Going Places: Slovenian Women's Stories on Migration

Chapter 2 A Wife at Home

68 Chapter 2 A Wife at Home Longing and Writing Marjan Drnovšek The weather is always nice, a little bit of rain and then again the warm sun. The time is flying by, soon it will be winter again. We’re not ready to come to Holland, because the little one is not yet fit to be in company much. Oh, I wish so much to talk to you already, but I don’t know when the time will come to do so. Come home, I’d like it if you came home. I still miss you so much, I dreamt about you last night; you came home without writing first, you simply stepped into the house and I was changing Lojzek’s1 nappies and the first words you said were: where were you that you look so tubby? I didn’t know what you meant; I laughed a little at your words and woke up. Now, I greet you heartily one more time and send you a warm kiss. Your little children, the old father and especially I, your always loving and faithful wife Francka, greet you.2 The period of the Yugoslav monarchy (1918–41) was short but very dynamic when it came to migration. The golden gates of the United States were by now barely ajar; Europe, however, became livelier migration-wise. The migration currents prior to World War I were incomparable to those in the period after the war, especially in the 69 A Wife at Home number of migrants. In the period that this chapter deals with, the conditionally free migration across the Atlantic was tightened, and control over the movement of people in Europe was strengthened. One of the consequences of World War I was the deficit in the male population, as many men had not returned from the battlefields. The war also triggered the needs of national economies for new pairs of diligent working hands. For this reason, soon after the war new migration waves started in the direction from the European east to the west, particularly to France, Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands. The Soviet Union was a closed system, although it beckoned ideologically suitable workers to work in that country. During the first decade after the war, France was considered to be the new America because it opened its doors wide to the workforce, including Yugoslav workers. However, the great economic crisis that began in 1929 stopped this growth. Working conditions were constricted, xenophobia increased, and forced returns of workers to their countries of origin occurred. Two totalitarian regimes, the fascist regime in Italy and the Nazi regime in Germany, were gaining strength, and the Spanish Civil War was a harbinger for the misery that lay ahead for people in both their country of origin and their country of migration. During the period of this great economic crisis, the story of a small family living near Ljubljana took place. Maks, the father, who had been a migrant worker before the war in the coal mines in the United States, decided to go to the Netherlands in the year when the Great Depression began, thus leaving behind his wife Francka with a small child, a new child on the way, and his aged father-in-law. The departure of the husband and the father cut deep into the lives of both spouses and their children, too. Despite the correspondence, a huge gap was created as they distanced themselves from each other, especially the husband who was not particularly happy with his life abroad. The most heartbreaking was Francka’s reaction to his cold attitude toward her, which was probably the result of him not wanting to have another baby. 70 going places Here I must draw attention to the importance of the archive materials and especially the correspondence of migrants, which reveals something that only the eyes of the addressees were supposed to see: the intimate and deeply personal portrait of how the main actors—the person who remained at home and the migrant—perceived their fate. It is only these stories that open the depth of the not known, the rarely heard, and the seldom seen, of something that gives a researcher the possibility of analyzing less known data, which must of course be handled and presented sensitively and ethically. The preservation of sixty-one letters that Francka wrote to her husband Maks in the Netherlands in just...