Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia

West wrote on the brink of World War II, when she was "already convinced of the inevitability of the second Anglo-German war." The resulting book is colored by that impending conflict, and by West's search for universals amid the complex particulars of Balkan history. In the end, she saw the region's doom--and our own--in a double infatuation with sacrifice, the "black lamb and grey falcon" of her title. It's the story of Abraham and Isaac without the last-minute reprieve: those who hate are all too ready to martyr the innocent in order to procure their own advantage, and the innocent themselves are all too eager to be martyred. To West, in 1941, "the whole world is a vast Kossovo, an abominable blood-logged plain." Unfortunately, little has happened since then to prove her wrong. --Mary Park

I have to say that I was most fascinated by her discourses on Yugoslav history. Balkan history can be a challenge because most of us in the West really don't understand the people or places involved. A section on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand runs on forever and never becomes boring. In fact, I became so enraptured of this event that I started reading other works concerning the assassination. Even though there are some problems with West's interpretation of history, her accounts are so well written that it makes the reader want to go out and read more about these events.

Many have criticized Rebecca West for her bias and her tendency to simplify history. This is a valid concern. Her most serious transgression is her rabid hatred of anything German. It literally infects parts of the book with a somber, unpleasant tone. Right from the beginning of the book we see West criticizing a group of German tourists who are on a train with her as she travels into the Balkans. The bias finds greatest expression when West writes about her relationship with her Yugoslav guide Constantine and his wife Gerda. Constantine is a Jew and a Slav, but Gerda is a German whom West seems to believe is a Nazi. West's slanders on Gerda are endless, so much so that Constantine himself eventually turns against West. What is important to remember is that West is English and World War II was only a few years away. West actually wrote this book a few years after her trip, in 1941, so war was already raging between the two countries. If I were a German, I would be offended by West's comments.

Please read this book. I guarantee you'll enjoy it, at least to some extent. Even if you don't like history, the descriptions of the Yugoslav people and places are enchanting. I wanted to hop on a plane and go to Yugoslavia after reading this book, although it's important to remember that this account was written during World War II and before the Communist occupation that followed the war. I imagine things have changed quite a bit in this part of the world since the 1930's. What prose! What endless beauty! Images that flow like honey! Read this and dream!!


Been there, done that, then read BLGF   September 15, 2005
Mark L. La Rue (Portland, OR USA)
48 out of 48 found this review helpful


I read BLGF after returning to the US after living in the region for over two years. I found and read Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts," while the 1999 NATO action in Kosovo within clear sight of the situation. Kaplan made numerous positive referrences to BLGF so I found and read that soon after returning to the US. (I do know that Clinton did read BG (and that this led him to intervene in Bosnia-Herzegovina) and so may have read BLGF after leaving office). I suppose it was because of my very personal witness to the Balkans when I was living there, in particular the personal stories and lives that were generously offered by loving and almost pathetically nationalistic people. I found that RW, regardless of her "only six week" tour of Yugoslavia hit the button on the head in an overwhelming fashion. The personal emotional bias must be understood and the historical meat filtered through it. I didn't find that any history she related was false. What did startle me was how much similar her findings were to my own, fifty years later. When one understands that Tito effectively froze the populations of Yugoslavia in time through the use of forced migrations and a strong secret police force, how this could be becomes easy to grasp. But Rebecca West's journalistic intellect reaches its zenith when after witnessing the ritual slaughter of lambs, makes one of the best arguments against religion I have ever read. At once, she makes the best intellectual and emotional argument I can never have imagined as I read the brilliance of it. How a people come to act as both lambs and falcons, victims of history, myth and legend. The story of the Serbian people and for that matter the Balkans is something not to be missed by anyone interested in the story of civilization.

I lived in Slovenia in the late 1990s for over two years, serving the public in concert with a Slovenian orthopedic surgeon. I was married there in 1999 before returning to the US. As one deeply drawn to historic studies since childhood, I carried along with me, a small library of historic works on European history, including the very large History of the Habsburg Empire, published by the Berkeley University Press. I traveled to many regions, but more importanly, had (and still retain) friends who are Slovene, Serb, Bosnian Serb as well as acquaintances of some in higher government and military offices. At one point, I was even invited to an informal meeting of (Ljublijana) university professors and a Croatian UN Bosnia-Herzegovina Peacekeeper mission executive. I was present to witness the development of the problems in Kosovo and led to the Bombing Campaign in 1999. I saw the protests against it that took place in front of the US Embassy in Ljublijana as I went there for the settling of various matters so I could be married in Slovenia legally. My dear, loving Serbian receptionist was symbolically blocking the entrance with other protestors. And later that day we met at the office and worked with only the slightest bit of simmering resentment, so deep was our care for one another. Through her, I learned so much, and on a later return, attended a Serbian Orthodox service as her guest, just to get a deeper feeling of the history of these people. It was very moving. People torn between the most generous loving inclinations with a rare love of life and at the same time, mutilated by a long history of oppression. They see themselves alone with the world against them. This same friend was also in the crowd in Belgrade that finally brought down Milosevic. All attempts to understand and find the tortured human element in Serbs is an obligation for us. And doing so does not require that we denigrate or minimalize the Albanians or any other of the ethnic groups in the Balkans. BLGF so enriched by complement, all these experiences. When I return, I do so with a greater and greater depth of knowledge and tolerance for all, regardless of the minefields of strong nationalistic sentiments one must step through to do so.


What makes BLGF so great and a must read for anyone remotely interested in history or literature in general is that it is at once an excellent source of introductory history of a region that has been for the West, lost in a mist of vagarities and myth. At the same time related as a personal experience by RW in a almost lyric fashion. Go with it, even the angry diatribes about men. History becomes real when it is felt as a personal experience; That is why traveling and living abroad is so valuable for everyone, but especially for Americans, who need to understand the world that their government so often effects. If there is anyplace in the world that can teach us that nothing is simple and perhaps most important, impress the American reader with the eternal sense of history, expanding that compression of time that US history lives in, the Balkans are it. This is a book that ought to be used at least at the community college class level in both literature and history classes.

I have read many of the reviews and various opinions on this book, including the one critic living in the region who only allowed one star. (Locals hate outsiders having any opinion of them). My view is that all the praises and criticisms are valid and deserved, even the one that questions whether RW and her husband had any kind of sexual realtionship and if her husband might have actually been homosexual. Without doubt, RW was a strong willed individual and I gathered from her occassional diatribes concerning men that she had a issue with the entire gender and completely capable of a "marriage of convenience." (So what)? Realizing that her father had left her mother and then soon died, must be somewhat to blame. Allow her to be human, it made her what she was as a writer. So although I found her rants less than usefull, I allowed her to be human because this book is part journal, part essay and part diary. How many authors have laid their own feelings out so clearly. Given the period that it was published in, that took courage. I have to wonder with our emotionally suppressive PC enviroment today, how could anyone even conceive such writing today and not be shouted down by the "thought police" installed in their own mind? Welcome to journalism before PC! What a gift that is in itself - an artifact of true intellectual freedom.




A Dense But Rewarding Masterpiece   September 7, 2004
Stephen B. Selbst (Old Greenwich, CT USA)
47 out of 48 found this review helpful

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West weaves together history, ethnography and travelogue into an encyclopedic and unforgettable portrait of this troubled region. As I explain below, I think there are some marvelous things about this book, and some aspects that are less well realized. On balance, it is well worth the effort, but for somebody considering it, the cautions are worth noting. First the highlights:

West is at her best as a reporter. She has a truly brilliant eye for detail, for simply seeing how the people lived, what they wore, how they worshipped and what they did with their days. Her images, particularly of the remote communities and the many churches and religious shrines that she visited, are particularly well rendered. Although the book lacks photographs or drawings, West's very considerable talents for description are such that the reader really gets a feel for a large number of diverse places within the Balkans.

She also does an excellent job illuminating a great deal of the history of the region, both relatively modern history (meaning modern at the time the book was written -- 1941) and more ancient history. Modern history at the time West wrote meant dealing with the Balkan wars, the series of rebellions by which the vestiges of the Ottoman empire were overthrown in the 19th and early 20th centuries. West devotes particular attention to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, which precipitated World War I, an event that at the time of the writing of the book was still relatively recent in the world's memory, and the facts of which were still somewhat controversial. Ancient history meant dealing with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the decisive battle in which the Turks defeated the Orthodox Serbs led by Tsar Lazar and began to move further north and east in Europe.

West's writing on why liberal democracies are typically reluctant to arm themselves to confront militant totalitarian regimes, which forms a secondary theme, seems quite fresh. West writes as an unabashed liberal and closely analyzes both her own squeamishness about violence and why, in more general terms, liberals' reluctance to use force is ultimately suicidal. Her criticism of the pacifism of the governments of pre-World War II England and France in the face of the visible threat of a rearming Germany and a bellicose Italy is both fascinating and dead-on. One of the points she makes in her admiration of the Slavs is that for five centuries, beginning with the Battle of of Kosovo, and largely ignored by Western Europe, they took arms against the totalitarian regime of their day, militant Islam in the form of the Ottoman empire. Her point of view on this issue is quite clear: for taking on this task, she regards the Serbs to have been the unrecognized and unthanked saviors of Western Christianity.

As brilliant as this book is, however, it will not be to every reader's taste, even those who want to explore the history of the Balkans in depth. West makes little effort to disguise her prejudices: she sees the Slavs as an heroic if primitive race who had been ill-used by the then Great Powers of Europe, Great Britian, France, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And within what was then the newly-formed state of Yugoslavia (which came into being after World War I), she is emphatic in her sympathies for the Serbs, whom she sees as the the descendants of what was good and right in the Byzantine empire. West is equally obvious in her lack of sympathy for the Croats and the Bosnians. But seen through the lens of the more recent wars of Serbian aggression, it is harder to see the Serbs in such an unqualifiedly heroic light.

Other parts of the books also wear less well, including her prolixity (the paperback edition is a whopping 1150 pages of small print). West's long tirades on the evils of the Austro-Hungarian empire seem a curiosity at this point; as evil as it may have been, it has long been relegated to the dustbin of history. Her antipathy to the Germans also seems an historical set piece, although rather more understandable in its context. And West's economic analyses of modern capitalism appear naive and superficial. Finally, the relatively major roles played in her narrative by she and her husband, their Serbian guide Constantine, and his German wife Gerda, are, at best, distracting. But these reservations should be seen for what they are: minor criticisms of an awe-inspiring work.











Today's enemy, tomorrow's friend...   September 16, 1999
30 out of 31 found this review helpful

...I initially was not so moved to write this review of Ms. West's remarkable work. What has inspired in me the need, though, was the reading of her being persistently condemned for her sympathy for the poor beleagured Serbians. Indeed...moreso than anything else, her work has forced me to ponder the question of 'What shall we tomorrow say of the 'poor, exploited, tormented Kosovars'?' It is most ironic that Ms. West's six-week journey through Yugoslavia should have so accurately succeeded in capturing the spirit of the land. Read it not for a travel guide, but as a snapshot of the past...nowhere else do we have access to many of the prodigious quantity of sources which she employed in her authoring...and whereelse may we hope to find a British tourist's view of the Balkans upon the eve of war? Nowhere. It is unique...and incomparable...and her revelations are sometimes stunning, her prose frequently beauteous...thus, five stars.


Pure pleasure   December 6, 1999
Alekos (Cancun, Quintana Roo Mexico)
45 out of 49 found this review helpful

One has to stand in awe before this enormous (ll40 pages) masterpiece of literary travel writing, even with its prejudice and poetry and occasional unkindness. Ms West and her husband and Constantine (he of the stubby fingers and wicked keyboard technique who tells unbelievable stories and opines on every imaginable topic) travel through Yugoslavia at the time Hitler is gaining power in Germany and the Habsburg Empire is just a dirty memory. Constantine is a Serb utterly devoted to the continued existence of the Yugoslav state but he's married to a dreadful hausfrau who despises anything that is not German and especially Slavs. She thus makes her own life miserable and does a number on the lives of everyone else. The book offers rich descriptions of all the states that make up (or made up)Yugoslavia, including religious and social customs, the mental and emotional tendencies of the people (sometimes depending on which outside influences -- Turkish, Austrian -- have impacted them most decisively). Montenegran men come in for high praise because because of their physical beauty and the presumed ease with which they could inseminate any woman. The book is a masterwork of richly textured Enlgish prose done in long, elegant, sometimes convoluted sentence that are a delight to read and may remind some readers of Proust. St. Paul and St. Augustine come in for the mistreatment they so richly deserve (the author traces several questionable religious practices she encounters to ideas found in their writings). This is a work for reasonably well educated adults, so anyone approaching it in search of accurate factual history is making a mistake. But nor will it mislead anyone on matters of historical fact.