Published by Bradt, 2022, 268 pages

“The beauty in small things seemed to speak Lika to me, a beauty that somehow held its own in this vast, sometimes overwhelming landscape. Orchards groaning with fruit, homemade cheeses hanging in muslin, ramshackle liquor stills gathering dust in cellars and barns until the right season came along, plump fresh fish cooked simply, loaves of bread the size of my torso…green scuttling lizards, dancing fireflies.”

Mary Novakovich is a journalist and travel writer based in London. Her family is from Lika, Croatia, an area that stretches from the Dinaric Alps to the Adriatic Sea, along the Croatian border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although Novakovich’s family are ethnic Serbs, their identity as Ličani is the one that really counts. Novakovich describes the Ličani as “[s]tubborn, mulish, impetuous, spirited, tough as old boots, warm-hearted and generous”. 

Her parents fled the Second World War, moving to the UK and then Canada. Novakovich first visited Lika in 1976 as an 11-year-old, sent to spend the summer with her aunt and uncle. By the time she returned, 28 years later, Yugoslavia did not even exist anymore. 

My Family and Other Enemies is Novakovich’s account of that first stay in Lika and several subsequent trips, but the bulk of the book is about her 2009 journey with her mother, visiting relatives. Mother and daughter bicker about the music in the car, about what they should do next: Novakovich wants to explore the area, but her mother insists on visiting relatives time and again. Although the two are close, Novakovich gets exasperated with her mother, who is often unreasonable. Looking back, Novakovich thinks that her behaviour might have been an early sign of the dementia that was to set in. 

I loved this section because it is mostly about her family, whom you get to know. They spend time with her uncle Gojko and Dušanka, the woman he fell in love with when they were both in their seventies. And everywhere they go, they are fed. Novakovich details the endless feasts (which as a foodie, I enjoyed): burek, freshly baked bread, and gibanicai, a savory pie made by scrunching up sheets of filo pastry and dipping them into a mix of eggs, salt, sparkling water and sunflower oil.

But food has another resonance. Novakovich’s parents were refugees, which meant that they did not have family heirlooms or things that would link them to the past—they had to leave all that behind. Instead, they had food, “stronger than religion”, and their rituals revolved around it. 

Lika, like the rest of ex-Yugoslavia, is full of history and has seen more than its fair share of conflict. Novakovich weaves the horrors of the two world wars and the region’s civil wars into the family visits. She visits a pit in the forest where, on 28 June 1941, the Ustaše, a Croatian ultra-nationalist group, rounded up an entire village and threw them into the pit, leaving them there to die. Those villagers included Novakovich’s aunt and great-grandmother. Her aunt managed to crawl away but her great-grandmother did not survive.

The book gives you a real sense of the land: its history, its landscapes, its food and its culture. It is personal, like being in the homes of Novakovich’s family, and brings Lika to life.

Read my interview with Mary Novakovich.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.