Newcomers: Book One by Lojze Kovacic

Language, one that you don't understand, can be pleasant now and then... It's like a kind of fog in your head... It's nice, there's nothing truly better... It's wonderful when words haven't yet separated from dreams... But not always... I could examine everything as though I was in a theater... Before a storm the sky would get dark. The rain splashed as though a whole sea hung in the air... The Krka flowed like a roadway from hell... the water rose to the machine with the bucket... a whole wagon, a haystack, half a haystack, a small forest... once even an ox gasping for air and lowing... floated past quickly and slammed into the banks of the river... You lost your voice from the wetness, your sight from the gloom, your soul from the lightning... And then silence again.

In Basel, a child boards a train. The sights and sounds are overwhelming, disordered, both inside the train and outside the windows, where the only city the boy has known is chopped up into pieces and discarded. It seems like a grand adventure, but it's only the beginning: soon they are in rural Yugoslavia, the boyhood home of his Slovenian father. They have been escorted out of Switzerland (for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to have something to do with the father's status as an ethnic outsider and the rise of Hitler over the border) and must start again in their father's country--a great hardship for his German mother. They traipse through miles of dark forest, nearly drowning in a river, to get to the village. That no one meets them at the train is a sign of tensions to come; unwanted, they are eventually cruelly expelled and return to the city of Ljubljana, where they live in cramped quarters and difficult poverty.

One of the remarkable things about Lojze Kovacic's Newcomers--a book, I half-understand and half-guess, that is a slightly fictionalized version of his own experiences returning to Slovenia as a child--is how slowly but convincingly Bubi, the child narrator, begins to change. On the train, he's a child of nine with a sense of wonder and adventure, but this eventually curdles into a preteen resentment and viciousness. He's unable to grasp the Slovene language, and this alienates him, teaching him it's better to be silent than to speak up. His own words are transliterated in a kind of comic German accent; when people speak Slovene, it's translated in crisp English; when they speak German, it's written in German--as if to emphasize to us that he and his language are out of place here. He cultivates a teenager's rowdy interest in sex and the female anatomy; his few furtive sexual experiences take place with Gypsy girls and at windowsills. He scrounges up a few tense and hostile friends to form a kind of street army and seek out rock-fights. His schooling suffers; he steals. And yet we sense all the time that the child of the train ride is still in there, sensitive and curious, hardened over by being a newcomer.

Hitler exists on the margin of Newcomers, in newsreels, on the radio. Though Bubi and his family despise him, their Germanness is seen to ally them to Hitler, and brings unwelcome attention, both positive and negative. But it struck me that the book is drawing a parallel between the rhetoric of the Reich and that which surrounds Bubi in both the city and the countryside. This is a Europe that is riven with ethnic hatreds, ready to raise a wall against any kind of outsider. And of course, Bubi, too, is formed in the crucible of rivalry and hatred. Hitler, for the time being anyway, is several borders away. And yet the beliefs and enmities that animate Hitler, which allow him to come to power, can be found in every city and village of Europe. The book, or at least the first half of it--it's been split by Archipelago into two parts--ends with Italian forces rolling into Yugoslavia, the threat and menace of xenophobia and fascism made chillingly real.

With the addition of Slovenia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 107!