired the three-story boarding house she owned. She claimed to be the widow of a Hungarian about whom we never learned a thing. He must have been a musician too, because she had a violin and cello she said belonged to him and brought over from Europe. Aunt Helen was the organist for a Catholic church in Newark, New Jersey. Father occasionally would play aunt’s cello for a change of pace. The sounds he elicited from the instrument fell far short of those he produced on the piano. 3 Father sat me down at the piano keyboard when I was five or six, but I resisted his efforts to interest me in playing the instrument even though I enjoyed listening to classical music.

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