Hrvatska

Until yesterday, I thought I was going to Croatia to find my ancestors, the relatives of my grandparents who immigrated in the early 1900's. I never knew Joseph Rubick, and only met Grandma Mary once or twice. I've heard stories about her, a tough woman forced to put four children in an orphanage when her second husband died. My mom tells me she was haughty and mean, but my dad and Uncle George adored her. The whole family in Butte, Montana apparently did too, visiting her every single night after dinner in the miner's housing tract they all lived in.

It was my dad and his sister, Zora, who introduced me to my Croatian roots - indirectly. They used to sing Croatian duets together, and whisper to one another in the native language. Watching them you could see the permanent bond between them, much stronger than any other relationship they would ever have. I wish now that I'd ask them to teach me too, give me a glimpse of Croatia through them, but I'm guessing they would have resisted. After all, this was their world - their own safe place.

From what I've read, most of the first generation Croatians in Butte insulated themselves from the outside the same way - never learning English, living on the same street, attending the Croatian Catholic church (NEVER the Serbian one down the street, god forbid). I try to imagine the early immigrants coming from the gorgeous Adriatic coastline villages to live in Butte and spend their lives underground in the copper mines. How bad could it have been at home to make them choose that grim lifestyle?

And what about the family they left in Croatia who watched them leave for America, never to return? Where did they live? What did they do? Did they look like me? Were they artists and musicians like Tom and I?

I've spent many years on genealogy websites, trying to find them, and figure out what what our original name must have been in Croatia - Rubcic? Rubich? Rupcic? Why are there no Ellis Island immigration records for either of my grandparents? Did they stow away, enter America from some unusual place like Canada? Was Mary a mail order bride or had she grown up in the same village with Joe, or her second husband, Nick Pericich? How did they fly so low under the radar, miss every census, evade those cool headed LDS researchers in Salt Lake City?

After hiring three Croatian genealogists, I have a vague idea of the region they may have come from (kind of like knowing your relatives lived in Northern California near the coast - somewhere), but that's about it. Thanks to the cycling waves of invading armies in Croatia, many church and family records have been destroyed. And that leaves me with a big map, my grandparents marriage license (misspelled) and two pictures to go on.

What I do have is powerful memories of the music, and images of my dad and his sister/twin huddled close together. These two held all of the secrets, but I was too young to ask them when I could. And when I talked to the relatives in Butte, they all had the same answer about the homeland: "No one ever talked about it".
So, I'm going there to ask the questions myself.

More, I'm going there to find my dad. I want to see him in their faces, hear him in their songs. Maybe I'll understand what he never told me and feel what his life was like as a little boy in an immigrant ghetto. I'll eat the food his mother surely cooked for him, learn some of the words he heard every day until he moved to California.

I want to put my hand on the ground and feel the heartbeat of that country - and mine.