An ele g y
for Yugoslavia
Victor Sebestyen
CHERNOBYL STRAWBERRIES: A MEMOIR by Vesna Goldsworthy Atlantic Books, £14.99, pp. 290, ISBN 1843544148 ✆ £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The title of this charming book refers to the last summer the author spent in her native city of Belgrade in 1986, just before she married an Englishman and emigrated to London. Twenty-four-year-old Vesna Bjelogrlic, as she then was, picked berries in the hills near her home to make jam. Nearly two decades later, when she discovers she has breast cancer, she imagines that her illness had been caused by poisoned fruit. Ukrainian winds had borne fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor to her favourite strawberry fields.
As a medical diagnosis this may lack scientific rigour, but Goldsworthy could claim minor celebrity as a teenage poet and she makes the idea work effectively as a literary device. She uses a similarly visceral metaphor to compare the ravages cancer wrought on her body with the agonies of war and ethnic cleansing suffered in her homeland since she left it. This works less well not least because Goldsworthy is thankfully still with us writing interesting books, and the country she grew up in has ceased to exist.
Goldsworthy was born and bred in Belgrade during the fag end of the Tito period. She had a privileged upbringing in a middle-class home, went to the best schools, did well at university, held a job briefly as a radio presenter before falling for her English husband-to-be. While at high school she had joined the Communist party as an act of rebellion, so out of fashion had party membership become except among ‘ditzy girls from old familes who had fallen for the hammer-’n-sickle chic and a good third of the basketball team’. She lapsed, due to non-payment of fees, but it was de rigueur to ‘put it about that you had been expelled for saying this or that.’ She writes with wit and nostalgia about the vanished country in which she grew up. Even now, when asked where she comes from, Goldsworthy answers instinctively ‘Yugoslavia’ before realising it is no longer there. Only then does she step back and respond ‘Serbia’. It is clear she doesn’t altogether like what her homeland has become as the result of petty nationalism. Some of the most moving passages describe her time during the Kosovo war. She worked the night shift on the BBC World Service at Bush House when she would read new bulletins on the Serbian Service about Nato bombing raids on Begrade, ‘the city that once I knew as well as I knew my own body’, where her parents and other close relatives still live.
Goldsworthy wrote this book against the clock and occasionally it shows. When she thought she was going to die, she wanted her English-born son, then aged four, to know something of his origins. At times her patchwork style, the hectic jumps in time and place, are annoyingly hard to follow. At others it is beautifully written an elegy to a world that now seems so far distant that it is difficult to remember that it began to vanish just half a generation ago.
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