Balkan Gothic

HE, THE FATHER (313 pp.) -- Frank Mlakar--Harper ($3).

Young Osip Princevich hesitated to leave Slovenia for America, even though a lot of other fellows were heading west. He felt bound to his village by ties that he could not put into words. It was his copper-haired sweetheart, Lenka, who persuaded him. Osip beat up his father and stole the old man's life savings to get money for the trip.

From this violent beginning, 37-year-old, Cleveland-born Author Frank Mlakar (rhymes with blocker) carves out a Balkan gothic tale. For Osip Princevich, life in America was no bowl of cherries; it became a nightmare of homesickness and guilt that only Osip's return to his homeland could end or explain.

Osip himself was slower to sense this than Lenka. For one thing, Osip insisted on settling down, over her protests, in sooty, swarming Chicken Village, the Slovenian quarter of Cuyahoga City: it reminded Osip of home. His job at the wire mill wasn't enough for him; he invented backbreaking, spare-time tasks such as digging his cellar deeper & deeper. Lenka finally caught him carving a heart out of an old piece of driftwood. Shrewdly, she suggested what Osip had not guessed: "Is it supposed to be a bleeding Christ-heart like the one in [the church in] Gobelye?"

It was, indeed, though it takes Osip--and Author Mlakar--all the way to the end of the symbol-ridden story to put the missing pieces together. For Osip's smothering sense of guilt went back to his childhood, when he first began to hate his brutal, domineering father. One day, as the boy stood before a carved image of the Christ in the little Gobelye church, it seemed to him that the Christ and his father had fused into the same person. Osip had been so startled that he had dropped the sacred heart which he was holding and broken it. About then, Osip later remembered, he began to suffer from the strange attacks that throughout his life had made him temporarily unable to move his legs.

Final enlightenment hit Osip after he had deserted Lenka and his own seven-year-old son to return to Gobelye. "Father . . . forgive [me]!" he cried to the averted face of the Christ image. Forgiveness was in that face, but not in the faces of his hostile fellow villagers. In an impulsive surge, they closed in and kicked him to death.

Author Mlakar has wasted some of the force of this first novel in plodding, wooden writing, but, nonetheless, he has put together a powerful, Dostoevskian story. And at the core, despite its burdening trappings of auto-psychoanalysis, it is as simple, and final, as a folk tale.

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