Download Free Memoirs Of My Childhood In Yugoslavia Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Memoirs Of My Childhood In Yugoslavia and write the review.

A “funny and tragic and beautiful in all the right places” (Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestseller author of Furiously Happy) memoir about the immigrant experience and life as a perpetual fish-out-of-water, from the acclaimed Serbian-Australian storyteller. Sofija Stefanovic makes the first of many awkward entrances in 1982, when she is born in socialist Yugoslavia. The circumstances of her birth (a blackout, gasoline shortages, bickering parents) don’t exactly get her off to a running start. While around her, ethnic tensions are stoked by totalitarian leaders with violent agendas, Stefanovic’s early life is filled with Yugo rock, inadvisable crushes, and the quirky ups and downs of life in a socialist state. As the political situation grows more dire, the Stefanovics travel back and forth between faraway, peaceful Australia, where they can’t seem to fit in, and their turbulent homeland, which they can’t seem to shake. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia collapses into the bloodiest European conflict in recent history. Featuring warlords and beauty queens, tiger cubs and Baby-Sitters Clubs, Sofija Stefanovic’s memoir is a window to a complicated culture that she both cherishes and resents. Revealing war and immigration from the crucial viewpoint of women and children, Stefanovic chronicles her own coming-of-age, both as a woman and as an artist. Refreshingly candid, poignant, and illuminating, “Stefanovic’s story is as unique and wacky as it is important” (Esquire).
In 1992, Savo Heleta was a young Serbian boy enjoying an idyllic, peaceful childhood in Gorazde, a primarily Muslim city in Bosnia. At the age of just thirteen, Savo's life was turned upside down as war broke out. When Bosnian Serbs attacked the city, Savo and his family became objects of suspicion overnight. Through the next two years, they endured treatment that no human being should ever be subjected to. Their lives were threatened, they were shot at, terrorized, put in a detention camp, starved, and eventually stripped of everything they owned. But after two long years, Savo and his family managed to escape. And then the real transformation took place. From his childhood before the war to his internment and eventual freedom, we follow Savo's emotional journey from a young teenager seeking retribution to a peace-seeking diplomat seeking healing and reconciliation. As the war unfolds, we meet the incredible people who helped shape Savo's life, from his brave younger sister Sanja to Meho, the family friend who would become the family's ultimate betrayer. Through it all, we begin to understand this young man's arduous struggle to forgive the very people he could no longer trust. At once powerful and elegiac, Not My Turn to Die offers a unique look at a conflict that continues to fascinate and enlighten us.
In 1965 a young woman disembarks at Mascot Airport in Sydney with her family. They have migrated from Yugoslavia to seek a better life. 'What have you brought with you?' asks the immigration officer.This memoir is about the intangible but vital belongings that arrivals carry with them. They are pictures of the past; in her case landscapes in verdant colours, a state built on utopian ideals, family ties which will stretch across continents. The author's childhood unfolded in post-war socialist Yugoslavia, a society aspiring to fairness and equality. Some of those principles worked, some were corrupted. The Church, opposed but tolerated, continued to ring the bells of faith.The central character threads her way through opposing ideologies as she swears her allegiance to the socialist state and has her first communion as well. Importantly, her family is affectionate and supportive even as it changes and shrinks around her.Chestnut street where she lives provides a backdrop of changing seasons and moods as the story unfolds.All of this, unnoticed, she brings with her to Mascot Airport.
The Children of Atlantis is a collection of statements by a hundred young people who have fled various parts of the former Yugoslavia in the face of war and destruction, nationalism, hatred and ethnic cleansing, the pressure to take sides, and the draft. As refugees, they are seeking to continue or complete their education at universities around the world, all the while confronting the task of making something of their lives amid the catastrophe that has overwhelmed them, their families, and their homeland. Gathered here are extracts from essays written by the students describing the circumstances that drove them to leave their homes, and the different ways (both optimistic and bleak) they envision their futures. It offers a snapshot of virtually a whole generation of young people on the threshold of their working lives, uprooted from the world they grew up in. Their voices are varied, expressing pain, anger, uncertainty, hope, and the positive energy of youth. What they have in common is a sense of disbelief and bewilderment at the forces unleashed in what was their country. In a way this is a war-report, though not prepared by foreign war-reporters or covered from the frontlines. Rather, it is a diverse chronicle revealing the unseen psychological aspects of war, written by the victims from the depths of their souls.
When it was rumored that the communist partisans planned to destroy Sremska Mitrovica, Jugoslavia as the German Military retreated, the father persuaded the mother to leave the city for a short time, taking the five children and her mother to a safe place until the fighting was over. They boarded the over-crowded last train going west, away from the terror that was imminent. They had no idea where they were going nor how long they would have to be away from home. The father could not leave the city; he was drafted into a "home guard" and charged with protecting the city. The family never returned to Sremska Mitrovica. Separated during the war, miraculously all family members, except for one son, were reunited in the American Sector of Austria. The second oldest son had been living and working near Berlin, Germany as a foreign worker. "Liberated" by the Russians he was sent "home" to Jugoslavia, which was by then behind the iron curtain leaving him with no chance of joining his family in the west. They endured fear, discrimination and persecution during the post-war years in a country of which they did not even speak the language. The family lived in deplorable conditions in a makeshift "Displaced Person's camp", commonly known as a "D.P.camp". The family survived hunger, displacement and many other hardships with patience and courage while relying on their faith.
Liberal Forces in Twentieth Century Yugoslavia: Memoirs of Ladislav Bevc spans 80 years of his professional and political life: from the early years of his childhood in the large family of a civil servant, to his studies in Vienna and the interruption of his professional career by military service at the Eastern and Western front under the detested Austrian flag, to a flourishing career in the liberated homeland of Yugoslavia. Born in Skocijan, Slovenia, he graduated as a civil engineer from the Technical University in Vienna. In World War I, he served on the front in Russia and France. Following the war, Ladislav Bevc focused his life on politics, civic organizations, and the engineering profession. In Ljubljana, he served as a city councilman and was active in civic and academic affairs. He helped establish a new University and resisted Communist subversion in the Sokol Patriotic Gymnast Association. Following the German invasion in World War II, he joined the resistance movement of General Dragoljub Mihajlovich, which led to encounters with the Gestapo and eventual political emigration. In 1949, he immigrated to California, where he remained active in the efforts to liberate Yugoslavia from the Communists and rescued his family, who had been held hostage. In the free world, he organized the Slovenian liberal émigrés in the Slovenian Democratic Party and was instrumental in rebuilding the Yugoslav Sokol in the Free World. He practiced civil engineering in the United States, where he was elected Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He died on November 29, 1988.
A “funny and tragic and beautiful in all the right places” (Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestseller author of Furiously Happy) memoir about the immigrant experience and life as a perpetual fish-out-of-water, from the acclaimed Serbian-Australian storyteller. Sofija Stefanovic makes the first of many awkward entrances in 1982, when she is born in socialist Yugoslavia. The circumstances of her birth (a blackout, gasoline shortages, bickering parents) don’t exactly get her off to a running start. While around her, ethnic tensions are stoked by totalitarian leaders with violent agendas, Stefanovic’s early life is filled with Yugo rock, inadvisable crushes, and the quirky ups and downs of life in a socialist state. As the political situation grows more dire, the Stefanovics travel back and forth between faraway, peaceful Australia, where they can’t seem to fit in, and their turbulent homeland, which they can’t seem to shake. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia collapses into the bloodiest European conflict in recent history. Featuring warlords and beauty queens, tiger cubs and Baby-Sitters Clubs, Sofija Stefanovic’s memoir is a window to a complicated culture that she both cherishes and resents. Revealing war and immigration from the crucial viewpoint of women and children, Stefanovic chronicles her own coming-of-age, both as a woman and as an artist. Refreshingly candid, poignant, and illuminating, “Stefanovic’s story is as unique and wacky as it is important” (Esquire).
A memorable and fully illustrated book on extraordinary days of childhood during the Cold War times when Yugoslavia was led by Marshall Tito. It is an amazing account on how children lived in this country during the Cold War era. On one interesting way, this 240 pages book follows author's life and explains the ways of how this socialist system treated children and their families, and it describes all of the adventures kids had in this urban setting of newly built New Belgrade. It is an amazing experience of witnessing and understanding this different and unique country and its times and learning about things we only heard about in news reports... This is an opportunity to compare our own childhood experiences with those in a different political and economic system¿And¿ there is something for everyone to find, discover, read, enjoy, and learn in¿Once Upon a Childhood in Yugoslavia