Dina Greenberg is a Wilmington-based author. In 2021 after more than 15 years of research, writing and editing, she’s published Nermina’s Chance, a fiction novel that explores the trauma and aftermath of the Bosnian War through its title character, Nermina.
The Bosnian War took place over the course of three years in the 90s. Three ethnic factions, Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims fought bitterly and indiscriminately in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The war brings us the term ethnic cleansing, which was an effort on the part of Serbian nationalists to expel Bosnian Muslims from its proposed Serbian state through murder, rape and military force.
Last year, Greenberg toured Bosnia and Herzegovina, talking with survivors and their descendants about the war’s impact on their lives and how it continues today. Greenberg uses the novel to discuss the impact of inter-generational trauma, the process by which experiencing fear for long periods of time changes psychological and physiological traits and is passed down to the next generation.
Dina Greenberg's book follows Nermina, a Bosnian Muslim and medical student, whose family was a casualty of the war. She'll be at New Bern's Next Chapter Books & Art on Saturday, July 15 to discuss her book.
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Ryan Shaffer, PRE News & Ideas: This is PRE, Public Radio East. I'm Ryan Shaffer. I'm joined by Dina Greenberg, a Wilmington based author. We're discussing her book Nermina’s Chance, a fiction novel that explores the trauma and aftermath of the Bosnian War. Dina’s book follows Nermina, a Bosnian Muslim and medical student whose family was murdered in the war. She'll be at New Bern's Next Chapter Books & Art on July 15th. Dina, thank you for being here.
Dina Greenberg: Thank you. It's my pleasure.
Shaffer: I would like to start by talking about the background research for the novel. It started 15 years ago. What was that process?
Greenberg: Originally, when I started to research the book, I didn't know it would be a book. I was anticipating it would be a short story, and in the workshop where I presented a very long and unwieldy short story, my cohort of writers told me that it needed to be a book. Since I love research, I started with internet research, but I got very lucky and I came across a journalist who had been living and working in Sarajevo at the outset of the war, and her name is Zrinka Bralo. She eventually fled and gone to London, where she started a nonprofit organization to aid refugees. So, Zrinka was incredibly generous in the time that she gave me. We did Skype interviews, and so many of the details that are in the book at the outset in Sarajevo, Zrinka provided for me.
Shaffer: I'm hearing that Zrinka Bralo played a very pivotal role in in shaping the story, but she herself is a very interesting person, having worked in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
Greenberg: She was a TV reporter for CNN-1 at the time, and she and her colleagues were basically trapped inside of the TV studios like so many other people. What most people think of when they hear about the Siege of Sarajevo, they think about the snipers. So, to understand the geography, because there are mountains, the Serbs had the advantage of being in the mountains and being able to position their snipers so they could literally just pick out a civilian in their viewfinder and shoot from the hills. And it was an awful, awful kind of warfare. So, Zrinka provided some of the details about creating a system of sending people out to the UNPROFOR, where they had set up stations for clean water and food. She was on one of those rotations and had to literally take her life in her hands to run out and bring water back.
Shaffer: And how did that conversation and that relationship with Zrinka show up in the novel?
Greenberg: Well, I got her personal experience. When people think about wars that break out in faraway places, they think about people being somewhat backward, as though these are not educated middle class, upper middle-class people. Zrinka is an educated woman and living a really wonderful lifestyle, just like many people in the United States were. She explained to me what it was like to literally be ripped out of your life. People were living this normal lifestyle and then all of a sudden, they are being terrorized. I think having a connection, even if it's over a screen and she's sitting in her apartment in London and here I am in the United States, and you're making eye contact. When she was describing the fear and not knowing when the mortar shells were going to fall, not knowing if and when a sniper was going to take aim at that particular window in the room where she was. That element of fear, I think. I would have never gotten that just reading it in a book or even viewing it in a documentary.
Shaffer: You use this book as a springboard for discussion of intergenerational trauma for those of us who may not have heard that term before, could you define it for us?
Greenberg: There's a body of research that has really come into its own in the last decade or so. I would say that much of it is based in work with second, third generation Holocaust survivors. So aside from the spiritual and emotional and psychological study, there's also a study under the discipline of epigenetics and essentially, it's what makes sense. It's what we would imagine if someone were living in a constant state of fear. There are things that would take place in the body, whether it's a release of hormones or whether it's something pertaining to the autonomic nervous system where the person is constantly in fight-or-flight mode. It's similar to what takes place in PTSD. The difference with intergenerational trauma is that these traits of feeling as though you are constantly in fear and constantly in danger are passed down to your children and your grandchildren. One of the fascinating things for me was having the opportunity now via zoom and via lots and lots of connections and collaborations to speak with people who have experienced the war. I'm now speaking with their children, and I am hearing in their voices and seeing in their facial expressions that they're feeling the war. They're feeling the trauma that their parents and grandparents experienced.
Shaffer: The war may have finished. 30 years ago, but it has a long tail. You see it when speaking with the descendants of survivors from the war. And you did this. Tour of Bosnia with the book what sort of response did it get and the conversations that you're having with people? What did those look like?
Greenberg: My husband and I spent three weeks traveling through Bosnia. We had prpre-arranged seven different sites and they included the International University of Sarajevo and some nonprofit organizations that deal with peace building. So, the organizational piece was already in place. I had some partners on the ground who were helping us to bring the audiences together, though I didn't know who those people would be. What was really interesting is that it was a combination of – as you'd imagine – high school and college students, and then some older people who didn't necessarily have much in the way of English-speaking skills. But by and large, what I noticed was that I would kind of leave the format of the discussion open to the facilitator wherever our site was, and then we would have sometimes we would have a reading and sometimes we would have a discussion. I would always open it and say I am happy to, answer your questions, but I really want to know your story and there were so many times when someone would sit in the back and they would raise their hand and the story that would flow out of this person’s psyche was one that may have not ever been told before. Everywhere we went, whether it was official or whether it was getting in the back of a cab to go somewhere, the conversation always began with the phrase either “before the war” or “after the war,” and that was the delineating moment. People talked about the fact that they felt shame in talking about their fear. They felt shame in talking about the fact that they are carrying this trauma and shame in admitting that it might be helpful for them to find some kind of therapy. It's not something that's the norm in Bosnia, so the overarching story and the overarching concept was that we need to listen. We need to understand that there is absolutely room for healing, but it's not going to happen unless we provide that safe space for it.
Shaffer: May I ask you, did all of this effort and research? Why write it as fiction?
Greenberg: Yeah, that's such a great question. I think fiction allows a writer a lot more leeway in terms of creativity and creating characters. I just feel that it is a way of transporting you, transporting the reader into a whole other world, and when it's done well, it's transformative. I just. I love taking that journey.
Shaffer: Thank you, Dina, for joining us today.
Greenberg: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Shaffer: That was Dina Greenberg, a Wilmington based author. She wrote Nermina’s Chance, a 2021 fiction novel following a young lady in the trauma she endures in the aftermath of the Bosnian War. She'll be at Nex Chapter Books & Art in New Bern on July 15th.
