“After an absence of thirty years, I did go back to Yugoslavia, but I did not find what I was looking for. The people I had left behind, the playmates of my youth, were no longer there. The place had also changed, unbelievably, from the way I remembered it. Bewildered, I finally realized it was I that had also changed. It was only in my memory that those people and that place—that way of life—still existed.”
—from the author’s notes for The One Who Leaves Never Returns
With so many Eastern Europeans displaced within the past decade, and with daily headlines screaming of turmoil in the Balkan States, The One Who Leaves Never Returns, by Croatian-born author J. Anthony Paladin, is a timely and insightful look at the experiences of one forced to leave his homeland in response to occupation by a politically and ideologically opposed foreign army. Based on the author’s early years in Split, Croatia, The One Who Leaves Never Returns is a historical novel that offers an intimate glimpse into this charged and violent experience.
Set in 1940 in the Dalmatian Coast city of Split and the nearby island Solta, The One Who Leaves Never Returns is also a young man’s coming of age story, one set against the background of the buildup of World War II and the foreign occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by Nazis and fascists. The young hero is a royalist, making him unpopular with his peers and placing him in opposition to the occupying forces. Tony also has teenage problems, including arguments with his parents, raging hormones, and a tendency to get into trouble. But Tony’s usual teenage anxieties are magnified by Yugoslavia’s troubled times, and he is eventually arrested by the occupying regime. Tony escapes and finally flees his homeland for what he expects will be forever.
Living in retirement on the French Riviera, author J. Anthony Paladin visited Split for long periods. Soon he enjoyed recalling the carefree feelings of his youth, moments of new and pleasant sensations, faces of friends and shared escapades at a time when every day seemed long, bright, and without stress. Paladin shared his remembrances with people he’d known before he left Dalmatia, but their responses startled him. Friends and relatives had little to say about life during the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and especially avoided any talk of that period when World War II was spreading through Europe, before it reached their homeland. Paladin recognized their lingering fear, and realized that the subject of his memories and the past of his dear homeland was taboo. With his friends’ resistance to remembering the past, plus an inability to share his beloved memories with those who could also share them, Paladin felt as if he were in limbo, and was compelled to write down the story of the last year he spent in Dalmatia as he remembered it.
J. Anthony Paladin grew up in Split, Croatia, and studied medicine at the University of Rome. Following World War II he left Europe to pursue a career as a physician and surgeon in Southern California. In 1990 he retired and returned to Croatia, where he now lives on the island of Solta.
