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The True Path
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
133 The True Path When my father was con sid er ing the var i ous re lo ca tions of his fam ily, his thoughts would quickly reach the inter sec tion of two paths. One led east ward, to ward Con stan tin o ple and Cairo, the other to ward the West, to Rome and Paris, and, from there, to Amer ica. For him there was no third path. This was the cross roads at which many of the family’s pre de ces sors had found them selves. Un like his pre de ces sors, my father had traveled along both those roads and had re turned: first in the twen ties, when he spent time in Con stan tin o ple and Cairo, and then, to ward the end of the thir ties, when for the first and last time in his life he traveled with my mother to Italy, vis it ing Rome, Bari, Brin disi, and Ven ice. My father held on to the mem ory of these travels his whole life, never ex haust ing them. If that mem ory wore down, he re vived it dur ing dif fi cult times in our lives. My father spoke so often about Con stan tin o ple, and my mother so often about her trip to Italy, that we chil dren adopted their travels as our own. My father often pon dered the mean ing of these two trips within the con text of his family’s un cer tain fate. In his heart he felt that it would have been, at the same time, both easy and dif fi cult to steer the fam ily gal ley to ward the east, to ward Con stan tin o ple. In travel ing to Con stan tin o ple he would have con tin ued the family’s un broken pro ces sion through time; there we would have had a se cure ma te rial moor ing and ref uge. This travel reached its happy con clu sion in his thoughts; at times he was un happy be cause it had not hap pened in re al ity. But those mo ments were rare . . . As much as it had fas ci nated him in his youth—and my mother con stantly kept the idea alive— travel to the West through Italy was 134 un cer tain and dif fi cult to ac com plish. There the link between the family’s dis tant an ces tors and fu ture gen er a tions had long been lost. In other words, no third so lu tion was pos sible. He had to re main in the Bal kans with his fate. He re mained in the Bal kans, con demned at its very roots, with the cer tainty of wars to come. He fol lowed some sort of fam ily in stinct for sur vi val, with all the pos sibil ities for mis for tune it car ried, into the un cer tain and con tin gent fate of the iden tity he pre served. ...