Diaspora Diaries
Diaspora Diaries: Radmila Rados, The Things That Survive Generations
Radmila Rados was born and raised in Toronto to Serbian parents who believed their newfound freedom deserved to be exercised, and that preserving their culture required more than simply remembering where they came from. It meant showing up, broadcasting the news, singing in the choir, speaking the language, feeding people and building community. As a girl growing up in Canada, Rada sometimes wondered why everything had to be so Serbian. Decades later, standing in her father’s hometown with her own Canadian-born children, she finally understood what all that effort had accomplished. Like so many diaspora stories, Rada’s begins before she was born. Her parents crossed oceans in pursuit of a safer, freer life. They met through the church, opened a dry-cleaning business, raised a family and planted new roots thousands of kilometres from the places their own had begun. They did all the things immigrant families are expected to do when starting over: they worked, sacrificed and built. What made their story extraordinary was how determined they were to make sure that building a new life never required forgetting the old one. If Rada could walk back into her childhood home for just one day, she knows exactly what she would hear. “I hear a lot of people talking at the same time,” she remembers, “as well as Serbian music playing in the background on vinyl records.” Her father’s typewriter would be tapping rhythmically upstairs. The landline would ring against the wall and somebody would answer with “Halo?” There would be food on the table and fresh-baked goods that her Baka made, ready for whoever happened to walk through the door because, as Rada remembers, there was “no such thing as junk food or an empty fridge.” When asked what her Canadian friends thought of their family, her answer mimicked that of many diaspora kids: “They thought my family was loud, but fun.” Rada remembers a lot of commotion and even more laughter. Serbian was her first language and, for the earliest part of her childhood, it was all she knew. Her grandmother lived with them and couldn’t speak English, so Serbian wasn’t a language her parents needed to enforce. It was simply the language Rada used to communicate with the people she loved the most. She was aware that this made her different from many of the Canadian children around her, but she doesn’t remember feeling ashamed of it. “It did feel normal and I liked it because our family was always together.” That family, however, extended well beyond the walls of their Toronto home. Her weekly routine included some combination of church, folklore practice, Serbian church choir, igranke, community banquets, picnics, slavas, weddings, christenings, funerals and multicultural festivals. Weekends revolved around Serbian events. Vacations often meant travelling to another Serbian event somewhere else. Even summer camp was Serbian. By the time Rada reached her teenage years, her world started to open up, but the overwhelming number of Serbian events made her curious about life outside her usual circle. Though she loved her culture, there were moments when she wanted what teenagers everywhere want: to just feel normal. But in her family, normal had a Serbian soundtrack. There Was No Such Thing as Just Staying Home She danced folklore and spent fourteen years singing in the church choir alongside family and friends. Many of the other young people in choir and folklore were her age, so the community became its own social world. The children who were constantly being dragged to Serbian events together eventually became friends because, realistically, they were all going to be there anyway. An igranka in those days wasn't simply a church dance. There was live music, ćevapi and food prepared by the Kolo Srpskih Sestara, singing and dancing, tambura groups, theatre performances, recitals, and, of course, lots and lots of kolo. The entertainment could stretch on for hours, and songs like Rastao Sam Pored Dunava, Niška Banja and Marš na Drinu can still transport Rada back to those rooms. Church music reaches somewhere even deeper. Her maternal grandmother in Michigan was a singer. Her mother and aunt sang in the choir, and Rada and her siblings followed them, with Rada singing for fourteen years herself. Even now, the Easter hymn Jelici and the wedding hymn Isaije Likuj carry particular emotional weight. Church was never only about Sunday service. It was where people worshipped, certainly, but also where they celebrated and mourned, where friendships formed, marriages began, children were christened and community news travelled long before anyone could post it online. “There were Serbian picnics, slavas, christenings, funerals and weddings,” Rada remembers, “all heavily embedded with our culture and traditions.” The people around her became extensions of her family. Her parents' closest friends were the honorary aunts and uncles who weren't technically related but still became, in Rada's words, “very strong role models and mentors.” Her actual parents, meanwhile, seemed to be everywhere. Rada didn't fully understand the significance of that as a child. By about twelve, however, she had begun noticing something: everyone around her seemed to know her parents. For many Serbian children, meeting an older person in the community inevitably brought some version of the question, “Čija si?” — literally translated to “whose are you?” Rada often got something else. “I know your parents.” “That was the first thing anyone ever said,” she remembers. Her mother and father weren't simply attending Toronto's Serbian community events. They were helping create the community those events served. Alongside raising children and running their dry-cleaning business, they produced a weekly Serbian radio program. It was an enormous commitment, and producing the broadcast became part of the rhythm of their household. Friday nights were particularly busy. Rada remembers her father upstairs at his typewriter preparing scripts while her mother listened through records and tapes, choosing music and preparing for the next show. Their program carried news from the Serbian community in Toronto and beyond, happenings from back home, wedding announcements, music and dedications lovingly sent from one family member to another. Before group chats, social media and FaceTime, there was a radio sitting somewhere in a Serbian family's home. And they listened. “It was the only source of information because there was no internet,” Rada explains. “It brought people together in a different way.” When she was older, Rada spent time at the station herself. She remembers CHIN Radio founder Johnny Lombardi and how exciting the recording studio felt. She even recorded a couple of commercials. Today, someone missing Serbia can hear a favourite song in seconds, video-call relatives across an ocean or scroll through news from Belgrade before getting out of bed. Rada's parents belonged to a generation that had none of that. For them, keeping people connected required people willing to do the connecting. Her parents were two of them. And for Rada's father, the ability to broadcast his voice carried a significance far beyond community announcements and music. Newfound Freedom Was Something To Cherish Rada grew up hearing stories about what her parents had lived through before the life she knew in Toronto. Her mother had been a child during the Second World War and remembered hiding in bomb shelters. She eventually immigrated to the United States before marrying and building her life in Canada. Her father had been a young soldier. War took both his father and his brother, leaving him and his mother behind. Rada heard those stories when she was young, but children can know the facts of their parents' lives long before they understand their weight. “I think I had more empathy and understanding when I was an adult and really had time to let it sink in,” she says. That history shaped the way her father understood Canada. Coming from communist Yugoslavia, he knew what it meant for certain traditions and opinions to be suppressed. He told Rada about people celebrating slava privately and about the consequences that could accompany speaking openly. Canada gave him something he valued intensely: freedom of speech and expression. “You could never get arrested for voicing your opinion here,” Rada remembers him saying. Her father didn't regard that freedom as something merely to enjoy. To him, it was something to use and never take for granted, a privilege that the younger version of himself wouldn’t even be able to comprehend. He became deeply involved in Serbian organizations, produced the radio program, served his community and even ran for local municipal councilman. His work ethic was relentless; Rada says he continued working until he was 91 years old. There was very little slowing down in their household, something Rada admits could sometimes be frustrating. “Relaxing is not a big part of what we did.” But underneath all that work was a philosophy she can summarize today in one sentence: “Never forget your roots or your family.” It's a principle millions of diaspora families would recognize. Yet some of the ways Rada's parents lived out that philosophy were anything but ordinary, like the morning a king came for breakfast. When King Petar II Came to Breakfast Rada was only a toddler when King Petar II of Yugoslavia came to her family's Toronto home, so the memory belongs to her through photographs and the stories repeated around the family table. It began with a letter addressed to her father, informing him that the King was coming to Toronto. Rada's family met him at the Toronto airport. Later, black limousines and security pulled up outside their home, and King Petar II took a seat at the same dining-room table around which this Serbian immigrant family lived its everyday life. Her grandmother prepared scrambled eggs and liver, along with gibanica and baked goods. Apparently, even the arrival of royalty was not enough to suspend the Balkan principle that a guest must immediately be fed. But this wasn't simply an extraordinary social visit. King Petar II had come to present Rada's father with the Commemorative War Cross 1941–1945 of the Royal Yugoslav Army, honouring his late father, Srećko, who had died a war hero. As a toddler, Rada couldn't possibly have understood the history sitting at that breakfast table. Even now, there is something almost cinematic about imagining it: her father had crossed an ocean carrying memories of war, loss and the family members who never had the chance to build the life he was now creating in Canada. Then, inside that Canadian home, his family's sacrifice was formally remembered. For Rada, extraordinary moments like this were woven into a childhood that otherwise felt perfectly normal. It was only later that she began to understand just how unusual the life her parents had built really was. “Can We Just Be Normal?” Behind the radio broadcasts, royal visits and enormous community calendar was another reality: Rada's parents never seemed to stop. They ran their business, raised their children, prepared the radio program, attended community functions, maintained friendships, went to church and travelled to Serbian events across North America. Rada's father wanted his family together as much as possible and, looking back, she understands how much effort that required. “He had to be strong, no matter what,” she says. “We all depended on him. He was always present, which took a huge effort.” As a teenager, however, Rada didn't always see the sacrifice behind the schedule. “I did not always like that everything we experienced was mainly Serbian culture,” she admits. She didn't reject being Serbian. Sometimes she simply wanted a little room around it. Outside the Serbian community was a bustling city, disco music, friends from school and a Canadian lifestyle she wanted to experience too. That memory stayed with her when she eventually became a mother herself. Rada married another Canadian Serb, which made keeping many traditions feel natural rather than forced. Slava remained non-negotiable, and Serbian culture was still a strong presence in their home, but Rada consciously chose to make her children's experience less intense than her own. “I did want it to be a lot less intense,” she says. Her daughters did ballet instead of folklore. The family travelled beyond Serbian events. Her children didn't grow up speaking Serbian as fluently as Rada had. Culture was always present, but Rada didn't want it to overpower everything else. There was just one thing she couldn't know yet: whether enough of it had made its way through to the next generation. What Counts as Serbian Enough? Language can become a sensitive measuring stick in diaspora communities. Do you speak Serbian? How well? Can you read Cyrillic? Why are you answering your Baba in English? Rada understands why language matters. Being able to speak her mother tongue has given her access to people, places and experiences she deeply values. But she doesn't believe fluency is the only evidence that culture survived. “You can feel very Serbian and love your culture and music without understanding every word.” Her children began proving that in small ways. One of the moments Rada remembers was realizing that they knew the words to Serbian songs they listened to in the car together. Perhaps that is one of the peculiar things about passing culture down. Parents tend to focus on what their children aren't absorbing—the language they don't speak perfectly, the tradition they don't practise exactly the same way, the knowledge that seems to be disappearing. It's harder to see everything quietly taking root. Rada eventually got to see it when her family went to Serbia. When the Diaspora Returns Rada and her husband wanted their children to visit the places where their families' stories had begun. The trip meant seeing the selo, meeting neighbours, eating suvo meso, drinking rakija and experiencing all the familiar things that have been pulling members of the diaspora back to the Balkans for generations. One stop carried particular weight: Guča. It was the little town Rada's father had left all those years ago before building his life in Canada, and when the family arrived, Guča was preparing for its famous trumpet festival. The town was alive. Brass music cut through the hot August air, trumpets announced the morning, outdoor food was being prepared and people filled the streets. The Serbian language surrounded them in the conversations and music, familiar smells drifted from food stands, stray cats greeted them at their feet while family they had never met graciously opened their doors. For Rada and her husband, much of it stirred memories of the Serbian community they had known in Canada. But what would their Canadian-born children feel? Rada didn't have to wonder for long. Her oldest daughter took it all in and said, “Mama, I'm home. This is in my blood.” Her daughter had been born in Canada. She didn't speak Serbian fluently. She had grown up wearing ballet shoes over opanke and with a version of Serbian culture Rada had deliberately choreographed to be more balanced than the one her own parents had given her. Yet there she was, standing in her grandfather's hometown and recognizing something she had never been taught how to explain. We asked what she thinks her daughter was responding to. “The whole experience,” Rada says. “Music, the smell of ćevapi, friendly people and feeling at home so far away from Canada.” For anyone raised in diaspora, there is something deeply familiar about that contradiction: arriving somewhere geographically foreign and having your body tell you that you've been there before. Rada had spent years wondering, consciously or otherwise, how much of her culture her children had absorbed. In Guča, she got her answer. “It was proof that all that was going on growing up was absorbed despite Canadian culture.” All those slavas and songs, church services and family gatherings had made their way through. Not identically and not perfectly, but indisputably. Even more remarkably, Rada was able to bring that moment home to her father while he was still alive. The family made him a small photo album of Guča as a souvenir. Rada remembers how proud he was to know that his grandchildren had walked through the town he came from and felt connected to it. The man who had spent so much of his Canadian life telling his family never to forget their roots lived long enough to see his Canadian-born granddaughters find those roots for themselves. “I felt like we came full circle,” Rada says. One Suitcase Near the end of our conversation, we asked Rada to finish a sentence: My parents came to Canada carrying… Her answer was strikingly simple. “One suitcase.” It is difficult not to think about everything that somehow arrived with it. The Serbian language wasn't packed between shirts. The songs didn't need luggage space. Slava couldn't be folded into a corner beside a pair of shoes. Neither could faith, recipes, family stories, memories of war or her father's conviction that the freedom he had found came with a responsibility to use it. Yet all of those things crossed the ocean too. Her parents turned them into a life. They built a business and raised a family. They filled their house with people and helped build a community around them. They broadcast Serbian voices across Toronto, sang in church, danced, worshipped, celebrated, fed people and honoured their culture for decades. Rada understands now what she couldn't fully appreciate when she was the teenager occasionally wishing they could just have one normal weekend. “I DO appreciate that now,” she says, “because I feel connected to my heritage and feel like my parents' and grandparents' efforts to come to a new country and hold on to their past were not wasted.” Today, she sees her parents differently too. Of her mother, she says, “I had it easier than she did. A mother very much shapes her children.” And if she could sit across from her father again, Rada knows what she would want him to understand. “I would want him to know that I am so thankful for the way that he raised me.” Because she can go to Serbia today and read Cyrillic. She can speak the language, dance kolo and sing the songs by memory. She can attend church and follow the service, embrace the people and enjoy the food without feeling like an observer looking in from somewhere else. “But most of all,” Rada says, “I feel like I am Serbian, even though I was born in Canada.” When asked what being Serbian-Canadian means to her, she puts it another way: “I live in a wonderful country, but I know where I came from.” Perhaps that is the legacy her parents were building all along. Not children who could perfectly reproduce the lives their parents had left behind. Children who would know where they came from. And children whose own children might one day stand an ocean away from Canada, hear the brass music starting, breathe in the familiar aromas and somehow know: I’m home. That is the nature of diaspora. Some things soften, some change and some inevitably disappear. But cultural belonging always survives. Diaspora Diaries Diaspora Diaries is a Balkanish series sharing the stories of the global diaspora community—the people growing up between cultures, languages and definitions of home. We tell these stories because family histories deserve somewhere to land, and because sometimes the most powerful reminder that we belong is discovering that someone else has felt exactly the same way.
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Diaspora Diaries: Anastasija Perincic Lopes, The Place You Live Isn’t Always Home
Diaspora Diaries: Anastasija Perincic Lopes, The Place You Remember Isn’t Always Home Anastasija Perincic Lopes was three and a half years old when her family left Trebinje for Canada in 1996. She remembers almost nothing of life before they left, yet she has always had a deep sense of belonging tied to the home she left. Anastasija Perincic Lopes doesn’t remember leaving Trebinje. There are no vivid childhood scenes of Bosnia and Herzegovina before Canada, no remembered final morning or journey she can reach back and retrieve. She was three and a half when her family immigrated in 1996, and although she has returned many times since, her earliest memories belong almost entirely to Canada. Ask her where home is, though, and the answer becomes more complicated. When she returns to the Balkans, she says it feels like going “home" and that "I sometimes feel like a guest in Canada.” It may be an unexpected answer from someone who has spent almost her entire life here. But memory and belonging are not always the same thing, and many diaspora stories don’t fit neatly into a single box. A Family That Couldn’t Fit on One Map When people ask Anastasija where she is from, she often gives the answer that leaves the most room for the truth: Former Yugoslavia. Her family tree travels across borders that have shifted more than once. Her father’s paternal roots reach to the Dalmatian island of Rab in Croatia, with an Albanian ancestor further back in the family line. His maternal side was Serbian, from Topusko in Croatia, with roots reaching into Montenegro. Her mother’s family is Serbian and has been in Herzegovina for generations. Anastasija describes herself as “Serb, Canadian with a sprinkle of Croatian,” but adds one important qualification: “Balkan first, always.” It isn’t difficult to understand why. Her family arrived in Canada with very little family nearby. It was Anastasija, her parents and her older sister, with extended relatives living farther away. So her parents did what immigrant families often do when relatives are separated by geography: they found people who eventually stopped feeling like friends and started feeling like family. Her parents built friendships with other people from the former Yugoslavia, and Anastasija remembers looking forward to weekends spent with those families and their children. Canada may have been where they were rebuilding their lives, but inside that newly built community, there were familiar customs and people who understood where they had come from without needing the story explained first. The Weird Balkan Kid School was different. Anastasija was bullied. Other children thought her name was strange. Her food smelled unfamiliar to them. They noticed her clothes, her family and the language they spoke. Even the way her mother dressed her stood out. Her mom had European taste, which meant that before Anastasija could explain why her family was different, sometimes she simply looked different. Her older sister experienced it too. As a child, Anastasija resented being moved somewhere that made her feel like “the weird Balkan kid.” At home, there were fresh, home-cooked meals over the processed foods she saw in her Canadian friends’ homes. Serbian was present in everyday life. There was slava, Vidovdan, folklore and a social circle built largely around families from Ex-Yu.These were ordinary things in her house. Eventually, Anastasija began trying to make one part of that identity less visible. “I was embarrassed to say I was Serbian,” she remembers. Serbia, in her experience, came with negative associations she was too young to control. It didn’t receive the easy recognition she saw attached to other European identities. It wasn’t received with the same excitement that other kids got when sharing their cultural background,”It wasn’t cool like saying, I’m Italian.’ People love Italians and Italian food.” Serbian was harder to explain. So, for a while, she tried to hide it. Now? “I’m proud of it.” Please Don’t Tell Me Who I Am There was another side to growing up between places that left Anastasija feeling othered just as much. People would call her Canadian. On paper, that conclusion made perfect sense. She had arrived before her fourth birthday. She couldn’t remember her life before the war. Canada was where she went to school and where nearly all of her conscious childhood unfolded. But being told she was “basically Canadian” by her Balkan family never felt like a compliment. It felt like someone else was editing her story. “It would bother me when people would call me Canadian and reduce my identity into what they thought it should be,” she says. “It’s like they were telling me how I ‘should’ feel.” That distinction matters. Anastasija wasn’t rejecting the country where she grew up. She was rejecting the idea that geography and memory gave someone else permission to decide which parts of her identity were legitimate. She may not remember Trebinje at three years old, but she remembers the visits throughout the years and how she feels at home in a country so far away from her home. “In my heart, I was always Ex-Yugoslavian.” Belonging, after all, isn’t something another person gets to calculate for you based on the number of years you have lived somewhere. What Our Parents Leave Behind Anastasija understood her parents’ decision to immigrate differently as a child than she does now. Her family was mixed; Serbian and Croatian and the war had made them feel as though there was no longer anywhere they were entirely comfortable. Canada offered safety, but beginning again came with its own cost. Her parents took jobs that did not reflect what they had studied or the lives they had known before immigrating. Their beginnings in Canada were humble. As a child being bullied for being different, Anastasija couldn’t fully appreciate the trade they had made. She knew what immigration had cost her: familiarity, extended family and the comfort of not being the strange kid at school. Adulthood gave her another view. “I understand their struggle now as immigrants, and I have more empathy.” That may be one of immigration’s quietest truths. Children grow up inside the life their parents fought to create without yet understanding what had to be dismantled for that life to exist. Appreciation grows through the years. The Grandfather Who Connected Her to Another Side For someone whose family history crosses so many places, identity has also changed with loss. Anastasija was close with her Croatian grandfather, and through him she felt a strong connection to that part of herself. After losing him, she felt that connection weaken and found herself identifying more strongly as Serbian. It is a reminder that heritage isn’t always inherited evenly. Sometimes one branch of a family tree feels close because a particular person keeps it close. A grandfather tells the stories, speaks the dialect, and embodies a place strongly enough that knowing him becomes a way of knowing it. When that person is gone, the connection can change too. Building a Family Across Cultures Anastasija eventually married outside of her culture. Her husband is Portuguese, which makes the question of “dating within the culture” considerably less important to her than whether a partner respects and participates in the culture you bring with you. For Anastasija, that matters very much. And she is grateful that her husband does. Perhaps that has become even more significant now that Anastasija is a parent herself. Her daughter is growing up with more than one cultural inheritance, just as Anastasija did. And rather than seeing that mixture as a reason to dilute the Balkan side of her identity, motherhood has made preserving it feel even more important. “Even though my daughter is only half Balkan, it’s still important to me that she understands her culture fully.” Anastasija grew up frustrated when other people tried to decide how Balkan she was allowed to feel because she had spent most of her life in Canada. Now she has the opportunity to give her daughter something different: the freedom to understand every part of where she comes from without being asked to rank them. At the end of our conversation, we asked Anastasija to finish one sentence: Being part of the Balkan diaspora means… “I have to represent my people well.” For Anastasija, heritage isn’t something to prove. It’s something to carry—with pride, with intention, and now, into the next generation. Diaspora Diaries Diaspora Diaries is a Balkanish series sharing the stories of the global diaspora community—the people growing up between cultures, languages and definitions of home. We tell these stories because family histories deserve somewhere to land, and because sometimes the most powerful reminder that we belong is discovering that someone else has felt exactly the same way.
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Diaspora Diaries: Sophie Steger, A Makedonsko Devojče Living in Canada
The Zelnik in the Lunchbox Growing up diaspora is strange: as a child, you notice all the ways your family is different; as an adult, those are often the things you hold onto the tightest. For Sophie Steger, a Macedonian-Canadian born and raised in Mississauga, Ontario, that journey began in a loud Macedonian home filled with grandparents, food, traditions and a culture that followed her far beyond the front door. There is a particular kind of childhood embarrassment reserved for children of immigrants, and it usually arrives at lunchtime. Around you, other kids begin pulling out the foods that television commercials have assured everyone are normal: crackers arranged neatly beside slices of processed cheese, juice boxes, individually wrapped snacks and, if the universe has truly smiled upon them, a Lunchable. Then there is you, unwrapping the tin foil. Inside: zelnik. “Sometimes I would be a bit embarrassed when my mom would pack me Macedonian food for lunch,” Sophie remembers. “I would be opening up a tin foil wrapped zelnik and my friends would be having Lunchables, which were much cooler at the time.” At eight years old, there is no explaining to your classmates that one day they will pay $14 for something “artisan” wrapped in brown paper while you will spend your adult life trying to recreate the exact taste of something your mother casually packed into aluminum foil on a Tuesday. Childhood has a funny way of making us want what everyone else has. Diaspora life has an even funnier way of making us spend adulthood longing for what we once tried to hide. Somewhere Between Mississauga and Bitola Sophie was born and raised in Mississauga, Ontario, but inside her childhood home, Canada could occasionally feel very far away. Both sides of her family come from the Bitola region of Macedonia—her father’s family from the village of Grešnica and her mother’s from Budimirci. Her grandparents lived in the same house as Sophie and her parents, so Macedonian wasn’t a language reserved for holidays or occasional phone calls to relatives overseas. It was the language of home. In fact, Sophie learned Macedonian before she learned English. The house itself operated according to a volume and pace familiar to many Balkan children raised abroad. It was, in Sophie’s words, “very LOUD.” There was a garden “the size of a hockey rink”—a reference only a Canadian would make—peppers hanging in the basement to dry and others being pickled for winter. Saturday mornings meant watching the Macedonian program together, followed by soap operas with her grandparents. And, of course, there was always food. “There was always food on the table and usually someone stopping by for coffee,” Sophie remembers. Family wasn’t something scheduled into life; family was life. Meals were shared, weekends involved relatives, and plans became family discussions. School, friendships and seemingly minor decisions could suddenly require the participation of an informal Balkan parliamentary committee. Sophie remembers her Canadian friends having a little more independence. At her house, “there were more rules and a lot more questions.” Anyone raised Balkan already knows them: Where are you going? What are you going to be doing? Who is going to be there? Have I met their parents? What exact time will you be home? A spontaneous Friday night plan could require the diplomatic skills of a United Nations negotiator. Staying out late, going to parties or taking trips with friends weren’t necessarily impossible; they simply required a full proposal, supporting documentation, character references and several rounds of negotiations. “Where Are You From?” For many Canadians, this can be a simple question. For children of the diaspora, it rarely is. When someone asks Sophie where she’s from, her answer is Macedonia. Growing up surrounded by her grandparents and Macedonian culture, she considered herself Macedonian. It was only later, as an adult, that “Macedonian-Canadian” began to feel like a more accurate description. Her maiden name often started the conversation: Terzievski—or Terzievska, depending on whether there happened to be another Macedonian in the room ready to correct you. People struggled to pronounce it throughout her childhood. They would ask how to say it, give it a try and inevitably get it wrong. Then came the question: Where are you from? Macedonia. And often: Where is that? Rather than diminishing that identity, those conversations have made Sophie more conscious of its uniqueness. “It makes me realize that my Macedonian identity is unique and not familiar to many,” she says, “which makes me somehow even more proud.” Maybe that is one of the quiet transformations of growing up diaspora. As children, we desperately want our differences to require no explanation; as adults, we begin to understand how precious they are. Too Macedonian. Too Canadian. We asked Sophie whether she has ever felt “too Macedonian” around Canadians but “too Canadian” around Macedonians. Her answer required exactly three words: “All the time.” Three words that probably have more than a few people nodding as they read this. You learn to move between worlds without consciously realizing you’re doing it. It looks like English and Macedonian in the same conversation, Top 40 followed by the dramatic opening of Svadba Golema on your Spotify playlist, bacon and eggs for breakfast and tavče gravče for dinner. Sophie learned Macedonian first, but today English is the language in which her brain instinctively responds. She still understands Macedonian better than she speaks it, and she knows the classic diaspora experience of having a relative speak an entire sentence to you in Macedonian, understanding every word perfectly…and answering in English. And yet there are certain words English simply cannot replace. Like lele. Go ahead. Try translating that one. We’ll wait. Growing up in Canada may have changed which language Sophie reaches for first, but Macedonian has left its little linguistic fingerprints behind. There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Food When we asked Sophie what her Canadian friends would immediately identify as “very Macedonian” about her, she didn’t mention language, religion or national history. Her answer was much simpler: “Always preparing WAY too much food.” Few things explain Balkan culture more efficiently. You are expecting six people, so naturally you cook for fourteen. Guests insist they’re full; you become personally offended. Their objections are disregarded, and more food appears. Hospitality in the Balkans is rarely subtle. It is edible. That same sense of abundance shaped Sophie’s childhood. Traditional meals kept Macedonia present at the family table, while church, community and the calendar carried the rest of the culture forward. Her family attended Macedonian dinner dances and picnics, went to church and volunteered at Mississauga’s Carassauga Festival of Cultures. At home, traditions marked the passing of each year: a coin hidden in the zelnik for New Year’s, Easter eggs coloured together, roast pig for Orthodox Christmas, Kolede, fasting before Christmas and Easter, Macedonian music, oro and video calls with relatives back home. None of these things carried the entire weight of preserving a culture on their own. Together, however, they built a world—a little Macedonia recreated in Mississauga. Perhaps that is one of the beautiful things about growing up abroad: your roots find ways to reveal themselves. We put on folk costumes and dance the dances of generations before us. We sing songs whose words have travelled farther than we have. We prepare the same foods, repeat the same traditions and, for a moment, feel connected to people and places thousands of kilometres away. It is a feeling difficult to explain unless you have been lucky enough to inherit it. “Understanding My Culture Is Understanding Who I Am” Culture follows us into adulthood in ways we don’t always anticipate, and relationships are one of them. Growing up, Sophie says there was an expectation that she would eventually end up with someone Macedonian. Today, what matters most isn’t simply whether someone shares her background, but whether they understand how deeply that background shaped the person she became. “My Macedonian culture is something that is very important to me and plays a huge role in my life,” Sophie says. “Understanding my culture is understanding who I am, how I was raised and why I do certain things.” Participating in that culture, she adds, is a bonus—another way to make sure traditions aren’t lost. Introducing someone to the Macedonian family, however, is another matter entirely. We asked Sophie which is harder: introducing someone to her family or explaining her family to them. “Definitely introducing them to the family!” she answered. “Too many questions will be asked! Too many opinions will be made!” Some cultural traditions, apparently, are in absolutely no danger of disappearing. The Macedonia We Inherit Through Stories Nostalgia is rarely grand. We imagine we’ll miss countries and cities, but sometimes what we really miss are sensations. For Sophie, Macedonian childhood can be summoned through the smell of ćevapi on the barbecue, tulumbi for dessert and the sound of Makedonsko devojče. Some of her connection to Macedonia, however, comes not from her own memories but from those handed down to her. Her father would tell stories about Mount Pelister near Bitola and its natural springs, a place Sophie came to associate with the Pelisterka mineral water she knew growing up. She still wants to visit it. There is something profoundly diaspora about wanting to stand somewhere simply because someone you love once stood there. We inherit geography that way: villages through our grandparents’ stories, mountains through our fathers’ memories, songs before we understand their words and places that somehow feel familiar before we have ever seen them. When we asked Sophie what part of being Macedonian makes her proudest, she didn’t say the food, the music or even the traditions. She said: “The community connection.” Perhaps that is the thread running through all of it—the zelnik in the lunchbox, the peppers in the basement, the two-hour coffees, the questions before going out, the Macedonian words that refuse to leave, and the stories of places still waiting to be visited. Growing up between cultures can make home difficult to define. Sometimes, though, home isn’t a country at all. It is the people, rituals and memories that continue to find us wherever we happen to be. And, more often than not, there’s something waiting for us on the table. Diaspora Diaries Diaspora Diaries is a Balkanish series sharing the stories of the global diaspora community—the people growing up between cultures, languages and definitions of home. We tell these stories because family histories deserve somewhere to land, and because sometimes the most powerful reminder that we belong is discovering that someone else has felt exactly the same way.
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