The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Bait, by David Albahari. Trans. Peter Agnone
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 117 pp. Paper: $14.95.

In Bait, a poet in exile imagines a story he might write, if he were a writer. Recalling his early life in postwar Yugoslavia while sitting in a restaurant on an island in a Canadian city with a writer friend, David Albahari’s intent Serbian-Jewish intellectual cannot ignore the appeal of a voice from the past. While atrocities in present-day Bosnia and Croatia slide past him, this poet tries to convince Donald, his Canadian friend, that on some reel-to-reel tapes he has carried around with him for years lies a story beyond his ability to express. Donald’s stepfather’s rickety old tape recorder has unearthed a voice, a spoken language, once dear but now nearly forgotten, which enthralls the poet. His mother’s anecdotal recollection of life during and after the Holocaust, surviving two husbands and untold privations, has to be told. Not even Donald’s cajoling skepticism can deflate this conviction. As the disturbing effect of his mother’s confessions ensnares him, far removed in time and space from the source, her only surviving son realizes that his Holocaust is not yet over. After his father’s death in the fifties, Albahari’s unnamed protagonist convinces his mother to record her impressions of her former life, despite her misgivings. Years later, her familiar plain speaking rekindles a sense of his past with unexpected vehemence. Listening to his mother relate her observations, he reels, unnerved by what he believed had been relegated to obscurity. Even hearing his own stumbling efforts to get his mother to say something during their recording sessions becomes almost too painful. As his unwound thoughts careen between past and present, the postwar Balkans and nineties Canada, at the prompting of a haunting reminder of a situation he has never put behind him, Albahari’s poet submits to his worst fears.