And, oh my, Miljenko, you have some lovely paragraphs, which I knew already of course, but when I get to write them again in English, I feel them in a way that makes me new:
In the winter of 1945, while Vjekoslav Luburić was cooking people alive in the basement of a Skenderija villa, and the Independent State of Croatia was, with the blessing of our Archbiship Ivan the Evangelist Sarić, squaring accounts with all those not living in accord with Jesus Christ and the Poglavnik Ante Pavelić, my Nona—who knows where or how in Sarajevo then—had her final abortion. If they had captured her, she and whoever had helped her would have found themselves among those hanging from their necks along the boulevard in Marijin Dvor. It was the final moments of the Croatian state and no time to be fooling around by throwing some woman into the camps at Jasenovac. It was also the final moments in which an abortion could have been carried out, for a month or two more and the fetus would have been too large to dispose of. Thus was the birth of my aunt or another uncle avoided at the final moment.
There are too many things to love about this, the personal subtly mixed into the historical, the ironic deftness, that splendid repetition of final. It is so good. I have added the explanatory Vjekoslav and Ante and camps, for the source is appropriately eliptical there, and there is something darkly hilarious about the part about Jesus Christ and—in the source, article-free—Poglavnik Pavelić, which allows for the possibility of thinking of Pavelić as the administrative superior of Jesus Christ (I hope my rendition does not eliminate completely that possibility), but that twist at the end is so like a Shakespearean couplet that closes a soliloquy, a little rhyme to say here we are together, see? Now on to what comes next.
Russell Scott Valentino 