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by
MALINA
STEFANOVSKA
(UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES, USA)
ISBN:
978-1-952-799-47-1
FRENCH
VERSION:
ÉLÉGIE POUR UN SUD
RÊVÉ
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(Mary
Adelaide Walker, 1864 Benaki Museum Library) |
(Bitola Old Baazar, Nineteenth Century) |
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The Author's Father's Home |
The Author's Mother's Home |
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Peoples
of South-Eastern Europe sometimes nurture through their music
and poetry a feeling of intense longing that brings them at the
same time sadness and happiness. Sevdah, the
Balkan version of the famed Portuguese
saudade,
encompasses
nostalgia for a lost homeland, youthful dreams, past loves, or
even for things that never were. This autobiographical narrative
of a Macedonian woman recreates her beloved South through
childhood memories, family portraits and legends, and the
history of an ill-fated love with a man from that region. The
rich account of a vanished political and cultural world is
revealed through sensual reminiscences, tales of homicidal
patriarchs, hospitable matriarchs, and existentialist smugglers.
The poignant anthropology of displacement that it constructs by
weaving together American, Macedonian, Greek, Vlach, and Roma
cultures, opens onto a radically different, imagined South: that
of her adopted daughter who, in her turn, is destined to leave
her roots.
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The Author's Paternal Grand-Father |
The Author's Paternal Family |
(Photo: BYU Humanities) |
Malina Stefanovska
grew
up in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, to where her family came from
the extreme South of the country. Having spent her summers in Bitola, a
once opulent city of the Ottoman empire, she retains vivid memories of a
world rich with multi-ethnic traditions, and of her own roots as the
offspring of an ethnic minority, the Vlachs, and a Macedonian peasant
family. Following undergraduate studies in the Congo, and in France, and
after several years as an interpreter for the Yugoslavian government,
she left the country before its break up in the 1990s. She currently
lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. Her personal memoir is born of
a long-term interest in writing about memory, nostalgia, exile and the
self.
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