Memoirs of My Childhood in Yugoslavia

by Wayne S. Vucinich

Wayne Vucinich (1913-2005) was one of the twentieth century's foremost historians of Eastern Europe, and a legendary teacher at Stanford for more than four decades. Now published posthumously, these memoirs tell the extraordinary story of his childhood in Yugoslavia in the 1920s, living among peasants and shepherds in the traditional mountain society of Hercegovina. His story offers a child's perspective on the Serbian extended family, on the survival of venerable South Slavic customs, on the founding decade of Yugoslavia's existence after World War I, on the tensions and complexities of society in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and on the movement of populations between America and Eastern Europe. In these memoirs a great scholar in America looks back upon his childhood in Eastern Europe, and brilliantly describes a traditional peasant society as it faced the first intimations of modernity. The book offers a striking synthesis of scholarly expertise and personal memory brought to bear upon the native region of the Vucinich family in Bosnia and Hercegovina, the region of Bileca Rudine, constituting its own isolated world of mountains and flocks, of family loyalties and time-honored rituals--the world that shaped the author's values, emotions, and ideals. With this posthumous volume Professor Vucinich gives us one last powerful contribution to our understanding of the issues that he studied with such great insight and erudition during his lifetime

208 pages, Hardcover

Published November 12, 2007