My father’s family lived at Grčarice (Masern) 15, the number of our house in the village. I was born in that house as were at least seven generations of my ancestors. The earliest on record is Mathias Tschinkel, his date of birth being 1729.
 
The year 1729 comes from the Book of Marriages which records the wedding of his son Johann Tschinkel and Magdalena Sturm on April 25, 1782. The wedding information, in addition to the birthdays of the couple, also shows that Mathias, the father of Johann was 53 years old, fixing his year of birth at 1729. The entry was made by the resident priest in Gotenica (Göttenitz).
   
The Book of Marriages, which shows the wedding date of Johann and Magdalena, is part of a set of three ledgers listing births, marriages and deaths kept by a priest in any village of a parish.

The ledgers on Masern were kept by the priest in Göttenitz after that village became a parish in 1363. The priest there continued making the entries even after Masern was placed under the main parish of Ribnica in 1741. And even after Masern became a sub-parish under Dolenja Vas in 1767 and Anton Wallisch became its first resident chaplain, the books continued to be kept in Gotenica (Göttenitz).  During his four years there he walked the 4 kilometers to Göttenitz to make his entries. And after he left in 1771 there was no resident priest in Masern for 51 years until 1822. But during this time, the priests of Göttenitz and Dolenja Vas looked after the spiritual welfare of Masern and updated its records which continued to be kept in the parsonage of Göttenitz.
 
The previous ledgers filled up, the priest in Göttenitz started a new set in 1773 and continued to make entries on Masern until the arrival of its next village priest, Johann Munini in 1822. Father Munini brought this new set of books to his parsonage and from that year forward, he and his successors continued with entries on births, marriages and deaths including the descendants of Mathias Tschinkel.  Unfortunately, Father Munini did not bring to Masern the sets of ledgers prior to 1773. As a result, they were irrevocably lost in the turmoil of W.W.II.  But from 1773 forward a total of three sets of books were filled up. They cover the periods 1773-1820, 1821-1895 and 1896-1944. All are stored in the archives of the bishopric in Ljubljana.

Father Munini left Masern in 1837 and for 30 years until 1867 there again was no resident priest in the village. As before, the priests from the adjacent parishes of Göttenitz and Dolenja Vas took care of the spiritual welfare of Masern and maintained its records.
   
Father Johann Posnik came to Masern as its resident priest in 1867.  He, however, gave up the priesthood in 1884, to become the full time teacher in the first school of the village, inaugurated that same year. But he continued to give religious instructions to his pupils and also continued to maintain the books on births, marriages and deaths.
 
Posnik in 1877 also made a tabulation of all houses in the village including the name of the owner and property owned by the house. He did this by starting with house number 1 and continuing in numerical sequence until he listed all 63 of them.

In 1939, the three sets of ledgers and the tabulation were transferred to the parish of Dolenja Vas when Father Jože Rozman, the last village priest left Masern. From there they were transferred to the Archdiocese in Ljubljana where they are kept in the Nadskofijski Archiv to this day. The tabulation of 1877 however remained at the Dolenja Vas parish from which it was finally moved to the municipal District Office of the County of Ribnica. My birth on February 28, 1931 was recorded in the Book of Births from 1896-1944 by Father Klemenčič after he christened me on March 5, 1931.

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In the absence of church records, family continuity may, however, be found in land records kept on the properties owned by each house in the village via the house number, in our case 15. But this was only so if the oldest son was the inheritor which automatically was the case according to the primogeniture law.  And if the oldest son died without issue, the inheritor was the next oldest brother.
  
But continuity was lost if there were no sons.  In this case the oldest daughter inherited the property.  However, when she married, the property transferred to her husband.  But the property and all its individual parcels continued to be listed in the Land Records under the number of the house of which the husband was now the owner.

Continuity via land records becomes unclear if the owner, be it the father or the oldest son, decided to split the property. In such a case, the land records were changed to show the new house number, reflect the division and all the parcels involved.  But unlike the church records which provided continuity via the ledgers on births, marriages and deaths, the land records do not show the origin of the new owner of the land that had been split away and therefore the connection is lost.

The search for the origin of my family, after exhausting the church ledgers, took me to the available land records and the belief that my ancestors may have been among the original group of six families that settled in Masern the middle of the 14th century. But there is proof that they did live in Masern ever since the end of the 17th Century.

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The history of Masern and the extent to which my ancestors were part of it comes from five documents that record land ownership, the first being the “Vrbar des ambts Riegkh, anno 1498”. This document shows that in 1498 the original six Hides, awarded to the settlers on their arrival in the middle of the 14th century, had already been split into halves.  The names of the twelve owners are:

1, Gregor (Supann),  2, Paule Weber,  3, Caspar Kramer,  4, Mathe,  5, Paull Liser, 6, Vrbann Wochenn,  7, Clement,  8, Paulle des Achatz son,  9, Jury,  10,  Caspar Leschner,   11, Petter,  12, Fritze vnd Peter.
 
The “Urbar Register der Herschaft Gotschee, Anno 1564” 66 years later shows that the names of some of the twelve owners are phonetically still the same even if spelled differently. That some are already owned by their primogeniture is indicated by the “son of”. The half Hides of Caspar Kramer and Vrban Wochenn now belong to Peter Stamphl, a new name.  This is repeated four years later in the Blagay “Vrbar ‘Gottschee Ao 1568”, a survey which induced Countess Elizabeth Blagay in 1613 to sell or lease five and one half additional Hides of her land to increase tax revenue and capitalize on the population growth there.
 
The noteworthy entry is for Paull Liser, (5).  In 1564, this owner is listed as Gregor Luschar and in 1568 as Gregor Lusar, both spelled differently but phonetically are similar to Lisar.  In the 1903’s when each house was still recorded by its village number, not its family name, Lusharsh was the house name for Masern number two, its owner a Michitsch. Father had often mentioned that the Lusharsh were one of the oldest residents of the village.

The next available land document, the Therezijanski Kataster of 1752, was prepared 184 years later. Unfortunately, the Blagay tax records, showing the income from the land in Masern during this interim, could not be found. This missing link would reveal when and how the names listed in the 1498, 1564 and 1568 documents evolved into the names listed in the 1752 Kataster which now shows twenty three land owners and twelve land leasers or thirty five in all.
 
Among the twenty three land owners there are eighteen with one of six family names. They are:
 
Primosch (6), Fritz (4), Sturm (3), Parthe (2), Michitsch (2) and Stampfl (1).

These eighteen families now own the twelve half-Hides split into eighteen parts of one quarter Hide or more. This would indicate that these eighteen owners are the descendants of the original settlers of Grčarice (Masern) having arrived there sometime before 1498. The fact that the all the owners now have both a Christian and family name that are different or new, may be attributed to the fact that the repeated use of only Christian names became impractical or that the property was transferred to a son-in-law as was then the practice.
  
Of the other seventeen new names in the 1752 Kataster, five are owners and twelve are leasers of the five and one half Hides of land made available by the countess in 1613. The name Tschinkel is among the seventeen and as such appears for the first time in land records.
 
The five owners are Krisch, Wittine, Schober, Tschinkel and Wittreich, their joint ownership being one and three eighths Hides of which Michaill Tschinkel owned one eight of a Hide and lived at Number 15.  He either purchased the land from the Blagays after 1613 or married a female descendant of one of the other owners. The missing records of the interval between 1568 and 1752 would reveal this and show when the Tschinkels arrived in the village or if they were already residents known by another name before family names became adopted and used in records.

Among the twelve families leasing the balance of four and one eighth Hides were Mihael and Matel Tschinkel who lived at Masern 26 and 29 respectively. Matel (Mathias) was the son of the Michaill at number 15 and my G,G,G,G, (fifth) grandfather.  He inherited the property when his father died.
 
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In his tabulation of 1877, Father Posnik listed every house by its number, recorded the last and first name of the owner, his age and the amount of land owned by the house. If no land was connected to the house, Posnik listed “none”. Even though each house had its own family name, he provided the house name well. Among the villagers only this house name was used; almost never the formal family name, a name not even known to some of the residents.

Posnik’s information and the book on births, marriages and deaths since 1773, reveal a high degree of intermarriage, a large number of offspring, an enormous infant mortality and the longevity of those who survived. Also apparent is the fact that many of the Masern men took their wives from families having the familiar names of Michitsch, Parthe, Sturm and Stampfl.
 
But since these names also predominate in the neighboring Göttenitz/Gotenica, their wives may have come from there. In Göttenitz, twenty seven of the forty families have the name of Michitsch, Parthe, Primosch, Stampfl and Poje.
 
The similarity of names in the two villages is not surprising given their long and intimate association and only strengthens the conclusion that these families have been connected since their ancestors arrived there in the fourteenth century. In fact, Gertrude Michitsch, the second wife of Grandfather George, came from Göttenitz. They were married on August 14, 1886.

But after 1613, two new family names appear in the village. These are Sbaschnig and Knaus. They most likely came from the Slovene village Dolenja Vas just outside the enclave. The “Therezijanski Kataster”, in “Bekanntnuss Tabellen, Unter Krain, 23. April 1752” under the: “Mittel Wiertl der Krain Herrschaft Reiffnitz, Dorff Nider Dorff“, lists eight families named Sbaschnig and at least one named Knaus, all owning land in Dolenja Vas.

The same Kataster under: “ Dritter Viertl Herrschaft Gottschee“ shows that as part of the land released in 1613, the Blagays rented one and three eighths Hides to two Sbaschnig families. Given this, it can be assumed that the Sbaschnigs of Masern were the Slovene Zbašniks of Dolenja Vas who moved into the enclave and became assimilated and Germanized their name.

(Great Grandfather George Tschinkel married a Sbaschnig on March 3, 1853. She too may have come from a Dolenja Vas family).

Dolenja Vas, only six and one half km from Masern and for centuries a Slovene speaking village, has many other family names that have a distinctly phonetic equivalent to names inside the enclave. Zbašnik (nine families in 1877), Fric, Klun, Kromer, Schwerger, Kaplan are examples.
  
The Kataster of 1752 also shows that even more commonality is found in the even nearer Rakitnica. The names there are Widerwoll, Honigmann, Schober, Potschauer, Hegler and Fritz. (Both Schober and Fritz are listed as resident property owners in the Masern Kataster of 1752). The Rakitnica name Hegler is found to own property in Göttenitz. And the name Widerwoll, listed as property owners ten times in Rakitnica is recorded five times for owners in Göttenitz where it is spelled as Widerwohl, all of whom were identified as ethnic Germans and resettled as such in 1941.

The above indicates that the settlers on both sides of the enclave had much of their ancestry in common but adopted the language in their part for the sake of communication. But this was long before any nationalistic ideology entered their lives and drove them apart.
 
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Based on the above records, the presence of the Tschinkel family living in Masern starts eight generations ago in an unknown year of the late 17th and early 18th century. This comes from the fact that “Mihaill”, my ancestor lived at number 15 in the house I was born. The path between “Mihaill” and myself is clearly documented in the Kataster of 1752 and in the church records kept by the priests.

Based on the Posnik ledger, the number of Tschinkel families living in Masern in 1877 had increased from three to ten since 1752.  Of the ten, six were land owners, together owning two and three eighths Hides in fractions of various sizes representing, in all, 21% of all the land in the village. As such, Tschinkel was the most populous name, together owning more land than any other name in Masern. The increased ownership since 1752 could have been acquired only through direct purchase or marriage to heiress daughters, or widows of landowners. Four of the ten Tschinkel families own no land but all owned their house and the land it stood on.

The entry Johann Posnik made for my great grandfather’s house is:
 
“Masern 15,   House Name: Sturnjacklsch, (meaning the house of Johann near the well),  Family name: Tschinkel,   Christian name: Georg,   Age: 62,   Property size: one quarter.
 
For the first ten years of my life I was known as Sturnjacklsch Johann of Number 15. By then the land owned by the house had increased from the 1/8 Hide listed in the “Theresianski Kataster of 1752” to one quarter of a Hide.

I, Johann, emerged as the product of a Tschinkel and an Ilc, on February 28, 1931. My parents, Johann and Maria, members of two families separated for centuries by a language barrier and a one hour walk over a few steep hills, found each other in the tavern of my Slovene grandmother in Dolenja Vas. Their language barrier was overcome, but more than anything else, it was their less than fortunate past that brought them together for life.

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My Father was one of the nine children of Georg and Gertrude, (his second wife), my paternal grandparents. Georg, the oldest son of Georg and Margarete, was born on April 2, 1862. He married Rosalie Sturm of Masern 20 on August 16, 1885. The twenty two year old Rosalie died six days after giving birth to son Johann on June 8 1886. Johann died fifty two days later, the cause of death listed in the ledger of deaths as “lack of mother milk”.
 
Georg married again on August 14, 1886. His new wife was Gertrude Michitsch, aged twenty four. She was born on January 23, 1862 in Göttenitz at house number 22. Together they had nine children but only four survived. One died in birth, four others in infancy. Karl died of smallpox at one, Phillip at six of pneumonia, Maria at three of infection and Gertrude at ten of Typhus. The four survivors, Johanna and Paula both lived to sixty eight while both Johann and Franz died at seventy six.
 
Most marriages produced similar numbers and the high infant mortality rate, the most frequent way of death in the village, was not viewed as a curse but as part of the natural selection process.

Johanna, Paula and the eldest son Johann (my father), left for America, as soon as they were grown. Johanna left in 1905 when she was eighteen; Johann followed her in 1910 when he was seventeen to live with Johanna and her husband. Paula joined them in 1914 when she was sixteen. This left the parents George and Gertrude, both fifty two, and the youngest, Franz aged nine to tend the farm.

The exodus for America was common throughout the area, the enclave included. The New World offered opportunities which most of the young, including those in the family of George and Gertrude, realized the enclave did not. The extension of the railroad from Ljubljana to Kočevje (Gottschee), placed in operation on September 28, 1893 brought not only America but also the other parts of the world to this remote place. The exodus was especially large in the late part of the 19th and the early 20th century, up to the start of WWI. It built on itself when those who had left reported their successes and started sending back part of their earnings. A large percentage of the population, most of them young adults, left during that period.  There was little to keep them at home.

The land could no longer support the higher survival rate resulting from the improving level of education and better medical care. The inadequately fertilized soil, meager and unproductive to begin with, was being depleted in spite of crop rotation and barely provided for one family. Artificial fertilizer was not affordable and natural fertilizer from domestic animals was no longer adequate for the ever-increasing demand on the soil. Topping all that, frequent subdivision had reduced the available acreage to a point where further subdivision was no longer an option.  The ownership of land had, over the centuries, been reduced to the minimum needed for survival.

Apart from lumber mills, there was little industry inside the enclave and other parts of southeastern Slovenia. Various attempts within the enclave at glass works, Loden mills and wood products including carving, did not prosper and expand.

Johann, the natural heir to the land, had gone to America with the intention of returning after he saved enough to allow him to have a head start when he took over. Johann was to inherit the one quarter Hide equal to 21 hectares or 51 acres encompassing two and a half hectares of arable fields, seven of meadows and 11.5 of forest.

After his return, he intended to marry his childhood sweetheart Minnie to whom he was already engaged when he left.  Minnie was the only child of Joseph and Sophie Primosch, owners of one half a Hide. It had been agreed that the two properties would merge after the marriage.
 
But destiny would have it otherwise.  It came to Johann and Minnie in the form of WWI. Specifically; it came to Johann in Brooklyn NY in an order to appear for duty as a soldier at the Austrian Imperial Army station in Ribnica. It was sent to him by his father Georg with a reminder to follow the order or else lose all rights as heir to the family property.
 
Johann, having no intention of losing his inheritance, his betrothed Minnie and her half Hide, bought a ticket on the next steamer to Trieste from where he took the train via Ljubljana to Lipovec, the station nearest to home.
 
After training as a soldier, he was sent to the Italian front. He was there for most of the four years of the war but was sent home on a short leave, the first since being sent to the front. This was only a few weeks before the final confrontation at the Isonzo on October 23 in which the Italians destroyed the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian army in the battle of Vittorio Veneto. All hostilities ended November 4, 1918 and the Austrian units dissolved seven days later with the general armistice of November 11, 1918.
 
At home he found his mother Gera, now 56, brother Franz, aged thirteen and a totally neglected farm. His father Georg had died of cancer in 1916 and with Gera on her own, she could do only the bare minimum necessary to survive.
 
With no firewood on hand and winter approaching, Johann, Gera, Franz and the team of cows pulling the wagon made for the “Unterbinkl”, the nearest part of their forest to fell trees and cut them into logs. Ahead of this, Johann had filed the teeth of the saw and the cutting edges of the axe, something that had not been done for years since even before his father died. He also filed the edge of the machete, a cutting tool used for clearing the underbrush, into a razor sharp edge. With this tool he cut himself in the knee, a wound that would not heal and continued to fester. Apparently, the cutting edge of the axe had been contaminated by the file and the cut brought poison into the wound.

The file used for sharpening the machete axe had been used to clean the copper soldering iron with which he fixed the holes in the pots and pans the women of the village brought to his shop for repair. The iron was a pointed clump of copper at the end of a handle that was placed into the flames of the stove in the shop, and after being heated was cleaned with a file scraping off remnants of solder, copper and other residue. It was this residue that the file transferred on to the machete and which, through the cut, found its way into the blood stream.

At first, he ignored the wound as he had others while in the trenches for nearly four years. There, however, was usually a medic who took care of such wounds.  In isolated Masern there was no antiseptic and medical care was hours away. And when the cut began to fester, he asked a woman in the village for some of her mercurochrome which she denied him saying she had to save it for her own family.
 
When the twenty five year old soldier finally got to the military hospital in Ljubljana, gangrene had set in. Recalling the events later he said that by the time the busy staff got around to him, the gangrene had spread and there was no choice except to amputate the leg above the knee. He talked about being aware of the saw cutting the bone and the pain due to the lack of anesthetic, which at the end of the war, was not readily available in this hospital.
 
But after he came back home to Masern without his right leg, the woman who denied him the antiseptic tearfully came to apologize for her selfish act.
 
While Imperial Austria lost the war, Johann lost not only his leg but also Minnie and her half Hide. Minnie’s parents did not see a good future for their only daughter in being married to an invalid, called a “Krippl” in the enclave, a derogatory term used when referring to a physically handicapped person. Physical fitness was essential in this rural environment, the key to a productive existence, to survival. So Minnie’s parents put her on the next boat to America where, after several years, she married but not for love.

Johann’s fortunes declined even further when his brother Franz came of age and left to join his sisters in Brooklyn in 1926. Apparently, Franz demanded that the property of one quarter hide be split in half, something Johann would not agree to. With his leaving, Johann lost him not only as a brother but also as a helper in tending the land. However, Johann learned the art of leasing his acreage in return for labor to tend his own; there were many landless villagers willing to oblige. He also acquired a horse and carriage to make it possible for him to get around. The latter two brought him to the tavern in Dolenja Vas kept by Maria Ilc, my maternal grandmother to be.

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The family tree of the maternal side of my family starts nine generations ago with the birth of Mihael Ilc in 1650. The tree was developed from dates in church records of both Dolenja Vas and Ribnica. My mother Maria was the second of six children of Alojzij Ilc and Maria Zbašnik, living at Dolenja vas 46, the house name “Venckovi”.

Grandfather Alojzij was the third son of a prominent Ilc family, born on June 16, 1862 in the nearby Goriča Vas. But as the third in line for any inheritance Alojzij was a penniless bachelor, at twenty nine years having nothing except a good family name.

Grandmother Maria, born on November 1, 1869, was the second of eleven children of Johan and Agnes Zbašnik family in Dolenja Vas number 16. The house name was Pečkovi which, in addition to number 16, distinguished it from the other eight Zbašnik families in Dolenja Vas.  All are listed in the Theresianski Kataster of 1752. The Pečkovi lineage itself has been traced to the birth of Gašper, born in 1767.
 
Among her ten siblings, Maria had five brothers and five sisters. One of them died at birth. Jože the eldest son had no interest in the land, went to study law in Vienna and remained there. As a result, the burden of running the estate and caring for the aging parents fell mostly on the eldest daughter. She proved to be an able administrator, destined for a sizable dowry since the family was exceptionally well off and therefore she was a sought-after match by the likes of Alojzij Ilc and his parents.

The marriage of Alojzij and Maria took place in 1891. It was arranged by the parents and was no love match. The dowry of Maria was large; a house and 52 choice parcels of fertile land. The large house in the center of the village included a gostilna, a tavern selling wine, beer and meals that were served in a large guest room; in the summer on the terrace under shade trees. The tavern was similar to the Jaklitsch one in Masern. The house at number 46, purchased for the young couple by the parents of Maria was, together with the land, transferred to the twenty nine year old Alojzij and as dowry recorded in the wedding contract. All believed that the clever and determined Maria, even if only twenty two, would be a capable partner to Alojzij in making a success of running the enterprise.

That Maria was clever was noted. Her intelligence was recorded at the end of first grade by her teacher Janez Čuk who entered her as exceptional in the Honor Book of Students in Dolenja Vas for the first time on August 10, 1877. The leather bound hard cover book with its gold embossed “Ehrenbuch der Schüler in Niederdorf”, (Honor book of students in Dolenja Vas) locally called the “Zlata Knjiga”, the Golden book, was kept by the parish to commemorate its brightest students. Janez Čuk continued to make similar entries on Maria at the end of each of the following three school years. But she did not continue schooling after the fourth grade; education beyond the fourth grade was not yet mandatory and in rural areas even undesirable since at age twelve and beyond all hands were needed to work the land.

Maria and Alojzij were formally introduced at a “spraševanje”, a get together of the couple, their parents and the priest in the office of his Dolenja Vas parsonage prior to the wedding. At this meeting the priest questioned the future bride and groom about their commitment and the parents about the financial arrangement. My cousin Mira states that this was the first time Maria met Alojzij which may have been the case since their elementary schooling did not overlap and the parents usually kept a close watch on their daughters.

The marriage went bad very soon. Alojzij, at twenty nine suddenly thrust into a position of power, assumed control of both the tavern and the farm. Maria had no choice but to submit to his dictates. While she and helpers were sent into the fields, Alojzij tended the tavern, often winding up drunk with his loose friends who did not pay their bills.  Maria protested but without results.

A son Alojzij was born in 1892, Maria, my mother in 1896 and Angela in 1899. Immediately after that, the now restless husband left for America, leaving Maria to cope on her own. This she did well and recovered most of the damage done by her husband. But he returned in 1904 and fathered, in rapid succession three sons, Franc, Janez and Jože (05, 06, 08.) He also continued in his former destructive ways, tolerating no interference from his wife whom he beat into submission.  More than ever before he entertained non-paying customers and friends and in his perpetual drunken state neglected to pay his suppliers. Soon deliveries stopped and patrons stayed away. And everything the wife had recovered in his absence was dragged down again. To escape the consequences of his mismanagement he left for America in 1909, this time for good.  He died in Cleveland on Jan 27, 1937.

However, the gostilna could no longer recover from the damage and a public auction on March 23, 1911 forced by creditors caused the sale of all 52 parcels of land. The auction yielded 6,113 Imperial Krone, then equal to 1,232 US Dollars, at today’s valuation approximately roughly 140,000 Dollars. Maria Ilc herself bid on parcel number 40 which she got for 226 Krone.

But it was parcel number 40, together with the earnings from the recovering gostilna that helped the now forty two year old Maria to survive and raise her five fatherless children. And daughter Maria, at her father’s final departure an able ten year old, became the right hand to her now single mother, helping her with the siblings, the fields and the tavern. But while the aging mother clung to the oldest daughter, she struggled to make sure that her other children were raised and educated in a manner that satisfied her pride and did not reflect the failings of her husband.

The apple of her eye was Alojzij, the oldest. He inherited her intelligence and she sent him to the Gymnasium in Ljubljana and from there to University in Vienna where he got a law degree, graduating just before the start of WWI. He became an officer in the 47th Regiment of the Imperial Army and was soon sent to the Italian front. There he was killed on August 18, 1917 during the 11th battle at the Isonzo near St. Giovanni in the Monfalcone district of the Veneto coastal area.  His officer’s sword and personal alarm clock were returned to his family by his orderly. The sword got lost, but I still have the clock, now one of my treasured possessions.

His death resulted in a life long hatred for anything Italian not only by his mother but also by his sister Maria, a hatred that surfaced into the open when the Italians came to Dolenja Vas as occupiers in 1941.  But more on that later.
 
Angela, two and one half years younger than Maria, was sent off to Kočevje (Gottschee) City to learn to be a seamstress. After she finished training and returned home she used her skills to help support the family by sewing cloth into shirts and dresses, but resisted working in the fields which resulted in endless friction between her and the other two women. This friction among the three continued even after Angela married Janez Pahulje in 1928. As a builder of some standing, Pahulje was an acceptable husband to the mother, seeing in the marriage a repair of the honor to her family.

This honor, tainted at first by the sordid ways of her husband, then further damaged by a humiliating auction, was now dragged even further down when it became public that the twenty seven year old Maria was pregnant. Made pregnant by her secretly affianced lover; the affair kept secret because he was judged by the mother as being unworthy of her daughter. When the mother discovered the added shame brought home by this wayward daughter, she expelled her from the house and Maria went to live with the Zbašnik family, her maternal grandparents.
 
Maria gave birth to a girl on September 23, 1923 but by then the father had died of tuberculosis.  My mother never spoke of him and I never asked.  But Janez Pahulje, who knew him said his name was Karel Widerwoll; that he was a sickly man already terminally ill before the girl was born.  A “kind man, but one without property or learning”. This was not in line with the expectation of her mother and Maria was forbidden to marry him.

But the expelled Maria was missed as a helper and after the initial anger abated, her mother demanded that the dishonored daughter recover her graces by coming to the inn as an unpaid day laborer. This she did for years starting daily at crack of dawn and performing her former duties until late into the night. As time went by, she was allowed to bring with her the bastard child, “cross-eyed by God as punishment on the wayward mother”.

In the meanwhile, the three sons Franc, Janez and Jože had grown into teenagers and the mother was arranging their future. Franc became an apprentice to a carpenter, Janez an apprentice to a mason and Jože, the youngest was sent to a lawyer’s office in Ljubljana to learn law.

Franc finished his apprenticeship and left for Argentina in 1925. He never came back. But before departing he mentioned to his coworkers that his mother wished him to do something about his unruly hair for a family photograph. They suggested a watered down mixture of carpenter glue which worked well and satisfied the mother and the photographer. But the glue mixture hardened and the hair became a solid mass which had to be softened and melted out with masses of very hot water.
 
Janez, after finishing his training worked for Pahulje, met Maria Bradač, the daughter of a landless worker and to the displeasure of his mother, married her in 1937. Shunned by her mother-in-law, she was nevertheless required to come and help with the gostilna, scrub the floors and clean up after the guests. After several years, the mother-in-law relented and in 1940 finally asked that her son and his family come to live with her. But this was only when she was no longer able to cope on her own at age 71.

As for Jože her youngest, Grandma Ilc pulled out all the stops. Recognizing his intellect, she sent him to Kočevje City where he finished the Gymnasium and from there to the university in Ljubljana where he studied law. After one year in the military in 1933, he went to work for a law firm in Ljubljana as an assistant lawyer. There he met Iva Knoll, a secretary and the daughter of yet another landless peasant. Anticipating disapproval from his mother, Jože kept the liaison secret for six years. And when he informed her of his decision to marry Iva in 1939, she not only forbade it, but terminated all contact with her son and never met his wife and children. This separation was maintained for eight years until 1947 when, on her death bed in the hospital, she finally agreed to meet Iva.
 
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After the twenty nine year old Angela married Pahulje in 1928 and left the house, her mother, now at sixty, relied even more on her oldest daughter, her right hand for over fifteen years. Janez was of limited help being away on his job most of the time and Jože was a student in Ljubljana. And when in 1930 Maria, now thirty four agreed to marry Johann Tschinkel, her mother, for obvious reasons tried her utmost to prevent it. But Maria remained determined, surely aware that she was well on the way to spinsterhood and that this opportunity, even if hardly ideal, might be her last. Fortunately, strong support for her decision came from brother Janez and two of her aunts, her mother’s younger sisters, Franca and Jula, both spinsters themselves. Maria for years remained grateful to all three, helping them whenever financial or other help was needed. In addition to the three, she had other supporters in the village and ultimately, her mother relented and gave her reluctant blessing. The fact that he was a landowner, even if an invalid from a German village, helped this proud woman with her decision.
 
The detractors were Angela and Jože, each of them to be impacted by the pending absence of Maria’s support of their mother. Their joint effort to prevent the union was the beginning of a life long animosity between Angela and brother Janez and decades long hostility between the two sisters. In addition, the likelihood of any reconciliation was set back even further by the events related to Aunt Johanna’s roof described in the next chapter.

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Maria and Johann, each burdened by their handicaps, were brought together by the very handicaps destiny had imposed on them. She, a disgraced woman with a bastard child; he, a handicapped man on crutches. Both damaged goods no one else wanted.  These handicaps forced them to be realistic about their choices and conclude that the union, while far from ideal, was preferable to remaining single.  On top, there was the lack of a common language. But apart from their handicaps, both were young, healthy and strong; each determined to face a difficult future, one they started with a honeymoon in Bled.

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It was Johann who got the better deal. He got himself a wife, a cook, a housekeeper, a worker in the field and had his ego as a man restored.  In addition, he acquired a seven year old step daughter who was not only of help immediately, but in a few years would be a major contributor.
 
But while Maria got herself a husband, a landed one at that, she also acquired a mother-in-law Gera (Gertrude) who, for the next eight years until she died in 1938 did her best to make her life miserable. She hated Maria as an intruder, a Slovene no less who spoke an ‘inferior’ language, one who robbed her of the status as the woman of the house, one who had a cross-eyed bastard child who made her dislike no secret to the step-grandmother.
 
For Gera, Mother became the easy tool with which she maligned her son who had cast her aside for this Slovene; a person she claimed was trying to get rid of her by poisoning her food. She consequently cooked her own meals which she ate in her room. Having no money of her own, she demanded and received an allowance from her son which she called inadequate. To have her way she took him to court in Ribnica where she was awarded a fixed monthly sum.

Gera was most successful in fanning hostility with the Tschinkel brothers of Number 12 and their relatives who continued with their resentment over what they believed was the erroneous award of the French surveyor Colanetté during the village wide survey in 1825 to the benefit of the Tschinkels of Number 15. A claim they continued in spite of the re-survey and settlement negotiated by Franz Jaklitsch.
 
She also frequented others who had cheated Father by getting firewood from his forests without his permission, reneging on pledged work in return for letting them use his land, and deeds of yet others who had taken advantage of the invalid. But he had exposed their deeds in the village where, as a result, they lost the trust of those on whom they depended for subsistence. For this they now blamed Father and Gera’s doings only furthered this animosity.

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At first Mother, living isolated in part due to her inability to speak the dialect of the village, made contact with the few other women who spoke Slovene, women who years ago may have been in a similar situation and were, therefore, sympathetic.

But after a few years of living in the village and having acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the dialect, she broadened her circle of acquaintance to the ethnic German women (and men) who soon respected her dedication to her husband, the farm and the household. Being a Slovene did not seem to matter; at least not until the second half of the 1930’s when hatred of anything Slovene fanned by Nazis also included my mother. This mattered then in spite of the fact that there were many other Slovene in the village who had become integrated and absorbed into the community without a trace of their former nationality. This was the case not only in Masern but in other parts of the enclave as well.
 
And Mother was well underway to do the same, in spite of the hostile mother-in-law who tried to make her stumble every step of the way and spoke ill of her to all who would listen. Fortunately, there were few who believed her.  Father often confronted his mother and there were bitter rows after which Gera stormed out of the house and even stayed with her few friends in the village. After one such event she even went to live with her sister’s family in Gotenica (Göttenitz) and there was peace for a while. But there the combative septuagenarian soon outlasted her welcome and after her unrepentant return, our home again reverted to tension and hostility. However, our life became pleasant after Gera was moved to an old age home in Ljubljana in 1937 where she died the following year at age 76.

In the meanwhile, Mother sought comfort from her own family in Dolenja Vas.  This she got from brother Janez and her two aunts and eventually also from her own mother who welcomed the frequent visits; not only from her daughter but also from her son in law. And after a short while also from her grandson Johann on whom she doted even before I started remembering. Our visits were frequent and usually on Sunday after Mass when Yiorgo was harnessed and pulled the four of us to Dolenja Vas where we had one of her excellent meals and stayed for the afternoon. And since there were also paying guests in the gostilna, Mother would help Grandma in attending them, while Father mingled with the men and exchanged stories about their time at the Isonzo.

When I reached preschool age, I begged to be allowed to stay for a few days.  Mother was reluctant to leave me behind believing that I would be a nuisance and interfere with Grandma’s work. But Grandma insisted that I would not be a hindrance and I was allowed to stay. And while I was there she, in spite of all her tasks, always found time for me and when not, invented ways to entertain myself, be it in the house, the gostilna or on the grounds outside. Together we walked to the fields to spend hours weeding, me helping her with a miniature hoe she found for me. She proudly showed me off as her grandchild, the son of Micka her oldest; her fondness of me elevated perhaps because I was the only grandchild who sought her company and obviously adored her.

After I got a little older, I was allowed to visit her on my own; at first by walking the six and one quarter kilometers and later on by cycling there. She taught me to read when I was six.  She was proud of my rapid learning and said that I was an Ilc, her family name. I was confused and said my name was Tschinkel but she grimaced, winked her eye and said again "you are an Ilc”.
 
I was always welcome and her ability to keep me occupied had no limit. This was particularly so after I became a fluent reader. Knowing how much I loved to read, she made sure that there would be something new for me the next time I came. For me this was an added draw, especially after going from house to house in Grčarice (Masern) in search for something to read, no longer brought results.

But having learned to read early was also a burden, especially in our one room school where the Slovene teacher gloated because the “half-breed” was better than the “pure Aryans” many of whom had difficulty with the alphabet. Some schoolmates did not take kindly to this unfavorable distinction and I took extra bullying as a result.

I had learned to read in Slovene, but it was Grandma Ilc who introduced me to reading German which she knew reasonably well. She said it was important to learn it and therefore found easy to read material and helped me as I stumbled with words most of which had no similarity with the Gottschee dialect. And by 1941, I was able to read the Gottscheer Zeitung that came regularly and was on a table at the Jaklitsch tavern available to all including me.

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I kept cycling to Grandma’s even after the Italians arrived in the spring of 1941.  A contingent of the Italians stayed in Dolenja Vas and their field kitchen was set up in the shaded orchard of her gostilna, much to her displeasure and disgust. She passionately hated all Italians for killing her favorite son. On my first visit after their arrival in May, she forcefully commanded me with "…don’t go near them…”

I did not until I watched them prepare a meal and smelled the aroma.  Tomatoes, beans, macaroni and other exotic things went into the big pot and the aroma was heavenly. I drifted nearer but Grandma saw me and yelled:  "... get away from them ..." I reluctantly did, but in a little while the aroma became irresistible again.  Again Grandma yelled and I withdrew, but not too far.

The Italians noticed the goings on which they found most amusing. And when Grandma was again not watching, they winked with their fingers and I crept toward the soldier who with a ladle scooped the pot and poured some its contents into a field dish for me. With this I ran behind the house, out of sight of Grandma and ate the most delicious food of my short life.  I remembered this event of tasting forbidden fruit only after many years of puzzlement about my love for anything Italian. Fortunately my wife is a wonderful cook and very early discovered my culinary passion. I am certain that one of the reasons for our marital longevity is the way she excels in the various ways of preparing pasta.

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