The best writer from Kosovo

Writing for Kosovo Online: Muharem Bazdulj, writer and journalist

David Albahari died recently, surely you know that. A lot has been written about that death, in practically all media. Albahari was probably the best, and certainly the most globally recognized Serbian writer of his generation. Perhaps also because he was more apolitical than most of his colleagues, it seems that he was equally sincerely lamented by the so-called First and the so-called Other Serbia, so extensive and detailed obituaries were printed for him both in the media close to the authorities and in the media close to the opposition, and he had faithful readers both among "patriots" and among "cosmopolitans".

When a person dies, the shortest possible biography is reduced to the years of birth and death, that is, their locations. Albahari was born in 1948 and died in 2023; Albahari was born in Peja and died in Belgrade. His birth in Kosovo is the result of a large intersection of tragic circumstances. Albahari's father was an officer of the royal army, more precisely a military doctor, so he was taken as a prisoner to a military prison camp in Germany, where he survived the Second World War. Seemingly paradoxical, being a prisoner of war from the ranks of a recognized army was one of the few ways for a Jew to survive the Holocaust, and in a territory controlled by the Nazis. The Nazis didn't care if someone was a lawyer or a craftsman, a banker or a beggar, if he was a Jew, he was destined for extermination. Albahari's father is not the only such example, not even among Serbian Jews. In almost the same way, Stanislav Vinaver survived the Second World War. By the way, as many as 60,000 Jews were among the prisoners of war from the US, British, and French armies held by the Nazis and the vast majority of them survived the war because, in the words of one historian, "contrary to all expectations, they were treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions". According to the civilians, however, there were no conventions, so the first wife of Albahari's father, together with their two children, was killed, as well as most of his relatives. The Nazis also shot the first husband of Albahari's mother, and their two sons died in a train accident. Albahari himself noted somewhere, "Four children had to die for my sister and I to be born."

Ivo Andric was born in Travnik, but he did not spend his childhood there. His connection with Travnik is confirmed through the "Travnik Chronicle" and some short stories such as "The Story of the Vizier's Elephant". Albahari did not spend his childhood in Kosovo either, but it is not that Kosovo is absent from his work. Just for example, in "Bait", perhaps his best novel, there is this fragment, "Then, after the war (...) she literally plunged to Peja. If we hadn't gotten along so well with the Shqiptars, she once said, we would never have overcome the power of that eclipse. Maybe father said that, I'm not sure anymore. The war ended somewhere, but here, in Kosovo, she felt it in her womb, in the new fetus in her womb, it was just beginning. The walls were high, the gates low, the windows protected by bars. (...) And when I was born, they took me to be circumcised in Pristina, where the last group of Kosovo Jews slowly melted and left."

I wasn't lazy; I asked ChatGPT a while ago who the most famous person born in Kosovo was. The answer surprised me a little. It said Mother Teresa, with an explanation that although her hometown of Skopje is today the capital of North Macedonia, at the time of her birth (1910) it was part of the Kosovo vilayet. Then I asked who the most famous writer born in Kosovo was. The answer surprised me even more: Ismail Kadare, truth be told, his hometown of Gjirokaster is in Albania, but it is linked to Kosovo in many ways. Then I asked, ”Where was David Albahari born?” The answer was correct: In Peja, which belongs to today's Kosovo.

Albahari was a Yugoslav and Serbian writer. For himself, half-jokingly, he liked to say that he was a writer from Zemun. He was, in many respects, a Jewish writer. But also, at least by place of birth, in a regional sense, David Albahari is also a Kosovar writer, at least as much as Borisav Pekic from Podgorica or Vladan Desnica from Dalmatia or Branko Copic from Krajina. Among the different perspectives from which it is worth and should be written about Albahari is the native one, and it opens up space for some interesting and revealing insights. After all, in this context, the following detail is also not unimportant: as early as 1990, Rilindja from Pristina published under the title "Fytyra e vdekjes" selected stories of David Albahari in Albanian, translated by Eqrem Basha. It is good that the greatest modern writer born in Kosovo can be read in the Albanian language as well.