TO THE LAKE

A writer from the Balkans revisits the region's tumultuous past.

An award-winning writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, Kassabova, who was born in Bulgaria, is the fourth generation of women to leave the Balkan region around lakes Ohrid and Prespa, encompassing North Macedonia and Albania. In lyrical, radiant prose, the author recounts her journey to the lakes in a quest to understand the historical forces that shaped her family and her sense of self and to seek “continuity of being through continuity of place.” From her moment of arrival, Kassabova felt an uncanny connection to Ohrid, her grandmother’s home city, and “an exhilaration of wholeness” beside the glistening, ancient lake whose shores had been inhabited for 8,000 years. “Whose are you?” was a repeated refrain from many she met. Complicating that question about family heritage, Kassabova also asked, “What is a nation? What is geography?” The region, “still a bastion of Eastern hedonism and puritanism,” had a violent past: Ottoman colonization, religious conflicts, wars, resistance, desperate escapes, and “the ravages of a decayed autocracy [that] resulted in civil collapse and the rule of banditry.” Albania suffered for three decades under brutal communist totalitarianism. Through the many people she met—many, in fact, relatives—Kassabova chronicles the region’s history and culture, evoking songs, folk tales, poetry, myths, and superstitions. Ranging over “a traumatized topography,” she reveals her own profound inner journey. “My whole life,” she writes, “felt like a bid to break away from the grip of my predecessors with their endless grievances, step after step, road after travelled road—as if awakening and seeing the light of the Lake for the first time.” As she examines her responses to “a lost homeland I was slowly remembering,” the question that gnawed at her was not “Whose are you?” but rather, “Whose life are you living? No, really living.”

A haunting, captivating memoir of homecoming.