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Travels With Dad

The greatest misfortune for a child is the loss of a parent. Dad was born in July 1918, when Nikšić was still under the Austro-Hungarian occupation. At the end of that year, his hometown became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Raised by his widowed mother, he excelled at school and became one of the youngest graduates at the Belgrade Law Faculty. During World War II, he joined the antifascist resistance and, as a partisan, fought the Nazis. After the liberation of Yugoslavia, he fell in love and married a girl from the Danube plains.

As a diplomat, he served a country that, during the Cold War decades, punched way above its weight. Living with our parents in Turkey and Lebanon, and travelling the Mediterranean, my brother and I acquired the skills necessary to navigate the choppy waters of the global world.

This text is based on conversations with my father, family letters and documents, my mother’s agenda annotations, and my diaries and readings. It reconstructs our timeline until the summer of 1965, while the dialogues reimagine the essence of factually accurate scenes, places, and relationships.

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Other Books By Author

The Belgrade Five

Based on a diary, this collection of anecdotes and vignettes focuses on five high-school friends, and covers the two years they spent together. It brings to life their passion for football and girls, academic failures and triumphs, pranks and escapades, letdowns and amends. And their watershed period cemented a lifelong friendship.

As it reveals the tone and spirit of the times – music and fashion, books and movies, food and politics – the memoir weaves in the country’s complex history, natural beauty, and cultural diversity. And it gives tribute to the First Belgrade Gymnasium, one of the oldest high schools in the Balkans, which played a pivotal role in the boys’ coming of age.

Vuka

Vuka’s elopement in 1928 caused a major scandal in a small Adriatic port. Wise Mike, a mature sourdough, organized her ‘voluntary kidnapping’ and took her on a venturesome journey to Alaska, where he had struck gold.

In defying local customs and in breaking a taboo, she chose personal happiness over family constraints. She fell in love with the adventurer, endured frigid nights and freezing winds, and fully apprehended the majestic beauty of a distant frontier.

The text traces the life story of this Southern Slav woman without formal education but far ahead of her time. Independent and wealthy, she was most at ease at her Fairbanks Creek, in the midst of astonishing nature and at peace with the essential. There is an endowment in her name at a university in California entitled the Power of Good.

Getting to Know the Manager

Based on the author’s Day-Timer notebooks, this collection of episodes records a process of getting acquainted with an influential manager in a multicultural environment. Set in four countries of the Western hemisphere, the chapters describe the human side of unusual events and relationships. Within the context of international financial affairs, the story gradually reveals a remarkable life story of migration from the old to the new continent. The book is not only entertaining and easy to read but is highly instructive and relevant for the practice of management and teamwork in any multinational organization

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