Café Europa is the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić's third book of essays on life in post-Communist (now ex-) Yugoslavia. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, 1992) brought the author to the attention of American readers. Lecturing on the first book in this “series,” she amused audiences by holding up a tampon as a symbol of why communism was destined to fail—its inability to provide citizens with the basic requisites of modern existence. She also lamented the intractability of communism in Eastern Europe, even after its formal demise, as a “state of mind.” Another book of short essays appeared the following year. The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New York, 1993) was perhaps the most accessible journalist's take on the various human sides to the Yugoslav wars. She interviewed Bosnian refugees and Croatian soldiers. Anyone who followed the war closely will recall the incident in “Love Story,” when a young Sarajevan couple (the Bosnian Serb Boško and Bosnian Moslem Admira) were gunned down while trying to flee besieged Sarajevo for Belgrade, even though their safe passage had been agreed to by both sides. In Café Europa Drakulić revisits some of the issues concerning newly independent countries in Eastern Europe that she discussed in the previous books and comments as well on the realities of (let us hope) post-war ex-Yugoslavia.

It is an unfortunate irony that the two women writers who have been most successful in conveying to Western (especially American) readers the commonplace tragedies of the Yugoslav debacle and the perspectives of the victims of the conflicts—Drakulić and the writer and Slavist Dubravka Ugrešić—suffered recriminations and, to varying degrees, persecution in their native Croatia for their “cosmopolitanism,” that is, their rejection of virulent nationalism. Ugrešić published a book of essays on the war from her vantage point in the United States (she lost her teaching position at the University of Zagreb), Have a Nice Day (New York, 1994), followed by the award-winning lament for her homeland Kultura laži (antipolitički eseji) (Culture of Lies [Antipolitical Essays], Zagreb, 1996), which will be published in English this year. Ugrešić's name appears in a review of Drakulić's book for several reasons. These women, coevals and former residents of Zagreb, by virtue of their celebrity and eventual notoriety, appear to have become indistinguishable in the public consciousness. This is understandable when one considers the uncanny way in which they at times appear to be in sync, or in dialogue. They have both discussed in their works their mothers' vacillation over whether to remove the red star from their husbands' (and the writers' fathers') graves, because service in the Partisans or the Yugoslav Army became a source of suspicion or shame after Croatia's succession from Yugoslavia. And they have likewise both analyzed the West from the perspective of Eastern Europe: the reduction of individuals to a monolithic mass of “Eastern Europeans” that begins with their first meeting with a Western border guard, the culture of Western advertising, and the perky phatic language that is required in a service economy—our “Have a nice day!” Yet there are significant differences. Drakulić's prose conveys a sense of immediacy and the presence of the writer as an eye-witness and participant. This contrasts to Ugrešić's pensiveness and her philosophical and literary recontextualization of events.

In Café Europa, Drakulić is most engaging when she takes us where few people are allowed to go, whether literally or figuratively. Her piece on Albania, “The Pillbox Effect,” may be edifying even for Slavists, for whom many of the other revelations of this book come as no surprise. The author describes her first reaction when landing in Tirana to the hundreds of defensive “pillboxes” around the airport, which only confirms the image of Albania as a virtual prison. Drakulić reminds us of the rampant destruction that ordinary citizens inflicted on their own country's infrastructure after the revolution. The author attributes this mayhem to the public's attack on all that they equated with the government—and that would have been everything. However, her suggestion that this destruction occurred because Western television advertising promised Albanians a whole new world once they were out from under Hoxha's rule seems less plausible.

Drakulić reveals much of herself personally; at times she is confessional. In “To Have or Have Not,” she questions her habit of carrying loads of goods back to friends and relatives in Croatia, even now when almost everything is available there, if expensive. She recalls the original reasons for this practice—there was less to buy in Yugoslavia, and it was the duty of the person traveling “abroad” to compensate the less fortunate at home. Yet now she is irritated that attitudes have not changed. The person living abroad is not necessarily more fortunate, but those in Croatia still feel more needy and entitled.

Drakulić's generalizations on the current status of “Westernization” in Eastern Europe will not be news to specialists, but she travels widely and offers glimpses of the process in various locales. In Prague, there is still no sense of the connection between work and pay. Capitalism means only the former scheming to get money, but now without rules. In Sofia, hotel receptionists still equate service with servitude and treat hotel guests with contempt—they are determined to preserve their pride despite their position. Several pieces deal with Croatia's rush to resurrect, rather than atone for, its Fascist past. The title essay “Café Europa” treats the ambivalent attitude of Eastern Europeans toward the West. Capital cities all have their version of a European café, but their vision of the Europe that denies them their geographical membership in the continent is just that—an ideal that cannot be realized or even approached without drastic cultural changes.

Presumably Drakulić wrote Café Europa in English. It is pleasantly idiomatic, yet still in serious need of an editor. The English is too often ungrammatical, and occasionally confusing (in the last sentence on page 84, surely both clauses should not be negative—Croatia was able to erase its Fascist past), or nonsensical (“the uniform of an army officer … complete with a sable” [71]). More disturbing is the rare occasion when the author seems to write carelessly. In the touching essay with which the book concludes, “Bosnia, or What Europe Means to Us,” Drakulić recounts a visit to a Bosnian refugee family in Stockholm. She muses over the differences between them and herself—superficial matters like names and ways of preparing food—and the more important similarities—45 years of shard history, their Slavic race, not to mention their basic humanity. She regrets the Western European nations' neglect of their formerly shared homeland, which they justified “with the very convenient theory of the ‘ancient hatred’ of peoples of the Balkans” (211). Yet on the very next page, when discussing the myth of “Europe” that Eastern Europeans devised, Drakulić employs the same orientalist stereotype that she deplores: “Because for us, the people from the Balkans, the biggest fear is to be left alone with each other. We have learned better than others what you do to your own brother” (212). Certainly the author was referring to the latest atrocities, “brother” was intended metaphorically, and this reviewer is hyper-sensitive. Yet we must be that careful.

Café Europa is a now humorous, now poignant glance at the growing pains of Eastern Europe. Drakulić entertains and informs. Her book is welcomed by those who are invested in any way in the fates of these nations and who strive to remind the world of their continuing existence.