My Native Land
By
I SUSPECT that Louis Adamic is a completely honest man — or at any rate as honest as they come. I have felt this quality of honesty in everything of his that I have read, and, on occasion, when I have heard him speak. At all events I am disposed to pay close attention to his words. I have found his diagnosis satisfying and convincing, though I may not always be in agreement with his suggested therapy. Doctors disagree on treatment, but good ones should at least recognize the disease and tabulate the symptoms.
In his latest book,My Native Land, he relates the contemporary history of Yugoslavia, including as background an historical review of the unhappy nationalistic groups which compose the present state. If you have read Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, you have surveyed this ground, but from a different angle and through wholly foreign eyes. Adamic’s account has a momentary advantage in being LOUIS ADAMIC sustained daily by the march of events, while he is himself a Yugoslav, born in Slovenia, though now an American citizen.
His fragmentary reconstruction of these present war years is a record of incredible disaster: of political chicanery and poltroonery, of collaboration, liquidation, starvation, persecution, mass murder, war and civil war, wheels within wheels — a ruthless, savage record of extermination. His documentation is convincing, though it comes through devious routes and by subterranean channels. But it all adds up to a compelling statement by a competent and unprejudiced observer who has no axe to grind, who is not interpreting or tampering with the facts to make them conform to a brief of special pleading, who is not suppressing evidence or attaching undue weight to it: a story of rebellion against shrewd and ruthless Fascist tyranny, from within and from without, in the face of overwhelming odds, by a little group of heroic and determined men and women — Tito and his Partisans.
Americans should read this book, if for no better reason than that they might come to understand in a very modest way the part they will be called upon to play in the making of a peace that will involve such complicated problems as those which exist in Yugoslavia. Harper, $3.75.
MARTIN FLAVIN