The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess (review)

Amra is sixteen in 1992 when Serbian tanks roll into Bihać, completely upending life as she knows it. Within weeks her Serbian friends and neighbors leave town, abandoning Amra and other Bosniaks—Bosnian Muslims—to what would become a three-year siege by the Yugoslav National Army. Instead of following her dreams to eventually attend university, Amra now finds herself regularly hiding out in bomb shelters, dodging sniper bullets on the streets, and enduring the leering insults and sexual threats from Serb soldiers. Through it all, she finds comfort in a street cat that saves both Amra and her brother multiple times by leading them away from danger. The cat, along with other lighter elements of the story like Amra's romance with a local boy and her sweet relationship with her father, adds bits of levity, but this is nonetheless a brutal recounting of the author's own experiences during the Bosnian War and a disturbingly realistic portrayal of how the seeds of nationalism easily flourish into the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide. While Amra is never victim to it herself, systematic sexual violence and enslavement are used by the Serbs as much as guns and bombs, and the threat of "rape camps" looms large in Amra's fears. There is harrowing hope in Amra and her family's persistent survival, but a sense of nihilism settles in when the U.N. does little to stop mass murder. Although Amra eventually makes it to safety and academic success in the U.S., readers will nonetheless be haunted by her question, "Where has all the beauty of the world gone?" An author's note and further resources on the Bosnian war are appended.