Aleksandar Tišma was a Serbian author, editor, translator, and journalist. His own experiences of seeing World War II firsthand as one of Tito’s partisans helped him to write powerful fiction about the effects of the conflict on his country.
Background
Ethnicity:
Aleksandar Tišma’s father was a Serbian and his mother was a Hungarian-speaking Jewish.
Aleksandar Tišma was born on January 16, 1924, in Horgoš, North Banat District, Serbia (a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the time). He was a son of Gavra Tišma, a merchant, and Olga Tišma (maiden name Muller).
Education
Aleksandar Tišma was the only child in the family. He learned several foreign languages from an early age due to his melancholy and art-loving mother.
Tišma’s studies at Serbian Gymnasium in Novi Sad was cut short by the Second World War when his city became occupied by the Nazis.
However, during the war conflict, Tišma pursued his education in Budapest where he learned French language and literature. In 1952, he received a diploma in English and German Literatures and Languages at the University of Belgrade.
The start of Aleksandar Tišma’s career can be counted from his military service at the end of World War II. During the last year of the conflict, he was a member of Tito’s guerilla movement.
After the war, he worked as a journalist in several Serbian periodicals, including Bilten and Borba. From 1945 to 1949, Tišma served at Slobodna Vojvodina and Borba newspapers. In 1958, he joined the staff of the oldest cultural-scientific institution Matica srpska where he served as an editor till 1982.
It was during this period when he started to contribute reviews of foreign literary periodicals like Letopis and tried himself as a translator from Hungarian, then from German. Letopis published one of Tišma’s first original stories ‘Ibikina kuća’ (Ibiza's house). Boško Petrović and Mladen Leskovac praised his prose and encouraged him to write poetry as well.
The trip the writer made to Paris at the age of thirty-three inspired him on first travelogues which saw publication upon his return to Serbia in 1958. It was an ascent of his career as a writer. During the following years, Tišma issued a couple of short story collections, ‘Krivice’ (Faults) and ‘Krčma’ (Tavern), and a travelogue ‘The Meridians of Central Europe’.
Another turning point in Aleksandar Tišma’s career was related to his trip to Poland. Since then, Judaism and the Holocaust became the main topics of his writings. The most emblematic of such stories was a 1978 ‘Skola Bezboznistva’ (The School of Godlessness), in which a fascist interrogates a communist prisoner and tortures him to death while the fascist’s own son is seriously ill. A 1976 novel ‘Upotreba coveka’ was published in English in 1988 under the title ‘The Use of Man’. It was a group portrait of a set of characters who survive World War II physically but not spiritually. The narrative was organized around the postwar discovery of a diary written by a lonely woman.
Tišma returned to similar themes in his 1987 novel ‘Kapo’, published in English in 1993 under the same title. Like its predecessor, this work presented the author's view of life. A kapo was a concentration camp prisoner who was placed in charge of other prisoners and therefore enjoyed limited privileges.
Although Aleksandar Tišma supported pro-democratic movements of his home country, he stood apart from the membership of any political group. In 1993, in protest with Slobodan Milošević policy, the author relocated to France and stayed there for three years.
Views
In his writings, Aleksandar Tišma touched such eternal questions as the search of freedom which is inevitably related to suffering, violence, horror, and guilt.
Membership
Aleksandar Tišma was admitted to Vojvodinian Academy of Sciences and Art as a corresponding member in 1979 and became its regular member by 1984. He also was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1991, and of the Academy of Arts, Berlin since 2002.
Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Art
,
Serbia
1979
Academy of Arts, Berlin
,
Germany
2002
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
,
Serbia
1991
Personality
Aleksandar Tišma spoke English, German and French fluently.
Connections
Aleksandar Tišma married Sonia Drakulić on January 19, 1952. The family produced a son named Andrej.