Psalm 44

Although the great Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) also wrote poetry and drama, he is certainly best known in Central Europe, the Balkans, and the world of translation for his novels, such as The Attic (1962), Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972), as well as his sets of interlocking stories — themselves considered rather novelistic by some readers — such as A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) and The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983). With the publication of this novel, Psalm 44, and the simultaneously published stories of The Lute and the Scars, most of Kiš’s fiction has now seen the light of day in English. Significant quantities of his other work have not yet been translated, and hence they have unfortunately not yet factored into the ways most of us categorize, or interact emotionally with, Kiš and his work. Our interest in Kiš’s already intriguing persona, views, and books (the elegiac, almost lapidary prose; the pointed documentary and narrative experiments; and his evocation of history as marginalization, peril, and loss) seems likely only to deepen and become more nuanced as more of his works become available. Ultimately, to access and take account of Kiš’s humor, paradoxes, disdain for party politics, sense of the “revolutionary” in art, and even his linguistic patriotism or at least his acknowledged South Slavic heritage, is to treat Kiš in a responsible and more comprehensive way. It also gives us more to appreciate than just Kiš the restless and sharp-witted postmodernist, polemicizing about his work in the 1970s, or Kiš the “good Serb,” or the “un-Serb,” whose writings were revived in the West in the 1990s as people strove to understand the madness erupting in the wars of Yugoslav succession.

Psalm 44 is, above all, a story about a young family during the Holocaust. Marija, Jakob, and little Jan are at Auschwitz or its associated camps, and most of Kiš’s narrative about the death camp is devoted to a depiction of the miserable and brutal life in its women’s section. Some of the chapters are presented as stream-of-consciousness narrative; others contain lengthy flashbacks; some passages combine the two techniques, often with abrupt returns to the central narrative set in the camp. A reader gets the impression that the characters, like the author, are trying to make sense of the unprecedented events (prejudice and discrimination and persecution in the eyes of a child in the Vojvodina, at first, moving to the mind-numbing terror of the Final Solution) and to find a mode of expressing the experiences of the Shoah in words. We also find brief historical and philosophical references to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and comments on the hollow enterprise that was “Nazi science,” on the nature of Holocaust commemoration in the postwar period, and on West German and American reactions to such remembrance.

The plot and chapter structure are relatively simple, even if the texture of the emotional and allusive prose is not. The characterizations are unique because of the unexpected and fitful ways the relationships and personalities are revealed to us. The characters fight, often in small but significant ways, to maintain a sense of human dignity.