Radjocí-Kane, Natasha 1966-

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RADJOCÍ-KANE, Natasha 1966-

PERSONAL:

Born 1966, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; immigrated to United States, 1989. Education: Attended the Academy of the Arts (Belgrade); Fordham University, B.A. (English literature); Columbia University, M.F.A. (fiction writing).

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Four Walls Eight Windows, 39 West 14th St., Room 503, New York, NY 10011.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

Homecoming (novel), Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A memoir.

SIDELIGHTS:

Natasha Radojcí-Kane was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia into an academic family. Her father was Christian, and her mother was Muslim. By the time she moved to New York City in 1989, she was already experiencing the effects of her heritage. From the United States, she followed the crises in the Balkans, especially as it affected her mother's side of the family, and in just one year, her country was broken into factions. Slobodan Miloševič came to power, hyperinflation resulted in a loaf of bread costing a week's pay, and people were starving, including her widower father. Her Muslim relatives were under siege in Sarajevo and hundreds of thousands of murders were documented. Another million people fled as refugees, and large numbers of atrocities were committed.

By 1995, a modicum of peace had been restored after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord. Radojcí-Kane was studying at Columbia University and working on a romantic fantasy novel. When another conflict flared in 1999, Radojcí-Kane's brother, who had joined the underground, contacted the family when possible by satellite telephone, but the phone would then have to be destroyed to avoid tracking by authorities. Her anguish over his well-being became desperate. In an article in the Boston Review, she wrote that, "it seemed to me that I was really going mad, but not only from trauma; my guilt, my responsibility haunted me and visited me in the little sleep I was able to get. It was clear to me that I would soon lose touch with reality unless I did something that mattered."

Radojcí-Kane put aside the romantic story she had started and wrote the first seven pages of what would become Homecoming, the story of a Muslim soldier named Halid, who comes home to his village after suffering a shoulder wound at the end of the Bosnian War. Burdened by a crime he committed while a soldier, Halid returns to look for Mira, the woman he loves, and who married his best friend, a Serbian Christian. He discovers that the husband has been killed by a land mine, and Mira is now a poverty-stricken widow, living with her child and mother-in-law. Halid also finds that his neighbors are bitterly divided, and the peaceful place he left no longer exists. Although this story is about war, it is the aftermath that Radojcí-Kane exposes.

Halid anonymously sends flour to the house where Mira lives, and when they meet, he wins her through promises of other gifts, including a tractor for the older woman. The villagers speculate about the way in which Halid accumulated his wealth, and his erratic behavior alienates him from them and Mira. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the novel as "a dark and well-executed tale with unsettling scenes and the grit of reality—as well as an acute sense of loss at the failure of a good but desperate man." In Publishers Weekly a reviewer compared Homecoming with Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

In the Boston Review article, Radojcí-Kane wrote, "When I decided to tell the story of the dead in Yugoslavia, I learned something I had not been taught in school: the power of fiction as a political tool, as a means of humanizing the historical facts, the gruesome nonfictional details that on their own leave the readers cold, the unique role of storytelling in documenting and guiding us towards uncomfortable truths."