1941( The Year That Keeps Returning)[1941 THE YEAR THAT KEEPS RETUR][Hardcover]

by SlavkoGoldstein

1941( The Year That Keeps Returning) <> Hardcover <> SlavkoGoldstein <> NewYorkReviewofBooks

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Memoir, Holocaust, European History, War

Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fantastic history of 1941 in and around zagreb. slavko is 13 when his dad is taken away by the ustasha, never to be seen again. then his mom gets arrested, so neighbors and friends take care of him and his little brother. then mom is finally sprung and they quickly boogie over to the italian zone of yugoslavia, and shortly thereafter all three join the partisans. though goldstein is a progressive his history seems very even handed and analyzes both sides for their inhumanity.
why the subtitle? it happened again in 1991-1995. and author (and reader) come to the conculsion that this awful destruction will keep happening over and over until the truth is told, the individuals, not the groups, are outed, and tolerance is truly in place. if you read just one book about yugoslavia, make it this one. but then... there are so many good ones too Minuet for Guitar and Trieste to name just two more critical novels.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging combination of the autobiographical and personal with the historic, and a must-read for the Yugo-watcher and Balkanophile. It's scrupulously balanced and fair, in a context where there is famously little balance on offer. He is - evidently - a good man.

Reading this, twenty years from 1991-1995, you also soon realise how little time, really, had elapsed between 1941-1945 and that next flare-up, giving it all a feeling of terrible inevitability (though it needn't have been inevitable, of course).

I always avoided the 'ancient hatreds' interpretation (knowing so many people from a generation who patently never felt such), but this does gives more context to some of those fears and paranoias. And you know you've seeing brutal when even the Nazis asked to calm it down a bit. I think it's also safe to say that Tony Robinson and 'Time Team' probably won't ever want to make a special in the former Yugoslavia - stick that 'geo-phys' anywhere and they'll find a missing village from some time in the 20th century with a horrific, fragmented account attached.

Yes, the 20th century. The nineties indeed: high-tops, scrunchies, grunge and genocide.

[Kata Bitowt · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The twentieth century produced the greatest hopes for mankind, but it buried most of them. It became the graveyard of great ideals. It taught us that ideals are most often a seductive chimera and that doubt is not fatal weakness but a necessary defense against fatal beliefs.
This book was written with such thoughts in mind.'
Pasikartosiu, puikus reportinės žurnalistikos pavyzdys ir vienerių metų istorija perteikta per kruopštų darbą su archyvais, dokumentais ir asmenines, pavienes individualių žmonių istorijas. Kraupu, kartais sunku skaityti, bet didžiulis ir svarbus darbas. Ačiū

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preko 470 stranica memoarske proze o porodici Goldstein, ispraćeno sa značajnijim historijskim činjenicama o periodu 1941-1945 i nakon rata u Karlovcu, Kordunu, Hrvatskoj, Jugoslaviji.
Knjiga mi je dala odgovor na neka pitanja kojima se nisam stizao baviti. Pitanja o položaju Jevreja iz ugla preživjelih članova, života u NDH, Hrvatskoj i svim dešavanjima 1941. i 1945. na prostorima nekadašnje Jugoslavije.

Povukao sam i neke paralele sa posljednjim ratom u BiH.
Knjiga obiluje imenima. Lokalnim junacima i lošim momcima. Vjerovatno ću ih sve zaboraviti kroz pet godina, ali kontekst u kojima su opisani, ta određena vrsta ljudi i određena skupina ljudi ostaju sa mnom nakon čitanja knjige.

Iskrena preporuka svima, uz napomenu da je po sadržaju ipak riječ o knjizi koja je morala biti podijeljena u dva ili tri dijela. Za potpunije i bolje praćenje knjige, najljepše bi bilo da ste živili u Karlovcu duže vrijeme. Ako niste, lijepo bi bilo uzeti mapu i pratiti dešavanja.

[Wf Munn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valuable contribution to understanding the Balkan Holocaust and Nazi collaboration in Croatia.

[Margaret Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always marveled at the audacity of the Croatian priesthood pushing to canonize Aloysius Stepinac, knowing the crimes of the WW2 Catholic church that served the Ustasha state and not the Saviour.

Having commenced this stunning book, I don't marvel anymore.

Goldstein is not the only author who, using his love of the Croatian people as a starting point, seeks to understand the immediacy of the brutality that followed hard upon the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, the NDH, in 1941. (Hubert Butler's Balkan Essays is another example.) Balkan Essays

Goldstein writes: ‘the absolute power of an uncontrolled government can morally corrupt many seemingly gentle people.’

Here is how he describes Vinko Nikolić, the man who saved for him his father’s letter for half a century.

‘Nikolić would describe himself as mild-mannered, a “peace-loving man” with “a sensitive poet’s heart.” Yet he wrote hundreds of inflammatory texts filled with hatred against the Serbs.’
‘It is probable that …Nikolić was among those Ustasha intellectuals…who reluctantly accepted persecution of the Jews as the unavoidable price to be paid to Hitler for his benevolent patronage in the establishment and continued maintenance of the NDH.’

Goldstein believed that ‘Nikolić was thinking that [the émigré magazine he edited in Buenos Aires] should publish a statement of repentance for the Ustasha crimes against the Jews and also for the Ustasha's crimes in general.' He defined 'the most valuable possible mission for his magazine: the examination of the NDH phenomenon and confronting Croatian Ustasha émigrés and pro-Ustasha émigrés with the whole truth, urging them to suppress the self-controlling stories, falsifications, myths, and arbitrary accusations in which everyone else is guilty, but not we who avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror.'

Unfortunately, after Croatia's independence in 1991 most émigrés who returned 'arrived with the baggage of their old prejudices, as champions of an autocratic regime and political and national intolerance. Nikolić ...was not [able to touch on] that sacred idol, the state, or more exactly, on the NDH as the embodiment of the state of the Croatian people. Before that idol he knelt and prostrated himself for his entire life in shallow, inhibited thoughts.'

'Remorse requires exceptional courage. Something that Nikolić did not possess....he lived with a permanent division between ethical sensitivity and a fetish for the state that relentlessly crushed ethics....Goldstein concludes that Nikolić and other Ushasha intellectuals believed that 'if you loved Croatia very much, you must be forgiven completely even if in its name... you persecuted people, drove them into prisons and camps, killed them, or had them killed on a massive scale. If you have expressed remorse with a few general phrases, you have been “purified“ and you will receive the honour that you deserve.' This perverted logic arises from a fetishism of the nation'.

Wow.

[Matija V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly one of the most important documents concerning the NDH and the civil war of Yugoslavia. The focus is on Croatia's collapse into genocidal mania, revolutionary fractions, & the complex social relationships that make up the substance of such vast, abstract historical events.

Slavko was a citizen of Karlovac, so the historical information, and personal experiences, reflect the events from that epicenter. This extends to the entire Kordun region during 41-45, which is the primary emphasis of the book.

There is a lot in here to read about the rise of the Partisan resistance movement and it's subsequent capture (in a moral sense) by the strict state communism of post-war Yugoslavia. Slavko was part of that initial resistance process, but was hastily discouraged and disillusioned from participating in the authoritarianism it morphed into once in power.

The book is a wealth of information on the major events of the NDH and how their maniacal pseudo•religious nationalism precipitated the civil war of the Kordun region (in particular, but also covering significant events and developments in Lika, Banija, & other areas).

Thank you for sharing these difficult memories, and thank you for providing an invaluable resource for Yugoslavia/Croatia scholarship in the English language. Most certainly the value extends beyond that.

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 4 out of 5]

No matter how truthful or simple are the facts narrated in a book, every reader somehow gives birth to their own take on the story. For me the title of this biographical story is the trick that messed up all my expectations, my thinking while reading and ultimately the taste in my mouth when I closed the book for the last time.
I was expecting a truly flash-forwarding series of interwoven actions and reactions between then and now, the 'returning' of 1941 in every single decade until 1991 and maybe beyond - not just a summary of points in the middle of a chapter and a few anecdotes here and there of what has returned from the past.
A craving for moving forward permeated my reading of each chapter...what's going on now, what have been the consequences of 1941. The family story and history is immense and intense and exudes more than what you get by following it. It's what makes this book a powerful rarity in my long history of reading on Yugoslavia.
Eventually every reader has to come to the bitter end of the last page, the last sentence and the last word. No matter how rich, symbolic, everlasting, poignant was the narration and its content, a huge emptiness was left in my mind - it has been hard to find closure in this experience.

[Brett Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very important book covering the period of mass killings of Serbs and leftist individuals by the Ustasha. It is written in language that was surprising in honesty and level headedness reminiscent of Primo Levi. Despite the loss of the authors father to the Ustasha- he makes the effort to connect to the killers, the victims and retaliators. He even goes so far as to recount the lives of the men who arrested his father and his mother and of those men who were sent to death themselves for their actions. It is a book written by a man who is too old now to bother with anger, with sadness or with regrets, it is a journey into forgiveness and forewarnings, into his own mistakes and of those around him. Would highly recommend to anyone especially those who seek to unravel the complexities of the Balkan region .

[Otto · Rating 4 out of 5]

#lesejahr2019 #geschichte #kroatien #ustascha #holocaust #partisanen 1941 die Ustascha übernimmt die Macht in Kroatien, Massaker an Serben, Nachbarn werden zu Feinden, Nationalismen siegen über Menschlichkeit, aus Bürgern werden Verfolgte, Auszurottende, zu Vertreibende. 2007 schreibt #slavkogoldstein dieses erschütternde Werk über die Erlebnisse von ihm, dem in Kroatien aufgewachsenen Juden und seiner Familie, den Verfolgungen, den Ermordungen, den Massengräbern und Goldstein sieht hier die Wurzeln der Gräuel der 90er Jahre, die Wurzeln des Hasses, der wohl noch Generationen nicht völlig vergessen sein wird. Ein Buch, das uns daran erinnern kann, wie rasch durch Fanatismen und Feindbilder das Böse ausbrechen kann, ein Buch, das auch uns heute hier in Österreich zu denken geben soll. #Leseempfehlung

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I embark on my 6th visit to Croatia, I finally sat down to read this book purchased after my 4th trip.
I have a much better idea of the history of Croatia in the 20th Century.
Well balanced, carefully researched, and eloquently put together.
I feel I can superficially summarise the content for my husband who found the brutality too much to read through.
I have more places I wish to visit.
I understand the challenges better. I respect the journey my Croatian friends have lived through.
The book concentrated more on events in the North of Croatia-in the towns and villages around Zagreb.
I will visit this region for the first time this year.
I’m interested how the 20 century was experienced in the southern coastal areas.

[Susan Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an easy read as the unfamiliar places and people's names get confusing. But I found it fascinating and revealing personal memoir, history and hindsight about the troubled country and ethnicities of Yugoslavia as well as eastern Europe in and after WWII, Croats, Serbs, Jews, fascists, Partisans, and the communist movement, the roots of its problems, and the ultimate collapse of socialism.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow - learned so much about the minutia of the fascist take-over of Yugoslavia, 1941. Probably a bit too much detail for the average reader, but for those interested in totalitarianism and the holocaust 'in the corners of Europe' not often talked about...

[Keval · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one of those non-fiction works that read like a novel. Goldstein's 1941 provides a rich history of what happened that year in and around Zagreb. It's a pretty good resource in understanding Croatia's role/position during the Second World War. I would have liked a bit more history though, going further back, to explore the roots of the hatred and violence detailed here. Alas, that's for further reading.

[Gail Hedlund · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this book was good. I sometimes got lost in facts & figures. Facts & figures are important, but not when the people those facts & figures represent "get lost". I thoroughly enjoyed when the author told about his family & friends struggle to survive. People I can see in my mind & the places they lived or were held captive.
I also enjoyed how he linked what was going on then with the present day world. I whole-heartedly believe that if we fail to remember the past AND LEARN FROM IT, we are doomed to repeat it. That is probably the single most important thing to learn from horrific events, learn and do not repeat.
I'm also thankful that the author had such concise notes in his book. Not all of us were raised learning history of the world around us, which I feel is a big disservice. That's why books such as this are so very important. So that those of us who want to learn and hopefully understand history on our own may.

[Carlos B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creo que es mejor libro sobre Yugoslavia y sus traumas que he leído, y llevo dos años leyendo todo lo que puedo sobre el tema.

El autor se centra en sus vivencias personales y lo que ocurrió en su área (Karlovac, Kordum, Plitvice) para de ahí explicar lo que pasó en los Balcanes Occidentales. A pesar de recurrir a su propia vida, el libro es bastante objetivo, argumentando siempre sus puntos de vista. Su teoría principal es que los traumas de 1941 y 1945 no fueron tratados de manera correcta y sana durante la etapa comunista, a esta base se le unió un sistema de gobierno y economía destinados al fracaso por sus dinámicas internas y unos líderes que fomentaron el odio en aras de aumentar sus ganancias personales.

El único pero que le pongo al libro es que a veces la cantidad de datos y nombres abruman y dificulta la lectura, aunque a la vez es una muestra de lo bien documentado que está el autor.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have an interest in what happened to Croatia right before, during, and right after WWII, I recommend this book. I would have liked more discussion about the Serbian experience in Lika-Senj County, but I enjoyed the discussion of what the different ethnic groups went through. This book is a good reminder that people can do horrible things, that ideals and power need to be checked, and that--sadly--innocent people often suffer because of others' actions.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really nice blend of memoir and history, though the personal storytelling was better done than the context bits.