The Book of Blam - Hardcover

Tisma, Aleksandar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151002355 ISBN 13: 9780151002351

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998

Synopsis

Miroslav Blam walks through the empty streets of Novi Sad, remembering. The war has ended, but for Blam the town is haunted with its presence, and memories of its dead: Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; Arthur Spitzer, a grocer who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a communist lawyer. They stand before him as ever, but they are only the ghosts in Blam's mind. Accompanying the others are Blam's family and his best friend, all of whom perished in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942. Blam lives. He seeks no revenge, no retribution. His life is a spectator's-made all the more agonizing by the clarity with which he sees the events around him. The silhouettes of the dead pass before him, and he incorporates what would have been their daily lives into his own. And in telling the story of one man's life after the war, Ti

About this title

About the Author

ALEKSANDAR TISMA was born in 1924 in Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, to a Serbian father and a Hungarian mother. He experienced the Holocaust in his native town of Novi Sad. After the war he worked as a journalist in Novi Sad and Belgrade, and later became an editor, writer, and translator. He has written sixteen works of fiction, of which the last five--what he calls a pentateuch of novels and stories--have been devoted to the subject of the Holocaust.

Reviews

One morning in 1942, in the Serbian town of Novi Sad, Vilim Blam and his wife, Blanka, are visited by a detachment of the Hungarian Arrow Cross; although their papers are in order, the soldiers walk the old Jewish couple down the street and machine gun them alongside 1400 others. The events of that raid, recounted with a cool detachment that paradoxically heightens the horror, are the historical facts around which Tisma has produced a complicated narrative of infinite regret. Their son Miroslav, the novel's protagonist, survives because he is protected by the wonderfully ambiguous Propadic, his mother's erstwhile lover and the man who takes over Vilim's post as a reporter at the Novi Sad paper after Vilim is fired for being a Jew. Tisma has made Novi Sad a microcosm for the most painful developments of 20th-century history. It is a city of tiers, one tier the actual city in which Miroslav survives, the other filled by the possible lives of those who perished. Yet life on the edge of the abyss is surprisingly normal. Except for the fact of the massacre, this could be Svevo's Trieste, or a provincial town in a Chekhov story. Miroslav is that familiar creation of the great middle European writers, the city intellectual whose whole bourgeois existence is devoted to making up his mind. The intersection of this high intellectual refinement with the most brutal incidents in history gives the novel, which has been published to acclaim in France and Germany, its great, eccentric pathos. (Nov.) FYI: The Book of Blam is the third book to appear in English from Tisma's "pentateuch" of Novi Sad novels, including Kapo and The Use of Man.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Literature has tried to explain human suffering since the story of Job. In this novel, Tisma quite effectively captures the unanswerable questions of why this and why me as he recreates what happened to his native Yugoslavian city when the Holocaust came to town in 1942. Seen through the mind of Miroslav Blam as he reflects on events about 10 years later, Novi Sad is a despairing place, a conclusion one reaches partly because of Blam's passive nature and partly from his daydreams--never acted upon--about tracking down the betrayer of his family, wiped out with a thousand other Jews and Serbs. "And I alone have escaped to tell thee," said Job's messenger, but Blam hesitates to tell anyone about his paralyzed state of mind, least of all his uncaring wife. Tisma uses language wonderfully: he is tactile in his description of Novi Sad, grows dramatic in telling its tragedy, and turns evocative to convey the psychological fog Blam exists in. A skillful work that lodges in memory. Gilbert Taylor

Miroslav Blam is a man living a lie, an inert observer equally terrified of life and death. Walking through Novi Sad, his native home in Yugoslavia, he vividly recalls the people who once shared the city with him?family, friends, acquaintances?now all dead, victims of the war and the bloody Hungarian purge of 1942. Blam alone is left to mourn their suffering, reflecting on his shameful reluctance to share their fate and gathering the strength for one final act of truth. Award-winning Serbo-Croatian writer Ti sma (Kapo, LJ 8/93) experienced the Holocaust himself in Novi Sad. Addressing the subject of human suffering in simple, vivid prose, he offers a powerful psychological portrait of a man traumatized by humanity's inhumanity and by his own timid nature. This is a wonderful addition to world literature collections in public and academic libraries.?Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151002355
• ISBN 13: 9780151002351
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240