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Biography
Serbian

Aleksandar Tišma

1924 — 2003

Aleksandar Tišma was a Serbian novelist whose fiction about the Holocaust in Vojvodina — particularly The Use of Man (1976) and The Book of Blam (1972) — is among the most important European writing about World War II and the Shoah. His novels depict the destruction of the multiethnic communities of Novi Sad and the moral compromises of survival with a merciless clarity.

Past sales0
Period20th Century
NationalitySerbian
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Aleksandar Tišma (1924–2003) was born on 16 January 1924 in Horgoš, in the Vojvodina region of Serbia (then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). He was of Hungarian-Jewish and Serbian heritage. He survived the Holocaust and lived in Novi Sad for the rest of his life.

Life and Career

The Book of Blam (Knjiga o Blamu, 1972) — about Miroslav Blam, a Jewish survivor of the 1942 Novi Sad massacre who has spent the post-war decades trying to forget what happened — is a devastating portrait of guilt, survival, and the impossibility of forgetting.

The Use of Man (Upotreba čoveka, 1976) — about a group of people from different ethnic backgrounds in Novi Sad whose lives are destroyed by the war — won the NIN Prize and is his most ambitious novel. Kapo (1987) — about a concentration camp prisoner who becomes a kapo (prisoner-guard) — is his darkest.

Major Works and Themes

Tišma wrote about the moral catastrophe of the Holocaust as it was experienced in the multiethnic communities of the Vojvodina — where Serbs, Hungarians, Jews, and Germans lived together until the war destroyed the possibility of coexistence. His fiction is unsentimental and mercilessly honest about the compromises of survival.

Key Works

  • The Book of Blam (1972)
  • The Use of Man (1976) — NIN Prize
  • Kapo (1987)

Collecting Tišma

Serbian originals (Matica srpska, Nolit) are the primary collected form. English translations (Harcourt, NYRB Classics) bring $15–$40. Tišma died in 2003.