All Tito’s Children

Who is Marshal Tito? His accent is strange, his birthdate and name uncertain. He addresses his people in a voice that might be his own, or perhaps it is the voice of someone else. Stjepan and Elizabeta are siblings in Kotoriba, a small village between two rivers in Yugoslavia. They want to know everything about the world. From their tiny corner of communist Europe, small cracks are starting to appear in their adoration of their national leader, Tito. All Tito’s Children is a remarkable first book of poetry by Tim Grgec. It is shadowed by the story of Grgec’s own grandparents, who fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and came to New Zealand as refugees. Lyrical and haunting, it is a multilayered portrait of personal and political disillusionment, deception, escape and loss.