November 9, 2023 : Wondercab Mini (54A)
I remember how the initial phases of the post-Yugoslav wars in the early nineties drove Jews in particular into a serious case of cognitive dissonance. After all, during the Second World War, Serbs had behaved relatively well, indeed heroically, with regard to their Jews, by contrast with the Croats whose fascist regime had been closely allied with the Nazis. And now here we were being presented with harrowing images of utterly emaciated, hollow-eyed Croat and Muslim prisoners being warehoused behind barbed wire in Serb concentration camps (like the one in Omarska) in scenes hauntingly reminiscent of the Nazi camps of that earlier era, coupled with ever-more-horrifying accounts of mass ethnic cleansing rampages by Serb militias. And this was all even before we began having to process the seemingly endless siege and bombardment of Sarajevo and the mass-killings at Srebrenica.
So maybe it’s not all that surprising that recent developments in Gaza keep pulling me back to some of the experiences I had reporting from Belgrade in the immediate aftermath of that war. A couple of passages in particular from my “Aristotle in Bosnia” coverage in The New Yorker in February 1997 keep resurfacing in my thoughts (I was there covering the anti-Milosevic student demonstrations that had finally broken out at the war’s conclusion—though not so much, it began to seem, over the fact that Milosevic had fomented the war as that he had gone and lost it), and I reproduce them here, along with a pertinent scene from the film A Man for All Seasons that likewise keeps tolling through my mind these recent days.
Make of them what you will.
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ISRAEL: An analogical precursor
(from my “Aristotle in Belgrade” essay in the Feb 10, 1997 New Yorker, also included in my 2004 Vermeer in Bosnia collection)
The evening I went to see Dragojevic's film, I struck up a conversation with the woman the next seat over and we subsequently went out for coffee. She'd clearly been deeply affected by the film. She told me a bit of her life history—she was thirty years old, a kindergarten teacher; she'd been visiting her brothers in the United States during the late eighties when, overcome with homesickness, she'd made what she described as the mistake of her life, returning to Belgrade just as the country fell apart. She hated Milosevic but was otherwise somewhat confused politically. She was a good person. (I’ve often thought somebody should write a book about the Serbs: When Bad Ideas Happen to Good People.)
I took my time: it takes a while, talking with Belgraders, especially if you’re an American, before you can establish your credentials, that you're not some knee-jerk Serb-hater, but when I thought I’d done so, after an hour or so, I hazarded out upon the topic of Srebrenica. "So a couple dozen Muslims were killed," she shot back defensively. "Why does everybody keep beating us over the head with that?" I suggested it was more than a couple dozen. "Okay, so a couple hundred—it was wartime, what do you expect?" No, I persisted, it was more like several thousand. She hesitated: how did I know? where was the evidence? I explained that I'd been at some of the mass gravesites myself and had heard eyewitness testimony from survivors. I described how men were taken off buses by the hundreds, their arms bound behind their backs, paraded to ditches and machine-gunned in cold blood for hour after hour after hour. She was silent for a few moments, authentically shaken, it seemed. Not that she was hearing all this for the first time, I don't think, but maybe that she was being forced for the first time truly to listen and to take it in.
She sighed and steadied herself. "Well,” she replied at length, "I knew someone in Croatia, a Serbian girl working in a restaurant, and one day these bandits came barging into the place, lined the staff up along a wall, selected one Serb boy at random, killed him, and then told all the others that if they ever so much as breathed a word about it, they'd come back and kill them, too."
I waited for the rest of the story, but it gradually became clear that that was it—there was no more. By my expression it must have been evident that I was failing to fully grasp the moral equivalence between the two episodes.
"The point is," the woman elucidated, "the boy at the restaurant—they stabbed him."
I still wasn't getting it.
"They stabbed him! Can you imagine? Stabbed. I mean, the people in Srebrenica, okay, so there were more of them, but at least there they were machine-gunned, so they all died instantly, mercifully. And each individual can only die once. But try to imagine the agony of that poor Serb boy who was stabbed like that for no reason."
Like I say: Brain damage.
”You never hear of a Serb just dying in battle," as my gruff cop-reporter pal Vasic likes to say. "They're always being ‘butchered’ or 'slaughtered' or' massacred.’"
And indeed, Serbian culture is pickled in the brine of the epic, the heroic, the mythomaniac: the endless cycle of mindless atrocity and atrocious retribution. I had found myself thinking, during my few weeks last summer when I was traveling around the country, that what the people of the Balkans generally, and the Serbs in particular, really needed was a transition from the epic to the tragic, from the Homeric to the Sophoclean: Oedipus, the evidence of his own tortuously tangled complicities staring him full in the face the entire time, and yet he just can't see, he can't see, he can't see, until finally, in a great purging moment of cathartic revelation, the scales fall from his eyes and he does see. He sees, he acknowledges, and somehow he goes on. Or Euripides (who even managed to write a play from the point of view of the Trojan women!) : how in his Bacchae, Agave comes staggering home from her Dionysian revels, exultant, triumphant, brandishing in her arms the bloody lion's head she'd earlier managed (in her ecstatic delirium) to tear free with her own bare hands, only gradually (under the gentle prodding of her horrified father) coming to realize ("I do not understand this question—and yet I am somehow becoming in my full senses, changed from my previous state of mind") that this is no lion's head wrenched clean from its roots but rather that of Pentheus, her own beloved son.
That was the sort of great purging cathartic realization and self-recognition that seemed so desperately called for and yet so endlessly fugitive last summer in Belgrade.
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ISRAEL: An analogical warning
From Robert Bolt’s Thomas More play, A Man for All Seasons.
Sir Thomas More: “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
The same scene from the Fred Zinnemann’s celebrated 1966 film of the play, starring Paul Scofield:
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INSTANT HAPPENSTANCE CONVERGENCE
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ISRAEL: And an analogical coda
(the final section of that “Aristotle in Belgrade” piece)
My last evening in Belgrade I attended an astonishing, free-form modern dance performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth, of all things, choreographed by and starring one of the country's foremost theatrical figures, Sonja Vukiceric, in the harrowing role of Lady Macbeth. I say, "of all things" but it quickly became evident that this was the perfect play for this moment.
No one in the audience needed a playbill to recognize that what was really being alluded to was the tale of Slobodan and Mira Milosevic, their surging lunge for power, and its inevitable, terrifying, blood-drenched denouement. That was the easy part, but Vukicevic was up to something far more sophisticated as well. For she'd made the first third of the piece, the exposition of the initial relationship between Macbeth (played by Slobodan Bestic) and his wife incredibly erotic and engrossing, drawing the audience in, inviting it to remember how thrilling and vivifying and involving that initial lunge for power and territory and glory had been for all of them, and thereby implicating them in all the horrors that were to follow. This, it seemed to me, in a stylized, theatrical context, was precisely the sort of cathartic confrontation with their past that Serbs in general needed to be moving toward.
After the performance I said as much to Borka Pavicevic, the dramaturge and chief doyen of this performance space, the Center for Cultural Decontamination, that, as it turned out, had been hosting evenings like this one throughout the darkest days of the hysteria.
I tried out my theory about the transition from the Homeric to the Sophoclean, suggesting somewhat facetiously that maybe the Aristotle the students really needed to be reading, rather than the Ethics, was the Poetics, with its careful elucidation of the themes of recognition and catharsis.
Mrs. Pavicevic smiled but then replied, "The thing is, before you could have Sophocles you had to have the polis—the possibility, that is, of face-to-face relations between equals. Democracy has to precede catharsis, not the other way around."
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With regard to that last comment of the late Ms. Pavicevic’s, what is most urgently called for now in the Palestinian context are new governing regimes on both the Palestinian and the Israeli sides (I broached that thought as well a couple weeks back in Issue 53A in the context of my discussion of Jerome Karabel’s article)—and if the current American government can’t bring itself to be actively and visibly pursuing that goal (along with several others, including an immediate cease fire, with an equally expeditious provision of adequate and sufficient humanitarian aid, a halt and roll-back of rampaging Israeli West Bank settlement expansion and settler violence against local villagers, and a release of prisoners and hostages on all sides) perhaps here as well.
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Finally, a trio of recommendations. If you haven’t already done so, do watch Representative Rashida Tlaib’s heart-rending speech in her own defense, this past Tuesday, against the ultimately successful Congressional calls for her censure here (and do note and remember the 22 Democrats who went along with that censure, here); and consider as well Fintan O’Toole’s extraordinary survey in the New York Review of Books a few weeks back of the history of the shifting divide between what kept being characterized as “civilized” and “barbarian” forces in Palestine and other former British colonies and protectorates, and how that supposed divide has kept fostering and seeming to sanction massive violations of humanitarian law to this day, here . In addition, a few days ago, Kenan Malik made a similar argument to those Belgrade musings of mine from several decades back, though in his case directly in the context of Gaza, in a piece centered on the hard enduring lessons of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in The Guardian: “In the Middle East, Justice must prevail over moral absolutism.”
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See you next week…
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