A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia\'s great literary voices.
David Rieff is the author of ten books, including The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami
Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son\'s Memoir ; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies ..
Richard Williams \'s translations from the Serbo-Croatian include the Sinisa Kovačevic play Novo je doba ( Times Have Changed ).
Tisma moved to France after the outbreak of war and collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but in 1995 he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his last years.
In the 1970s and \'80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad
The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after; and Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp.
Tisma published his first story, Ibika\'s House, in 1951; it was followed by the novels Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl and a collection of stories, Violence .
After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tisma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and went into journalism and in 1949 joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980.
In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year--Tisma\'s last in high school--the regime carried out a series of murderous pogroms, killing some 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Tismas were spared.
The family lived comfortably, and Tisma received a good education.
His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was middle-class and Jewish.
About author(s): Aleksandar Tisma (1924-2003) was born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War.
Tisma\'s terrible gift is to see with an artist\'s dispassionate clarity how fear, violence, guilt, and desire--whether for life, love, or simple understanding--are inextricably knotted together in the human breast.
Kapo , like Tisma\'s other great novels, is not simply a document or an act of witness.
Not long after he sees her, aged and ungainly, Lamian is flooded with guilt and terror.
Then one day in the paper he comes on the name of Helena Lifka, a woman--like him a Yugoslav and a Jew--he raped in the camp.
Everything is normal enough.
Lamian has settled down in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, where he has a respectable job as a superintendent in the railyard.
Auschwitz is in the past.
But the war is over now.
Kapo is about Lamian, who made it through Auschwitz by serving his German masters, knowing that at any moment and for any reason his "special status" might be revoked.
By contrast, the teenage friends in The Use of Man are condemned to live on and on while enduring every affliction.
Blam simply lucked out--and can hardly face himself in the mirror.
The Book of Blam , The Use of Man , Kapo In these three unsparing novels the Yugoslav author Aleksandar Tisma anatomized the plight of those who survived the Second World War and the death camps, only to live on in a death-haunted world.
A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia\'s great literary voices
