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DORMOUSE NIGHT
Given the rarity
of my last name, I had a habit of checking for it everywhere: school rosters,
membership lists of professional associations, the phone directory of
every new city I visited. So, when I entered graduate school at Berkeley
in 1967, I lost no time in looking it up in the library catalog. In that
pre-computerized era, this consisted of card files in the main hall of
the library, a neoclassic room with marble floors and pillared doorways,
lighted by garish fluorescent bulbs recessed into a featureless dropped
ceiling that concealed the original high, frescoed one. The beautiful
old oak cabinets wore the patina of decades of handling, and the brass
hardware was buffed by thousands of student fingers; the cards themselves
were thumbed and dirty, their corners rounded from incessant use. But
I discovered that a book edited by one Rajko Ložar was classified
under Slovenian ethnology; I immediately ventured into the stacks, with
their narrow aisles and thick pebbled glass floors, and found it.
The contents were no use to me: the book was in Slovene, published in
Ljubljana in 1944. But the illustrations were fascinating: old engravings
of peasant dress, hunters in the woods, and farmers working their fields;
a photograph of a group of men and boys, in their Sunday best, holding
staffs topped with miniature houses and barns and churches; ancient maps
and botanical drawings. One engraving showed what appeared to be a wooden
animal trap, and the caption said, simply, "Lož." Was that
the name of the object, or something else? I had no way of telling.
As for the editor's name, a visit to the Slavic Languages department confirmed
what the book itself implied: my last name, with its peculiar combination
of spelling and pronunciation, was Slovene. It was properly written with
a "hacek," an accent mark that resembles a little seagull alighting
on the "z"; so I began to write my name with the accent mark,
and my father, to my delight, soon followed.
For me, at least, the motive was more than ethnic pride: in the era of
Affirmative Action, with a name that appeared Spanish to the casual observer,
I attracted a degree of interest from potential employers that I found
intensely embarrassing. Some of my fellow students with quasi-Spanish
names had no qualms about playing Disadvantaged Minority, even if they
were raised in a white-bread suburb rather than in the barrio. Although
I was willing to take whatever advantages my gender gave me, I felt that
I came by those honestly, whereas it would be a kind of betrayal to pretend
to an ethnic identification I wasn't entitled to. Given the choice between
awkward explanations or heading the problem off before it started, I knew
that I would rather fly an Eastern European flag over my name.
But I still had entirely too many teaching job interviews based on someone's
wishful thinking, or on their assumptions about someone from San Jose,
California with a Spanish-looking name. One winter, as I was juggling
uncomfortable interviews at the Modern Language Association convention,
I saw that one Tom Lozar, from a college in Quebec, was speaking in a
session devoted to the poet and painter Kenneth Patchen. Between interviews,
I dropped in. Tom, it turned out, pronounced his name like mine, and I
found the Canadian connection suggestive, but I couldn't stay until the
end of the session to speak with him. I later wrote to him and discovered
that he was Rajko Ložar's nephew; but the whole family had emigrated
to Canada from Ljubljana in the 1950s and had nothing to do with the elusive
John Lozar who fathered a son in 1909.
At a church picnic in the 1970s, my father met a Slovene who ran an excellent
bakery in Palo Alto. When my father recounted my researches, the baker
suggested that our "Pennsylvania Dutch" heritage might, in fact,
be connected with Gottschee, a rural colony of Germans who were transplanted
to Slovenia in the 17th century and, I discovered years later, expelled
during the ethnic "cleansing" that followed the post-World War
II separation of Yugoslavia from its Austro-Hungarian connections. I found
the town-now called Ko?evje-on the map, and turned up a 19th-century book
in the UC Berkeley library about this intriguing Germanic "Sprachinsel."
But at the time my German was minimal, so I didn't learn much from it.
Later I concluded that the good citizens of Gottschee had nothing to do
with us: as a rule, they didn't intermarry with their Slovene neighbors,
and they were indelibly and wholeheartedly Catholic. My ancestors with
the Slovene name and the nonconformist religion were something entirely
different.
Identifying my name as Slovene was a breakthrough of sorts, but didn't
get me much farther, other than piquing my interest in all things Slovene.
In 1989, on a trip through Yugoslavia, I took a train into what was then
the province of Slovenia, and spent a few days in Ljubljana. I was fascinated
by the city itself, with its improbably picturesque setting and gorgeous
Art Nouveau architecture, and I was delighted to discover that people
named Ložar took up an entire page of the phone directory. But the
language was an insuperable difficulty: almost no one spoke English, and,
although my shaky German was some help, any transaction more complicated
than buying a train ticket was beyond my linguistic reach.
The hotels were Soviet-bloc ugly, and the restaurants mediocre. But I
was enthralled by the city's outdoor market: women with baskets of wild
mushrooms, damp humus form the woods still clinging to their roots; apples
with wormholes and an intense fragrance that I hadn't smelled since childhood;
an old man in a worn tweed overcoat selling honey still in the comb, and
surrounded by a humming cloud of friendly bees. Using sign language, I
bought half a dozen slices of succulent ham, a half-loaf of bread, and
a sack of apples, and lunched well on the train to Zagreb the next day.
Fifteen years later, as my research into my family began to bear strange
fruit, I decided to approach the question of my ethnic ancestry from an
oblique angle and made a return visit to Slovenia. The country had become
independent two years after my first visit, and the Slovenes had heartily
embraced tourism and high technology: everyone, it seemed, spoke English;
there was an Internet café in every town, or, failing that, a computer
with high-speed Internet access in every hotel lobby. The farmer's market
in Ljubljana had lost some of its funky charm, and the honey-sellers their
bees; but I slept in comfortable hotels, and dined on Karst ham and wild
mushroom soup in elegant restaurants.
As for the enigmatic Lož, I'd discovered that it was the name of
a village in the province of Notranjska; my guidebook identified this
province as the rural backwater of Slovenia, but not without features
of interest. So one day in Ljubljana, I rented a car-a small black SUV,
with an annoyingly jerky "semi-automatic" transmission, that
I promptly dubbed the Batmobile-and drove south to sample the rural charms
of Notranjska. "OK," I said to no one in particular, "I'm
looking for my people. I don't expect certainty; just give me a sign."
The southwestern quadrant of Slovenia is made up of Karst, a peculiar
limestone geology found in a few other parts of the world-interestingly,
the Burren in County Clare, not far from my Irish ancestors' home, is
another example. The limestone is highly frangible and porous; it supports
the scrubby bushes and trees that have acclimated to it, but is virtually
useless for human cultivation. Over the eons, erosion has carved it into
fissures, tunnels, and caves that range from mere holes in the ground
to the giant caverns of ?kocjan and Postonja, the latter home to a blind
pink salamander that lives almost to human age and has never been observed
to breed in captivity.
Slovenia has put considerable effort and money into creating a network
of modern and efficient toll roads, so I left the city behind me with
astonishing speed; but, once off the motorway, I was back in the 19th
century. A two-lane highway with uneven pavement meandered past green
fields and cow pastures, and twisted through a series of villages with
onion-domed churches, cream-colored stucco houses, and geraniums in window
boxes everywhere. Under a heavy gray sky that threatened to turn to rain,
I traversed a wide flat valley edged with low, densely wooded hills.
One of the major attractions of this region is the disappearing Lake Cerknicka:
the grassy plain is underlain with Karst, permeated by a series of tunnels
and caverns that flood in the rainy season and overflow into the plain.
So overnight a lake appears, nearly forty kilometers square but no more
than ten meters deep, only to vanish again as the hollows under it dry
out in the summer.
By early October the lake had, in fact, disappeared: aside from a little
river flanked by the inevitable beer-drinking fisherman, and a pond with
rowboats chained to its bank, there was nothing but a churning sea of
dried yellow grass. I drove partway around the lakebed, but the view didn't
change, so I soon called it quits and drove back the way I came. I passed
through the center of the nearest village (its cheerful hotels and pubs
empty now in the off season), regained the highway and drove on.
At the south end of the valley, the mountains closed in. The highway zigzagged
through a narrow pass cloaked in dense forest, passed the entranced to
yet another cave (closed for winter), then popped out unexpectedly into
the village of Lož. It was crammed into a long, narrow valley, and
the houses seemed pushed up against the margins of the highway by the
encroaching forest. It reminded me of a shabby Austrian village: the stucco
houses were coated with peeling cream-colored paint, and their stone thresholds
were worn down; there was a rather grim gray stone church with a tall
spire; and the biggest local employer, occupying an ugly box of a building
in the center of town, appeared to be a factory that manufactured windowshade
fittings.
I shrugged and drove on. The next village, Stari Trg pri Ložu, had
an imposing onion-domed church and looked marginally more prosperous;
but I passed through it and took a narrow road that led west off the highway.
It crossed the fallow autumn fields and bumped into another settlement
in the foothills of the mountains; the road skirted the houses (wooden
ones here, with patches of turnips and cabbage in their yards), then headed
into the woods. They were dense at first, tall pines with gloomy, sparsely
vegetated glades at their feet; then the road passed through a gate and
into a grove of spindly trees (alder, perhaps), where a tombstone-shaped
monument bore the inscription, "Schneeberg."
Like many places in Slovenia, this estate, its castle, and the mountain
are called after have names in several languages: "Nevoso" in
Italian, and "Snežnik" in Slovene. For most of its history,
the castle belonged to a wealthy German family who used it as a hunting
lodge. In the opening scene of Der Rosenkavalier, Octavian gloats
that he's enjoying the Marschallin's favors while her husband is off hunting
bear in the forests of Croatia, but I suspect that Strauss may have been
thinking of Schneeberg.
The castle has a moat, a drawbridge, and an imposing profile, but it resembles
a larger verson of the local houses: plastered white, with window boxes
filled with pink and red geraniums and dark slate-covered roofs. I parked
the Batmobile next to a bus which, it was soon apparent, had brought an
Italian tour group to the site. The castle's outbuildings, a cluster of
crumbling structures painted a faded Maria Theresia yellow, housed a small
pub; the Italians, fresh from their tour of the castle, had taken over
the pub and the picnic tables outside; and were engaged in serious sampling
of Zlatorog, the best local beer.
My interests, however, lay elsewhere. Next to the pub was a small, gloomy
office, and at the half-door stood a stout gray-haired man in a faded
blue canvas jacket. This was the admission desk for the barnlike building
across the way, formerly the castle dairy, but now the Dormouse Museum.
The old man led me up a set of creaking wooden steps to the door, flipped
a few light switches, and left me on my own.
The dormouse, or polh in Slovene, looms large in the legend of
Notranjska. It was traditionally trapped for its fur and its fat (which
supposedly makes a especially fine machine oil); but it was also a source
of protein for the local peasantry, whose diets were otherwise sparse
and mostly vegetarian. Traditionally, the opening night of dormouse hunting
season was celebrated on the Saturday nearest to September 25; legend
held that the Devil himself herded the dormice, so hunting them was almost
a sacred duty. Today the hunt is a social event: on Dormouse Night, or
Polharska Noc, everyone gathers at the castle; the stouter souls
head off into the woods to trap the obligatory dormouse or two, then enter
them into a competition for the best catch of the evening, but mostly
it's an occasion for a party. In fact, according to a flyer I picked up
in the museum, I'd missed the festivities by only a week.
The lower floor of the Dormouse Museum is devoted to stuffed animals,
most of them dusty and faded, including everything from sparrows and magpies
to a rather scary brown bear nearly as tall as me-and, of course, the
dormice. They're engaging creatures, the size of a small squirrel, with
big black eyes, long whiskers, round ears, and soft gray fur that resembles
chinchilla. Up another flight of creaking stairs is the Dormouse Museum
proper: the room is lined with glass cases housing dormouse-hunting paraphernalia
of all sorts. There are programs and posters from past hunts, going back
into the 1950s; there are newspaper and magazine articles, photographs
of people in evening dress hoisting wineglasses, commemorative vests and
caps, more stuffed dormice, flasks of dormouse oil, and even an elegant
dormouse-fur hat.
But mostly there are dormouse traps. Some dormouse hunters used the crude
expedient of luring the dormice into a barrel. But most of them made and
used an astonishing variety of ingenious and, sometimes, intricately carved
wooden traps: a hunter out for a productive night would set dozens of
these traps near the hollow trees where dormice nested, and return later
to collect the results. The object was to either stun or behead any dormouse
that was unfortunate enough to put its nose into the trap. Some had simple
spring triggers like mousetraps; others used a drop grate like a guillotine;
and some were rigged with a bow mechanism that released when a dormouse
touched it. The carving enabled the owner to identify his traps, but its
elaboration argued that the joy of creation often took over. Animal lover
though I am, I couldn't help marveling at the trappers' inventiveness.
And, I realized, the trap that I had seen illustrated in my namesake's
book was a local product-that's why the caption said, "Lož."
No one came into the museum after me, so I turned off the lights as I
left and went back to the office. Both halves of the door were closed.
I hadn't paid the admission fee yet, so I went next door. The Italians
and their bus had left; the Batmobile was the only vehicle still occupying
the weedy gravel patch that constituted the public parking lot.
The pub was crowded, noisy, and smoky; a soccer game blared on the TV,
played on unnaturally lime-green grass that testified to the poor reception
in this remote valley; a dozen locals, in variations of the same faded
canvas jacket, were knocking back pints of Zlatorog and talking at the
top of their lungs. I recognized one of them as the man who had let me
into the museum. Lacking an alternative, I said in English that I needed
to pay him, and he replied with his own two words of English: "No
problem!" I bought a handful of postcards at the bar as a small contribution
to the local economy, and would have gladly done more; but, being disinclined
to drink while driving a rental car through unfamiliar country, I left.
I drove out of the woods, down the hill, and back through Lož. I
parked the Batmobile on the grassy shoulder to take a photograph of the
sign at the north end of the village, then edged cautiously back onto
the road. Entertaining as it had been, the morning, I told myself, was
an exercise in futility. Was some ancestral connection to this village
memorialized in my name? There was no way to tell. And, enchanted as I
was by the prospect of being descended from a line of mighty dormouse
hunters, I had no more reason to assert that ancestry than to claim a
link with Gottschee, or to pose as Disadvantaged Minority thirty years
before.
But I'd asked for a sign, and it came to me unexpectedly. One puzzling
aspect of the American ancestors I'd discovered was their partiality for
the name George. Not that it's an uncommon name; witness the long list
of British monarch and US Presidents. But my great-grandfather was named
George, his father was George, and his father before him was another George;
my grandfather's eldest full brother, who died in infancy, was named George,
and so, I'd discovered, was one of his nephews. There had to be more to
it than simply habit.
North of Lož, where the road curves dangerously through the forest,
the regional government had erected a universally familiar pair of back-to-back
signs that said, in Slovene, "Welcome to the Lož Valley"
and "Thank you for visiting …" Following the road occupied
almost my full attention, so I didn't notice the "Thank you"
sign until I had nearly passed it. Besides the message, the sign displayed
the insignia of the region. I recognized a kneeling maiden, a knight on
horseback wielding a spear, a dragon … and suddenly I knew. St. George.
I had asked for a sign, and that's precisely what I got.
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