Sara und Serafina

A young couple is to be smuggled out of besieged Sarajevo using forged baptismal documents. The operation fails. The rescuers involved are tormented by guilt. Serafina, the mother, cannot bear the loss of her daughter and the destruction of a love, and decides to die. Just twenty minutes separate the beginning and the end of the novel, yet the story, told like a time spiral, reaches back to 1942, when Serafina, who called herself Sara, wanted to follow her Jewish friend to Auschwitz. Dzevad Karahasan, the most significant poetic chronicler of Bosnia alongside Ivo Andric, has documented the magic and tragedy of his hometown more relentlessly than in this book.