Aleksandar Tišma: the centenary of the Holocaust underground writer

Aleksandar Tišma (Horgoš, 1924 – Novi Sad, 2003) was obsessed with literature – “For me writing was a matter of life or death” – but he discovered that there are more serious crossroads than the professional vocation, those that do not depend on one same. For the generation that lived through the Holocaust this was a truism that was as unbearable as it was difficult to convey.

He experienced this cruelty at the age of eighteen. In Novi Sad, where the Tišma family (of Serbian and Hungarian-Jewish origin) lived, some 1,400 Jews and Serbs were driven at gunpoint into the frozen Danube for three days, starting on 20 January 1942. Hungarian soldiers shot them in the back and let them fall into holes in the ice. Witnesses say that the number of bodies was so great that the executioners had to stop because the bodies were overflowing the surface of the river. Tišma and most of his family were saved by a Hungarian neighbour who distracted the soldiers.

All of Tišma’s novels are autobiographical. He acknowledges this successively in his diaries, Dnevnik 1942–2001 (Diary) (1991) and We look forward to seeing you in Vali (Eternally remember Vasli) (2000). The writer assumes the apparent contradiction between his withdrawal, which distanced him from people, and the need to imitate voices and gestures, to emulate Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann on paper. Tišma was attracted by any unknown world (he read German, French and English fluently, as well as Hungarian and Serbian), but he was shocked by the backwardness, boredom and trivial attitudes of his surroundings. He ended up embracing them as literary material, turning the nondescript landscapes of Vojvodina, a challenge for poets, as they say in the region, into an intriguing setting.

Something of that elusive yet observant character is found in Miroslav Blam. The protagonist of The Book of Blam (Acantilado, 2006; his works have been translated into Spanish by LF Garrido and T. Pištelek) is a Holocaust survivor, married to a Christian. His parents and his sister are murdered, but he saves his life thanks to a Serbian collaborator, lover of his mother. At the same time, his wife cheats on him with another man, longing for a passion that his partner denies her, consumed by guilt and the ghosts of the past. Tišma says that he wrote out of a passion.

He had published other books, but this was the beginning of a path that would mark his career. The catalyst was not the experiences caused by the Novi Sad massacre. It was during a trip to Poland in 1961, as an editor at the Matica srpska cultural institution, that his vocation took that direction. He visited Auschwitz and that experience was the trigger for his cycle dedicated to the Holocaust, Intertwined branches, with which he received awards and translations into nearly twenty languages.

Fascinated by evil

Tišma was fascinated by evil, but without the fatalisms of Ivo Andrić or Meša Selimović. Her confessed sadism always suggested him to understand her. The result is a renunciation of the archetypes of good and bad, to give the characters the ambivalence of a human nature whose integrity suffers depending on the circumstances. This realism leaves no room for illusions, not even a hint of greatness, but, without moralism, it challenges the morality of the readers, seduced (and sometimes even identified) with the duplicities of the characters. Her mission, as she stated on several occasions, “was precision, precision of language and precision of thought.” The final product is a surgical nudity, the weaknesses, passions and foolishness of victims and aggressors, who can be the same person.

In The use of man (Acantilado, 2013), with which he obtained the most relevant national award of the time, the NIN, analyzes the Kroner, Lazukić and Božić families, of different origins and social class, but with a shared destiny, and in the collection of stories school of impiety (1978) returns to the war and the postwar period from the perspective of survival. In Loyalties and betrayals (Acantilado, 2019) the war has ended, but it clouds any future based on regrets and resentment: “Existence is a problem for me, probably because it coincides with identity. Only those parts of my existence that abolish identity are free from suffering: sleep, travel, sex and writing.”

However, war is not just a context, and this is where the writer stands out for his virtuosity. His main quality lies in the atmospheric recreation of the war and its aftermath, to turn those environments into another character, a facet where Tišma is at the level of the greats. Because for Tišma the human being is a vestige trapped in the vortex of war, in a spiral with no return towards misfortune and manipulation, decadence, hypocrisy and that environment is as relevant as the psychology and work of the protagonists.

His pessimism was also autobiographical. When the Second World War ended and he returned to Novi Sad, now on the partisan side, he declared: “When liberation came, I felt miserable.” He was repulsed by all those who, during the Holocaust, had deliberately haunted the Jews. arrowed crosses Hungarians, and then paid homage to the partisans, who took over the cities in a spirit of revenge.

Nazism scholar

Tišma became a tenacious student of Nazism, with the same dedication as other writers such as David Albahari or Daša Drndić. Thus he arrived at the plot of The Kapo (Acantilado, 2004): “In the documents I found that a Jew from Zagreb had been kapo in Auschwitz. She didn’t want to change anything. If he hadn’t found that in the documents, he probably wouldn’t have written that novel.”

Novelist, travel writer, essayist, journalist, editor and translator (for example, from Imre Kertész into Serbian), two of his latest works are the stories Without a scream (Acantilado, 2008) and the novel those we love (Acantilado, 2004), which in his maturity speak most of him as a creator, without the argumentative and symbolic weight of the Holocaust. The first for being a counter-propagandist work, which exposes the social miseries that were aired during the Titoist heyday in Vojvodina, and the second for the mastery of the arts of seduction of a prostitute like Beba, a novel devoid of any lyricism (nor frivolity) that sweetens the author’s sobriety. He himself declared: “I am convinced that art emerges from underground.”

Exiled in France for three years by the regime of Slobodan Milošević, in his later years he showed an ideological commitment that he deliberately concealed during the Second World War. He, like his literature, exposed the different faces of the human being, how lights and shadows coexist in the same person that are projected and obscured according to the dilemmas: “I am a very cautious person. Life teaches everyone something different. It taught me to be distrustful. I don’t trust anyone.”

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