The Book of Blam [Hardcover]

Aleksandar Tisma (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1998

Miroslav Blam walks through the empty streets of Novi Sad, remembering. The war has ended, but for Blam the town is haunted with its presence, and memories of its dead: Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; Arthur Spitzer, a grocer who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a communist lawyer. They stand before him as ever, but they are only the ghosts in Blam's mind. Accompanying the others are Blam's family and his best friend, all of whom perished in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942. Blam lives. He seeks no revenge, no retribution. His life is a spectator's-made all the more agonizing by the clarity with which he sees the events around him. The silhouettes of the dead pass before him, and he incorporates what would have been their daily lives into his own. And in telling the story of one man's life after the war, Ti

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Balkans: a seething cauldron of centuries-old racial hatreds and periodic massacres perpetrated by one ethnic group upon another. The newspapers fill with one atrocity after another, and eventually the mind and heart numbs to the sufferings of whichever unlucky group is being victimized this time. Perhaps the only way to truly appreciate the horror of the tragedy is to scale it down from the general to the specific, from the anguish of the many to the agony of one. This is the approach Aleksandar Tísma takes in The Book of Blam, originally published in 1972. Set in post-World War II Yugoslavia, in the city of Novi Sad, the novel chronicles the despair of Miroslav Blam, the only member of his family to survive an infamous Hungarian slaughter of Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube in 1942.

Blam survived the roundup only because a traitorous journalist who was once his mother's lover vouched for him with the Hungarians. Now it is after the war, and though Novi Sad has seemingly returned to normal, Blam is beset by the ghosts of those he has outlived. As he walks the streets of his city and goes through the motions of his life, he remembers the woman he loved, the friends he lost, and his own failure to "face the rifle barrels like his father and mother, the search patrols like his sister, Estera; he has failed to go down to the Danube like Slobodan Krkljus and bend over an old man on the ground, deaf to all warning and moved only by the thought of the moment, the thought of assistance. He had seen nothing, learned nothing." Tísma offers neither consolation nor redemption for his protagonist. Instead, Blam is left only with the hollow expectation of a future war in which he will, at last, be able to make the supreme sacrifice, thus "committing an act of the most profound truth," while the reader is left with the uncomfortable realization that in a world riven by sectarian violence, Blam's tragedy is not unique. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (October 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151002355
• ISBN-13: 978-0151002351
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,078,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The Book of Blam" describes Novi Sad of the 1940's., April 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Book of Blam (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Novi Sad, sadder than its name, October 24, 2000

By 

J. Michael Cole (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Blam (Hardcover)

The poetic description of sadness at the heart of this short novel is very moving.

Within the pages of this book, Tisma has brought to life a small part of the world which, at the time, was sadly caught between the clash of two ideologies that were slowly descending, like dark clouds, upon Europe - communism and fascism. The consequent racial suspicions, which leave no one untouched, are real: Hungarians, Jews, Serbians, all are caught in the ideological swirl which, as we know, had devastating consequences for the people of the region: pogroms, the invasion by Arrow Cross Hungarians, the murder of communists (Blam's sister)...

The novel also delves into the unconscious of violent retribution, something which, as we have learned in recent years, only leads to the perpetuation of violence. Mr. Tisma must have had the wars that raged throughout the 90s in mind (i.e., Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina) while he was writing his novel. (The precariousness of the region, of which we are all aware, is in part the result of a failure to put the past behind, to let go, to forgive.) The dream-like scenes, where long-dead friends of Blam's pay their executioners in kind, are harrowing.

A short novel about a region of the world whose history we unfortunately know too little about, and but one tiny chapter in the book of horrors that were visited upon the European Jewish community.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very sad Novi Sad, December 29, 1999

By 

NYC "atravelingreader" (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Blam (Hardcover)

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.