Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

ALEKSANDAR TIŠMA (1924–2003) was born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War. His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tišma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year — Tišma’s last in high school— the regime carried out a series of murderous pogroms, killing some 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Tišmas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tišma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and went into journalism and in 1949 joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Tišma published his first story, “Ibika’s House,” in 1951; it was followed by the novels Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl and a collection of stories, Violence . In the 1970s and ’80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad; The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after; and Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp. Tišma moved to France after the outbreak of war and collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but in 1995 he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his last years.

BERNARD JOHNSON (1933–2003) was affiliated with the Language Centre at the London School of Economics for many years. In 1970 he edited and translated the first anthology of modern Yugoslav literature, and throughout his career he distinguished himself as one of the most active translators of Serbo-Croatian poetry and prose working in English.

CLAIRE MESSUD is the author of four novels and a book of novellas. Her novel The Emperor’s Children was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected as one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times . Her most recent novel is The Woman Upstairs . She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What is literature? Potentially, everything; possibly, nothing at all.

Aleksandar Tišma may have been more acutely aware of these stakes than most, on account of his talent and temperament, and also as a result of the accident of his birth. The son of a Serbian father and Jewish mother, he was born in 1924, and spent his childhood in Novi Sad, a city on the banks of the Danube, in what was then Yugoslavia. He grew up surrounded with memories of war, in the likely anticipation of war, and in the midst of war.

The war brought particular confusion to Novi Sad, where Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Germans, and Jews had long lived together and intermarried. Annexed by Hungary in 1941, the city was the site of an especially brutal massacre in January 1942, in which approximately 2,500 people were slaughtered, 800 of them Jews. In October 1944, Novi Sad was reclaimed by Communist partisans, becoming a part of Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. Tišma lived through all these upheavals, and inevitably they determined his subject matter. He could be called the Bard of Novi Sad, petit-maître of a small canvas; though in a profound sense his fierce, often brutal stories of this provincial life are the central stories of the twentieth century. They resonate far beyond Novi Sad’s borders, forcing us to look again, to look more closely, at our frail humanity.

Against mayhem and horror, what is there to say? Tišma’s ruthlessly unsentimental fictions would seem to assert the necessity not only of bearing witness but of bearing witness to all the shades of guilt with which atrocity taints its perpetrators and its victims. Tišma is careful neither to condemn nor to exonerate: rather, he insists upon the humanity of each of us, however heinous our acts. In the novel Kapo , for example, he explores the late-life reflections and recollections of Lamian, a Jew from Novi Sad who, denying his parents and heritage and assuming the identity of a dead man, survived in the camps — and who as a Kapo committed brutal crimes against his fellow men and, particularly, women. Since the war, Lamian has lived in hiding and fear, warped by guilt and by the terror of being unmasked. Ironically — or perhaps logically — he turns to one of his surviving victims, a Jewish woman of almost his own age, in hopes of redemption.

I know few — if any — novels as blisteringly powerful as Kapo . It provokes continual discomfort and is genuinely, deeply shocking. Above all, it shocks by implicating the reader — Baudelaire’s hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère —in its story of violence to others and to self. We are forced to acknowledge that this, too, is our human condition . Much as we seek to separate ourselves from the unsavory Lamian, who can say with certainty that we could not have ended up like him?

Lamian has become a monster as a result of his own choices, you might say; but what were they? Condemned by a German soldier to stand at length outside in winter in a drenched coat, he was effectively given the choice either to become a Kapo or to die.

The power of the club, though he obediently used it, could not make him exult, because he did not wield it with desire — because he had become Kapo Furfa by freezing beneath the coat of ice which Corporal Sommer had put on him, but beneath that ice, beneath the Kapo’s insignia and red triangle, he was really Lamian, a Jew with no yellow star sewn on him, whose heart quaked in fear and horror as he beat those to whom he secretly belonged.

Over the course of the war, Lamian was forced to choose, and choose again, simply to live — and with each choice came greater crimes and more profound self-loathing.

The Book of Blam is about a different kind of survivor and a different kind of guilt. In it, Miroslav Blam, a Jew married to a Christian and thus spared deportation and execution, recalls the years of his youth. Unlike Lamian, Blam is not guilty of heinous crimes. But he, too, has been mutilated by his survival, in his case by his careful, timorous passivity. He has lost his parents and closest friends to the war; repeatedly cuckolded by his indifferent wife, he has raised as his own a child fathered by a collaborator. In the years after the war he has seen Novi Sad transformed almost beyond recognition, into what appears to be a thriving, untroubled modern city. He wanders in a lost geography, the city of his memories, full of regrets and resentments. Lamian chose to survive; Blam just survived. The legacy, for him, is very different from Lamian’s, but no less painful.

From that time, from that place, as Tišma’s novels make horridly clear, barely a soul emerged undisgraced or uncompromised. To survive was to compromise. The only clean souls were dead souls. (This is a truth known to most Europeans of a certain age.) Tišma does not exempt his characters from moral accountability, but he sees, detachedly and with austere compassion, the tremendous costs of life.

Nowhere are these more apparent than in The Use of Man , Tišma’s masterpiece. At the heart of the novel is a book — a modest diary, one of several books that play important roles in the novel. Curiously, they are at once central to the plot (the diary in particular) and ineffectual, motivators and bystanders, rather like people themselves. What are books good for? One of the novel’s characters, a thoughtful and retiring middle-aged Jewish patriarch named Robert Kroner says, to his daughter’s boyfriend, about Goethe: “We have no men and writers like that today. Mysticism now rules the world, the cult of blood and violence, darkness, the longing for the past, nationalism. Do you think that anything great and noble, like this book, can come out of such chaos? No; you’ll see, our time will be remembered for its barbarity and barrenness.”