The Book of Blam

By Aleksandar Tišma

Book Overview

The Book of Blam , Aleksandar Tisma'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 Gr n, 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 S ndor V rtes, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159017920X
• ISBN13: 9781590179208
• Release Date: February 2016
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A Very sad Novi Sad

The Book of Blam is a wonderful book and an important book. It recounts the events during the Holocaust period in what is now Serbia. After reading this and Tisma's Kapo, he has a style of writing that is unlike most writers that I have read from Eastern Europe; concise, flowing storylines and easy to read. His story has been told many times before but there is something to Tisma's writing that makes Genocide appear as normal to these killers as washing their hands or going for a walk. His is a voice of reason in Novi Sad, a city with little tolerance then and now. After the events in the Balkans during the recent past, sad to say, not much has changed.

A Vanished World

This is the literary equivalent and then some of the photographic essay "A Vanished World" and Anne Frank's diary in 1950, had she survived. And an all too useful exploration of how survivors of the abyss might look at the world. I can't say I'm looking forward to reading Tisma's other work, but read it I must.

"The Book of Blam" describes Novi Sad of the 1940's.

In the past several weeks (April, 1999), Nato bombs dropped two of Novi Sad's bridges into the Danube River. This excellent novel, written by a man who experienced the human or inhuman tragedies of Novi Sad in the 1930's and 1940's helped me get a feeling for this city. The book appears to fill a gap in what can be found in ordinary U.S. public libraries.