Songs From This and That Country — Gail Sidonie Sobat

It is 1996: a mortar shell explodes, shredding nine Sarajevan citizens, while a Canadian opera singer and others huddle together in horrified solidarity;thirty years earlier: a mother gives birth to a caul baby, a strange child who seems able to will events into being;forty-five years earlier: a young man returns home from the Italian front and his hair has turned snow white;600 years earlier: a young woman leaves her father, a despot under the Ottomans, to meet the witch Baba Roga from whom she learns that father and Turk are not so very different;and back in 1996: a young opera singer, estranged from her parents, sings about all of this and contemplates killing her father.Songs from This and That Country is an inter-generational story that examines the reality of age-old ethnic conflicts between Serbs-Croats-Muslims, exposing these divisive and acrimonious relationships as recursive and mirrored in the lives of first- and second-generation families. As a blend of family drama, historical fact and fairy tale, Songs reflects a South Slavic immigrant experience, WWII infantry service in 1940s Italy, the Bosnian conflicts in the 1990s, and the rise of a second generation Serb-Canadian opera singer–all set in relief to a Slavic fairy tale in the time of the Ottoman Empire.