VOLUMES 44, 45/46 AND 47 OF THE JOURNAL OF CROATIAN STUDIES APPEAR

The Croatian Academy of America has issued 4 volumes of the Journal of Croatian Studies since July 2010.

Volume 44 contains the following articles: “William Feller (1906-1970): An Outstanding Croatian American Mathematician,” by Darko Žubrinć, “Three Alphabets Used in the Printing of Croatian Reformation Books in Germany,” by Vinko Grubišić, “Migration History of the Italo-Croatians of Molise to Western Australia,” by John Felix Clissa, “Brother’s Keeper: The Surveillance of American Croats by the Federal Bureau of Investigation During World War II,” by Jure Krišto, “Canadian Ethnic Studies (1969-2003) and Polyphony (1977-2000) as Sources for the Croatian Ethnocultural Community in Canada: An Annotated Index,” by Stan Granic, and “Forward to Krsto Hegedušić’s The Drava Valley Motifs,” by Miroslav Krleža (translated by Vladislav Beronja).  The Volume also contains book reviews of Josip Zoretić’s Goli Otok: Hell in the Adriatic (reviewed by Brian Gallagher), Vinko Brešić’s Kritike (reviewed by Vinko Grubišić) and reports on the Academy’s 49th Annual General Assembly and Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration as well as obituaries of departed Academy members Andrew F. Lovrich, Matthew Z. Markotić and Juraj (George) Šutija.

Volumes 45-46 and Volume 47 are the first two parts of a trilogy of issues related to the translations of Croatian Renaissance poetry, plays and prose, edited by guest editors Vladimir Bubrin and Vinko Grubišić.  The Volumes contain texts in their original Croatian with a translation into English and a modern Croatian language version.

Double Volumes 45-46 contain the texts of a selection of Croatian Renaissance plays by Marko Marulić, Mavro Vetranović, Džore Držić, Hanibal Lucić, Nikola Nalješković, Marin Držić and Martin Benetović.  The Volume contains a bio-bibliography of each of the playwrights.  The Volume also contains book reviews of Boris Senker’s Bard u Iliriji: Shakespeare u hrvatskom kazalištu and Slobodan P. Novak’s, Milutin Tatarin’s, Mirjana Mataija’s and Leo Rafolt’s Leksikon Marina Držića (both reviewed by Vinko Grubišić), Luko Pateljak’s Marin Držić, Dundo Maroje: U čast 500-godišnijicu rođenje Marina Držića and M.N. Drobysheva, Dalmatinsko-Dubrovnitskoe Vozrozhdenie: Tvorchestvo Marina Drzhicha (both reviewed by Vladimir Bubrin) and Bruno Šišić’s Dubrovnik Renaissance Gardens: Genesis and Design Characteristics (reviewed by Srebrena Bogović).

Volume 47 contains the texts of a selection of Croatian Renaissance poetry by Šiško Vlahović Menčetić, Džore Držić, Marko Marulić, Mavro Vetranović, Petar Hektorović, Hanibal Lucić, Antun Sasin, Nikola Dimitrović, Dinko Ranjina, Dominko Zlatarić, Barne Karnarutić, Juraj Baraković as well as a number of anonymous writers and two folk poems.  The Volume contains a bio-bibliography of each of the poets.  The Volume also contains book reviews of Bratislav Lučin’s The Marulić Reader (reviewed by Vinko Grubišić), John S. Miletich’s Love Lyric and Other Poems of the Croatian Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology (reviewed by Vladimir Bubrin) and Slobodan Prosperov Novak’s Slaveni u Renesansi (reviewed by Vladimir Bubrin).

Copies of the Journal may be ordered from the Academy (Members of the Academy receive issues of the Journal as part of their membership dues).

After an unexpected hiatus of a few years, The Croatian Academy of America held its Annual General Assembly on Saturday, May 5, 2012 at New York’s Villa Berulia Restaurant located on 34th Street in New York, New York.  Approximately a dozen Members and friends of the Academy gathered to discuss the activities of the Academy during the past several years and plans for the Academy’s future.

The Members specifically discussed the recent appearance of Volumes 44 and 45/46 of the Academy’s Journal of Croatian Studies as well as the on-going work for Volume 47 which appeared later in 2012.  Members also discussed plans to update the web site of the Academy as well as putting into place the mechanism to award a number of academic scholarships and planning a celebration for the 60^th anniversary of the Academy’s founding.

The Members present elected the following officers for the Academy for the coming year: John P. Kraljic – President; Michael Young – Vice-President, Mladen Lolich – Executive Secretary, Emily Erceg – Treasurer, Dr. Maria Tuskan as Recorder and Suzanne Grimm – Committee of Control.

The members further agreed to unanimously re-elect the current members of the Executive Committee for an additional one year term.

The new officers of the Academy expressed much optimism concerning the Academy’s future and look forward to revitalizing the Academy’s work.

CROATIAN ACADEMY OF AMERICA CELEBRATES ITS 60^TH ANNIVERSARY AND PUBLICATION OF THREE ISSUES OF THE JOURNAL OF CROATIAN STUDIES

In 1953, a group of persons dedicated to promoting Croatian history, art and culture agreed that a formal organization needed to be established to introduce to an American and Canadian scholarly audience the importance of Croatia to civilization.  The Croatian Academy of America resulted from the work of these dedicated persons.  The Academy’s Journal of Croatian Studies made its first appearance seven years later, in 1960, and has been publishing ever since, showcasing the articles of hundreds of prominent scholars from North America and Croatia.

Over the past year and half, the Academy published four issues of the Journal of Croatian Studies.  Volume 44 includes articles by Zagreb mathematician Darko Žubrinć (“William Feller (1906-1970): An Outstanding Croatian American Mathematician”), Toronto’s Vinko Grubišić (“Three Alphabets Used in the Printing of Croatian Reformation Books in Germany)” and an article by Jure Krišto (“Brother’s Keeper: The Surveillance of American Croats by the Federal Bureau of Investigation During World War II”).  Other articles include “Migration History of the Italo-Croatians of Molise to Western Australia,” by John Felix Clissa, and “Canadian Ethnic Studies (1969-2003) and Polyphony (1977-2000) as Sources for the Croatian Ethnocultural Community in Canada: An Annotated Index,” by Stan Granic.  The volume also contains an English translation (made by Vladislav Beronja) of famed Croatian author Miroslav Krleža’s “Forward to Krsto Hegedušić’s The Drava Valley Motifs.”

Volumes 45-46 and Volume 47 are the first two parts of a trilogy of issues related to the translations of Croatian Renaissance poetry, plays and prose, edited by guest editors Vladimir Bubrin and Vinko Grubišić.  The Volumes contain texts in their original Croatian with a translation into English and a modern Croatian language version.  The works translated include selections written by Marko Marulić, Mavro Vetranović, Džore Držić, Hanibal Lucić, Nikola Nalješković, Marin Držić, Martin Benetović, Šiško Vlahović Menčetić, Petar Hektorović, Antun Sasin, Nikola Dimitrović, Dinko Ranjina, Dominko Zlatarić, Barne Karnarutić and Juraj Baraković.

The publication of works by such seminal Croatian authors in English as well as scholarly articles on Croatian themes represents an important achievement in promoting Croatian culture in the United States and Canada as well as in other English speaking countries.

This is a record few organizations can boast.  The Academy will celebrate its achievements and the 60^th anniversary of its founding on Saturday, April 20, 2013 with all events to take place at Arno Ristorante, located at 141 West 38^th Street, New York, New York.

The Academy’s Annual General Assembly will open at 5:00 p.m. during which officers of the Academy will present reports of their activities over the past year, new Executive Committee members and officers will be elected and members of the Academy will have an opportunity to express their views about the Academy and its future work.

Following the Annual General Assembly, a cocktail hour will take place beginning at 6:30 p.m. with a dinner starting at 7:30 p.m.  During dinner, Dr. Vinko Grubišić, one of the current guest editors of the Journal of Croatian Studies, will present a speech entitled “Six Decades of The Croatian Academy of America: Its Rich History in Promoting Croatian Culture, History and Literature.”

Dinner costs $75 a person ($50 for students).  If you are interested in attending, please contact one of the following: John Kraljic at 718-309-4289 or jkraljic@garfunkelwild.com; Michael Young (201) 816-1560 or michaely@svnp.com; or Vedran Joseph Nazor (212) 957-5808 or (917) 449-4001.

Those who cannot attend are urged to join the Academy.  Membership is only $50 a year – all Members receive a copy of the Journal of Croatian Studies.  If you are interested in joining, please contact John Kraljic, the President of the Croatian Academy of America at 718-309-4289 or at jkraljic@garfunkelwild.com.

This is a photo from Annual Meeting 2012 – Leadership.

The Croatian Academy of America issued volume 44 of the Journal of Croatian Studies, its annual interdisciplinary review

The opening essay was written by University of Zagreb Professor Darko Žubrinić and deals with the life and contributions to mathematics of William Feller (1906-1970). One of the founders of Probability Theory as a scientific discipline, Feller was born in Zagreb and received his initial education in mathematics and physics at the University of Zagreb before going on to achieve international fame. Feller was particularly known for his two-volume monograph An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications which underwent several editions and was translated into Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Polish, and Hungarian.

A fascinating chapter in the cultural and religious history of the Croats relates to the Reformation period and is presented by University of Waterloo Professor Emeritus Vinko Grubišić. Despite major challenges and uncertainties as exiles, Croatian reformers in Germany printed over 20,000 books, including complete translations of the Bible into the Croatian language (“stumačena v hrvatskom jaziku” / “in die Crobatische Sprach verdolmetscht”). These books were printed in the Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Roman alphabets in an effort to spread reform ideas throughout lands inhabited by the Croats and other South Slavs.

Various aspects of the history of the Croatian diaspora are presented by three different contributions.

John Felix Clissa examines the migration history of the Italo-Croatians of the Molise region of Italy to Western Australia. The smallest ethnolinguistic minority in Italy, the Italo-Croatians of Molise are remnants of one of Croatia’s oldest diaspora communities whose spoken language has been designated as “severely endangered” by the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages. As an immigrant from Molise, who spent his childhood in Belgium before emigrating to Australia, Clissa’s contribution is an outgrowth of his important 2001 book The Fountain and the Squeezebox (La Fontana e L’Organetto / Funda aš orginet). In this book, he transcribed and saved for posterity the idiolects (specific speaking styles) in Molisan-Croatian (together with English translations) of twenty-seven individuals from Molise and first generation Italo-Croatian Australians who were born between 1901 and 1934.

Based on the records of the U.S. Department of State relating to the internal affairs of Yugoslavia, Jure Krišto, Ph.D., of the Croatian Institute of History (Zagreb) examines the surveillance of American Croats by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during World War II. He concludes that the FBI began its spying on American citizen of Croatian descent at the behest of Yugoslav diplomats in Washington, DC. This operation continued despite conclusions by several operatives that further surveillance was not warranted.  Instead, over time the surveillance mutated to focus on alleged Communist-related activities of American Croats. He concludes that the FBI was not always careful in the selection of its informants, which often resulted in grave consequences for American Croats.

Following a review of the policy origins of multiculturalism in Canada and the launch of Canadian Ethnic Studies and Polyphony, Stan Granic highlights the approach and achievements of these two periodicals. He then summarizes the main contributions in the two journals dealing with the Croatian ethnocultural community in Canada and the achievements of Canadians of Croatian origin.

Vladislav Beronja provides a translation of Miroslav Krleža’s exceptional poetic essay on the artist Krsto Hegedušić (1901-1975). Hegedušić’s most famous paintings depicted social themes and especially the harsh life of the Croatian peasantry in the style of naive art. Krleža’s essay, considered a masterpiece in its genre in Croatian literature, accompanied Hegedušić’s 1933 book of drawings entitled Podravski motive (The Drava Valley Motifs). Hegedušić’s career was marked by his pursuit of an independent artistic course incorporating a national and social voice combining satirical, grotesque and surrealist elements.

Two reviews are also included in the issue. Brian Gallagher reviews Goli Otok: Hell in the Adriatic (2007), the personal reminiscences of Josip Zoretić about life in the most notorious prison camp of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The reviewer discusses how this work provides a corrective to the observations of those who gloss over the serious human rights violations that took place in ex-Yugoslavia. Vinko Grubišić reviews Kritike, a 2008 collection of forty literary critiques penned by Vinko Brešić. Brešić critiqued works written in verse and in prose of various genres by diverse Croatian authors, literary historians and critics over the last decade.

Stan Granic, CAA

http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/10132/1/The-Croatian-Academy-of-America-Issued-New-Volume-of-the-Journal-of-Croatian-Studies.html