Habitus

by Habitus · 02/23/10

The inaugural issue of the Jewish Review of Books has a historical artifact that should be of interest to Habitus readers. The autobiography of “sage and heresy-hunter” Jacob Emden (1698?-1776) touches on two of our previous destinations, Budapest and Sarajevo. Emden tells the story of his father, a “wealthy man” in Buda and later a rabbi in the “holy city of Sarajevo.”

My revered father escaped from there through a miraculous and wondrous event when the city first came under siege. A fiery ball from a large fire barrel called a cannon came and fell upon the house in which my revered father of blessed memory dwelt. It smashed the house into chips and splinters, and the [cannon] ball killed his first wife together with the young girl he had by her. He was in another adjoining room in the house and it did not harm him at all. He was saved by the mercy of God upon him (Gen. 19:16); it was a miracle. From there he fled and escaped (1 Sam. 19:18) … He was [then] accepted as rabbi in the holy community of Sarajevo and served that congregation, which treated him with great respect, until the siege of Ofen ended. When the city of Sarajevo’s time approached and it too came under siege by the armed forces of the [Prussian] king, may his majesty be exalted, and when he heard that his father and mother were captured, my revered father left and departed from that country and came to the land of Germany.

Best of luck to the Jewish Review of Books on their new venture.

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by Habitus · 02/11/10

Sasha Hemon, who wrote about the essence of his native Sarajevo in Habitus No. 2, has been busy lately, discussing some essential reading, and talking about the future of international literature. He’s also spoken about his recent work editing the anthology Best European Fiction 2010 for Dalkey Archive. That anthology, by the way, includes an excerpt from Igor Stiks’ Elijah’s Chair, which first appeared in an original translation in Habitus No. 2.

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by Habitus · 03/22/07

The photographer Simon Norfolk finds moments of beauty and wonder in the world’s most forlorn landscapes. From Afghanistan to Auschwitz, Norfolk documents the imprints of war—sometimes physical, sometimes physic—on its surroundings. His book Bosnia: Bleed is an impressionistic testimony to the mass slaughter that accompanied the war in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, he focuses on the sites of “secondary mass graves,” where the perpetrators tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. He writes, “They thought that, by intimidation and subterfuge, their dirty secrets could be preserved, held, trapped. Frozen.”

Norfolk spoke to Habitus from his home in Brighton, England.

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by Aleksander Hemon · 03/21/07

The taxi driver who drove me from the airport and, when I observed that the leaves were already beginning to fall, replied: “Why, yes, first watermelons, then lessons,” which, on close analysis, I understood as representing a magic formula to describe the gradual approach of autumn.

The moment when, from Jekovac, after the Ramazan cannon fires to indicate sunset, you see the lights on all the minarets of Sarajevo simultaneously ignite.

The clatter of the first morning tram, echoing through the empty streets of the city.

The coldness of the buildings from the Austro-Hungarian era and the staircases inside them, with their treads worn by the soles that have climbed them for more than a century.

Somun—soft, white bread—(scattered with seeds) from the baker’s in Kovači.

Children’s balls, rolling in the shallow eddies of the Miljacka river.

The beauty of Sarajevo women, who always bear in them the imprint of their own past and their own future; the history of past and future changes: their faces reveal both skinny little girls and mature women, both minxes and careworn matrons.

The sfumato of a cold Sarajevo morning, before the sun steals up behind the mountains, and mist drifts up the slopes.

Škembići—tripe—at Hadžibajrić’s.

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by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/07

In just a few hours, I had traveled the distance between Sarajevo—Europe’s Jerusalem, as it’s been called since Sephardic Jews first settled there after their expulsion from Spain—and its namesake in the heart of the Middle East.

I walked both cities’ streets in the same day—the two cities I know on the planet where churches, mosques, and synagogues seem equally at home; where almost every turn points you towards another history, another ethos, another dream. These are places where multiplicity and division seem to taunt each other, where purity and synthesis make opposing claims on the cities’ authentic nature.

The displaced Spaniards who made their home in Sarajevo saw reflections of the Jerusalem they knew only in their minds’ eye. Somehow the analogy stuck. It’s become a central part of the story that Sarajevans tell about themselves and their city. In my time there, I heard it repeated by Jews and Muslims and Christians, by both locals and foreigners.

It’s the kind of comparison I would normally resist: there should always be room in the world for a Jerusalem, but how many can we take? Still, as much as both cities have changed over the generations, you can see the commonalities. In fact, the congruence has probably only deepened over time, and in ways that no one ever expected or intended. As I spent time in Sarajevo, I found myself thinking more and more about Jerusalem.

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