As a young mother, she would get so angry at her children, my mother told me, that she’d yell at the top of her lungs and even hit them. It was overwhelming to have five children in the village of Sveti Vid in Croatia and a husband who worked in America. My mother and aunt told a story about her foaming at the mouth because of some vicious rumors the villagers were passing around. In 1938, he took his wife and three of the children back to New York. At the time, my grandparents had no idea that a war would break out and devastate Europe. My mother and uncle, still children, stayed on Krk with their grandmothers and were without their parents for nine years.
Mamica (pronounced mamitsa) was very religious and went to Mass even on weekdays. She had a shrine of the Blessed Mother in her room, Our Lady of Lourdes. It was about four feet tall, huge, or so it seemed to me as a child. There were rosary beads hung around the statue, and pictures of people Mamica wanted to remember—my sister Gina, who died at eighteen was there—and flowers and other little things. There were a couple of bottles of holy water from Lourdes.
She went to Lourdes once by herself. She felt like it was her mission, a duty to perform, something she had to do before she got too old. When I asked my mother about this recently, she couldn’t remember if it was Fatima or Lourdes that Mamica went to.
“Mom, wasn’t she in France?” I said.
“Yes, where is Fatima anyway? Is it in Portugal?”
“You know the story? She slept in a bathtub,” said my mother laughing.
“In a bathtub? Oh yeah, I remember something about that, but what actually happened? She couldn’t get a room?”
“I don’t know. I just know she slept in a bathtub because there was nowhere else.”
I couldn’t imagine why, but I knew it was at least part of her story, a kind of martyrish experience she liked to tell about. Only my grandmother would go all the way to the south of France to see Bernadette’s grotto and end up sleeping in a bathtub. She brought her holy water back from Lourdes, and I’m sure she lit candles and prayed there in addition to all the rituals.
I went to Lourdes this summer. It reminded me of Medjugorje, which I visited with my mother, but a more refined, established operation. After all, its miracle happened in 1858 in France, while the Medjugorje miracle happened in 1981 in Bosnia. Stores lined the streets to the Lourdes grotto, and a gigantic cathedral grew out of it. The grotto itself was a modest place.
My mother has always been religious, even after my sister died in an accident at a young age. My grandmother was even more religious. She seemed to love the accoutrements. I have great memories of my grandmother and how she giggled, made my favorite dishes, was such a well-organized person, saved little pieces of aluminum foil, and was very affectionate.
One day I was visiting my grandparents in my adult years. She and my grandfather were sitting in their respective chairs in their small apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. A sweet flowery smell pervaded the place, especially around my grandmother. I called her Micica (mitsitsa) as a child, and Mamica when I got older. My grandfather was hard of hearing and looked a little lost in the conversation. We had just finished talking and were sitting there quietly when my grandmother got up and came toward me. Concerned, my grandfather half rose: “Mama, Mama, what’s the matter?” She walked over to me determinedly and gently squeezed my nose, giggling, “mića moya Sonjica.” My little tiny Sonja. Then about faced and walked frailly back to her chair. My grandfather looked befuddled, laughed and sat down. I loved that moment.
One time when I was five or so, my mother had to go get something from Micica at her job and took me with her. Micica worked in a sewing factory in Queens in a second story warehouse, among a huge sea of women with machines going so fast you couldn’t even see the needles whirring. The supervisor said something to my mother in the noise, pointing into the distance, in the middle of the great complex of women working busily. My mother took me by the hand and led me down the corridors of seamstresses and piles of clothing. I was small; my head bobbed among the noisy machines.
When we got to my grandmother, she finished her stitch and burst into a smile as she lifted her head and saw me. I went to her and my heart swelled. This was my grandmother, and she was so special to me. She was in the limelight for me, a flower blooming in the middle of a plain lawn. I felt sad that she had to work in that mass of women. Looking back, I realize how absolutely central and pivotal she was to me, the only one who mattered in that vast ocean of seamstresses.
Mamica loved the Croatian Club in Astoria, where there were dances and music, and lots of Croatians yakking away in their familiar tongue. Sometimes my uncle Rudy Richman played the accordion with his band. The kids faded into the background (unlike today’s kids) as the adults talked, drank, and danced. They were so tall from our perspective. My grandmother was not quite five feet tall, but she was big to us.
I could always pick out Mamica’s nasal alto voice as she harmonized with the women at her table on the old Croatian songs. She would lean toward the others, as they sang without accompaniment, a capella (“in chapel style”), in a way that made my hard quiver.
Did she feel like she was back in Sveti Vid, where she lived when she married my grandfather? Or back in her childhood village, Oštobradić, only two villages away? It was drier and more isolated there, I felt when I visited. Maybe singing helped the women work and steer away from worthless small talk. I could see Mamica as a little girl, standing behind a clump of bushes, listening to the women singing as they finished their laundry and laid it out on the rocks.
Before she died, my grandmother sent me a photo inscribed with the words “To Sonja, St Petersburg, Florida, January 1991. Mamica with little Sonjica Franeta”. She was forty-five at the time of the photo. It shows her holding me as a newborn, and pregnant with her last and sixth child, Mary, who was born four months after me.
Peasant Roots
Lipovka is a small Russian village of about a hundred wooden homes, four hours south of Moscow by train and not far from the ancient city of Ryazan, the oldest settlement in Russia. Burned twice in battles with neighboring states, the old Ryazan was sacked by Mongol invaders in 1237 and finally destroyed. It was part of Kievan Rus, the original unified country of eastern Slavic tribes, including Russians. A small settlement near the site of these great battles, Lipovka was not even on the map when I went there in 1993 and met some older villagers who remained after the younger people left to find a better life. They were descendants of this great history and of early Russia. Even today the villagers live simple lives based on subsistence farming and barter, reminiscent of those medieval times.
In the winter Lipovka is completely isolated. The makeshift temporary bridge across the flowing river is taken down when the river begins to ice over, and it is impossible to get there by car or truck. People have to conserve energy since they cannot get to town. They accumulate food for the winter months to feed themselves and their animals and to minimize their physical activity. One older woman told me she only left her bed in winter to eat and go to the bathroom.
In summer Lipovka blossoms and greens. Sheep and goats and cows go out to pasture every day, people work in the fields, and the sun bakes the long grass and forests. Insects make music. The air smells clean—dry grass and soil, a hint of sweet blossoms.
The summer of my visit I was there with Vera, one of several Muscovites who came to Lipovka as a break from the city’s teeming crowds and urban stench. We were a couple then. I am Slavic too, Yugoslav, (meaning “south Slavic”). Sometimes I feel Yugoslavia’s centuries-long ethnic war inside me. Vera once made such an observation when I had an emotional outburst: “You have Serbia and Croatia warring inside you.” I was shocked when she said that, and I asked her never to say it again. It was too true.