Cardboard Shoes

In my childhood I wrote several small books - handmade, stick-figure-illustrated - as gifts for family members. My parents didn’t think much of these, but my grandmother Eleanor (1918-2004) wrote me a nice thank-you letter for one of them, “Marvin Mouse on the Orient Express.”* She particularly liked that I mapped and followed the route of the actual Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, but

“I wish you had given more description of Yugoslavia, a beautiful country. But the people there are very poor, they work very hard and when I was there I was appalled to see that their shoes were made of cardboard. I was only in two cities: Beograd the capital and Dubrovnik on the Sea. In Beograd where the Sava River and the Danube River join together I saw the ladies (in their paper shoes and poor clothing) doing street cleaning and hard construction work.”

I think she was more shocked by women doing construction work than anything else. She continues:

“I remember when our train from Vienna crossed from beautiful, prosperous Austria into poor Yugoslavia - poorly painted houses, horse-drawn carts, poorly dressed people plodding along the muddy roads, lugging cardboard boxes of their possessions.” (January 10, 1980)

My grandparents’ visit to Yugoslavia probably occurred around 1970, and took them through some of the more prosperous parts of that former republic: Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I do not think she would find it recognizable today: living standards have risen, the cardboard shoes have (I suspect) largely vanished, and the blight of poverty has become less noticeable. On the other hand, the Yugoslav successor republics still bear the scars, psychological if not physical, of the civil war that eliminated the old federation. Historical change isn’t a vector quantity: people’s collective levels of happiness and misery can move in multiple directions at once.

* I’m afraid no-one was murdered in my version. I didn’t read the original until I was in my forties, and all I knew of the movie was that the ‘75 version was on TV a lot. 


 Images: Yugoslav 50-dinar note (1968) via Alnumis.com. The Yugoslav flag is in the public domain.