Balkan SnapShots

Blurb

Sometimes truth comes to us so raw and biting that we want to cover our eyes. That's when fiction can sedate our pain enough for us to look, to drop our protective mask and see. And when we do that, our timid brains assure us that fiction is, after all, just fiction. But that is when the trap springs shut on us, because good fiction usually butts up against truth; within the story are real people disguised, real events recast, or truth rewrapped.Balkan SnapShots is that kind of fiction, a collection of short stories using fiction to describe a most brutal decade of war. Behind each created character is a real one, or a combination thereof. These are stories from real cities and villages, about real people and events. Understanding the Balkan Wars means taking into account the conflicting ethnic interactions of Slavs who may be Serbs, Croats, or Slavonians, of Albanians possibly descended from Turks or Greeks, of Bulgarians, Hungarian Magyars, and Slovenes who may be of Austrian heritage; all possessing ethnic memories that go back centuries. Comprehension is made more difficult by mixing in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam with their dogmatic and mutually exclusive spiritual cultures. Adding to our problem is the linguistic factor of similar Slavic languages corrupted by Turkish, Greek, or Germanic influences plus the fact that the same oral language may be written in Roman alphabet or Cyrillic, depending on whether the speaker is a Croat or a Serb. Politically, the picture is also complex. This area has been brutally subjugated by Byzantines, Turks, Austrians, Nazis, and Communists, each force associated with distinct elements of the internal ethnic/religious mix. As a result, Balkan history is a long saga of sub-groups seeking their own freedom at the expense of the rest. Each group has had its day of dominance and subservience, playing the role of subjugator and subjugated, of being killers and being killed. All have practiced brutality to some degree and have been practiced upon. In the Balkan wars, we witness laminated bitterness, layer upon layer, like thick paint applied over a thousand years, hardened by fire and rendered virtually impermeable.