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The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia | 
 enlarge | Authors: Julie Mertus, Jasmina Tesanovic, Habiba Metikos, Rada Boric
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy Used: $6.55
You Save: $15.40 (70%)
New (14) Used (21) from $6.55
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 674821
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 267
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0520206347
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.7024
EAN: 9780520206342
ASIN: 0520206347
Publication Date: January 20, 1997
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Condition: * Item in good condition- Typical Used Book and at a great price! * We carefully inspected this * Great customer service * Satisfaction Guaranteed!
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The whirlwind of Europe's longest war in half a century has produced this powerful collection of personal narratives--essays, letters, and poems--from refugees fleeing Bosnia and Croatia. Taking us behind the barrage of media coverage, these stories tell of perseverance, brutality, forced departure, exile, and courage. With startling immediacy and in moving detail, speakers tell of stuffing a few belongings--a handful of photographs, a rock from the garden, a change of clothes--into a suitcase and fleeing their homeland.
Contributors from all ethnic groups and every region of Bosnia and Croatia describe their sense of lost community, memories of those left behind, recollections of town squares that no longer exist, and homes now occupied by neighbors. The editors of The Suitcase, themselves representing the diverse peoples of the region, traveled to camps and temporary homes across the globe to collect these stories. An antidote to apathy, this work moves beyond and outside the vicissitudes of daily politics to portray the human tragedy at the center of present-day Bosnia and Croatia. Probing the intimate losses of countless individuals, it delivers a powerful indictment of injustice, militarism, prejudice, and warfare.
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| Customer Reviews:
Poignant and Powerful Voices of Refugees March 11, 1999
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
Who are refugees? People who fled the wars in Bosnia and Croatia are scattered in Missouri and Ontario, Germany and Austria, Israel and Pakistan, and they are displaced to other towns within their own countries. They are not voluntary emigrants whose bags are packed with hopes in search of a dream. They may be wealthy, or at least they may once have been. The refugee cleaning floors for minimum wage may have been a surgeon in her own life. The eight-year old girl may be the only one in her family who has learned English, so it is only she who can speak with government officials and store clerks. Refugees are anyone and everyone. They are professionals and farmers and little boys and criminals and poets, but mostly they are women and children and the elderly. The Suitcase gives voice to the people "without context". They speak of their dreams and their losses. Their poems are here and sad scenes of small things washed away forever by tides of war. "War taught us a lot. How the fear makes people irrationally greedy. It is difficult to resist becoming greedy. It is almost like an instinct. To possess, to hold on to something. In shelters, to hold on to somebody. To hold on to your prayer, even if you never prayed before". Some refugees long only for the day when they can return to their hometowns to begin to reglue the shards of their old lives. Some can speak only of Bosnia's beauty or the pleasures of a cup of coffee with friends. Others close and lock the door on the past with determination. "We arrived here safely. Everyone is fine. Please do not write us or try to contact us. We do not want to be reminded of anything", reads the postcard sent by a Bosnian family after they arrived in Canada in 1994. The book is well-edited and well-organized along five broad themes. These are followed by three powerful afterwords, of which Dubravka Ugresic's is the strongest as she muses on the fact that the people of the Balkans are one people. Divided by the same language, they look alike, and yet "not one generation in the Balkans manages to escape war, in every family there is at least one killer and one killed, new life only begins on somebody else's dead head." There is one minor error (p.11, Vukovar was attacked in 1991, not 1992). The Suitcase rings powerfully and true. The simple message here is that refugees are people, and the lives they lead are but a shot away for us all.
EXPERTLY EDITED AND BOTH A TRAGEDY AND DELIGHT TO READ September 13, 1997
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The Suitcase is a wonderful and sorrowful journey into the hearts of an oppressed and victimized land. the personal stories are of those who, throughout history have had no voice. Any person with a sense of history will surely feel the magnitude of the plight of a refugee.
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