Comments on Slavenka Drakulic’s >How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed<

Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, Harper Perennial, 1991)

 

Introduction      The Trivial is Political

 

While in the West of the early 1990s after the disintegration of both the eastern European Communist Soviet regimes, the focus was on dramatic events such as the dismantling of the wall and cheering people in the streets at the news that long-abhorred leaders had been arrested, in the towns and cities of Eastern Europe, memories persisted of shortages, unkempt urban centers, and bureaucracies abusive and unresponsive to citizen needs, along with suspicion that lives were not really going to of a sudden be all that different.

 

Chapter I            You Can’t Drink You Coffee Alone

 

Drakulic describes the suicide of journalist friend Tanja, who during the late years of the Yugoslav regime lost her job as a journalist for offending the government, remembering how abandoned Tanja had felt and the summative sentence that she had uttered:  “You can’t drink your coffee alone.

 

Chapter II           Pizza in Warsaw, Torte in Prague

 

The author remembers her chagrin when once she landed in Warsaw during the late 1980s and exclaimed to friend, “Let’s go have a pizza”;  and another time how guilty she felt for a similar comment she made to a friend in Prague that she was craving a torte;  thereby remembering that spending in time in New York had made her insensitive to the shortages in the eastern European countries.

 

Chapter III          Make-Up and Other Critical Questions

 

Drakulic describes the home material goods and chemical solutions that women used during the days of the East European regimes, not (mercifully for GMD) just pertinent to make-up but to matters also of personal hygiene and grooming.

 

Chapter IV         I Think of Ulrike This Night in November

 

In this chapter we are taken to Iowa City (familiar turf for Barbara and me) in autumn 1988, where a young woman from East Berlin seems lost, not at home in the American Midwest but also not pining for return to her homeland any time soon.

 

Chapter V           On Doing Laundry

 

Drakulic describes the lengths her grandmother went to during the days of Yugoslav communism to get clothes bright-white---  boiling, scraping, starching---  never trusting washing machines (water not hot enough) or dryers (lack of fresh air) in the aftermath of the death of Tito. 

 

Chapter VI         A Doll That Grew Old

 

The author describes getting a factory-made doll after having to make do with rag and paper dolls, but then growing disenchanted with the technically advanced (simulating bodily functions, displaying emotional expressions) by comparison to the dolls that she herself made of whatever materials were available. 

 

Chapter VII        Forward to the Past

 

In this chapter we are given a history of the rough toilet paper known as Golub produced by the Yugoslave communist regime, including the days when lapses in production would necessitate innovating with newspaper and rags, and those immediately post-Tito days when imported toilet paper was expensive and the government-produced product not all that much better than Golub.

 

Chapter VIII       A Chat with My Censor

 

The author describes with touches of both humor and irritation the unsubtle ways in which Yugoslav journalist’s meetings with (often politico-emotionally pathetic) censors---  the case of focus being her own---   communicated that articles were crossing the line of political acceptability.   

 

Chapter IX          The Strange Ability of Apartments to Divide and Multiply

 

Drakulic describes efforts to create private spaces by partitioning;  or to gain a little bigger apartment by illegal trading of residences;  produced abodes that seemed ever shrinking or expanding slightly as if following arithmetic processes of continual division and multiplication.

 

Chapter X           Our Little Stasi

 

Stasi is the post office in Croatia, which served all manner of purposes (banking, telecommunications) in addition to mailing but where clerks, even in the immediately post-Communist years, manifested a surly in attitude and served as spies for the government.

 

Chapter XI          The Language of Soup

 

Drakulic describes the extraordinary efforts people in Prague would expend in attempts to make whatever ingredients were available in economies of shortage tasty in assemblage into soup.

 

Chapter XII        The Communist Eye, or What did I See in New York?

 

The author relates how she and another friend who grew up in Eastern Europe reacted to poverty and particularly beggars on the streets of New York City, in a fascinating account of how communist values that they imbibed have had some positive effect on how they perceive inequality in both impoverished and affluent nations. 

 

Chapter XIII       A Letter from the United States---  The Critical Theory Approach

 

In this chapter, the matter of feminism as Western academic ideology is contrasted with the issues (securing means of dealing with menstrual flow, maneuvering to achieve the best circumstances for themselves as women and for their families in a societies that demonstrate little respect for either, overcoming the attitudes of men whom they love to obtain a more equitable division of household labor) that actually matter to women, including feminists in eastern European societies.

 

Chapter XIV       Some Doubts About Fur Coats                       

 

This is a riveting chapter in which Drakula and another friend from eastern Europe just cannot act upon their environmentalist and ecological principals, succumbing to the purchase of cheap fur coats in western street markets, remembering the shabby coats that were winter gear in the communist societies.

 

Chapter XV        The Sun, Like an Empty Red Ball

 

Drakulic records the curious lack of joy among the people and evident on the streets of European cities when first given the opportunity to vote in free elections---  dutifully doing so, but with long-internalized doubts that voting makes much of difference.

 

Chapter XVI       My First Midnight Mass

 

The author describes growing up in Yugoslavia under Tito’s version of anti-church communist rhetoric, observing her bureaucratic functionary father enforce the prohibitions despite the Orthodox inclinations of her mother (who dutifully followed her husband’s house rules);  but then in the post communist era Drakulic (now moved to Croatia, where similar strictures had prevailed) only went to church with her grandmother out of interest and familial sensibility, not herself believing but existing somewhere in the midst of opposition to freedom of religion and nonbelief on her own part.    

 

Chapter XVII      On the Quality of Wall Paint in Eastern Europe

 

Drakulic reviews the terrible quality of paint on the buildings whether in Zagreb, Prague, or East Berlin during communist rule and the noble efforts of the populaces to enhance the appeal of such with surreptitious, dark-of-night ad hoc painting and graffiti.

 

Chapter XVIII     The Day When They Say War Will Begin

 

In this chapter we get another examination of the muted joy, despite the elation of the Western world at communism’s demise, in eastern European people, understanding correctly that war among the Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian populations almost certainly loomed.  

 

Chapter XIX       How We Survived Communism

 

Despite the title of the book, the author recalls how she regreted that title even as the work went to press, actually feeling that survival entailed constant fear and inconvenience and that laughs were all too few.

 

Chapter XX        Epilogue

 

Similarly, sending the paperback version of the book into print in 1993, Drakulic can muster little sentiment of joy for the fall of the communist states when the aftermath presents new challenges and ongoing reminders of the price paid for the suppressions of the communist era, including those nationalistic impulses that now made violence and death matters of overt rather than covert fear.