Another Jerusalem
by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/07
Sarajevo is known to the world today principally through the war that nearly destroyed it. Like Jerusalem, it’s a place most people encounter through the evening news, somewhere they think of only with fear and bewilderment. For a first-time visitor, it’s hard to see past the calamities the city endured, beginning fifteen years ago, after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo was a place where the constituent ethnic and religious groups of the region had cohabited reasonably well. As the Yugoslav collective broke apart under separatist ambitions, Sarajevo (and the mixed but majority-Muslim Bosnia in general) started to look like a dangerous anomaly. For the nationalists, blood was destiny; people of different ethnicities or religions could never live and thrive together. Sarajevo was the exception that threatened the rule.
The city was held under siege for nearly four years—all access to the outside world was blocked, and its people and infrastructure were systematically, almost leisurely, devastated by an irregular army of Serbian nationalists that included many of Sarajevo’s own citizens. All the vicious talk about tribal difference and destiny, about collective memories of injustice and peril, became more real for some than their own lived experience. These citizens could suddenly see only enemies—their ethnic antitheses—as they fired down from hills onto former neighbors, colleagues, friends, relatives, spouses.
Jerusalem, in its time, has also been besieged, coveted and targeted, wrecked from within and without. But to survive in a Jerusalem, you learn to live a peculiar dream-life that insulates from despair; you learn to fill in the gaps between ideal and actuality.
Sarajevans have an almost disconcerting ease with which they move through the wasted terrain of their city. The streets are filled with fashionable people who carry themselves with a kind of relentless civility. They walk in high heels over the craters of mortar shells; they sit, drinking and smoking, in refined cafes inside of machine-gunned buildings. The great Bosnian writer Ivo Adric wrote, long before this last war, that Sarajevo is “a city that is both near its end and dying, yet simultaneously being born and growing.” For many Sarajevans, it seems, the tragedy of this war has already been assimilated into the emotional narrative of their city—a part of its innate fragility and singularity.
This issue of Habitus returns again and again to the experience and aftermath of the conflict. But this isn’t typical war writing. The authors address this legacy without sentimentality or self-pity, and with a minimum of despair (though all those things are rightly due to them). With humor, drama, and imagination, these texts fulfill the words of contributor Semezdin Mehmedinovic, who has described “that passionate artistic desire to distill wild beauty from the spectacle of death.” The writers also conjure the city that existed before the mayhem, and the idea of Sarajevo that still exists in a hazy convergence of myth, memory, and promise. Though they live all around the globe, many of them dispersed by the war, the authors here are able to summon up all the details and feelings of the city with perfect intensity.
A truly unique aspect of this volume—one that confirms the distinctive culture of the city—is the assortment of Muslim writers who have chosen to address Jewish themes and Jewish lives. There is probably no other place where such an impressive array of writers might attempt to span this particular divide. But these pages offer several powerful examples. Dzevad Karahasan writes about “our Jews…whose arrival made Sarajevo a complete world in miniature.” Elsewhere, in a short story about a Jewish-American student adrift in a sea of ephemera, conspiracy, and delusion, Muharem Bazdulj explores a recognizably Jewish malaise with all the sensitivity and fluency of an insider. The venerable poet Abdullah Sidran composes a tribute that even interposes passages in Ladino, the private language of Sephardic Sarajevo. None of these works read as self-satisfied political statements; they are, rather, superb examples of literary imagination and empathy. There are no prescriptions here for easing Muslim-Jewish relations in other parts of the world (and in other Jerusalems). But given the poverty of voices that pass between the two sides, maybe it’s enough just to intimate another set of terms on which these groups can relate.
Likewise, you will read about the extraordinary wartime efforts of Sarajevo’s Jewish community, which opened its door to all the citizens of the city. Their generosity went far beyond critical needs like food and medicine; they offered classes, cultural events, even contact with the outside world. Community leaders like Jakob Finci, whom you will meet in these pages, attended to their neighbors’ humanity, in all its fullness, across all sectarian lines.
