The Book of Blam

“One of the most stirring novels to come from the Balkans.”—Larry Wolff The New York Times

“A startling, extraordinary creation.” —The New Yorker

“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.” —Publishers Weekly

“A Balkan bible presided over by an ironic vision of the imagination, capable of envisioning utter barbarity but not the expiation for sins.”—The Boston Globe

“Tišma is unrelenting in his quest for truth yet compassionate in his judgments of individuals.”—The Wall Street Journal

Aleksandar Tisma (1924-2003)

Born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Aleksandar Tisma’s life spanned a period of immense upheaval. His father, a Serb from a peasant background, and his mother, middle-class and Jewish, provided a comfortable upbringing and a good education for Tisma. The family’s life was deeply affected by the events of the Second World War. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina, and the following year, during Tisma’s final year of high school, the regime carried out brutal pogroms that claimed the lives of approximately 3,000 people, predominantly Serbs and Jews. The Tisma family, however, was spared.

After the war, Tisma fought with the Yugoslav partisans. He went on to study philosophy at the University of Belgrade and pursued a career in journalism. In 1949, he joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, a position he held until his retirement in 1980.

Tisma’s literary career began with the publication of his first story, “Ibika’s House,” in 1951. This was followed by the novels Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl, and the story collection Violence. His international recognition came in the 1970s and ‘80s with the publication of his seminal Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1972), which depicts a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad; The Use of Man (1976), following a group of friends through the Second World War and its aftermath; and Kapo (1987), the poignant story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp.

Following the outbreak of war and the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Tisma relocated to France. He returned to Novi Sad in 1995, where he spent his final years.

Michael Henry Heim (1943-2012)

Michael Henry Heim was a distinguished professor of Slavic languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. A gifted linguist, fluent in eight languages, Heim received numerous accolades for his work. He was a prolific translator, bringing the works of renowned authors such as Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, Günter Grass, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, and Dubravka Ugrešić to a wider audience. His life and career are explored in The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation, edited by Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and Russell Scott Valentino.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic is a celebrated poet, essayist, and translator. His extensive body of work includes some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. Simic’s contributions to literature have been recognized with many prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Among his more recent publications are New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012, The Lunatic, and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of essays published as an e-book original. In 2007, Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

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