History at the coalface

Born in Sarajevo by Snjezana Marinkovic
In this absorbing memoir, the author talks about her vocation to be a writer and her struggles with her stepmother’s disapproval and through the horrors of the Serbian war. Her parents separated leaving her grandmother in loco parentis. She ran with her beloved Sasha through ‘the bullets hitting the ground like hailstones’. The crowded Sarajevo airport with people trying to get out was closed. There is a very moving account of the young Snjezana waiting in vain for her mother in her favourite dress and hair perfectly combed. It was a lonely childhood with a mother-in-law who did not like her.
There is a constant sense of impending tragedy throughout the book: she saw a hand with a ring on the TV and prayed it wasn’t her beloved grandma’s.
One learns of the war first hand here—the conflict from 92-95 with Bosnians being ‘ethnically cleansed’, of the trade sanction on Serbia to curb their intervention in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Serbs eventually yielding Sarajevo to the UN.
The author’s poetic calling shines through the prose: ‘night a trembling thread’, and the prose itself is peppered with her poems, including her award-winning Sarajevo. Her beloved park Cara Dusana was rendered naked, its beautiful trees chopped down for winter firewood. The library was bombed and a half million volumes and ancient books were destroyed. Snjezana is an example of an artist wounded into print
Sasha became the inevitable solder with the inevitable fatal outcome. She recounts her migration to Rumania and Hungary and in new cities she sees strangers selling things that once belonged to her family.
Her grandmother suffered through it all. There is a heart-wrenching account of her grandma’s half-burned dresses. She wound up in a psychiatric hospital and, when the light went from her eyes, Snjezana knew hope for her was gone.
Finally after much travail, Snezana is accepted as a refugee in the USA, and in 2008, twenty eight years after Tito’s death, Kosovo declared its independence form the Serbs.
Snjezana is a passionate writer who wants to wage peace, who believes that difference should not divide us but bring us together. She ends with the Indian legend of the girl who saves a spider’s life. The spider returned and build a web to catch all her bad dreams.

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Sarajevo-Snjezana-Marinkovic/dp/0983402744