cover image 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning

1941: The Year That Keeps Returning

Slavko Goldstein, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Michael Gable. New York Review Books, $32.95 (640p) ISBN 978-1-59017-673-3

"I think I can pinpoint exactly the hour and day when my childhood ended: Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941." In this ambitious mix of history and memoir, Goldstein, a Croatian writer, looks back at WWII and its effects on his life, family, and neighbors. Much of the book is dedicated to the last days of his father, a leftist bookseller who was arrested and later killed at the Jadovno concentration camp in Croatia. However, Goldstein covers a lot of territory as he explores the vicious ethnic warfare between Serbs and Croats from 1941 onward and looks at how the Nazi pogrom further affected his country's Jewish community. The result reads like several books in one, with Goldstein digressing through numerous tangents to provide a thorough accounting. Thus, readers learn about the fate of the family and its bookstore, the brutal tactics of the fascist Ustasha regime, and Goldstein's own activities as a partisan. It's a poignant, uncompromising recollection, told in a meandering but easy-to-follow manner. Though its size will intimidate many readers, Goldstein's book, reconstructed through personal experience as well as numerous interviews and historical documents ("I have placed all my memories under suspicion"), provides invaluable insight into Croatia during WWII. (Nov.)