Majčina ruka (Mother's Hand, 2011) has just been published in its Slovenian version artfully translated by Jurij Hudolin for the Beletrina publishing house. Its author, Igor Marojević, is visiting Ljubljana as one of the main guests at the Fabula festival.
The novel's protagonist is a 16-year-old grammar school student with ordinary teenage problems (he doesn't manage to lose virginity) who unknowingly steps on the path of exploring his family's history. Marojević himself is behind the main character, yet due to troublesome experience with Serbian media the writer has refrained from equating himself with the protagonist.
The boy's discovery? Germans living in the region of Vojvodina, who had represented the largest minority in ex-Yugoslavia until the end of WW2, were deported after the war. Their homes were settled with local inhabitants from the countryside. This historical fact is still an intentionally overlooked topic in Serbia, argues Marojević.
The novel is the third book in a pentalogy, yet each work is also a complete story in its own. Together, the series forms a mural of "European nations who experienced a breakdown in the 20th century due to their ethnocentrism". The writer strived toward being as much beyond ideology as possible throughout the pentalogy. Mother's Hand depicts Germans in the role of the victim, while in the second book of the series the victims are Serbs, who turn into "executioners" into the 3rd book. "I had a completely personal reason to deal with this topic – I wanted to know about the history of the house I had grown up in. Someone needs to be interested in such topics; we can't all be solely pragmatic and opportunistic. Of course that was a taboo, since people don't like to think about such things. My grandfather on my mother's side always said that "this was all from others"; he had a guilty conscience and this also had an influence on me. Although it wasn't these people who decided to occupy the houses of deported Germans. It was a state decree, some sort of an experiment on how to urbanise rural areas. The people who got the houses did not speak about certain things out of opportunism," explains Marojević.
"My novel was lucky – or unlucky – to be issued a few days before the act on restitution and property return was amended in the parliament. Therefore, some media referred to the novel as a literary campaign for restitution. Primitivism can't rise from the gutter; it thrives on cover-ups, since it's much easier to manipulate ignorance. In this Balkan pre-political primitivism, those who expose a problem often end up having more problems than the ones' who have caused it. I think the quality of public discourse in the Serbian – and not just Serbian – society has plummeted. The lower the level of political discourse, the more fertile the breeding ground for taboos, which the politics like to exploit," concluded the Serbian writer.
Ana Jurc, MMC; translated by K. Z.
