Ashanin / McDonald Escape from Montenegro

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-8099-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 418 Seiten

For many years a seminary professor in Indiana, Dr. Charles Ashanin was known only to family and a few friends as one who narrowly escaped death at the hands of dangerous militants, Communists and Nationalists who dominated his native land of Montenegro in the years just prior to and during World War II. As a result he lived in lifelong exile from his homeland. The recording of his experiences took the form of an autobiographical novel, as he changed the names of some characters and combined others into single individuals to protect the identities of those involved. But the people who knew him well knew also that the facts he describes were true. Writer, and Ashanin's godson, Brian McDonald has beautifully brought this compelling story together so that it might be published and shared with others. The result is a truly heart-pounding tale of mad violence, love and grace.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ashanin, Charles B.

McDonald, Brian

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION Escape from Montenegro is an autobiographical novel adapted from an earlier fictionalized memoir by Dr. Charles B. Ashanin (1920-2000). That memoir told of his struggles to survive, both physically and spiritually during World War II when his homeland of Montenegro was torn both by Nazi invasion and civil war. Against great odds, he escaped, earned his Ph.D. in Scotland, and came to serve for many years as Professor of Early Church History at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. To his friends, students, and seminary colleagues, Charles Ashanin radiated an extraordinarily bright and vivid sense of the presence of God. But few knew how deeply that large-minded and glowing faith was rooted in the sufferings of his early life as reflected in an unpublished memoir-novel, A Garland for a Mother, the basis for this current work. Charles was born in a dirt-floored farmhouse in the tiny mountainous state of Montenegro (part of the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia). His parents, and especially his forceful and beloved mother, were devout Eastern Orthodox Christians, and the family’s happiness was unimpaired by the hard and somewhat primitive conditions in which they lived and worked. That happiness was torn from them as the tsunami of World War II descended upon Yugoslavia. In that war, Charles and his family shared in full the sufferings of an oft-invaded people as they endured their latest historical trauma: the twin evils of a Nazi/Fascist occupation and a civil war between Communist and Nationalist factions, each of whom hoped to control the country when the invaders would be driven out. Through a series of providential events Charles escaped the contending forces of this maelstrom late in the war to spend the rest of his life as an exile, never to see his homeland or family again. In the 1970’s, Charles sought to express through the means of a memoir, part fiction and part factual, something of the trauma of those dark days, which were also the days of his spiritual formation. As a historian himself, he hoped A Garland for a Mother would be a public witness to the suffering of a people so often overlooked by the writers of history, but he could find no publisher, and his story never saw the light of day. Since he seldom spoke of his early life, those who were close to him knew only its general outline and a scattering of anecdotes. They knew that many of Charles’s friends and loved ones had died in the violence wrought by the clashing but equally demonic ideologies of Fascism and Communism. They knew that he himself had nearly been condemned to death at a tribunal conducted by his own uncle, a Communist commissar who despised Charles’ stubborn clinging to his “bourgeois” ideals and “reactionary” Orthodox Faith. They knew that after escaping Montenegro, he had become a temporary dweller in many disparate worlds, being in turn a night watchman in Italy, a successful Ph.D. candidate in the University of Glasgow (the great continental theologian Karl Barth was on his Ph.D. committee), a teacher in the University of Ghana, Africa, and then subsequently in two African-American colleges in the American South, where his observations of the racial discrimination endured by his students (and his own experience of persecution) contributed to his outspoken support of the Civil Rights movement in his newly adopted country. But of course his friends and students got to know him long after he had navigated the dangerous waters of his early life and had come to rest in the relatively peaceful harbor of Indianapolis. It is certainly true that the outspoken Charles with his firmly-rooted Eastern Orthodox convictions endured (and created) some storms during his two-decades tenure at this liberal Protestant seminary; however, as intense as some of these were, they shared little in common with the outright physical sufferings, losses and perils that were the constant companions of his early years. Those of us who came to know the Indianapolis Charles during the last thirty-three years of his life in the Hoosier capital, where he and his wife Natalie raised their four children, knew Charles only as an inspirational teacher, mentor or friend, and not as a refugee from a long ago war in a little known country. Certainly we knew enough about his past to recognize the truth of a seminary colleague’s words: “Charles turned what could have been a Greek tragedy into a triumph of faith.” But the Greek tragedy was long ago and far away, only occasionally alluded to by Charles. The faith was triumphantly visible, the suffering mostly hidden. All we saw in Charles was a man who could have more easily doubted his own existence than the existence of God. He glowed with the confidence of his Eastern Orthodox faith, that the Lord was the philanthropos, the lover and friend of man, not his harsh judge. Charles had an almost overpowering sense of the mutuality of God and man, because God so loved our humanity that he had become Incarnate in Christ, to redeem and deify it, making us “partakers of the Divine nature.” The incomparable honor thus bestowed on humans made him once declare, “I believe in Christ because he is the only one who believes in man.” But those who have read his unpublished memoir quickly came to realize that this triumphantly twofold belief in Christ and humanity (how often religious rigorists or secular ideologues try to set them at odds!) was forged in furnace of that dark and fate-driven “Greek tragedy” of his earlier life. His affirmation that Christ was the only true believer in humankind was spoken in oppressive conditions that made such an open declaration perilous, and he would later almost pay for his faith with his life. A Garland for a Mother makes it clear that while he was terrified and overwhelmed by the violence and death raging around him, these also became his terrible teachers. In them he saw the bitter fruit of embracing ideologies and faiths that in their various ways held man in contempt. Each of them obliterated human freedom by making human beings the slaves and playthings either of Fate (various forms of paganism), of a Divine tyrant (predestinarian monotheisms such as Islam and Calvinism), of class warfare and the “laws” of dialectical materialism (Marxism), or of some master race (Fascism/Nazism). Only the God of Christian revelation was the philanthropos, making all human beings in his own image, loving them even in their sin and despair, redeeming them in Christ, whose own resurrection foreshadowed their ultimate destiny as those who would share in “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Charles’s intense urgency to convict others of this same joyful faith in lands where he was free to do so, came in part from his brutal schooling in what he saw happening to a people who rejected the Christian vision of God and humanity. Before discussing A Garland for a Mother and the process by which I was led, as a friend and godson, to expand it into a fully fleshed out novel, some more general historical background is necessary. Charles’ birthplace of Montenegro was famous for its fierce and warlike people who had, up to World War I, been one of the bulwarks against the advance of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire that for 500 years threatened the freedom and independence of Europe. When Charles was born, Montenegro was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (“Union of South Slavs”), a multinational state created in the west-central Balkan Peninsula at the end of World War I. Yugoslavia, an artificial creation of the Paris Peace Conference, was composed of the former kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro and the republics of Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Slovenia. The centralized state that emerged after the World War tried to clamp a strong lid over the ethnic/religious tensions simmering beneath the surface of superficial unity, but ultimately failed to prevent them from boiling over. Croatia was predominantly Catholic, though with a large population of Orthodox Serbs. Relations between the two ethnic/religious groups were tense. Serbia and Montenegro were populated by a majority of Orthodox Serbs, but with a history of bickering between them. Bosnia and Herzegovina had a large Islamic population due to their centuries-long incorporation into the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. By the time Charles was entering young manhood, further tensions were created from without by the rapidly growing menace of the totalitarian states of Germany and Italy, and from within by the increasingly aggressive actions of indigenous Communism, heavily influenced and guided by another totalitarian state, the Soviet Union. Charles’s memoir begins in the days immediately preceding the occupation of Yugoslavia by German Nazis and Italian Fascists. This occupation sparked a resistance which ultimately turned into civil war, as the Communist “Partisans” under the leadership of Josep Broz Tito (a Croat), and others such as Milovan Djilas (a Montenegrin) waged guerrilla war against the invaders from without and “class enemies” within. The Communist actions against the “unreliable elements” among their own people inspired a reaction, and soon the nationalists or “Chetniks” were battling the Partisans for control of those areas of the country that were not occupied by the German and Italian troops. The majority of Charles’s narrative takes place in...