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The unrelenting consequences of 100 years of Balkan wars force three generations of Croatian women¿Katarina, Zora, Taniäto flee their homelands multiple times. Eventually Tania, a successfully integrated American, journeys back to her fractured homeland with her mother to unravel the secrets of their shared past.
List of contents
1: Going home
PART I: KATERINA
2: The baby who wouldn't wait
3: Surviving the War
4: Balkanization
5: Post war crises
6: Finding another way
7: Starting over
8: Haven in Yugoslavia
9: World War II
10: Zora finds her way
11: Visiting their homeland
12: Medulin farewell
13: Katarina
PART II: ZORA
14: A best friend's wedding
15: Meeting Tolya
16: Belgrade and marriage
17: The golden child
18: Cold War threatens
19: Tania born to crisis
20: Exiled again
21: Campo San Sabba
22: Campo family
23: Sasha in Italian Hospital
24: Zora's ultimatum
25: Babusya's last stand
26: Leaving Zhenya
27: The SS Constitution
28: San Francisco, home
29: Speak Serbian, Tania
30: The Greg
31: Losing Tolya
32: Taking Zora to Medulin
33: Finding Cousin Milan
34: Visitors from America
35: Zora learns her real name
36: San Sabba secrets
Epilogue
About the Author
About the author
Tania Romanov Amochaev was born in Belgrade, Serbia of two displaced émigrés—a White Russian father and a Croatian mother—and spent her childhood in San Sabba, a refugee camp in Trieste. After arriving in America on the SS Constitution, Tania attended San Francisco’s public schools. She earned a degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, graduating while the school was on strike in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. She then forged a successful business career in technology and was serving on the board of advisors to her College when the formal graduation was finally held. Tania has been the CEO of three technology companies and took the final one to a successful turnaround and IPO. She also earned an MS in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and received an honorary PhD from Saint Catherine University.
Tania is a founder of the Healdsburg Literary Guild and the educational non-profit Public School Success Team, which mobilizes community volunteers to reduce public high school dropout rates. An award winning photographer, her work helped fund her nonprofit efforts.
She has climbed Mount Whitney and Mount Kenya, circumnavigated Annapurna, trekked through Bhutan and Kashmir, and sailed along remote rivers in Burma. In 2013 she landed in Nairobi the day of the terrorist attack and proceeded on a walk across that country from beneath Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean.
Tania watched, from afar, the disintegration of the country where her life story began. Those bitter Yugoslav wars of the 1990s put her mother Zora's sisters onto opposing sides of a battle, and not for the first time. Fluent in the languages of her parents, she visits her homelands to study her past. In her book, Mother Tongue, she explores, in a highly personal saga, the causes and consequences of Balkan struggles over the last hundred years.
Tania is the author of tales of travel to lands as diverse as Russia, India, Japan and Morocco. She is currently writing a book that starts with her father's flight as an infant from Russia during the Revolution of 1917, follows him through life in Serbia, and to San Francisco’s Tsarist Russian community. The essay on her visit to her father's home village in the deep heart of Russia during repressive Communist times was published in Best Travel Writing, Volume 10.
Tania resides in San Francisco, using that city as her base for her worldwide travels.
Summary
The unrelenting consequences of 100 years of Balkan wars force three generations of Croatian women—Katarina, Zora, Tania—to flee their homelands multiple times. Eventually Tania, a successfully integrated American, journeys back to her fractured homeland with her mother to unravel the secrets of their shared past.
