LJILJANA IVEZIC

Ljiljana Ivezic  
A Serbian engineer who transformed her life after moving with her husband from ex-Yugoslavia to the United States in 1990, passed away Wednesday, December 11, 2019, in Montgomery County after a long battle with cancer. She was 57. Ms. Ivezic was a beloved wife, mother, daughter, sister, daughter-in-law and friend who made a second professional career at the Library of Congress, where she was a librarian and catalogue-and-acquisition specialist. Her mastery of Balkan languages served her in amassing the library's collection from the now independent former Yugoslav republics. Born in Vrnjacka Banja, she studied civil engineering at the University of Belgrade and following graduation in 1987 was employed by the Jaroslav Cerni Institut in Belgrade. But she put that career behind her when her engineer husband, Nenad Ivezic, enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for graduate studies. In Pittsburgh, she gave birth to her daughters, Vera and Jovana. The young family moved to Bethesda in 1999. In 2007, at a ceremony in Annapolis, Ms. Ivezic became a naturalized American citizen.  "I'm living here," she told the Baltimore Sun. "This is my home. We feel really free. We never felt like strangers." Nor did strangers feel unwelcome by Ms. Ivezic, whose home was often a gathering place for a wide circle of friends and friends of friends. Their hostess was beloved for her warmth, empathy, mordant sense of humor and her bountiful Serbian menu. She was a fixture in Washington's community of ex-Yugo ex-pats, relationships formalized with the founding of the Orfelin Circle, a non-profit society offering the community samples of contemporary Serbian arts and culture, from music to literature to documentary film. She was a co-founder and board member there. In addition to her husband and daughters she is survived by her parents, Ilija and Mara Martinovic of Belgrade; her sister, Nada Radovic, brother-in-law Dragan Radovic, and niece Sara of Melbourne, Australia and her parents-in-law, Dragan and Olga Ivezic of Belgrade  A private service will be held for friends and family. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Serbian American Medical Association (SAMA) http://www.sama.rs/donate.