Thursday, April 01, 1999
Kosovo anguish reaches to Tristate
Many here fearful for relatives
BY TOM O'NEILL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
In a small church in Norwood, an Orthodox priest reads e-mail from a Serbian monastery. In a Cheviot home she's lived in since 1928, a Serbian-American woman thinks about calling relatives whose fate she fears.
As developments on NATO bombing in the Kosovo region evolve hourly, these two Cincinnatians — who have never met — share common ground.
Their focus is on people, not politics.
“My heart goes out to people on both sides,” 88-year-old Katherine Zavisin of Cheviot said Wednesday. “Do they know what they're fighting for?”
And at what cost?
Her voice grew softer. Her parents emigrated from Serbia in 1905. “I have been thinking seriously of calling,” she said of nine families of relatives there, mostly cousins she hasn't spoken with since 1996.
Are they still there? Does their phone still work? Have they disappeared into the shifting landscape of airstrikes, ground conflicts and political rhetoric?
Many local residents with family ties to the region — be they Albanian, Serbian, Yugoslavian, Macedonian or beyond — are left with more questions than answers.
“They tend to be anguished over it, depending on how long they've been in U.S.,” said Tom Sakmyster, a University of Cincinnati professor who teaches courses in modern European history. “They become Americans, but part of them is still in the old country.”
Many find collective strength at church, in Mrs. Zavisin's case the St. George Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church in College Hill.
In Norwood on Wednesday night, the ethnically diverse community at Christ the Savior-Holy Spirit Orthodox Church gathered for a Lenten dinner. They broke bread, lighted candles and shared concerns.
The church is the spiritual home to Serbians, Bulgarians, Romanians and others. With NATO airstrikes now expanding into Yugoslavia, there is growing concern locally that more families with ties there will hold their breath with each new media report.
They monitor CNN, pore over newspaper articles and sift for references to relatives' hometowns.
“It's been very hard, emotionally,” Mrs. Zavisin said.
Sunday, at a post-liturgy open forum at Christ the Savior in Norwood, the Rev. Steven Kastoff, the American-born son of Macedonians, will read from an Internet e-mail he received Tuesday. It's from Father Sava at the Decani Monastery in Decani, Serbia.
Father Kostoff says the lessons within will strengthen con nections to his parishioners' “old countries.”
“Serbian Orthodox Church remains fully faithful to the principle that good can never be achieved by evil,” the e-mail reads in part, “and that the Kosovo crisis must be resolved by peaceful and diplomatic means so that all peoples living here will be granted full protection of their human rights and freedom.”
“There's a lot of concern because of recent events over the bombing there, the very motive,” Father Kostoff said. “There's also concerns about the perceptions of the American public.”
Some hope that sharing their stories will personalize the headlines and TV news coverage, and that their fellow Americans will better understand the complexities of the tension in Kosovo.
They also want to show that local residents from both “sides” care for each other, and that their concern for the Kosovo region unites, not divides, them. They are Americans first.
In short: people, not politics.
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