BOOKISHGAL

The title of this ISBN-less book translates as “Biblia.” It’s a Serbo-Croatian Bible printed in Cyrillic script, that I bought in Europe several years ago. But this isn’t just another language book I grabbed for my collection. There’s a reason I have the book, and it’s not for the novelty and it certainly isn’t for hockey!

Aeons ago, in my fundamentalist/evangelical days, I went to Europe as a summer missionary. Yes, the fundies with whom I associated considered Europe a godless, almost Satanic continent because there were so many Catholics and stuff. And the worst of the bunch were the Eastern Europeans, who were all commies.

BUT. Some of those Eastern Europeans could be saved! Because Germany and Switzerland had a “guest worker” program where people from the country then known as Yugoslavia could work in those countries for a while and send the money home to their families behind the Iron Curtain. So we could get at them, and hopefully they’d be converted and then spread the word in secret back home.

Yugoslavia was a country that had been cobbled together out of smaller regions like Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and so on. Today we’d recognize those as separate, independent countries, but before the big split, they were all under one administration. And the common language (at least officially) was Serbo-Croatian.

So I went over for 6 weeks with a bunch of other young people, to work with the mission organization. We learned how to pronounce certain letters (e.g. the “c” was pronounced like ”ch” in “cheese”), and we learned how to read Serbo-Croatian lyrics and sing religious songs, without actually knowing what the lyrics meant. It was complicated a bit, because the country used both scripts - the Cyrillic script that Russians use, and the alphabet that we westerners would recognize. But most of what we summer missionaries had to deal with was the western script. Our Yugoslavian co-workers, of course, could read both.

But I already had that Russian textbook, so I could read the Cyrillic too. And I’d learned a lot of Russian vocabulary - and much of the Serbo-Croatian vocabulary, being derived from the same Slavic language roots, sounded a lot like the Russian words. So for example, to say “Good day” in Russian you’d say “Dobriy dyen.” In Serbo-Croatian, it would be “Dobar dan.” I found many phrases and words easy to pick up, because of that.

These little tidbits about me - that I have a good grasp of linguistic principles, that I could read Cyrillic, that I knew a bit of self-taught Russian - resulted in something rather amusing. We had summer students who only spoke English, others from Yugoslavia who only spoke Serbo-Croatian, a few Yugoslavians who spoke some English - and then there was me.

And as we all worked together, I often got called upon as a translatorwithin our group itself. The Yugoslavian who knew a few words of English would say the Serbo-Croatian words (often with gestures), and I’d think, “She said ’sertseh’. In Russian, that’s ‘heart’.” So I’d put my hand on my chest, ask, “Heart?” and she would nod vigorously, and the all-English listeners would understand what she’d been trying to say. And back and forth we’d go like this. I, too, would manage to get ideas across to the non-English speakers, with the few words I knew, a few gestures, and the help of one of their people who spoke just a little English.

We had many street meetings in Munich and Zurich, where we’d sing several songs to attract a crowd, and then our Croatian preacher, Mishko, would do a short sermon to the gathered people. And just as often, one of our English guys would do a sermon, with Mishko translating. We sang the songs often enough, and I heard the translated sermons often enough, that I learned what all the religious language meant. And eventually, I could listen to an untranslated sermon and understand it completely.

So when I bought this Serbo-Croatian Bible, in Cyrillic script, by the end of the summer I could read a lot of it, straight out of the book, without necessarily having to run to my English Bible. It’s not so easy now, but I can still read a little.

That was one of the best summers of my life, and this book always reminds me of it. I had a great time learning about the regions of Yugoslavia and meeting people from all of them (and now I sometimes worry and wonder if they’re okay after a lot of the troubles). And it was the only time I’ve been to Europe. So I see all of that again, just by picking up this book.

Another of my treasures without an ISBN. 

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