Hello my friend! This is a new endeavor for me, and not without its vulnerability. Know that I mean it when I say: I really appreciate your attention.

In this newsletter, I am going to write about migration, longing, the value of art, and the effort to maintain authentic creativity under capitalism — themes I explore in my WIP documentary film, ‘Vaguely European’.

‘Vaguely European’ got its title after I wrote a batch of voiceover imagining what commercial casting directors saw when I stepped up to audition: a tall brunette, white but tan, with large hands and a big nose. A ‘vaguely European’ look, accentuated — or perhaps defined by — a strange, hard-to-pronounce last name.

Kopajtic. Ko…what?

I didn’t always get along with my surname. It was unique, which I liked, but it made people nervous. As a competitive swimmer, I held my breath on every ascent to the awards podium, knowing that the announcer would mispronounce it even after they consulted me. I have heard ‘ko-padge-tick’, ‘kuh-pie-chick’, and the mysterious ‘ko-pae-ish’. Even my father recalls ‘ka-poop-o-vitch’ during his childhood in the 1950s, when McCarthyism rendered anything related to commie Eastern Europe fair game for getting picked on.

In college, I was thrilled when the nickname Katie K took off, and I considered legally changing my name — erasing all those jumbled consonants the way I wanted to scoop the ridge out of my nose. Then, sophomore year, I went to Croatia for two weeks. I stayed with family who looked like me and shared my name, and I had a classic American-In-The-Homeland-Experience that was equal parts significant and cringe. What mattered most is that I returned to the States no longer wishing for a surgeon to take a mallet to my nose.

A few years later in 2015, high off my spiritual connection with a place I never lived in, I decided to make a movie about my Croatianness. I knew jack shit about making docs, only that I wanted to interview my relatives and capture a Balkan vibe that justified my place in the world, as well as open the door to Hollywood, please-and-thank-you. My first subject was my cousin Ankica. We sat a stone’s throw away from where my grandfather grew up, in her living room in the village of Kukuljanovo. Under the benevolent, sapphire gaze of a portrait of white Jesus, who smiled at me with icing pink lips, I sipped herbal liquor while she explained what our last name meant to her.

Isolated, kopaj is the imperative form of the verb to dig, and ptica means little bird. To Ankica, being a Kopajtic meant being a humble, tiny bird — not a hawk, but a sparrow — one who digs through the dirt to find the worms of life’s answers.

It is the curse of the storyteller to dump existential meaning on everything that happens to them. Still, I can’t help but take Ankica’s personal interpretation of Kopajtic as some kind of destiny — both in the artist’s placement on the lower rung of the capitalist food chain, and the perpetual, daily work of discovery.

Thanks for reading Vaguely European by Katie Kopajtic! Subscribe to get the newsletter in your inbox each month.

I know that only some of you can pronounce my last name, and I mean it when I say to those who cannot: it is truly okay. Regardless, I want to offer an abbreviated lesson, because you are courteous and curious people and it might help you if you ever travel to the Balkans.

So: Kopajtic.

Let us begin with that j in the middle, the one that trips everyone up. In the Serbo-Croatian language, which uses Gaj’s Latin Alphabet or Gajica, J’s are pronounced like Y’s. For example, the name Yelena would be spelled Jelena.

kopaj- rhymes with go bye. 

Now, the c at the end. In Gajica you have three options for the letter c: c, č, and ć.

• c: this is a ts sound. Like the zz’s in pizza. Ankica is pronounced ahn-keet-sa. 

• č: a nice and straightforward ch sound, like chunk. In Croatian, the word for ‘tea’ is čaj – spell it out with what you learned and you will hear why.

• ć: a soft tsh, landing somewhere between the c and the č. This is the trickiest one, and it is technically how our last name should end: Kopajtić.

We don’t have ć in our English alphabet, so we spell our name with the naked c but pronounce it, incorrectly, like č.

Make of that what you will.

ko [koh]

paj [pie]

tic [titch]

Kopajtic.