User:Pavlina Pro/Stojan Hristov

Stojan Christowe (also known as Stojan Hristov) was an American author, journalist and noted Vermont political figure. Born in then Ottoman Macedonia, he is best remembered as the author of six books written about the Balkans and as a Vermont legislator committed to promoting social justice and  literacy. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje in the Republic of Macedonia and was elected an honorary member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences (MANU).

Early Life
Stoyan Christowe (Naumof) was born in the village of Konomladi,(after 1929 renamed Makrochori (Greek: Μακροχώρι, in Aegean Macedonia, [present day Greece) on September 1, 1898 to Mitra and Christo Naumof as the first of three children (including a brother Vasil and a sister Mara).

Born at a time when the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating, Stoyan, like many children, dreamed of being a komitadji, a freedom fighter, who would, unlike the heroes of bygone days, succeed in overthrowing what had become the oppressive, 500-year long Ottoman rule and bring freedom and liberty to Macedonia. }}

In 1911, aged 13, Stoyan Naumof  (he would later change his  name to Hristov,  and  in 1924  anglicize it to "Christowe") boarded the "Oceanic" in Naples, Italy -- destination America. Ellis Island records indicate that he passed himself of as 16 year old Italian named Giovanni Chorbadji beleiving that he would be admitted to the US easier if he were not a "Balkan peasant."

Upon arrival at Ellis Island, he immediately headed to St. Louis. There he bunked in squalid conditions with other men from Macedonia, taking on a succession of menial jobs, first in a shoe factory, then as a soda jerk and later in St.Louis Union Station. The pay was low, the days were long and the work was both dangerous and boring to this young man, whose every waking moment seemed to be dedicated to assimilating the country he had already adopted in his mind. As he gradually learned English, he absorbed all that he could around him about this strange new world. To his uncle, and nearly all who lived in their transplanted Balkan world, the sole objective was to live as cheaply as possible for a few years, work endlessly, save money, then to return to Macedonia to "live like a pasha."

"Their beings were not inoculated with the leaven of America that worked so powerfully with earlier immigrants from other lands. They were familiar with the heat of the steel mills and iron foundries and roundhouses but never came in contact with the heat of the melting pot. America had not put her finger on their minds or hearts as it had done to millions before them and as it would to their children and grandchildren."

Life in the US
But Stoyan did not share their goals or values and thus distanced himself from his fellow villagers. America had stolen his mind and heart and it was in this country that he planned to stay, striving to become more and more Americanized each day.

''With my growing knowledge of the language America itself grew before my vision, etched itself out more clearly, and captivated my soul more enduringly. There began to seep through my being, like a strong potion, a vitalizing American serum. My young body became possessed of a passionate yearning to be absorbed by America. I longed, like a youth in love, to lay my head on the breast of America.''

After 3 years in St. Louis Stoyan left on a journey that would take him across America. First, traveling west, he worked for the Union Pacific Railway in Montana and Wyoming. In 1918 he enrolled at Valparaiso University to get his high school diploma and there he began his writing career as a contributor to the Torch, the college newspaper.



In 1922 he moved to a Chicago suburb in search of a real job and eventually starred freelancing as a book reviewer for the Chicago Daily News. In 1929 he was dispatched to the Balkans as a correspondent. Stoyan eventually became a well recognized expert on that region and his book, Heroes and Assassins, became required reading for those seeking to understand the post Wold War Balkans, and the factional politics of Macedonia, the principal player in it being the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.

''I belong spiritually as well as chronologically to the generations of immigrants who had to Americanize as well as acculturate, integrate, assimilate, coalesce, all at the same time. With me, the process had begun even before I had set foot on American soil. Robert Frost expressed it when he said at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration that ‘We were the land, before the land was ours.''

In the 1930's Stoyan moved to New York City and spent ten years penning articles and writing book reviews for major magazines of the day, like the Dial, the Story Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and myriad of others, establishing himself as a respected author and critic. Stoyan's fourth book, "This is My Country", was in fact found on president Franklin D. Roosevelt bedside table when he passed away, a present from his wife Eleanor.

In his thirties Stoyan began a quest to untangle his roots. He had struggled with the issue of his identity since his teenage years. In 1929, in an article in The Outlook and Independent he addressed the issue candidly: "What has been there result of this long gestation in the womb of America? Despite the readiness and zeal with which I tossed myself in the melting pot I still am not wholly an American and never will be. It is not my fault. I have done all I could. America will not accept me. America wanted more, it wanted complete transformation inward and outward. That is impossible in one generation. Then what is my fate? What am I? Am I still what I was before I came to America, or am I a half American and half something else? To me, precisely, there lies our tragedy. I am neither one nor the other, I am an orphan.  Spiritually, physically, linguistically I have not been wholly domesticated."

Personal Life
In 1939, Stoyan married Margaret Wooters, a feisty young writer from Philadelphia. They had met seven years earlier while he was working on his first book, Heroes and Assassins, as writer in residence at the Yaddo Writing Retreat.

He and Margaret moved to Vermont in 1939. In 1941, shortly after the US entered World War II, Stoyan was called to duty and worked as a military analyst covering the Balkans in the War Department for two years, 1941-1943. In December of 1943 he returned to Vermont and refocused on his true calling, writing.

He spent the next ten years writing articles, editorial  pieces and book reviews for major American newspapers and magazines. However, the matters of his identity, his roots, and his place in American society continued to haunt him.

In the early 50s he traveled through Austria, Germany and Yugoslavia speaking at college campuses and lecturing about the American ideals. In 1952, Stoyan visited Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia. The culture he walked away from as a child he began to embrace as a man. We also glimpse at the democratic values that Stoyan had come to cherish and the strength of his personality when, in 1953, he met Marshal Josip Broz Tito in Belgrade. In relentless defense of the freedom of expression, Stoyan did not hesitate to criticize The Marshal for his treatment of political dissidents.

Work and Political Career


After graduating from Valparaiso University, Stojan became a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.

A 'New Yorker' from 1930 to 1939 he worked as a freelance writer and from 1941 to 1943 as a Military Analyst at the The War Department. In Vermont, from January 1944 to 1959 he was a writer, book reviewer, lecturer and a newspaper Correspondent for The Foreign Press Association in 1951-52.

In 1960, as Stoyan continued his quest to understand the meaning of 'Americanness', and, relentless in his effort to become an exemplary American, he run for a seat in the Vermont Legislature, won and served as a state representative from 1961-1962.

In 1963 he run for a senate seat, and won the Republican nomination for his county by a land slide. Reelected in 1968, he retired in 1972   and was succeeded by republican Robert Gannet.

His colleague, senator William Doyle, called him "an original" and his fight for freedom, equality and education for all is best remembered in a speech he made on the occasion of a proposed amendment to change the Constitution of Vermont.

"Mr. President! The idea that our State’s Constitution needs redefining of some of its most sacred definitions is preposterous. What’s wrong with the way it’s now? Do you want the Constitution to discriminate? Our constitution speaks of natural and naturalized citizens - a distinction without discrimination. These terms give us all the right to feel equally American! Redefining it to read ‘citizen’ and ‘natural citizen’ implies that to be a citizen is less than if you are a natural citizen. Mr. Chairman, it is just as important that America is born in the man, and maybe even more so, than the man is born in America"

- Vermont Senate, 1971



Retiring from the Senate in 1972, Stoyan immediately went back to his writing. His last autobiographical novel, The Eagle and the Stork, was published in 1976 and is by far his most widely read book.

Stoyan Christowe enjoyed relative notoriety as a writer during the 1930 and 1940s. As an author he had the power to move and persuade, and his many works, especially those written during his years as a correspondent in the Balkans, add to our understanding of Southeastern European history between the two World Wars. . At home, during his years as a politician he served as a beacon shining light on what was good and right in America. But, his message to those not born in the US was to have faith in oneself, accept this country and its language and grow with it, and embrace one's own inner changes. And, he admonished, embrace your roots as well. "America has room for people who are Americans with origins elsewhere, it is the genius of the country."

Christowe's Legacy

 * In 2006, the Macedonian Arts Council in a joint venture with the city government of Dover, Vermont erected a land marker, to honor its most famous resident.


 * In 2010,The Stoyan Christowe Scholarship Fund was established by the Macedonian Arts Council and is available only to students of literature and political science, at universities in Macedonia.

Controversy
An immigrant who became a writer and statesman, Stoyan Christowe, as he aged, became relentless in seeking to understand his origins and his place in the world. A matter that dogged him was the question of his native identity -- was he Bulgarian or Macedonian? At the time of his birth, the Christian Slavs of Ottoman Macedonia often identified themselves as "Bulgarian" owing to the fact that the center of their communities was the Orthodox Bulgarian Exarchate Church, since the Ottomans had abolished the Macedonian Orthodox Church in 1768. Prior to its founding in 1870, the Greek Orthodox Church had a monopoly on the souls of Macedonia's Christians. After the founding of the Exarchate, these churches (along with the Serbian Orthodox Church) competed for the allegiance of the Christian population of Macedonia. It was, however, the Bulgarian Church that had the greatest impact. Once established, it influenced the daily lives of the local population and served as an extension of the Bulgarian government's efforts to influence the largely illiterate peasantry to think they were Bulgarian.

Not surprisingly then, in his early years in America, Stoyan saw no difference in using the terms "Macedonian" and "Bulgarian from Macedonia" interchangeably in reference to his native identity.

It would take him almost 50 years to understand the complexity of religious propagandas of foreign churches that operated in Macedonia competing for the spiritual and linguistic fidelity of his people. By the age 57, having come to terms with his native identity, he fervently rebutted the commonly promoted Bulgarian argument that the Macedonian language is only a dialect form of the Bulgarian language.

The debate of the Macedonian identity, language and cultural history is still alive today, in particular from the Bulgarian perspective; as part of an effort to silence the Macedonia minority in Bulgaria.

"Italic textMacedonians in Bulgaria in the 1920s were the backbone of the economic, professional, social, political and cultural life of the capital. The foremost person in every field of activity is likely to be a Macedonian, or at least part Macedonian."

Several interpretations are promoted on the issue of "Macedono-Bulgarianism and the references contained in this section named Controversy reflect the complexity of the issue and the myriad of different interpretations such as the text put forward, bellow.

Stojan Hristov or Stoyan Christowe[Note 1] was an American writer, publicist and journalist of Bulgarian origin, who after the Second World War adopted Macedonian identity.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Macedonian identity.

Books

 * Heroes and Assassins, Robert M. McBride, (1935) (Хероu и убujцu, Мuсла 1985)
 * Mara, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., (1937) (Мара, Мuсла -1985)
 * This is my country, Carrick & Evans, Inc., (1938)(Ова е моjaта татковuна, Мuсла 1985) - one of the favorite books of Franklin Roosevelt.
 * The Lion Of Yanina, Modern Age Books, (1941) (Лavoт oд Janina, 1985)
 * My American Pilgrimagee, Little, Brown and Company, 1947 (Ṃоjoт Амерuканскu Аu̯uлак, Мuсла 1985)
 * Тhe Eagle and the Storк, Harper’s Magazine Press, (1976) (Орелот u штркот, Мuсла 1985)
 * The Immigrant’s Bride („Невестата на доселеникот“), изд. куќа „Дијалог“, Скопје (2010) (in Macedonian)


 * Partial bibliography of Stoyan Christowe's writings