![]() The onslaught of the media on me was relentless. “Being back in Croatia was extremely exciting but also extremely hard. In 2002, despite vowing to never go back to Croatia she returned to play the lead role in Medea. Babylon 5 gave me my life back at a crucial moment.” I’ve been going to conventions all over the world ever since. “Through Babylon 5 I entered the extraordinary science fiction fan tribe. It was like finding a new family after my old one disowned me” said Furlan. “That role gave me a chance to get back into the world I knew. She was cast as Minbari Ambassador Delenn in the television show Babylon 5. Three years later, in 1994, Furlan got her big break in the U.S. But our ‘negative’ motive was so strong, we felt such disgust towards the senseless slaughter in our country, that even that felt better than staying and participating.” “It was one of the harshest winters in New York and homeless people were dying in the street. “We slept on my friend’s couch and I worked as a waitress and my husband as a mover,” she said. Ugresic and others were described as “feminists raping Croatia.” And no one in the film or theater community defended Furlan, publicly or privately.įurlan moved to New York with four suitcases, and no money or contacts. Each individual who personally accepts the war is in fact an accessory to the crime.”ĭubravka Ugresic, one of Yugoslavia’s most respected writers and scholars, who faced similar attacks in the Croatian media, points out that Furlan’s experience was specific to women who dared to speak out about ethnic nationalism and war. ” “I cannot accept war as the only solution, I cannot force myself to hate, I cannot believe that weapons, killing, revenge, hatred, that such an accumulation of evil will ever solve anything. In November of 1991, as she and her husband prepared to leave Belgrade for the U.S., Furlan published in the Croatian weekly Danas a “Letter to My Co-Citizens. ![]() President Tudjman personally intervened to confiscate her tenancy rights to an apartment she had inherited from her grandmother. The articles’ depictions of Furlan echoed the ugly archetype of the Jewish woman as whore.įurlan received death threats, including messages on her answering machine that described in graphic detail how she was going to be brutally massacred. She was described as often cast in the role of a “loose woman” whose love life pointed to a long history of rejections by Croatian men. After the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991 (Yugoslavia had been a socialist federation of six states, with Croatia and Slovenia declaring independence in 1991, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992), war broke out in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.įurlan was attacked in the press in 1991 for performing in a theater festival in Serbia, “parading her naked breasts on stage…while people were being killed in Croatia.” Less-well-known actors called her a “traitor” and “collaborator.” Then, a series of anonymous “investigative” articles was published accusing Furlan of feeling schadenfreude towards Croats because her mother was Jewish. Vilified by the Croatian media, Furlan and several other prominent Croatian feminists received death threats. The socialist government at the time responded unfavorably to the feminists, accusing them of importing “a bourgeois ideology from the West.” When feminists supported the anti-war and human rights movement in Croatia in response to rising ethnic nationalism, they were accused of being pro-Communist and “Yugonostalgic.” In the 1980s, Furlan was active in the Yugoslav feminist movement, which addressed violence against women and children, lower wages for female workers, the political marginalization of women despite formal female representation in the socialist assembly, and pervasive legal gender inequalities. I reached out to her and we recently had a lengthy email discussion covering topics ranging from the nature of identity to her reflections on the past. Notably, last April, the Jewish and Serbian communities boycotted the government’s official Holocaust commemoration over the center-right government’s alleged inaction to stem the rise of neo-Nazism.īecause of this, I began to wonder what had happened to Mira Furlan. Today, two decades later, neo-Fascism still dominates Croatian politics. I am a woman of Croatian and Jewish descent and this was the first time in my life that I’d encountered anti-Semitism and misogyny at such a personal level. When I read these attacks against Furlan, including one titled “The Hard Life of an Easy Woman,” I felt physically ill. I was working as a journalist in Zagreb at the time. in 1992 as an exile, driven out of her native land by a toxic blend of anti-Semitism and misogyny. Mira Furlan, an iconic Yugoslavian film and theater actor, came to the U.S. ![]()
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