A Home in Red Hook, and a House by the Sea
A Conversation with Mirko Gabler
by Bernard Greenwald & Paul De Angelis

Photo by Cynthia Del Conte

     It is unusual for a Red Hook resident of modest means to have a vacation home on the Adriatic Sea. This is the way it came about. It started back in Zagreb,Croatia, in the 70s, when Mirko and Ann Gabler met and liked each other. Newly acquainted, they traveled together to a hilltop village named Montona in Istria, a region settled by the ancient Romans and said to be the landing place of Jason and the Argonauts in The Odyssey. Between the two World Wars Istria became Italian territory, and when the Italian Fascists were overthrown in WWII, the Allies returned the town to Yugoslavia.
     When the war ended, many Italians went back to Italy, abandoning their houses in Istria. The town population of 2,500 shrank and today there are only 400 inhabitants. Young Mirko and Ann, penniless students, arrived in '73 when these houses were being sold at auction. They made a small bid on their house, which had been somewhat damaged in the war. To their surprise and delight, they won. Unfortunately, a local Communist apparatchik also wanted the house, and eventually they had to leave without having assumed its ownership.
     Twenty-five years later, on another trip to Croatia, Ann and Mirko saw the house again, unlived in since the war. It seemed to have been waiting for them, so they bought it. Here's some of the rest of Mirko's story:

     I was born to a trilingual family, my mother's side speaking German, but being Czech. They lived in Sudentenland, near the German border. When I was a kid in the 50s you could still see the bullet holes and bomb craters, and there were still hand grenades going off in the woods. Then the Communists came in and it was rough for a time, since my father's side was from the Croatian part of Yugoslavia and they had already fled from Tito and the Communists in 1945 when they came to Czechoslovakia. When I was eight years old, my father decided he had had enough, and as a Yugoslav
citizen emigrated to Canada. My mother refused to leave the country and she and my sister and I stayed. My father used to send us chewing gum and blue jeans, all of these beautiful Western things. Of course the Communists didn't look kindly on that, and it was kind of a stain on our family reputation.
     Then, luckily, Stalin died, things loosened up, and life was quite bearable under the Communists in Czechoslovakia. In 1966 things were great, I was 15, I could listen to the Beatles and Rolling Stones on the short wave radio and we got the drift of the 60s from the West. I wore flowered pants and our hair was down to the collar! Then one morning in 1968 I woke up and looked out the second floor window and outside were Russian tanks. People went into shock and didn't know what to do next. Those who were abroad didn't come back. Those who could emigrated to the West. My best friend's family went to England. I was thinking, what am I doing here? So I got on the train and went to Yugoslavia, where by then my father had settled after some years in Canada. I lived and went to applied art school there in furniture design, interior design, though it was a Bauhaus kind of school and we did manual furniture building as well.
      I lost one semester while I learned Serbo-Croatian. There was a great sympathy for all the Czechs in '68, the kids were helpful, and I learned quickly. We didn't have much money, my father was always a low level clerk, since he never joined the Communist Party and you really had to join the Party if you wanted to get anywhere. It was a bare-bones life, but I had a great six years in Yugoslavia. At the time it was a very free country compared to the rest of Eastern Europe. Western music was everywhere, and clothes. The Adriatic coast is wonderful.
     After school I worked in animated film for awhile, but it was very hard to make a living. I was in Zagreb, the capital, and I was looking really to get out of Croatia, out of Yugoslavia. So I wrote to friends in Sweden, and distant family in Canada: could I emigrate, would they take me? But nobody really wanted me.
     Then at the New Year's celebration in 1973, I met this American girl. She was one of two students who had drifted into Zagreb and she was living abroad for a year in Italy. She said, why don't you come to Italy with me? So after nearly buying the house in Montona, we went to Naples and lived there for a few months. And then my Yugoslav passport was expiring, and I would have had to join the Yugoslav army. I really didn't want to do that. So I said to Ann, well, let's go to America.
     But the Americans in Italy would not give me a tourist visa, not even for a week. They knew I was going to stay. There was an Italian woman there though, who said, "You know, the only way you can get to America is, she has to marry you." We had just known each other for three months. "We don't want to get married yet." But there was no other way. I had to sign a piece of paper saying I would get married within three weeks of arriving, or be deported to Yugoslavia. Ann's parents had to sign too. You can imagine what they thought . . . Anyway, finally we arrived in America, on Icelandic airlines, and three weeks later we got married, and we are married still.

The Gablers' house in Montana

     We started out in Washington DC. Ann, who was my wife by then, was finishing her degree at George Washington University. I got a job working for a shop that supplied period furniture. The 1976 Bicentennial was coming up and they were turning the Old Smithsonian into a reproduction of the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. So I built a Victorian display-humungous cabinets out of mahogany and walnut. We were two foreigners-me newly arrived and my boss a Hungarian refugee-reproducing American history for the American government's official museum.
     Later we moved to Watertown, New York, and after that to Cooperstown, where I set up my first regular woodworking shop. I had no money, so I collected 1860 vintage machines, from an old mill in Cooperstown, and started the furniture-making business that's still my ongoing bread and butter.
     We moved to Red Hook from Cooperstown after we got tired of the snow. I got a part-time job at Bard at the former Blum Art Gallery, Ann got a job at Bard a year later, and eventually we transplanted here, bought this barn, and we're still here. Our kids, who were born in Cooperstown, grew up in the barn.
     I started writing books in '89. My back went out completely, I ruined it and I couldn't stand or sit or do anything, I was in total pain. So I thought, how am I going to make a living? I couldn't work in a shop, I couldn't build anything. At that time the Czech revolution happened, the Communists were overthrown. That brought back some memories and I was inspired. So I wrote two or three children's books, submitted them to various publishers, got turned down over and over, until finally Henry Holt published them. Some are based on Czech folktales.
     I've been a citizen since 1976. I couldn't wait to get citizenship. Even though I was drafted as soon as I got here. Luckily they never called me up.
     All the immigrants who came here from Eastern Europe, from any war-torn area, came here because it was far away from all the wars. They thought, Europe is really the hellhole, we always have wars here, I'm getting out of here. So seeing the World Trade Centers fall on September 11 was an especially horrible sight. I was watching and thinking: "Wait a minute, it's followed me."
     On the day it happened, we were sitting here in the country, and thinking, aren't we lucky to be upstate, to be away from the city. We are the buffer, we are the healing zone. In Europe, the cities always got hit in war time, and the city people went to the country. My grandparents had two Jewish girls for three years during the second world war. The father went to Theresienstadt and was gassed. My grandmother had worked for this family in Prague as household help and when the girls were going to be rounded up their mother said, please, please take these girls to the country. So they went to school with my mother, through the war, with the "cover" that they were cousins from some other part of the country. Some people knew, I'm sure, but they survived the war.
     And here it's a similar thing. I know city people who can afford to have a place up here, and some of them are really set up with huge generators, safes, you know, enough to withstand anything. Some people seemed to know about September 11th-about the demise of the good life-before it happened, especially Europeans, who are typically more plugged into the world than most Americans.
     Of course, there's not a more paranoid people than the Czechs. Right after the September bombing, 84 percent of Czechs thought there would be a Third World War. They've been through the Germans, the Stalinists, everything, and everyone still stocks their cellar full all the time.

     I feel very lucky to have our house in Croatia. I've always lived with one foot in one country, and one foot in the other. When I lived in Czechoslovakia I knew my father was in Canada or Yugoslavia, and I could go there. And I did. When the Russians came, I went. And when I got in trouble in Yugoslavia, I thought, I've got to go somewhere, so I was looking out. Now I'm in America, I'm thinking, who knows? To me it's not so strange to have a house there in Croatia, that we use only two weeks at a time, in spring and fall. It's like living two parallel lives.
     Besides, you feel really safe in this little town. It's totally fortified. Built in the thirteenth century. There's only one way in. The walls are very thick. . . . The town was built as an observation point guarding the approach from the mainland, so you can see the invaders coming from all directions.
     But I'm just kidding. . . My children and my friends are all in Red Hook. I think I'll be staying here.