Danilo Kiš Revisited

The best writers and philosophers throughout time have had a need to freely say what they think and are accustomed to disagreement and persecution. They try to convey their truth to those who understand and to leave a record for posterity. Danilo Kiš, a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, who was nominated by the Academy for the Nobel prize in literature, was such a writer: “The uniqueness and originality of Danilo Kiš’s literary opus represents permanently attractive reading material for readers, and, at the same time, a provocative literature for the world’s analysts and literary historians, as well as the divided opinion of the Yugoslav literary critique, which has not ebbed to this day,” Ana Šomlo wrote in her journal of reading.¹ A quarter of a century has passed since the death of Danilo Kiš of cancer in Paris, 1989, at the early age of 54. His thoughts and writings still live. They are studied, discussed, and cited throughout the world. His “ahead-of-time-ness” makes him clearer to his audience as time passes. It is only fair to acknowledge those who have studied and further explained him to their audiences.

Ana Šomlo succinctly concludes that “[t]he prose of Danilo Kiš is a monument to Middle-European Jewry as it does not exist anymore, in fact, a mirror of the deformed face of the twentieth century.”² Like Šomlo and Ženi Lebl, Danilo Kiš wrote in the Serbian language. So did numerous other Jewish writers throughout Serbia and Yugoslavia: Isak Samokovlija, Stanislav Vinaver, Oskar Davičo, Aleksandar Tišma, David Albahari, Erih Koš, and Filip David, to name only some of those listed in domestic and foreign (American, Russian, Swedish, Israeli) anthologies, literary histories, and critiques.³ They enriched the literature of the society in which they lived, and that society was responsive and favorable in accepting it. They often assumed leading roles in the social and political arena, thus becoming more accessible to readers beyond their national boundaries.

Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica, Vojvodina, the flat, rural “bread basket” of the former Yugoslavia, a cultural center near the Hungarian border, where both Serbian and Hungarian are spoken. Vojvodina has always been home to an ethnically mixed diaspora of many minorities. The word “minorities” signals trouble in times of war and other major confusions, intentional or unintentional, anywhere in the world. Migrations appear more easily and are becoming more massive, partially because time and technology have made it so. In times of peace minority as a concept loses its exaggerated importance and is neglected, overpowered by the everyday life of mixed families, neighbors, partners, and friends who enjoy living and working together. In his writing, speeches, and interviews, Kiš was compelled to explain that his mother was a Serb of Montenegrin descent, Serbian Orthodox, while his father was a Hungarian Jew, who was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, changing his name from Koen to Kish (meaning ‘small’ or ‘little’ in Hungarian). It was an act of survival used throughout history by Jews and Serbs. Time and place affected Kiš’s destiny and confirmed that nothing is accidental in the life of a writer, as he believed.

His family lived in Novi Sad, a cultural center, often called the Serbian Athens. His pleasant memories are tied to his first awareness of “certain scents, clean bedding, soap, and mother’s sewing machine,” as he mentioned in his first book of the family trilogy, Bašta, pepeo (Garden, Ashes),⁴ as well as during his interview with the Israeli journalist Raul Teitelbaum for the journal, Yedioth Ahronoth.⁵ That life ended one frosty winter night in 1942, when gunshots rang out under their window, and in the darkness, his mother hastily pulled the children out of bed and prepared them to run for their lives.

That night marked the beginning of the German Nazi occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–44). Their allies, Hungarian soldiers and Croatian “Ustashe,” perpetrated bloody, cruel, and massive pogroms of Serbs and Jews. The same was happening concurrently in other invaded countries. The...