Šalomounova pečeť – Samokovlija Isak (2017)

A collection of short stories by the Yugoslav dramatist and prose writer. During the last 'Balkan war' in the first half of the 1990s, some Czech journalists, in an effort to understand the reasons behind the Greater Serbian siege and shelling of Sarajevo, occasionally invoked Andrić's characterization of Bosnia as a 'land of hatred and fear,' even though the writer placed this ruthless characterization into the mouth of a literary hero in the 1920 story Letter, who fled from that alleged hatred to (perhaps less hateful?!) Western Europe (then dominated by Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, and those who yielded to the three) and who perished in Spain as a doctor during an air raid on a hospital along with his patients. I have always regretted that these our experts on Bosnia did not also think of a quite different conception of the country at the intersection of four religions, nationalities, and cultures: the conception of the Sarajevo doctor and prose writer Isak Samokovlija, who in his very first story Raf's Courtyard introduces, so to speak, a neighborly Bosnia, where around one courtyard live people of various faiths in peace and the fear of God, and where a Catholic girl naturally prays to the Virgin Mary for a dying Jewish beggar.