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“... a trap’. If cornered he’d jump, ‘plunge headfirst … as if diving into a swimming pool’. Aleksandar Tišma opens The Book of Blam (1971) with these anxious imaginings. The town is Novi Sad, on the banks of the Danube, fifty miles north-west of Belgrade. It’s the 1950s, but Blam, in his thirties, feels he is ‘the fossil of a long forgotten ...”

“... and obliterated large parts of Beirut. In his novel Kapo (1993), the Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma captures the revulsion many survivors of the Shoah felt at the images coming out of Lebanon: ‘Jews, his kinsmen, the sons and grandsons of his contemporaries, former inmates of the camps, stood in tank turrets and drove, flags ...”