Fly away, pigeon

"Fly Away, Pigeon" tells the heart-wrenching story of a family torn between emigration and immigration and paints evocative portraits of the former Yugoslavia and modern-day Switzerland. Melinda Nadj Abonji s prose is lyrical and supple, shifting between registers and tonalities as her characters slip from between languages and cultures. Like voices in counterpoint, Nadj Abonji interweaves two narratives strands, recounting the history of three generations of the Kocsis family and chronicling their hard-won assimilation. Originally part of Serbia s Hungarian-speaking minority in the Vojvodina, the Kocsis family emigrated to Switzerland in the early 1970s when their home town was still part of the Yugoslavian republic. The parents, Miklos and Rosza, landed in Switzerland with just one word work . It took more than three years of backbreaking, menial work, both legal and illegal, to obtain visas for their two young daughters, Ildiko and Nomi. As new Swiss citizens, the Kocsiss can only stand by helplessly as the family they left behind is caught up in the maelstrom of the Balkan War. For all their efforts to adapt and assimilate and despite the support of many Swiss friends, they must endure insults and prejudice from members of their new community. And within the family, the usual generational tensions are exacerbated by cultural ones. With tough-minded nostalgia and compassionate realism, "Fly Away, Pigeon" illustrates how much pain and loss even the most successful immigrant stories contain. This novel that is both intensely local, grounded in the histories and cultures of two distinctive communities, and universal in the human dilemmas it portrays. "