Books: Balkan Bastards

CRADLE OF LIFE — Louis Adamic — Harper ($2.50).

Two months ago a pretty, 25-year-old Roman Catholic nun named Manuela Mary Adamic, serving in a hospital at Dedinje, Yugoslavia, broke her religious vows, ran away, married a patient she had nursed through a long illness. In Manhattan her nervous, energetic, expatriate brother, Louis Adamic, author of two books on the sturdy Adamic family, observed, “She asks me, naively, to forgive her for the step. . . . She is one of the finest and most beautiful girls that ever lived. … A man who could make her escape after five years must have strength.” Thus U. S. newsreaders learned of the most recent development in what has gradually become one of the most celebrated peasant families in the populous Balkans.

Last week Author Adamic offered his second novel in which his family did not er.ter directly, but for which intense and frustrated family feeling still provided the guiding theme. A 468-page chronicle that begins ‘strongly, drifts to an unconvincing conclusion, Cradle of Life belongs in the ran!: of those books that are interesting for the facts they give on unfamiliar environments, but are made tedious by hackneyed and romantic plots. Louis Adamic’s interesting facts include descriptions of the perils faced by Balkan bastards. In pre-War Croatia these waifs, called fachooks, were commonly placed in peasant homes in wild regions. As long as funds were regularly provided for their upkeep they were kept alive, but if the money ran out they were done away with by any of several traditional means—they were left in cold air alter a very hot bath, were fed heavily after being starved for days, or were nourished on a mixture of milk and gypsum which ‘created a plaster coating on their digestive tracts. Lack of inquiry into the causes of infant mortality stimulated what Author Adamic calls a “horrid industry.”

The tedious romance of Cradle of Life deals with an aristocratic fachook who grew up in one of these peasant households, escaped it only to find that its ties were too strong to be broken. Learning to love his pathetic, awkward foster mother, Rudo Stanka suffered agony each time a new waif was brought to the poverty-ridden hut to die. He did not solve the mystery of his birth until he had been whisked away to a castle, educated. Then he discovered that he was the son of Rudolf, the brilliant, impetuous heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and thus grandson of the old Emperor Franz Josef he had hated as a tyrant in his peasant days. But Rudo as an illegitimate prince befriending the commoners, studying art, hating the nobility, philosophizing over nature, marrying a peasant girl, founding an orphanage, is a dull figure compared with Rudo the jachook, worrying about the regular arrival of the allowance that prevented his murder.