Author and translator / American

When I first moved to Slovenia in 1993, I used to symbolically equate myself with the country. Slovenia was a newborn country – learning how to stand on its own two feet, how to govern itself, how to enter the world – and I was a newborn Slovenian. I had no memory of what came before the birth of independent Slovenia, no memory of Partisans or Domobranci, of Yugoslavia or Tito or the Ten Day War. For me, Slovenia simply was Slovenia. 

In those early days, just as I forgave my own grammatical mistakes and cultural misunderstandings, so too did I forgive Slovenia’s mishaps, its stumbling and subservient leadership, occasional xenophobia, lack of inspiring rhetoric, and inability to accept the differences among its people and unite them, to transcend a difficult family history. Slovenia would grow up, mature, learn its ABCs, just as I would. 

So, twenty-five years later, how did the symbolic equation of me, the newcomer, and Slovenia, the new country, play out? Well, today I find myself deep in middle age while Slovenia is more like my children who were born in the mid-1990s: lovely, bright, interesting, but lost in a difficult world not of their own making, unsure of themselves and of their future. I view both, Slovenia and my children, with love and compassion, and I would give both the same advice: discover your values and live by them, safeguard your natural resources, your beauty and your creativity, don’t make decisions out of fear, and open your hearts to strangers as this country did for me nearly twenty-years ago.