Foreigner in the House of Natives

When President Clinton visited Slovenia in the summer of 1999, Slovenian television of course covered the occasion as a political event, with Jurij Gostinčič doing his best Jurij Gostinčič. But much more interesting commentators that day were the team of Erica Johnson Debeljak and her husband, the poet Aleš Debeljak, who gave this viewer the impression they were covering the Rose Bowl parade. Which is, of course, precisely what the occasion called for. Erica Johnson, an American become a Slovenian, covering an American president’s visit in her advanced learner’s Slovenian, is already a winning combination. When she covers her past in America and the soul of the Slovenia she has landed in, the result is the little masterpiece, Tujka v hiši domačinov. […]

Tujka is above all the story of Erica’s coming to Slovenia to marry Aleš. It is thus an immigrant bride’s story and immediately interesting because it is the story of a wrong-way immigrant. […] As an immigrant’s book, it is of course as much about the old country as the new and for her (imagine!) the “old country” is America. The book is rich because it is at once about California, Dolenjska, Delano, and Loški potok, San Francisco and Ljubljana, Otočec and New York. The texture comes from the inextricableness of all of these. There are great materials interwoven.  And there is another intertwining going on. The book is after all an epithalamium and is thus, yes, about sex. It is the sexiest Slovenian book I have read. […]

However, not everything is translatable. After the beauties of the Slovenian version, I want the book in English, and I want it now, and I want it illustrated.

Tom Ložar, Journal of Slovene Studies, June 2000

 

Erica Johnson Debeljak is a member of a small  […] human community, a positive child of global connection, an island in a sea of solitide where alienation ends because people in this community speak – and write – from the heart. I do not remember when a foreigner, except perhaps Handke, walked through our lands and simply described what they saw, heard, experienced, and felt. Erica offers us a mirror.  She is a passionate, smiling, sometimes baffled but always thinking American living out her unusual destiny among us.

Vlado Šav, Slovenian National Radio, 1999