Burying the Diplomat Father: Shifting ex-Yugoslav Spaces in Yelena Franklin’s A Bowl Of Sour Cherries
Burying the Diplomat Father: Shifting ex-Yugoslav Spaces in Yelena Franklin’s A Bowl Of Sour Cherries

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on recent research into East European diasporic and migrant writing by women, the paper explores ex-Yugoslav spaces of memory as represented in A Bowl of Sour Cherries (1997), a semi-autobiographical novel authored by Yugoslav-born US American writer Yelena Franklin. Following the narrative’s transnational trajectories of displacement, return, and departure, the paper embarks on mapping thematic and political preoccupations that Franklin shares with other women writers who have migrated from the former Yugoslavia to the United States, where their works composed in English emerge as a strategy of self-translating, preserving, and challenging their experiences of Yugoslavia as a vanished land. Based on the identification of recurring themes in postYugoslav migrant prose that often deals with the traditional notions of “the Slav spirit”, “brotherhood and unity”, and “the magic word abroad”, the paper attempts to offer an insight into women migrants’ revisiting of stereotypical representations of their birth and adopted cultures. While the disintegration of the homeland coinciding with the death of the father figure seems to be the main focus of the novel, it may be argued that Franklin in her literary representations of ex-Yugoslav patriarchal family and society tends to invoke subversive yet powerful pathways of women’s empowerment. The paper also juxtaposes the representations of shifting ex-Yugoslav and transnational spaces, as well as the notions of borders, transit visas, and nationalisms on the move.

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