Danilo Kiš

Born in 1935 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, to a Hungarian Jewish father and a Montenegrin Orthodox mother, Danilo Kis grew up in a world that was about to be destroyed. His father, Eduard Kis, a railway inspector and author of a quixotic bus and train timetable, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and never returned. Kis and his mother and sister survived the war in hiding in rural Hungary, and the absent father became the gravitational center of his art. He studied comparative literature in Belgrade and became a lecturer in Serbo-Croatian at universities in Strasbourg, Bordeaux, and Lille. A Garden, Ashes (1965) transmuted his wartime childhood into lyric prose of extraordinary compression. Hourglass (1972) reconstructed his father's last days through documents, letters, and bureaucratic fragments. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976), a cycle of stories about victims of Stalinist terror, provoked a ferocious plagiarism accusation from the Belgrade literary establishment, an ordeal Kis anatomized in his polemical essay The Anatomy Lesson (1978). He was a writer who insisted that Central European history could only be told through form, not confession. He moved permanently to Paris in 1979. Lymphoma killed him there on October 15, 1989, at fifty-four, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In January 1942, seven-year-old Danilo watched Hungarian gendarmes take his father from their home during the Novi Sad raid. Eduard was marched to the frozen Danube to be shot alongside hundreds of others, and survived only because the killing paused when the ice hole clogged with bodies.