A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices.
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. His
father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was
middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tisma
received a good education. 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. 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. 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. 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
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.
Richard Williams's translations from the Serbo-Croatian include the
Sinisa Kovačević playNovo je doba(Times Have Changed).
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.
“A book whose darkness, mercilessness, and intensity cannot be
suppressed.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“A brooding, curiously prescient saga. . . . A probing, exceptional
study of a man as both victim and tormentor, and more.” —Kirkus
Reviews
“[Kapo is] the last and best book in the Novi Sad trilogy. . . .
[Tišma’s] fiction is merciless, bereft of relief or respite. It is
the work of a documentarian accustomed to confronting atrocity
without allowing himself the indulgence of looking away.” —Becca
Rothfeld, “Sidecar,” The New Left Review
“An unblinking portrayal of evil for which there is no penance,
from whose guilt there is no relief, and for whose knowledge the
only escape is death. . . . Kapo is a palimpsest of horrible
knowledge, obtained through unbearable means, and its unique value,
even greater than Tišma’s other novels, lies in the rarity and
moral necessity of its knowledge, delivered as painfully
transparent art.” —David Auerbach, Apofenie
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
