Letter from Ljubljana #7, June 2022: Alpha and Omega and Maybe Back to Alpha
(Apologies for the 23-year gap between entries; I’d been a bit busy.)
I cried a bit when the Lufthansa jet flew into Slovenian airspace and the mountains and green vistas came into view. It had been 18 years since my last visit, after all, and over 20 since I’d lived there. In the interim I had moved to Texas, gotten married, had two sons, experienced my wife’s death, remarried. Distant memories were about to become reality again. I was coming home. I felt this, as if an actual limb was being regrown where there had only been a phantom one for two decades.
(Just a note on that, though I’ve said a lot already: I don’t want to be defined by my membership in the widderfolk, by my mom’s early death, or my younger son’s autism, and I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, but I don’t want to run from it either [not that I could even if I wanted to]. But I can’t deny that these experiences have changed me profoundly — I’m more patient, more compassionate, maybe even a bit…wiser? Anyway, it’s complicated. I strongly dislike the expression “moving on,” but moving forward, that I can live with.)
Now I was returning with wife #2 and my 17-year-old son Luka (Leo remaining behind with a caretaker in Texas). I’m quite aware that their experience of Slovenia will be quite different than mine. Laura was born in Cyprus, lived in 11 different states in the US and several different countries (including living and working in Dubai when married to her late first husband), and she’s no stranger to Europe, but it’s her first time in Slovenia. And it’s Luka’s first time in Europe (no London, Paris or Rome for him! At least not for now! No, Ljubljana it is!).
Ljubljana is my Paris, my spiritual home. I can’t really explain why, other than I always felt at home there from the start. Perhaps I lived there in a previous life. Who knows. I know I tend to romanticize the place — Gloria Slovenia in excelsis, indeed — and I know it’s far from perfect, but it’s a good fit for me.
I have no roots in Slovenia other than my own. None of my great-great-grandparents emigrated from there, and I have no second cousins in Ptuj or Kamnik. So how did I decide to move there?
On January 10, 1995 I was living in a basement apartment in Framingham, Massachusetts, some 20 miles west of Boston, in the midst of a seemingly endless number of shopping malls. I had moved there from the studio apartment in the Brighton student ghetto where I had stayed nine long years, thinking all the while that I might never get out of there. But I was none too happy in Framingham, either, and there wasn’t much holding me there.
That day I read in the Boston Globe that a friend of mine had died. Richard Cromonic had been the editor of Sweet Potato, a music zine I occasionally wrote for, and a freelance rock critic for a number of other local publications. He also lived in Brighton, and had died in a house fire (which I think may have started by his habit of smoking in bed). He was 40, five years older than I was at the time. Rich was a smart, sardonic dude, a good writer who could be very funny both on and off the page, but also a very solitary guy. He died alone, much as he had lived.
On January 25th I attended Rich’s memorial service at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. His parents had come from New Jersey, his myriad rock critic pals from the ’70s and ’80s and coworkers from the ’90s showed up, and many funny and touching stories were told. His dad remarked on Rich’s preference for never dressing up for anything, and remarked, “He went out in a sweater.”
I sat in a pew absorbing it all. Kind of an unusual memorial service, I thought, but befitting the man. And I also thought: I don’t want to end my life this way. I want to experience things. Dare to do something different. Live before I die. And so the kernel of foreign wanderlust took root in my heart.
But where should I go? It was over five years since the Berlin Wall had fallen, and Eastern Europe wasn’t as romantic as it might have seemed in 1990. Prague seemed too obvious— so many expats had headed over there already, and ya not that basic, are ya Wes? Try for somewhere exotic but safe, somewhere off the beaten path.
That same year, as it happened, I was doing some volunteer work for a local Jewish charity, helping recent Russian-Jewish immigrants assimilate into American society (language, culture, maneuvering within the bureaucracy, that sort of thing). One of my charges was a charming, intelligent, youngish couple, the husband a former English teacher in Russia, now spending his days processing photos, the wife — well, I think she was doing something in tech. I was sitting at the kitchen table in their apartment one day and mentioned I was thinking of moving to Central or Eastern Europe, don’t know where exactly, maybe the Czech Republic…
“You should consider Slovenia,” the wife said. “A friend of mine said it’s very nice.”
Slovenia? Never really heard of it. But I soon set about finding out everything I could about the place. The northernmost part of the former Yugoslavia, relatively high standard of living, independent only a few years, and despite being surrounded by several larger, diverse countries, has gone to great pains to maintain a separate, distinct culture of its own. It seemed to punch way above its weight, this Slovenia. I liked all of this, and even my first attempts to learn the odd language (which from the CD that came with the Colloquial Slovene package I bought, sounded like Russian spoken with an Italian accent) didn’t put me off. I was up for a challenge.
And in October of ’96, off I went.
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In late May of ’22 Laura, Luka and I flew directly from Austin to Amsterdam (blessings on you, KLM, even though your flight was over three hours late), where we stayed three days. We spent a few delightful hours at the modern, well-thought-out Van Gogh Museum (very glad I bought advance tickets, as the place sells out fast), visited friends. On the first of June, after experiencing disastrous delays with Lufthansa’s intra-European flights, we missed our connection in Frankfurt to Ljubljana, spent the night at a generic Frankfurt airport hotel on Lufthansa’s dime, then flew on to Ljubljana, via a stop in Munich, on the second of June. (One of our bags disappeared along the way, apparently being routed through Zurich before the prodigal luggage was returned to us 10 days later in Ljubljana.)
Of course I knew things would be different. Slovenia had been part of the EU for 14 years, the euro had long displaced the tolar as currency, and Stara Ljubljana, the old town, had pretty much been surrendered to the tourists. So many gelato stands. So many boat tours. A freaking funicular ferried tourists up and down the hill to Ljubljanski Grad, the uber-historic castle/heart of the city that had been renovated countless times. Everything was more expensive; the old description of the town as enabling “champagne living on a beer budget,” as a translator pal of mine once put it, wasn’t really that accurate anymore, at least within the city limits of the capital. On the plus side, the city had become much more diverse; the world had discovered it and was making inroads.
We checked in, a day late, to an Airbnb in a 16th century building on fab Križevniška ulica, home to good restaurants, theaters, the Jewish Museum and Cultural Center, and the House of Tolerance. Touristy, perhaps, but also attuned to the community; try to find an equivalent street in most cities in the United States and you’d be well out of luck.
Every Friday in the warmer months Ljubljana holds Open Kitchen, a street-food festival with all kinds of local eats and drink on offer. More diverse than you might think, too — churros, paella, Thai. And probably the best pizza in Ljubljana, if not the world, is served at a Neapolitan/Brooklyn influenced joint by the river with the decidedly non-Slovene name of Pop’s Pizza. I have a sentimental attachment to my old standby, Pizzeria Trta, which still serves a killer seafood pie, but this place, albeit pricier, is serious competition.
We did the National Museum and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum (Laura loves museums), met with old friends I hadn’t seen in an old dog’s age (writers, artists, translators, social activists…my crowd). One afternoon I even took Luka to have our teeth cleaned at a dental clinic in Bežigrad, just north of Center, since it cost approximately one-third of what it would in the States. (Very comparable to a Stateside dentist’s office, too, though it had been a while since I’d seen an actual spit sink.) While in Bežigrad, I took Luka on a short stroll to see my old house on Funtkova ulica, the last of three places I lived in Ljubljana.
The experience was, on the whole, kinda timewarpy. As I walked the familiar streets and alleys of old and new Ljubljana, I played the revisitors’ head game of “what’s new vs. what was there back then.” A lot was new, but the bones were good.
Revisiting Slovenia was a tremendously restorative experience for me. Much has changed there, but I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to see the place again — hopefully not for the last time.
Oh, we also made forays to the Idrija area, home of closed mercury mines and fine lace products, and Bela Krajina, the off-the-beaten-path southeastern corner of Slovenia that I’d wanted to see for 20 years and finally did…but let’s leave that for another day. Towards the end of our Slovenia travels, on our way back to Ljubljana to spend another few days, we stopped for a bit at BTC City, a huge modern shopping complex some miles from the center that my friend Vuk calls “the real downtown.” BTC, which traces its origins to 1954, stands for Blagovno Trgovinski Center (Goods and Shopping Center) and includes the likes of a water park, a casino and Slovenia’s tallest building, but my private joke is that it stands for Behind The Curtain, as it’s the place the locals prefer to spend their euros. I might add Luka to the equation as although he enjoyed exploring the old town, he relished going to the Adidas store at BTC and buying outfits; he’s a 17-year-old American, after all.
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Three days after flying home to Austin (our return flights smooth, uneventful, and on time for a change), I strolled into the German Consulate in Houston with my two sons and picked up certificates of naturalization. We are now dual U.S. and German citizens by dint of my father having been born into a German Jewish family in a suburb of Düsseldorf in 1930 and deprived of his citizenship by the Nazis during his childhood.
I’m told the German passports should probably arrive some time in August. Given the current dysfunctional state of my home country, relocation is becoming very tempting, not to Germany, but anywhere in the EU is fair game. Particularly one smallish country just east of northern Italy and south of Austria.
It’s an occupational hazard whenever I travel: As soon as I get home, I want to turn around and go back again to the place I just left (unless it was Newark Airport). Because I’ve gotten used to the place traveled to; it makes sense to me, probably more so than my home of record.
Slovenia is calling again.
For further reading:
My original, collected Letters from Ljubljana, 1996–1999.
Finally, I warmly recommend you read my comic noir novelette about turn-of-the-millennium Ljubljana, The Mesecnik Files, online. I put a lot of work into it. It’s fiction, mostly. I was going for a fun read; you be the judge.
