Home sweet home

There is nothing quite like the comforts of home. Note the flip flop resting on the ottoman. The comfortable chair. The books. Out of the picture but definitely on hand: the TV showing my beloved "Law and Order" reruns, "House", and the network news. Other pleasures that I missed while I was away: cheeseburgers, hanging out with my grandkids, playing the piano, the LA and NY Times, celebrating Obama's sweet victory with friends and family.

Spending a month in Croatia was a memorable experience though. In some ways, it was like being a child again, in that state of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. Most of my familiar frames of reference were missing, making it difficult to read the environment. Some of this was language-related. I could walk through busy streets without knowing what was behind the closed doors unless there were really obvious clues in shop windows. Then there were the unfamiliar cultural phenoma. The first week in Zadar, there was strange and beautiful music drifting up to my second floor room from the banquet hall below. Men were singing in multi-part harmony, without accompaniment, for hours. It sounded live, not recorded. It happened again the next night. I did a little investigating and discovered that these were bachelor parties, attended by men and boys. There is the usual drinking and celebrating at these events, but the singing is also traditional in Dalmatia. It is called klapa. Most men seem to know the songs and seem to be able to sing them in all of their complex five- to ten-part harmony. I now have a CD of this music, and it brings back that strange sense of wonderment as well as pleasure in the sound.

I will also be thinking about the memorial in Vukovar to the more than 200 victims of a Serbian massacre there during the war in the early 1990s, after Croatia declared its independence and Serbia disputed its claims to its borders. The town itself was almost completely destroyed and has been only partially rebuilt. They have left the damaged water tower standing as a monument to the suffering of the town. The memorial to the massacre, however, is at a distance from the town. It stands on the site where the Serbs had taken men and medical personnel from the hospital in town, shot them, and buried them in a mass grave. There is also a kind of museum nearby on which the names and faces of the victims who have been identified are illuminated on the round walls of an otherwise darkened room. While I was there, a busload of Croatians arrived. One of the group spoke in Croatian; it felt like a prayer, but I can't be sure. Then a woman began to sing a hymn which I remembered from my childhood church-going days: "Nearer My God to Thee." Everyone joined in, and the sound was heart-breaking in its simplicity and beauty. Tears ran down my cheeks.

Of course, as a pacifist, I cannot help but be moved by the many destructive faces of war. And like many war stories, this is a complex one. There is some suggestion that the Croatian President Tudgman may have deliberately sacrified Vukovar, withholding the limited Croatian troops as a way of strengthening his portrayal of brutal Serb aggression.

I will also be thinking about the relatively large space given in Croatian public libraries to playrooms for preschool children. Preschool education is seriously lacking in the country, and children don't start school until they are six and a half. So the public libraries have filled the gap with these bright, spacious rooms filled with educational toys. Many libraries hire people with both early childhood education and library degrees to plan and run activities in these centers, as many as three or four hours a day for different ages. I observed toddlers playing with foam blocks in Zagreb and five-year-olds acting out "Sleeping Beauty" in Karlovac. Our Family Place libraries are a step in this direction, but Croatia has outpaced us in this matter.

People often asked me what I thought of Croatia, its libraries, and its people. I had to say that it was a land of great unspoiled natural beauty and a long and complex history. Its libraries have great promise as institutions that can help to promote the skills and values needed in a new democracy. Its people are often cynical as they contemplate their place in the world, but they are also generous, kind -- and great singers.