The Serbian Things I Didn’t Understand Until I Grew Up

Author: Milanka Sulejic

When I was a kid, I thought my family was weird.
Not bad weird.
Just… Serbian weird.
I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then. I only knew that other people’s houses didn’t seem to work the way ours did.

At my friends’ houses, dinner was dinner.
At ours, dinner was an event.
Someone was always asking if I was hungry.
If I said no, food appeared anyway.
If I said yes, somehow enough food appeared to feed everyone in the neighborhood.
And if I finished my plate, someone immediately put more on it.
“I’m full.”
“You’re not full.”
“I really am.”
“Just a little more.”
There was no winning.
I didn’t understand that this wasn’t really about food.
I understand now.
For people who had grown up with less, feeding someone was a way of saying:
You are safe here.
You belong here.
You will not go without.
I just thought my grandmother was trying to make me explode.

I also didn’t understand the plastic containers.
My mother saved everything.
Butter containers.
Sour cream containers.
Takeout containers.
Jars.
Bags.
Boxes.
If something had a lid, it had a future.
I would open the refrigerator looking for something to eat and find twelve identical containers.
“What is in these?”
“Food.”
“What food?”
“Food.”
This was not helpful.
Sometimes I opened one and discovered leftovers.
Sometimes something that had been frozen since what felt like 1987.
And sometimes there was nothing inside.
Just a container.
A perfectly good container.
Apparently throwing away a container was a moral failure.
When I got older, I started doing the same thing.
I would stand in my kitchen holding an empty jar, thinking:
I could use this.
And then I would laugh.
I had become my mother.

I didn’t understand why my parents never wanted me to leave someone’s house without eating.
If we visited another Serbian family, the ritual was predictable.
Coffee.
Food.
More coffee.
More food.
Conversation.
Food again.
Someone would say, “You have to eat something.”
I would say, “I’m okay.”
They would look personally offended.
“Eat.”
So I ate.
Then they wrapped food for us to take home.
I didn’t understand that hospitality was not an optional part of the culture.
It was almost a language.
You didn’t say:
I care about you.
You said:
Sit down.
Eat.
Take this with you.
Call me when you get home.
Did you eat?
That was love.
I just didn’t know it yet.

I didn’t understand why my father could fix almost anything.
Or at least why he believed he could.
Duct tape.
A screwdriver.
A kitchen knife.
Something from the garage that nobody was allowed to throw away.
He would disappear for twenty minutes and return with whatever was broken functioning again.
Was it fixed?
Probably not.
Was it working?
Yes.
That was apparently enough.
I remember watching him repair things and thinking he was being stubborn.
Now I realize he came from a generation that didn’t automatically replace something because it stopped working.
You repaired it.
You made do.
You figured it out.
You kept going.
Maybe that was more than a way of fixing things.
Maybe that was how they survived.

I didn’t understand why my grandmother had remedies for everything.
Tea.
Honey.
Garlic.
Something wrapped in a towel.
Something else boiled in a pot.
And, inevitably, Vicks.
If you had a cold, you were going to receive advice.
If you had a headache, you were going to receive advice.
If you said you were tired, someone would immediately diagnose you with something.
I used to laugh.
Now I miss it.
Because there was something comforting about knowing that somewhere in the world, my grandmother believed there was a solution to everything.
Even if the solution smelled terrible.

I didn’t understand the language either.
I understood Serbian.
Sort of.
I could follow conversations.
I knew certain words before I knew their English equivalents.
I knew what my grandmother meant from the tone of her voice.
And I knew that when my mother switched from English to Serbian, I had probably done something wrong.
But I answered in English.
That was the language of school.
The language of friends.
The language of the world outside our house.
Serbian belonged inside.
It belonged to family.
To grandparents.
To church.
To weddings.
To funerals.
To holidays.
To the kitchen.
I didn’t realize how complicated that was until I became older.
I wasn’t losing a language.
I was losing pieces of a world.

I didn’t understand why our weddings were so big.
There were always people I didn’t know.
People my parents knew.
People my grandparents knew.
People someone knew because someone else knew someone.
By the end of the night, I had met approximately three hundred relatives and could not explain how any of them were related to me.
And there was always food.
Always music.
Always someone dancing.
Always someone telling you to eat.
And always someone saying:
“Do you know who that is?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“You saw them last year.”
“I don’t remember.”
“They’re family.”
Apparently that was enough.

I didn’t understand slava when I was young.
I understood that it meant people were coming over.
I understood that there would be food.
I understood that adults would be talking for a long time.
I understood that I was expected to behave.
But I didn’t understand what it meant.
Now I do.
It isn’t just a celebration.
It is memory made into ritual.
A family remembering where it came from.
A name passed down.
A tradition carried forward.
Something that says:
We were here before you.
And, quietly:
We hope you will be here after us.

I didn’t understand the photographs.
My grandmother had photographs everywhere.
Some were old enough that I didn’t recognize the people.
There were women standing outside houses.
Men in suits.
Children who looked serious because apparently smiling for photographs was not a requirement yet.
There were weddings.
Baptisms.
Funerals.
Houses.
Gardens.
People standing beside cars.
People whose names I had heard my entire life but whose faces meant nothing to me.
I used to wonder why she kept all of them.
Now I think I understand.
Because photographs were proof.
Proof that these people existed.
Proof that these houses existed.
Proof that this family had lived somewhere before it lived here.
Before the highways.
Before the American houses.
Before the English language became easier than Serbian.
Before the children forgot how to pronounce certain words.
The photographs said:
Remember us.

And I didn’t understand why my parents worried so much.
Study.
Work.
Save money.
Be careful.
Call when you get there.
Call when you get home.
Don’t waste money.
Don’t trust everyone.
Keep something in the house in case you need it.
Make sure you have enough.
They weren’t trying to make us afraid.
They were teaching us how to survive in the way they knew.
Their parents had taught them the same things.
And somewhere along the way, survival became love.

When I was young, I thought I lived between two worlds.
America was one.
Serbia was the other.
I thought I had to choose which one was mine.
But growing up changed that.
I realized I didn’t live between two worlds.
I lived in both.
One gave me the place where I was born.
The other gave me the stories of the people who came before me.
One gave me English.
The other gave me Serbian words that don’t always translate neatly.
One gave me my childhood.
The other gave me pieces of my family’s.
And somewhere between them, I became myself.

Now I catch myself doing things I once thought were strange.
I save containers.
I make too much food.
I tell people to eat.
I worry when someone doesn’t call.
I keep old photographs.
I ask questions about people I never met.
I hear Serbian and recognize something in it that feels like home.
Sometimes I even look at an empty jar and think:
Don’t throw that away.
And then I laugh.
Because I finally understand.
The things I thought were strange were never really strange.
They were evidence.
Evidence of everything my family had carried across an ocean.
The recipes.
The language.
The photographs.
The habits.
The stories.
The fear.
The humor.
The stubbornness.
The generosity.
The need to feed everyone.
The refusal to throw away a perfectly good container.
All of it came from somewhere.
And now some of it lives in me.
Maybe that’s what it means to be the child of immigrants.
You don’t always understand what you’re inheriting while you’re receiving it.
Sometimes you spend your childhood trying to become less different.
Then you grow up and realize the things you were embarrassed by are the things you most want to keep.
The accent.
The food.
The old stories.
The strange expressions.
The family traditions.
The photographs.
The language.
The names.
The things your grandmother did that made absolutely no sense to you.
Until suddenly they do.
And maybe that is the quiet miracle of inheritance.
We think we are leaving childhood behind.
But some things follow us.
They wait inside us until we’re old enough to understand them.
Then one day, without even realizing it, we repeat them.
We save the jar.
We make the food.
We tell the story.
We teach the word.
We ask:
“Did you eat?”
And somewhere, our grandmothers would probably smile.
Because finally—
we understand.

About the author:  Milanka Sulejic is a Serbian-American writer, author, and storyteller whose work often explores family, cultural memory, Balkan heritage, migration, and the stories passed between generations.