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.
