On Christmas Eve, 1998, Minnesota Public Radio came to our apartment in Brooklyn Center to do a story about my father.

We had been in Minnesota seven months. A church group had helped settle us there. My parents worked at the Rainbow Bakery, about thirty hours a week each — my father at the Brooklyn Park store, my mother at the one in Brooklyn Center. I translated for them. I was twenty-one.

The reporter, Dan Olson, described my father straining like a racehorse to get to his instrument. That was accurate. My father had been a professional musician his whole life — twenty-eight years with the Tambura Orchestra of RTV Sarajevo, and Sar e Roma before and around that. In Minnesota he worked in a bakery, and people who knew, knew. Word travels through the Bosnian community in America fast. Within weeks of our arrival, people were saying the master of the tambura was in America. A man from Pittsburgh got on a plane just to visit him. Another man in Chicago had all his records and wanted him to move there and play.

Nobody in that apartment had forgotten how we got out of Sarajevo.

The airport was a crowd of people trying to reach the last commercial flight. Soldiers at the roadblock had probably recognized my father from television and let us through. Inside, the crowd blocked the way to the plane, so my father put us on the baggage conveyor belt — it wasn’t moving — and we crawled on it, around the crowd, to the jet. On the plane there were families who had been separated at the door. When we landed in Belgrade, my violin and my father’s hundred-year-old tambura were lost.

A day later we went back to the airport in Belgrade. The instruments were there, lined up in the baggage area. My father pointed up and said: “Samo Bog.” Only God.

I don’t have anything to add to that.

In Minnesota I started teaching violin through Schmidt Music, a few students, then more. And my father and I started playing together in churches around the Twin Cities — him on tambura, me on violin. We had played together at home my whole life, but this was different. This was work, in a new country, in front of people who didn’t know his name. Frank Berthold, the man who translated for the broadcast and became our friend, remembered my father’s face warming up before the first of those church concerts. He said the smile came back.

That Christmas, I was scheduled to play at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.

My mother told the reporter it had been a little difficult in the beginning. We were scared, she said. We didn’t know anybody. Now it was much better. We had friends. Real friends, she said. It’s important for us.

She was right about all of it, including the order. First you are scared. Then you work. Then, somewhere along the way, there is music in churches, and friends, and a reporter in your small apartment on Christmas Eve, asking your father to play.