The book of Blam

the long version

The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grun, 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 Sandor Vertes, 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 water. Blam lives. He does not follow the woman who loves him across the border to Italy, to relative safety. He stays instead with a wife who repeatedly betrays him, bringing up a daughter he knows to have been fathered by the collaborator who both seduced his mother and saved his, Blam's, life. After the war, he seeks no revenge, no retribution. Life of a piece, but only half a life - made all the more agonizing by the clarity with which he sees the events around him. In this powerful, masterfully crafted work. Tisma has as much to say about how we live our lives in extraordinary circumstances as about the human condition.