Book Review of Escape from Despair: A Croatian Family's Survival

Katarina Tepesh’s harrowing and engagingly straightforward account of her

family history in communist Croatia and then in the United States after

fleeing an abusive and alcoholic father in 1968 should be added to the shelf

of memoirs of such family legacy, both for the new information it adds as

well as for the story it continues to tell.

This is the familiar story of the legacy of family trauma,

alcoholism, and abuse—and as old as Original Sin. Since the mid-1990s,

there has been a rise in literary and cultural accounts of growing up under

the dark shadows of alcoholism and mental illness. Mary Karr’s poetic

rendering of her East Texas upbringing, The Liars’ Club, is credited with

the resurgence of memoir writing. In Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt

captured the frame of mind of a child growing up under an Irish-romantic-

alcoholic father that slaked his frustrated dreams and inflicted an amazing

amount of suffering on his brood.

Tepesh’s spare and reportorial account of her Croatian family

living near the border with Slovenia adds much-needed cultural perspective.

The memoir introduces her family’s history (a marriage initiated by a rape)

with this straightforward connection:

My turbulent family history mirrors the history of two

countries, Croatia and Slovenia. For centuries, Croatia and

Slovenia have been caught in turmoil between powerful

empires or invaded by aggressive neighbors. Just as Croatians

and Slovenians always wanted to gain their freedom from their

conquerors and live in peace, my own family was abused and

sought freedom.

And therein lies the paradox: how to obtain peace and freedom?

Does “escape” from political and patriarchal tyranny by the channels

leading to green cards and citize...

... middle of paper ...

...t it is not something inherent in

the victim that invites such abuse. So, in this way, reading this book can

help break the chain of the victim blaming herself and thereby justifying the

abuse. It can also help break the cycle of religious and government

authorities looking the other way while the weakest are abused.

I know that Tepesh’s memoir will enjoy its permanent place on my

bookshelf tucked between Mary Karr’s and Frank McCourt’s. To learn

more, visit www.katarinatepesh.com and www.tepeshbooks.com.

Mary Grabar, Georgia Perimeter College

Works Cited

Karr, Mary. 1998. The Liars’ Club. New York: Penguin.

McCourt, Frank. 1996. Angela’s Ashes. New York: Scribner.

Katarina Tepesh. Escape from Despair: A Croatian Family’s Survival.

College Station, TX: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing, Inc., 2007,

203 pp., $15.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-60264-041-2.