Kapo

“A book whose darkness, mercilessness, and intensity cannot be suppressed.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“A brooding, curiously prescient saga… . A probing, exceptional study of a man as both victim and tormentor, and more.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[Kapo is] the last and best book in the Novi Sad trilogy… . [Tišma’s] fiction is merciless, bereft of relief or respite. It is the work of a documentarian accustomed to confronting atrocity without allowing himself the indulgence of looking away.” —Becca Rothfeld, “Sidecar,” The New Left Review

“An unblinking portrayal of evil for which there is no penance, from whose guilt there is no relief, and for whose knowledge the only escape is death… . Kapo is a palimpsest of horrible knowledge, obtained through unbearable means, and its unique value, even greater than Tišma’s other novels, lies in the rarity and moral necessity of its knowledge, delivered as painfully transparent art.” —David Auerbach, Apofenie

Aleksandar Tisma (1924-2003) was born in Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after World War I. His father was a Serb from a peasant background, and his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tisma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina. The following year, during Tisma’s last year of high school, the regime carried out a series of pogroms, killing approximately 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Tismas were spared.

After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tisma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and pursued a career in journalism. In 1949, he joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he worked until his retirement in 1980. Tisma’s first story, “Ibika’s House,” was published in 1951. This was followed by the novels Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl, and the story collection Violence.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Tisma achieved international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1971), which focuses on a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad; The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through World War II and its aftermath; and Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp.

Tisma moved to France after the outbreak of war and the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In 1995, he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his final years.

Richard Williams’s translations from the Serbo-Croatian include the Sinisa Kovačević play Novo je doba (Times Have Changed).

David Rieff is the author of ten books, including The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami; Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies.

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