The Book of Blam Read online

  ALEKSANDAR TIŠMA (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. His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tišma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year—Tišma’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 Tišmas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tišma studied philosophy at the University of Belgrade and went into journalism. In 1949 he joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Tišma 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. In the 1970s and ’80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1972), 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. Tišma 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.

  MICHAEL HENRY HEIM (1943–2012) was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. Fluent in eight languages, Heim was the recipient of many awards and translated such writers as Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, Günter Grass, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, and Dubravka Ugrešić. He is the subject of The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation, edited by Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and Russell Scott Valentino.

  CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Among Simic’s recent works are New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012, The Lunatic, and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a book of essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

  THE BOOK OF BLAM

  ALEKSANDAR TIŠMA

  Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by

  MICHAEL HENRY HEIM

  Introduction by

  CHARLES SIMIC

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Aleksandar Tišma

  Translation copyright © 1998 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Charles Simic

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Serbo-Croatian as Knjiga o Blamu by Nolit, Belgrade, 1972.

  Reprinted here by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Cover art: Enrique Metinides, Suicide Rescue, 1971, courtesy of the artist.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tišma, Aleksandar, 1924–2003.

  [Knjiga o Blamu. English]

  The book of Blam / by Aleksandar Tišma; introduction by Charles Simic; translated by Michael Henry Heim.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-921-5 (epub) — ISBN 978-1-59017-920-8 (alk. paper)

  1. Jews—Serbia—Novi Sad—Fiction. 2. Novi Sad (Serbia)—Fiction. 3.

  Psychological fiction. I. Heim, Michael Henry, translator. II. Title.

  PG1419.3.I8

  891.8'235—dc23

  2015032108

  ISBN 978-1-59017-921-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Introduction

  The Book of Blam is the first of three novels about the Holocaust in Yugoslavia written by the Serbian writer Aleksandar Tišma, the other two being The Use of Man and Kapo. It was published in 1972 in Belgrade and was well received, as were the two books that followed. Tišma’s work was translated into seventeen languages and he became internationally known. Although a child of a Serbian father and Jewish mother, who lost relatives on his mother’s side in the Holocaust, Tišma came to the subject of the camps late: He attributed this new interest of his to a trip he took to Poland in the 1960s and a visit he made to Auschwitz that reminded him of the horrors he registered as a boy but had learned not to think about in order to keep his sanity. The trip to Poland made him realize that he had a history he could not run away from. As Tišma’s compatriot Danilo Kiš noted, “One doesn’t become a writer accidentally, one’s biography is the first and the greatest cause.” Tišma would have agreed. In one of his journals he describes himself as a bug who had survived the bug spray and whose role now is to convey to the descendants of the killers the atrocities their fathers and grandfathers perpetrated on their millions of victims.

  Tišma was born in 1928 in Horgoš, a town on the border of Serbia and Hungary, where thousands of Syrian war refugees lately have massed while waiting to be allowed passage to Western Europe. His father came from Lika, an impoverished region in western Croatia inhabited by many Serbs. Though his parents, expecting him to become a priest, sent him to school in Serbia, on graduation he went to work for a wholesaler and eventually started a business importing fruit from the south. Tišma’s mother was Jewish Hungarian. She grew up in a small village in Hungary where her father ran a small, barely thriving store. She met her future husband at her aunt’s rooming house in Horgoš where he used to stay on his business trips. The newlyweds settled in Novi Sad, the largest and most multiethnic city in the region, where Tišma lived for the rest of his life and wrote his many books, including The Book of Blam.

  In April 1941, when Tišma was thirteen years old, Yugoslavia was invaded and occupied by German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops. Vojvodina, the area north of Belgrade, where Novi Sad is situated, was divided into three zones: one occupied by Hungary, one by the newly founded Croatian fascist state, and the rest under German control. Serbs, who had settled in the region after World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved and Yugoslavia came into existence, were to be deported; Jews, if they did not fall into the hands of the Nazis to be taken to Serbia and gassed in mobile gas vans, were persecuted or perished in a series of raids, the most notorious of which took place in Novi Sad. There, over a period of three days, starting on January 20, 1942, some 1,400 Jews and Serbs, including women and small children, were led at gunpoint onto the frozen Danube, shot in the back, and shoved into holes in the ice. Tišma and most of his family were spared thanks to a Hungarian neighbor who misled the soldiers knocking on doors a
nd searching for people on their list, but his beloved grandmother Theresa Miller was rounded up with several hundred other Jews and Serbs and was on her way to the banks of the Danube to be killed when a cable arrived from military authorities in Budapest ordering an end to the mass slaughter.

  Of course, the persecution and killings continued. In 1942 all Jews and Serbs between the ages of twenty-one and forty-eight were conscripted into forced labor battalions. Some 4,000 Jews from Bačka and Baranja were sent to Ukraine, near the front, where they succumbed to disease and starvation or were murdered; others were put to work in copper mines and on the railroads in Serbia and Hungary. In March 1944 when Hungary realized that it had taken the losing side in the war and began to negotiate with the Allies, Germany seized control of the country and the occupied territories. Any remaining Jews—there had been approximately 20,000 in Vojvodina before the war; now there were 4,000—were collected and sent into camps. Some Jews had already left the region since—until that March—territories held by Hungary were safer than neighboring Serbia and Croatia. Tišma and his mother were among them. They had traveled to Budapest in 1942 and he had enrolled at the university to study economics (changing after a semester to French). He even got a job working in an office. As he later explained to an interviewer, students enjoyed a privileged status in Hungary during the war. In 1944, Tišma and his classmates were conscripted into labor brigades to dig trenches against the advancing Russian tanks, but except for sleeping in tents they were not otherwise mistreated. His mother and grandmother also survived, though living in mortal fear as they watched friends and relatives being taken away to the camps.

  “All my novels are autobiographical,” Tišma said, explaining that he is not recounting his life but using elements of his experience in them. His central characters without exception share his own sense of alienation. Even as a child, he said that he was aware of being different and kept asking himself whether that was really true. He felt he didn’t belong, only pretended to, imitating people’s voices, accents, phrases, deeds, while remaining an outsider. Asked in a census which nationality he belonged to, Tišma checked off undecided. He had always wanted to leave, but he had never had the courage to, even when the opportunities arose. “I am a man who stayed in the hole because he couldn’t part company with its warmth,” he confessed in his journal.

  Miroslav Blam, the protagonist of this novel, is that sort of man, a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor, a Jew who married a Christian and was therefore exempted from annihilation while the rest of his family perished in the 1942 raid. He is a loner obsessed with the past, married to a woman who cheats on him. He has a grown daughter fathered by the Serbian collaborator who was his wife’s lover and who gave him a job and saved his life after his parents and sister were killed. He walks the city full of ghosts, a man whose faith in the world has proved to be futile, since those like his neighbors who lived by it expecting to thrive, as we all do wherever we live, ended up being murdered and forgotten. “Manhunt” is the name Blam gives to the onslaught of memories that pursue him and torment him wherever he goes. They make up the plot of this book and provide it with its large cast of interesting characters and their astonishing life stories. Tišma, who had previously published three short-story collections and a novel about a love affair, said that he wrote this book without a plan or a model, following his instincts, which, as the reader can verify, turned out to be flawless.

  A friend who read the manuscript told him that even someone as inconspicuous as his hero must do at least one extraordinary thing. Not in Tišma’s books. The heroes of an age, he believed, are not its winners, but those who bear its wounds. He writes about the private lives of people at the mercy of historical events beyond their control, the choices they did or did not make, victims and killers, both of whom he sees clearly, neither judging them nor forgiving them. An interviewer once asked how he had come to write so well about murderers. Tišma responded that crime fascinated him; the violence he witnessed during the war had made him comprehend hatred and cruelty. I’ve read in my lifetime many vivid and ghastly accounts of people led to their death in novels and historical documents, but few that match Tišma’s depiction of what those thousands inching forward on the frozen Danube felt and told themselves while hearing the sound of a machine gun, growing closer and closer, louder and louder, firing in quick bursts and now and then falling silent in the early-morning dark.

  One of the most poignant stories in The Book of Blam describes how in April 1944 the Jews and their families who were to be deported to the camps were assembled in the huge synagogue in Novi Sad. They spent three days and three nights there, not bothered by the guards, waiting quietly. The only discordant note came from five or six dogs who had trotted alongside their owners as they were being led to the synagogue and remained outside watching for an opportunity to dash inside. The guards chased them away, yelling and cursing, but the dogs came back. They did see their masters one last time, nuzzling them and getting them to part with some hidden morsel of food, when they were at the station waiting to be loaded into the train, but soon the train was on the move and the dogs were left alone on the tracks, though they kept running after it for a long time until at last their noses lost the familiar smells of their owners.

  At the end of The Book of Blam, Blam goes to a concert held in that same synagogue, known for its fabulous acoustics. There is one other Jew in the large crowd, an old man who dodged death in a camp playing the violin in a band that accompanied prisoners on their way to the firing squad.

  —CHARLES SIMIC

  THE BOOK OF BLAM

  Chapter One

  THE MERCURY IS the most prominent building in Novi Sad. Not the tallest, because it is overpowered by the steep glaciers of the high-rises and the sturdy wreaths of apartment houses that the postwar population explosion strewed over the fields at the edge of town. Nor the most attractive, because its builder and first owner, a prewar businessman, viewed it as a commercial venture, making the most of every square inch and avoiding costly ornamentation. And yet the Mercury, jutting into Main Square, one corner rounded like the stern of an ocean liner, running along broad, straight Old Boulevard in all its four-storied glory (and with its somewhat narrower decklike mansard) and boasting a continuous row of ground-level businesses, including a department store, a cinema, and a hotel with a restaurant and bar, is unquestionably the city’s focal point.

  Miroslav Blam, who lives in the Mercury’s mansard, understands the exceptional, almost lofty status of the building and of himself as a part of it. He is proud of his status, though secretly, reticently so, not having come by it on his own merit. When he writes his return address, he does not use the generally accepted “Mercury Building” (the name comes from the name of the original owner’s company); he uses the official though more complicated “I Old Boulevard,” which he also uses when giving his address to acquaintances, and only if they slap their foreheads and say, “Why, that’s the Mercury!” does he nod hesitantly, as if yielding to the unofficial, slightly wanton designation, while in fact concealing his pleasure. Or, rather, vacillating between pleasure and annoyance, because he dislikes being pigeonholed, even in so minor a detail.

  Actually, the reason he is so fond of his Mercury mansard is that it is in the center of things yet remains a hideaway. Lift your eyes from any point in Main Square or the boulevard and you’ll say, “That’s where Blam lives.” But try to make your way there and find him. First you have to be let into the building or slip past the janitor keeping an eye on the courtyard from his kitchen. Then you have to climb stairs and stairs—four flights’ worth, each with dozens of doors and more than dozens of people living behind them, meddlesome people constantly lolling on the balconies—and only then will you come to the mansard level. And are you willing to knock at every door and ask for him? If you’re too loud and conspicuous, he may hear you before you find him and thus remain eternally hidden. Yes, even if you do locate the door to his apartment. Because the
mansard deviates unexpectedly from the pattern of the other floors, narrowing as it does to the width of a footpath, which path, protected by an iron fence so people will not fall to the street, looks like a ship’s promenade perched on what is entirely residential space.

  Blam often visits this walkway, this place of celestial freedom, slipping out of his apartment through a passage tucked between the laundry room and drying room. Parading thus along the building’s edge, he has a bird’s-eye view of the Main Square’s spacious rectangle and the narrow pointed spire of the cathedral that dominates it, or of the broad trough of Old Boulevard with its endless processions of cars and pedestrians, or of the ravine of narrow Okrugić Street, perpendicular to the boulevard, and the tables in front of the hotel. True, he is so accustomed to these sights that he scarcely notices them, his eye resting rather on an uncommon detail, a lone, dark, pillowlike cloud that seems anchored to the cathedral’s spire, or a pedestrian, or a pretty woman who keeps returning to the same place. He pauses at the railing, leaning his elbows on it, eager to take part, to merge with the crowd. He becomes the pedestrian, he becomes the waiting woman. He knows nothing about them, yet for that very reason he can string together images of facts and possibilities. The image of an accident that once took place there, the image of two beaming faces meeting for a tryst. The screech of brakes, a cry of horror that overcomes the crowd like a wind. She is married, but her husband is in jail for corrupting minors and she has phoned an old admirer and asked to see him. The pedestrian hit by the screeching car was Aca Krkljuš’s father. Aca himself showed Blam the spot when he gave him his drunken account of what happened. His father’s leg was amputated and he could no longer manage his leather workshop, so Aca had to take over and give up his own work and calling. As for the old admirer, he is probably frightened by the responsibility involved—after all, he has remained a bachelor (if he hadn’t, the beautiful woman would never have asked to see him): he senses she wants him to replace her husband in the performance of certain familial duties as well as in bed. Aca, or the pedestrian whose choice of position on the street reminds Blam of Aca, seems to be surveying the terrain; he needs to make a sketch of it, a legal drawing, to support his indemnity case, which he has also told Blam about, while the man the woman has asked to see may have got the time and place wrong, mixed things up, because his memory is so poor. But the two people who are actually there waiting will in fact exchange a few glances and hastily thrown-together words; they will grow closer, realize their common bond in the losses they suffered on the same spot. They will begin to trust each other, and he will invite her for a drink or even (because he might well be Aca) suggest they take a load off their feet by going up to see Blam, Miroslav Blam, an old school friend, a friend also of my brother Slobodan, who died a tragic death in the war, Blam always comes to hear my band, my new pieces, he’s the one I told about the accident two months ago, the accident that cost my father his leg and me my freedom, he lives right here and he has a wonderful wife, don’t worry, I’ll introduce you, he’s very understanding, and a lawyer, well, kind of, and maybe he can give you some advice about getting your husband off, it’s right here, right in the Mercury . . .