This book, written between the fall of communism in Yugoslovia and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, is frankly heartbreaking. It's well written and engaging. The author focuses on the little things as a means of demonstrating the wholly inadequate nature of communism at providing the basic material and spiritual necessities of life. She doesn't spare capitalism any either - her words are drenched in a combination of longing for the choices provided and disgust at the waste the system engenders. Reading the book, which ends at the beginning of conflict in Zagreb, is that much more painful knowing what would come after the dissolution of the uneasy peace between Bosnians and Serbs that was enforced by the communist rule. This book is essential to understand the lives of women in Communist Yugoslavia. ( )

I liked this collection of articles better than Cafe Europa. Here she seems much less whining, most of the vignettes are touching, written with sensitivity and quiet humor. She focuses on the dismal lives of women under the Communist rule, and how the failure of the system to ensure even the basics of "decent" living ultimately led to its failure. The book's flaw, though, is its tendency to oversimplify the explanation behind regime failure, and lack of acknowledgment that there are far more nuances and more complex factors at work. ( )

She has a nice style and is interesting to understand Tito and Eastern European Communism from her perspective. ( )

"Just how many iron curtains still exist? What are they made of? Sometimes it seems to me they are made of a material stronger than iron itself: our memories."

regarding Croats and Serbs in Yugoslavia:
"For forty-five years, within the iron embrace of the Communist Party, the wounds of nationalism were not healed. Instead, they were ordered to disappear." ( )

I had heard nothing of this book (printed in 1991), but the title intrigued me. It is, supposedly, a woman's perspective on communist/soviet-style societies. Drakulic is a good writer with a keen eye for detail and a perceptive approach to life and society and the interconnections between the two. She is a Yugosalv, but travelled a lot around eastern Europe and seemed able to travel fairly free to the west as well, and her various stories in the book are basically set in the late 80s, just before the various regimes began to crumble. But the crumbling was not always apparent: the weaknesses of the regimes, and their lies about life and society were always evident, but people could not grasp the possibility that the regimes might not last forever.

Drakuic successfully reduces her explications of the nature of the communist systems to the human level, and in doing so, produces an even more damming indictment of the human costs. As she says about a friend, a young woman, who committed suicide:

Her death was wrong, it was useless, and only today can I see the full absurdity of it. Perhaps communism is collapsing, but what is the price? How many more victims like Tanja will it claim--not big heroes, political prisoners, or dissidents, but people who just couldn't stand it anymore?

Drakuic describes well the crushing, not just of individuality, but of hope, of a sense that there could be a different, and better future. She also describes well the disproportionate burden placed on women and their primary symbol of humiliation: after decades of communist rule, the system could still not provide a decent sanitary napkin. She notes the rush to expunge history in the elimination of all previous symbols or signs (a tendency repeated when the communist regimes fell); she describes the effect of the censorship "chill" that led to auto-censorship in order to avoid difficulties. All in all a very human book about life and, often, the triumph of ordinary people in ordering and controlling their lives to the extent that they could. One almost senses a nostalgia (although the author would not go that far) for a period when all were poor, but coped in their best and most ingenious ways, as opposed to the rampant consumerism that characterized the west and was adopted so wholeheartedly by the erstwhile communist states.

There is an epilogue to the book, where Drakuic speaks with great sadness of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the decent of its peoples into war and barbarism. She most perceptively notes:

This I learned when I realized that I was also reducing my friend from Sarajevo to a category--that of a refugee, and denying her personality and my responsibility altogether. In my reaction to her I recognized that my precious I had become us: us the non-refugees, us the "real" citizens, us the Croats, and so on since once you accept the division of us and them there are endless possibilities. You see war all around you, and recognize the brutality and readiness to kill but you still keep thinking that you are different, that you are somehow better until something banal forces that righteous, knowledgeable, sensitive, intelligent person to turn to her inner self. You do not see the animal [war] that feeds on blood, but you see clearly the seed of division, one single cancer cell from which the war multiplies and grows. Just as the cells in our organism have the ability to change into malign agents that destroy healthy tissue, so, providing that circumstances are right, a certain part of ourselves changes, eats away at our soul. It is an in-built possibility and we are responsible for it, there is nobody else to blame.

This is as good a description of the pernicious and pervasive tendency to "objectify" others, particularly those who are different, and which is the root of intolerance and worse.