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The Book of Blam, Aleksandar Tišma’s “extended kaddish . . . [his] masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews), is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. All dead. As are his younger sister and his best friend, a Serb, both of whom joined the resistance movement; and his mother and father in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942—when the Hungarian Arrow Cross executed 1,400 Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube and tossed them into the river. Blam lives. The war he survived will never be over for him.
The Book of Blam, Aleksandar Tišma’s “extended kaddish . . . [his] masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews), is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. All dead. As are his younger sister and his best friend, a Serb, both of whom joined the resistance movement; and his mother and father in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942—when the Hungarian Arrow Cross executed 1,400 Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube and tossed them into the river. Blam lives. The war he survived will never be over for him.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Reviews-
Starred review from September 28, 1998 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.
Larry Wolff, The New York Times
"One of the most stirring novels to come from the Balkans."
The New Yorker
"A startling, extraordinary creation."
Publishers Weekly
"Tišma 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...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."
The Boston Globe
"A Balkan bible presided over by an ironic vision of the imagination, capable of envisioning utter barbarity but not the expiation for sins."
The Wall Street Journal
"Tišma is unrelenting in his quest for truth yet compassionate in his judgments of individuals."
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