Walt Whitman, From New York . . . to Novi Sad

Obviously, you’re talking about three women who not only love each other very much and are deeply invested in coming to terms with our complex history, but possess the perseverance and drive (some might say the stubbornness) of our ancestors.  In the name of our fathers, we wanted to return to Sekitsch.  We wanted to face down the demons from which they had turned their backs, to build a bridge over a sea of dark memories.  In the name of our fathers, who had protected us from the past, we sought to reclaim it.  In the name of Michelle’s father Helmut, who passed away this May and who would have celebrated his 70^th birthday the week of the trip; in the name of my father Phillipp, who died seven years ago this month; in the name of Lisa’s father Ewald, who showed his loving support of us by not showing his worry about our mission.

But Lovcenac isn’t a town where things happen anymore.  It’s a depressing village—and I’m not just saying that because of what happened to our families there in the winter of 1944.  Lovcenac is roughly the same size as Sekitsch was 65 years ago (about 3,000 residents), though over 120 houses are uninhabited and/or uninhabitable.  Storefronts are empty, besides a few casinos, a mini-market, a bakery and the ‘Café Moskva.’  Roads and sidewalks are cracked or unpaved, and graffiti is everywhere—the most prominent message reading “лаку ноћ Lovcenac”,  or “Good night Lovcenac”, in the town center.  Most tragic is the evidence of the former picture-postcard village of Sekitsch, still visible in design and decoration of the standing “German houses”—and in a few postcards that survived the ravages of war.

Postcards like the one above are a testament to the town pride of Sekitsch, which certainly wasn’t on any tourist track.  The descendents of the original settlers from southwestern Germany and Alsace had reason to be proud of their showcase of a town, considering the difficulties that their ancestors had endured to build it.  My grandmother used to recite this simple rhyme,  said to reflect the three periods of Sekitsch’s history:

Dem ersten der Tod,
Dem Zweiten die Not,
Dem Dritten das Brot.

Though death and need were often encountered in the first hundred years, Sekitsch began to prosper in the 1890s when a European-wide depression ended and the market for agricultural products strengthened.  The combination of a good economy, fertile land, and hard work produced a culture that built exquisitely decorated homes, built an extensive pool (the Strand) and sport complex (the Insel Sportplatz), and imported luxury items such as wristwatches, sewing machines, and automobiles (my grandfather used to drive his car proudly up and down the Hauptgasse on Sundays in the 1930s).  When the town was evacuated by Tito and repopulated by Monte Negrians in 1944-45, it was at the height of its prosperity—and according to its residents, postcard-worthy.

Today, an assortment of ‘70s-era apartment buildings stands on the site of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, which was destroyed by the town’s new residents.  The German ancestral cemetery was also demolished, and the land used for the site of a large mill.  A former resident of Lovcenac, Ljiljana Pesikan Ljustanovic, told us that the bones of our ancestors had been collected, washed in wine, and buried in the new Monte Negrian cemetery before the land was reused; however, no one knew what had become of the granite headstones.  The original Town Hall, depicted on the top right of the postcard (above), was also taken down and replaced.   The swimming pool complex was filled in, the vineyards plundered and ruined, the buildings and property markers for the farms removed by the occupying Partisans.  And though original “German houses” remain, a former resident of Sekitsch would have to squint and to use his imagination, just to recognize his former home.

Dislocation.  It’s a fitting term for what this town represents to us.  We had returned to a site of great loss, and we felt that loss keenly in those first few moments, standing together in the Lovcenac town center. I could feel Lisa and Michelle’s shock at the state of affairs there; it came across in their distractedness, their inability to walk steadily, their insecurity about what to think and say.  Can you see our dads dressed in Sunday best, chattering as they walked up the Hauptgasse to the Evangelisches Kirche?  Or how about the handsome sportsman Ludwig, striding towards the strand to flirt with the love of his life, my Tante Gretchen?  I tried to think about how my Oma, who loved to sing, might hum as she made her way to her father’s salas just over the Krivala and beyond the “Hohl.”  But I had to squint very hard to imagine any of these scenes, and to hold back the tears.

And yet they were here.  Our fathers, and their fathers and mothers before them, had been waiting for us in an old house on the main street, now housing the Registrar’s office.  Stanka Kovijanic, the warm and obliging town registrar of Lovcenac, beckoned us to sit down.  Opening a large metal file cabinet next to the ‘kibitz fenster’ (the German word for these deep windows is still used in Serbia) she dusted off several oversized volumes with leather bindings and uneven pages.  Despite the town’s change in name and political affiliations, the church records of generations of Sekitschers had survived.  For the first time, the three of us would see the birth records of our fathers, grandparents, and great-parents.  We could obtain our first copies of their birth- and marriage- certificates.  These pieces of paper were proof of a history we had nothing to show for, besides a few surviving photographs.  We held our breath as Stanka opened the first book.

I gazed very hard at the Филип Михаел and tried to see my father here.  The spelling of his first name, and the existence of a middle name, were new to me.  And yet this was my father’s birthday, these were his parents, this the town of his birth.  Filip Mihael Karbiener, son of Fulop Karbiener, son of Fulop Karbiener.  All of them loved Sekitsch, and not one of them died with his birthright intact or in the family home.

Helmut’s birth was also written out in elegant Serbian Cyrillic in 1939.  Хелмут Лудњиг of Sekitsch, Kingdom of Yugoslavia.  Helmut’s recently untimely death was very much felt by all of us.  Michelle blinked when she looked up from the page.  “He would have been 70 this week.”

For Michelle, this trip was well-timed and emotional.  She wasn’t just looking for her past; she, like me, was looking for her father.  And her dad, like mine and like Lisa’s, was a truly exceptional man.  Helmut was 11 when his family managed to emigrate to the US and attempt a new start in New York.  He had excelled in his studies, particularly in literature and writing, and had won scholarships to prep school and Cornell University.  Despite his literary bent, he went on to become a medical doctor—delivering thousands of healthy babies with care and an ever-ready sense of humor.  Both Michelle and I were inspired by his interest in literature and medicine; he had been an attentive godfather and a present, loving dad.  Perhaps making up for his own lost childhood, Helmut surrounded Michelle and her brother with affection and support.  The well-possessed, confident, warm, and fun-loving cousin I adore, is very much the product of Helmut’s school of parenting.  She misses his guidance, his presence—and so has determined to recover/discover him, at ‘home.’

And homeward bound we were, maps in hand, heading for the spot where a marriage of love (not economics, as was so common in Sekitsch) had its first home, and where two brothers spent their first formative years.  It was a long walk.  We made a left on the old Kula Er Gasse, walking west from the main street down four sizable blocks.  Michelle, Lisa, and I were both fascinated and appalled by the remnants of the ethnic German settlement: the beautiful but neglected carvings of grapes on the houses built around the vineyards, the chipped and fading facades that had been refreshed twice yearly in their best days, the garish paint jobs that seemed to mock the quaint architectural details.  But we were clearly more interesting to the townfolk than their architecture was to them.   We suddenly realized that we were the focus of attention in this dead-end town.  ”Why not take MY picture?” yelled a boy (in Serbian) on a bicycle as Lisa snapped photos of the buildings we passed.  Another man stopped us and—in German—asked us why we were here.

An example of a dolled-up 'German house' on the corner of old Kula Er Gasse and Maximiliangasse.

Perhaps we should have been more nervous.  But the walnut trees seemed to protect us with their mellow, yellow leaves, and the air was fresh with the fragrance of quince.  ”Good morning,” piped a young boy from across the street—obviously practising his English, since it was four in the afternoon.  Walking down this wide street, I felt a sense of peace, of familiarity.  Though I’m a city girl (like my Oma) at heart, I understood at that moment the sense of contentment that small town life must have brought to my ancestors.

”There it is!” The house, like Ludwig himself, was a quiet but sure standout.  The only building to face the Kula Er Gasse at an angle, it seemed to look at us curiously out of the corner of its eye, over its shoulder.  ”Izvolite?”