Cornelia
Most of her narrative, however, focuses on a Croatian children’s book, The Encyclopedia for Girls, which pictured a young blonde girl cooking and completing craft projects, celebrating holidays, and spending time with her friends. Cornelia reflects that she was jealous of this little girl: “This girl also has, you know, she explains how to have a dog and a cat and a hamster and a bird, and I always remember thinking, she has everything. This girl has everything. She’s the luckiest little girl in the world.” Cornelia was also envious of the girl’s apparent freedom, compared to her own:
There are scenes where she and her friend who appear to be no more than, I don’t know, 9 or 10 years old, walk the city streets dressed like little women and um, just enjoy a lot of independence that I couldn’t imagine in the life that I lived which was living in the suburbs. And you know, um, I was allowed to go in my backyard, and here were these very cosmopolitan girls um, allowed to use irons, and all kinds of things like that.
Reading these books through their images in her suburban American home, Cornelia exists in a thirdspace between the American culture of her school and the cosmopolitan Croatian life depicted in the children’s book.
Cornelia notes that when she looks back on The Encyclopedia for Girls, she now sees cultural values represented in its pages that she could not understand as a child. Because Croatia was part of communist Yugoslavia when this book was published in the late 1960s or early 1970s, holidays were described in nonreligious language, such as New Years and Carnival rather than Christmas and Mardi Gras. The book also had a page that depicted a May Day celebration, with children dressed in Communist Party uniforms. Cornelia describes the children’s books in these pages as her entry into Croatian culture and her parents’ language, and her story demonstrates the ways in which the process of enculturation into a society happens through the kinds of literature she describes. The Encyclopedia for Girls is held up in Cornelia’s narrative as communicating a great deal of cultural knowledge.