The Book of Blam (First Edition)

Tisma, Aleksandar

ISBN 10: 0151002355 / ISBN 13: 9780151002351

Published by Harcourt Brace, New York, 1998

About this Item

New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1998. First American edition. First printing (full letter line including A). Hardcover. Fine in a fine dust jacket. A clean, tight copy. Jacket retains original publisher's price of $23.00 on the front flap. Protected in a removable archival mylar sleeve. Smoke-free. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Michael Henry Heim. Originally published in Yugoslavia in 1972, "The Book of Blam" is the first volume in Tisma's acclaimed "Novi Sad trilogy," preceding "The Use of Man" and "Kapo." The novel follows Miroslav Blam, a Jewish survivor of the 1942 Novi Sad raid, as he navigates post-war life in Yugoslavia, haunted by memories and survivor's guilt. Octavo, 226 pages. Aleksandar Tisma (1924 2003) was a Serbian novelist, short story writer, and translator whose work examines the moral and psychological aftermath of war, especially the Holocaust and its lingering effects in postwar Yugoslavia. Born in Horgos to a Serbian father and a Hungarian-Jewish mother, he was educated in Novi Sad and Budapest and later worked as a journalist before devoting himself to fiction. Tisma's novels are marked by lucid, disciplined prose and an unflinching exploration of guilt, complicity, and survival. His major works include The Book of Blam (1972), The Use of Man (1976), The Great War (1975), Kapo (1987), and The School of Godlessness (1993), many forming an interrelated cycle set around the occupied city of Novi Sad. Often compared to Primo Levi, Tisma was one of the first Eastern European writers to confront the Holocaust from within the moral ambiguities of his own community. His principal English translations, many by Michael Henry Heim, were first published in the United States by Harcourt Brace and later republished by New York Review Books as part of their Classics series. Tisma was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and remains a central figure in postwar Central European fiction.

Seller Inventory # Fiction-Tisma-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Book of Blam (First Edition)
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace, New York
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151002355
• ISBN 13: 9780151002351
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Serbian Literature

About this title

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 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.