Portraits of Europe's Powder Keg

...In sketching Balkan history, Kaplan goes heavy on Bosch strokes...

...We get only the fuzziest sense of other factors, such as the manipulation of nationalism by leaders in both Belgrade and Zagreb, or the economic and political malaise that fueled ethnic tensions in the former Yugoslavia...

...In what may be her most touching essay, "A Letter to My Daughter," Drakulic blames her own generation for failing to protect its sons and daughters from today's agony...

...Reviewed by Jerry Kisslinger Author, "Serbian Americans" "Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans," Rebecca West wrote in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, describing the stereotypes she held before ever visiting Yugoslavia...

...Kaplan takes pains to "heartily condemn" the present violence, yet his lurid account makes it seem normal, if not inevitable...

...We connect besieged Sarajevo with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, not the Olympics of 1984...

...What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities...

...Sulzberger: "It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily, and had a splendid talent for starting wars.'' Even Rebecca West, whose 1,200-page masterpiece on Yugoslavia is Kaplan's greatest inspiration, may have encouraged him to shoot from the hip on matters of national character...

...Kaplan quotes without comment this characterization of the Balkans by the late New York Times correspondent C.L...

...Above all, these essays convey a sense of violation...

...Absent completely are the roles played by the West's early recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, the inequitable arms embargo, and the world community's failure to facedown aggression...

...Death becomes a simple, acceptable fact," she writes, "but life turns to hell...

...For all his insightful interpretations along the way (such as his debunking the various myths about Greece, promoted by travel agents and classicists alike), he is too ready to portray the Balkans as a historical cauldron awash in gore, illicit sex and Eastern Orthodox incense—the haunted house of a violently dysfunctional family...

...Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia and Alex N. Dragnich's Serbs and Croats dealt with the political and historical background to the conflict...

...19.95...

...Sava, the Macedonian rebel Gotse Delchev, Count Dracula, the Croatian Cardinal Stepinac, the Fascist Ion Antonescu, and Nicolae Ceausescu...

...In Transylvania, for instance, he finds a "coffee-house culture, even though there had been no coffee for many years...

...Drakulic describes a photo of a house that had its roof blown off...

...On its most ingenuous level, this is a Balkan travel book warmed by plum brandy and the author's self described obsession with his subject...

...Its overreliance on earlier Western images of the Balkans, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to the film Never on Sunday, renders Balkan Ghosts unnecessarily derivative...

...Mixed throughout his account are stories from the particularly brutal Balkan past—the excesses of the Ottomans, the violence of the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, and the horrors of World War II from the genocidal Croatian Ustashe state to the demise of Jewish Salonika to the rabidity of Romanian anti-Semitism in Bessarabia...

...to her 20-year-old daughter's flight from the country...

...When Kaplan refers to "the East" as a realm of "darkness, mystery, sadness, and irrationality," his orientalizing provokes us to ask whether the "enlightened" West—the home of Wounded Knee, the Hundred Years' War, the Spanish Inquisition, and Nazism...

...The 18 beautiful and painful narratives in this slim collection trace her personal descent into the fighting in Croatia...

...The author would similarly have been wise to avoid statements on "national character'' and other sweeping generalizations about what he unblushingly calls "a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced vision and ecstasies...

...hearing the name "Macedonia," we jump decades to the Balkan Wars or millennia to the conquests of Alexander...

...A small number of books have come out in response to the current tragedy in the Balkans...

...This severely limits his treatment of the current conflicts...

...For this successful member of a postwar generation raised on Titoist slogans of "Brotherhood and Unity," atrocities are anything but commonplace...

...Now two journalists have published personal accounts of events in the region, one as an observer, the other as an insider...

...The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War By Slavenka Drakulie Norton...

...She writes sympathetically of a Croatian actress whose insistence on performing in the Serbian capital leads to exile, and of a cosmopolitan professor whose protests against the "narrowing of human horizons that the war and nationalism have brought" makes her a pariah...

...In spite of everything," she writes in the Preface to this sad book, "I still believe in the power of words, in the necessity of communication...

...again and again she articulates a shuddering horror at "the deep crimson hue of gore" imbuing her homeland, at the nationalistic furies that have been unleashed...

...146 pp...

...From Belgrade to Zagreb to Washington, those with an interest in fatalistically ascribing the war to "ancient hatreds" can read this book, nod their heads and pretend it simply had to happen...

...Through the book's understated accounts, we watch her return to Zagreb and pass milestones of realization and denial, from her first glimpse of death in a newspaper photo, to her mother's advice, remembered across 50 years, on shopping in wartime ("Get salt...

...As he extrapolates from these tales, Kaplan paints with a broad brush...

...despite her skepticism, internal and external pressures move Drakulic reluctantly toward the kind of ethnically defined politics Kaplan takes for granted...

...The Balkans are a region of pure memory," he has written elsewhere, "a Bosch-like tapestry of interlocking ethnic rivalries where medieval and modern history thread into each other...

...Drakulic's journey begins in April 1991, here in our world, where she has long been known as a contributor to the Nation and author of several books...

...It is not hard to understand why, since except for a few folklorists and tourists, we have generally ignored this spectacularly complex region when it was at peace: The powder keg of Europe has only mattered when it exploded...

...The unusual cruelty of Balkan history may indeed help explain the current violence, but do these nations, however tangled their past at the border zone of continents and empires, really inhabit a different moral and historical universe...

...Thus bared, she probes the meaning of war in the minutiae of her personal life, in her own behavior as a daughter, friend, mother, and citizen...

...he asks, as if any place on earth were truly innocent...

...Dazzled by the nationalist and religious passions he has come upon, Kaplan embraces a view of politics in which ethnicity is all...

...An uncritical acceptance of other voices is equally distorting...

...The picture of this bedroom with two neat beds, helpless and exposed," she tells us," looked like a picture of my own life: the perversity of war stripping away all intimacy...

...doesn't have abators of its own...

...One wishes for a less idiosyncratic sampling of Balkan figures...

...She reminds us that "War is not a single act,'' it is "a head-spinning spiral of events and a gradual process of realization...

...In Balkan Ghosts Robert D. Kaplan, an American who has also written on the Middle East and Afghanistan, shares experiences gathered over a decade of reporting for the Atlantic and the New Republic...

...Almost every page of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon contains the kind of cultural generalizations that we can indulge in a British novelist of the 1930s but must read as absurdly patronizing in a reporter of the 1990s...

...A half century later not much has changed...

...In the title essay, she and two other passengers share a compartment on a train returning from Vienna to Zagreb...

...We meet nuns, prostitutes, painters, priests, martyrs, opportunists, and alcoholics...

...He reports as well on the forgotten back alleys of culture—on Saxons in Transylvania, Greeks in Albania, Turks in Bulgaria—giving voice to ethnic minorities deposited, like glacial moraine, by the retreat of empires...

...These apparitions are the ghosts of the title, more foreground than background...

...He moves us south from one end of the Balkans to the other, from Austria to the Asian aridity of Thrace...

...Kaplan is so anxious to prove they do that he even blames Nazism on Balkan thinking: It was in Vienna, "abreeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the Slavic World, that Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously...

...Even in describing war photos she fixes on the recognizable remnants: the package of yeast next to a bloodied corpse, the clean wash still hanging next to an annihilated house...

...The war soon brings more complex troubles...

...But Kaplan's more ambitious subject is his impressionistic take on Balkan history...

...In Balkan Express she bravely breaks that silence...

...Anyone comforted by that kind of demonization will have a harder time with Vie Balkan Express by the Croatian Slavenka Drakulic, who writes in an undeniably human first-person voice...

...No one speaks because, she explains later, "speech implies categories, assumptions, meanings, understandings and misunderstandings," and may reveal them to be enemies...

...She learns the ache and shame of the refugee as she herself flees to Ljubljana, Vienna and Paris...

...Kaplan vividly conveys both the unfamiliar landscape—the polluted Romanian countryside looks "as though someone had taken a billowing, yellowgreen Oriental carpet and poured tar all over it"—and subtle ironies he encounters...

...That faith alone is enough to challenge our assumptions, and to stir our compassion...

...The nadir of inhumanity is probably the 1941 pogrom of the abator, the slaughterhouse where hundreds of Bucharest Jews were put through the stages of animal slaughter by Romanian Fascists...

...Her vain attempt to lay out alliances and territories on a napkin is a poignant symbol of the difficulty of clueing in Westerners...

...War erupts suddenly in these stories, forcing us to confront the normalcy of the life it destroys...

...Western images of blood feuds, bombs and pistols in the waist find new confirmation in Croatia and Bosnia...

...Over Waldorf salad at the Harvard Club, she tries to explain the gathering storm to well-meaning friends...

...In another, she discusses how the nationalism of the war creates ethical quandaries and intolerable demands for conformity...

...And we see her draw close to the combat, visiting the front and meeting an adolescent who has learned to kill like a machine...

...Aboveall, however, he presents an anecdotal cavalcade of larger-than-life characters, including Romania's Queen Marie and King Carol II, Serbia's St...

...Here he unweaves the basic strands of that tapestry: the trauma of Ottoman rule, the memories of medieval greatness that inspire revanchist ambitions in so many countries, the open wounds of World War II, and Communism's role in deep-freezing development...

...When Drakulic's fork hangs in midair during the first air raids in Zagreb, some readers will be more surprised by the Cabernet and pasta al bianco on the table than by the bombs falling from above...

...We stop at a rioting soccer stadium in Kosovo, on the flats of the Danube delta, in the smokecoated intimacy of a Bulgarian journalists' club, and in the heady darkness of a Serbian monastery...