The youngest member of the famous Yugoslav quartet went to the eternal hunting grounds. Filip David did not want to betray his friends. He also died of cancer. Like Danilo Kiš, 1989, Paris, Borislav Pekić, 1992, London, Mirko Kovač, Rovinj 2013. Flip David, Belgrade, 2025. Four champions. And there is cancer for the champion. As Zoran Radmilović said in the buffet of Atelje 212.
Filip David's first stories were praised by Ivo Andrić in an interview for Evening news. It was the mid-sixties, and David had not yet published his first book. A well in a dark forest. Kovač reminded me that, among the younger writers, Andrić singled out Kiš and David in that conversation. Flip's stories follow the romantic tradition, whose forerunner was Novalis, Hymns of the night. At the beginning is ET Hofman and his history Princess Brambila i Miss Skiddery. From Hoffmann Golden pot Two writers emerged whose poetics were closest to David's: Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. John Bartain's watch I need E. Birsa as a rhyme for the end of this essay.
In an early story Box David writes: Outside, swollen flowers were splashing, and the windows were stained with fragrant blood. This image of a flower and a window, and the letter R trotting like blood across the plain, leads to that refrain from the song the Raven: Never more. To Poe's stories In the Depths of the Maelstrom, The Well and the Pendulum, The Devil of Perversion, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death... In David's stories, as in EA Poe's, the erotic is closely associated with death: Death is born where love is strongest. Or: The abyss opens when a person is at his most carefree. Stories are built on this principle. happy anger Philip David. The moon rules in these stories. November. And the heroes make the Moon nervous. And death breathes easily in David's stories. It is so close to the reader. At a distance no longer or shorter than a knife. As in the story A poem about celestial chariots: Swear that you will always love me, that you will be faithful to me forever. And as she held out her lips to him in ecstasy, the young man felt a terrible passion for her... but when her eyes came close to his, his intoxication disappeared; under the thick black eyelashes, he saw nothing but a deep emptiness, then in them appeared the edges of the gray sky, on which tiny chariots were riding. He, terrified, shouted at his wife; she did not even flinch, she fell asleep forever in his arms. If only a moment earlier he had touched hers with his lips, he would have been dead... kissing him, she breathed the breath of death into him.
Fantasy in Yugoslav literature does not have a rich tradition. From that fantastic heritage that is close to David, I would like to highlight from memory: Doctor Mišić's dream Šandor Ksaver Đalski and his story night. So talk Mouse Antun Gustav Matoš... A record of my cousin Maria's gifts Momcilo Nastasijevic, Garden of the Blessed Women Miloš Crnjanski. I still can't remember who else influenced Filip David, because true masters always leave something out. It's a bottomless grave: The secret of Makarger's ravine. David followed Singer's instructions: write about what you love most. In a way no other writer had ever done.
The Kinoteka also influenced Filip David. I still remember when I was a boy and a student change on Kosovska Street in Belgrade, young men existentialist, thin, pale, with big dark circles under their eyes. And girls in black suits, always with straight hair. I remember expressionist films that made an impression on David: Tired death i Metropolis Fear Near, Night walks i Nosferatu F.W. Murnau, bye Doctor's office Calgary Roberta Vine, G Pola Wegener and Karla Bezea, Mummy Ma's Eyes Ernst Lubich and, my favorite, and the best Street and number Karl Grune. The moonlight from those films shimmers in David's stories.
And the Japanese masters?, Filip asks me in the Media Center. Milan Đorđević smiles and remains silent. I try to remember and start from Streets of shame Misogyny and his O Haru, the legendary Ugetsu, Keneto Shindu with Onibaba and Naked Island, then Diary of a Thief... Nagiše Ošima i his The Realm of the Senses and the Realm of Passion. And finally Kurosawa Drunk angel, pa Bloody throne movies The wicked sleep peacefully.
In a monograph on Filip David, these titles could be chapter titles. What a treasure of evil and anxiety sleeps in David's stories.
The boy who saw what no one else saw
In the story Prince of Fire and is Filip plemić plama (for the book Prince of Fire David received the Andrić Prize). In one of Aharon ben Shamel Hamasi's experiences, I easily recognize an important chord in David's autopoetics: The first story from which the others emerge and into which they then merge is recorded in part in the Chronicles of Ahimaz in Hebrew, in rhymed prose.
It is difficult to achieve the poetic in prose. Filip David succeeds in this. In his stories, fantasy (or) the occult rhymes with the landscape: ruins, dark forest, inn, castle, hospital, crossroads, madhouse, wilderness. Costume and props (candle, knife, box, bell, brick) rhyme with quotes from the Torah, Kabbalah, and the Gospel. Rhyming quotes from Hasidic stories and Stanley Fleming's Hallucinations, theater rhymes No and the Moon's shadow theater, death and love rhyme, Dibuk i Golem, number and letter.
David writes rarely, as if he were dipping his pen in blood. Fragrant. And the color? Purple. And why purple, I don't know. Or is it the color of David's fantasy? Some other time I will write something about the role of the music box in David's stories, about the similarities and differences of his stories with the stories of his friends Pekić, Kiš, Kovač. About the sculpture of Matija Vuković and David's Sumatraism. I know that David knows that I did not mention his secret teachers, Marcel Švob, Aleksandar Grin and the other Marcel, Marcel Eme. I am happy that I managed to persuade Filip to write two stories: A dream about love and death i To die in Madrid.
Mirko Kovač introduced me to David. A thousand and two nights at the Metropol Hotel. And now into a footnote as if into a hug. In Book of letters 1992-1995 (Feral Tribune, Kovač-David correspondence), Kovač writes about our meeting in Trieste in 1994. Boba and a friend were there, as well as a friend and Mr. Bogdan Tanjević. In the same letter, Kovač writes about the Koprivica cemetery in Šake: There is the grave of Filip Koprivica with an engraved six-pointed star. At a meeting in the garden Last chances on Taša Filip agreed to join the Montenegrins and B. to join the Jews. David supported an independent Montenegro all these years as if he were a native of Cetinje.
I know for sure that Aleksandar Tirnanić, Mr. Oxford, the creator of the Olympic team (Beara, Stanković, Crnković, Čajkovski, Horvat, Boškov, Ognjanov, Mitić, Vukas, Bobek, Zebec) said that Filip David could have played. clutch about the young Partizan team. Like Vladica Kovačević. And I know for sure that the barefoot boy from the story Little ducklings Filip David: One boy was different from the others. He had blue eyes with deep circles under his eyes and blond hair as soft as silk, a transparent face; he trembled like a plant with every breath of wind, he could hear voices coming from afar and see what no one saw... He passed quietly on tiptoe, between the boys who were breathing evenly in their sleep; at one point he stopped with some anxiety not to wake them, it seemed that he was passing through their dreams.
My friend Filip David also passed through my dream and did not wake me up. I will remain in the magical stories of Filip David. I love dreams the most- The story of the Turkish watchmaker. (That's a rhyme for the story John Bartain's watch): No numbers anywhere, just a dull ticking. That was the clock. The dish passed from hand to hand: everyone was horrified, no one said a word until Mr. Richard They don't cry out: these are human hearts, my God!
Time is measured only by the heart. The clock is ticking, but my life has stopped, says a distant friend of mine. Tick-tock. Time is measured by the heart of Filip David. It is not the end.
The sound followed me, driving me crazy.
Claude Lanzmann made a documentary film Shoah about the suffering of Jews in concentration camps. It was FEST in 1987. The film lasts nine and a half hours. A Hundred Jews and Me in the Sava Center. In the Holmno camp, seventy kilometers from Lodz, 400 Jews were killed. Only two camp inmates survived. One of those two was a thirteen-year-old boy, Simon Srebrnik. In January 000, the fascists began to kill the last prisoners. They beat them with iron rods, then shot them in the back of the head. They also shot Simon the boy in the neck. He had a beautiful voice, they made him sing while the boat sailed down the river. And the criminals enjoyed it. A Polish peasant found him half-dead and dragged him to a pigsty. And a Russian military doctor cured him. Claude Lanzmann convinced Simon to come to Holmno after so many years. The two of them stand alone in a meadow surrounded by forest, an idyllic picture. The foundations of a brick hut are visible, overgrown with tall grass: It has always been peaceful here, just like now. And then when they were burning two thousand people a day. Silence. Filip David also writes about this silence in his novel The house of memories and oblivion. Silence like a butterfly on the snow. Silence like a noise, like a scream. Silence like the clatter of silence in the silence of the novel's prologue: That sound often occurs... Boom-chiha-boom-chiha-boom... The sound followed me... It drove me crazy... Suddenly it stopped... But I knew it would come back.
I know he'll call. Freight trains/livestock wagons/the colors of liver and blood/a long composition/laden with banal Evil/banal fear/despair/banal children, women/girls/in the very spring of life/you hear that cry/for one sip of water/for one sip/all of humanity screams/for one sip/of banal water.
This is Tadeusz Ruzewicz, his poetry rhymes with David's prologue. David's novel is composed as a sonnet and as an ancient tragedy. Silence as Noise and Four Boys Who Escaped the Holocaust by a Twist of Fate. Albert Weiss, Uriel Cohen, Misha Wolf, Solomon Levi: Soon the nights will come/when, like wandering actors/we will bleed each other/in each other's dreams. David's boys, now old men, are in the sign of, as these scholars would say, a change of identity. They have all lived a century under someone else's, spare name. Such a wound in childhood hurts the most. Beauty comes from the wound. Pain leads to loneliness, to a nightmare, to a terrible energy. And Filip David at the table as Albert Weiss: His temple is white/like an ember that has gone out. Philip's fire will never die. This is a book that, like Giacometti's sculptures, addresses the dead. I am convinced that Cohen, Weiss, Levi, Wolf knew that their suffering would be healed in Philip David's house of memory. Albert Weiss, an eight-year-old boy, with his brother Elijah, two years old, and his parents Isaac and Sarah, was in the cattle car of death. Albert's father, whose family tree also includes Harry Houdini, the illusionist, managed to make a hole in the wagon's planks with a knife hidden in his boot. He threw Elijah out first, and a little later Albert. The eight-year-old boy was left alone in the snowy whiteness, and his brother Elijah had disappeared. The boy searching for his brother in the forest was found by a forester, the Volksdeutscher Johan Kraft. He kept an icon of St. George and a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall in the house. Or David's humor at the heart of the tragedy. Humor and change of rhythm in a different type of letter: diary, newspaper report, discussion about Kabbalah, about mysticism, about medicine, about dreams, about miracles... The son of Johan Kraft and Ingrid disappeared in the whirlpool of the Danube. And the unhappy mother wanted to replace her son Hans with Albert. They start forbidden games a boy who doesn't want to forget his brother and parents. The games begin on Hans's birthday. Albert saw Hans's picture on the wall, as if he saw himself in a mirror. That's how he was designed. Then he took down the picture, broke the frame, threw it on the floor, stomping furiously on the pieces of broken glass. The cruelty of adults as in the movie Forbidden games Rene Kleman, infects the boy. Or from nobility, to anger, to hatred, from madness to suicide. Johan Kraft locked Albert in the pantry to punish him. In the eyes of his wife Ingrid he saw hatred. The mastery of David or the pain of the Volksdeutscher burns the reader's fingers: "I went out into the yard, got on my bike and headed for the German command. I went around the command building several times. I swear, I didn't report him. I didn't find anyone in the house. Not the boy, not Ingrid. My heart sank, I was overcome by panic from the silence that reigned in the house. I went through the dining room, the bedroom, the utility rooms, and went out the back entrance, the one from the yard. There on the porch, over the upper railing, a rope was thrown, on which my Ingrid was hanging. I never saw that boy again.". ''
In the family history of Albert Weiss, I recognize many elements from David's biography. This can be easily verified in the letters that David sent to Kovač in Rovinj from 1992 to 1995. A large number of close members of David's family, both on his father's and mother's sides, perished in the camps. On his father's side in Jasenovac and Đakovo, and on his mother's side in Kragujevac October and at the Old Fair. In no other book has he left his autobiographical mark as in this novel. This is the book he had to write, it is a testamentary book in which Filip David looks fascism, evil, in the eye. This is the literary crown of David's civic, ethical and literary courage. A book of resistance and rebellion.
The bizarre fact that Harry Houdini is a close relative of Albert Weiss partly explains David's penchant for fantasy. Unique in Yugoslav literature. It is amazing how the poem about Houdini written by Elo Mendel, a Russian Jew, rhymes with the novel House of Memory and Forgetting: He knew, I suppose/that coffins are metaphors/he knew how to distinguish/the most fantastic rhythms/that unwind from the rope, and echo/in the chain/he knew the metric of the deepest waters. I think of him as I listen to the word:/that the chains, the cells, the handcuffs speak/especially the deep ones/the words of the coffins/to save oneself/to save oneself/says that strange Harry/while all those chains/sang around his feet.
I love you, it's so short, yet so hard to say
It is a haiku by an unknown Japanese poet, all great poets are unknown. In the tenth chapter, the musician, composer Miša Brankov in To the Jewish community receives a tin box for sweets and biscuits. The box was found by workers digging a canal for a new water pipe at the Old Fairgrounds. The box contains a letter and an unfinished composition written by Avram Volf in the camp before he and his wife Ilda entered a truck, a gas chamber, which was circulating through the streets of Belgrade. When he was two years old, Miša's parents took him to the Brankov family farm. And so he lived to be seventy years old, believing that he was the brother of Kosta Brankov. This novel is a dedication to those courageous, honest Serbs who hid Jewish families, risking their lives. Filip David's family also spent the war in the village of Manđelos, in Vojvodina. The entire village sheltered them. Filipa with her mother and brother, and her father was in the partisans. Miša goes to the farm to visit his brother Kosta. The brothers go to the cemetery to light candles for their parents: "Why didn't they tell me? They couldn't imagine you going to an orphanage... They swore me not to tell you. They loved you maybe even more than I did."
"The first drops of rain are starting to fall... Kosta takes a step, approaches Misha. He hugs him. -"Forgive me, Misha - what, Kosta? What should I forgive you for? - Well, that's it. Forgive everything."
Forgiveness has the power of catharsis. Forgive what happened to your parents, forgive for final solution Jewish question. Forgive me for giving Milan Nedić an order from the leader of the Third Reich for Serbia. clean from Jews. Forgive me for four decades, the traitors and criminals, Ljotić, Mihailović, Nedić, Kalabić, have been glorified. Forgive me for having so many followers among Šešelj and his bastard Vučić (pathological criminals), the scum and the scum. But the end is in sight for them. Forgive me for having the Staro sajmište Jewish camp, a mockery of Belgrade. With dilapidated pavilions and small huts. This is a book against forgetting crimes. There are still bloody traces on the clogs and hands of the fascists. That blood does not evaporate. That is a crime forever.
"The rain is falling harder and harder. But they don't move." Brothers Kosta Brankov and Miša Volf do not move. This scene would have appealed to the master of melodrama, Douglas Sirk, whom Fassbinder loved very much. This chapter is a tribute to the film by Goran Paskaljević When the day dawns for which David wrote the script.
Avram Wolf left behind small bequest to his son - an unfinished composition because he knew that music is stronger than all the horrors that await them. He knew that Hasidic music carries the voice of father to son. Just as he knew that Misho would complete that composition. And as he hears his father's melody, Misho sees in a phantasmagoria how the truck door opens, soul-sucking. He hears roll call Jews like in the movie The Finci-Kontini Garden: Mandil Avram, Mandil Eva, Tajnher Oto, Rajs Artur, Koen Ester, Levi Josif, Švarc Geza, Kalderon Moša, Kalef Lenka, Naayudas Luna, Adanja Hajm, Melamed Moša, Đurković Adela, Kalmić Isak, Semo Lazar, Amar Somonov, Demajo, Jakha Berjoov, Koen Koen Josif, Beraha Moša, Vajner Ana, Singer Charlotte, Singer Greta...
Three dots mean if one name is forgotten, one victim, then a requiem, then the account is not clean. History rounds the skeletons to zero. A thousand and one is still a thousand. That one seemed not to exist, an imaginary fruit, an empty cradle. One, a man swayed on a skewer of barbed wire. David or Isaiah: I will forever name each of them. Misha Volf hears a voice calling out to Avram and Ilda Volf, he wants to shout something to his parents before entering the gas chamber, but his voice stops in his throat. Like a stutter.
David chose memory because I reaped nothing but pain. That's Hölderlin. Like I'm sorry. David knows that whatever happens, wherever it may be, remains on the waters of Babylon. Every moment remains like the sound of the Psalm: Day to day proves, night to night proclaims... their story goes out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the earth. He set up a dwelling for the sun on them.
Filip was a great ball player. And here's how he dribbled past me in the last chapter of the novel - Hidden order. It seemed to me that this last chapter, regardless of the prologue, should end with the embrace of the two brothers Albert and Elijah. That the appearance of their parents was a melodramatic excess. And then came Filip's dribbling in the last two sentences: Albert doesn't dare open his eyes. And the noise in his head is getting louder.
Noise or silence, all the same, 1:0 for David. This essay on David's stories and novel is schizophrenic, but whatever. And so for the end a symphony in four hands. Marina Tsvetaeva and Danilo Kiš from Ending poems:
Outside the city! Do you understand? Outside the city?/Out? Let's cross the ramparts floor? /Life is a place where life suffers:/ The Jewish quarter... /Isn't it then a hundred times more worthy/To become an eternal Jew?/Because for everyone who is not/A scoundrel, the Jewish pogrom is alive./Life. It is only alive for the baptized!/ Sheep-to-the-slaughter! I publicly trample my residence permit with my feet! With a cry/ I trample it! For David's shield/Revenge! -The mud is hot in the body!-Isn't it delightful that the Jew/didn't want to live?! Ghetto of the chosen! From the ramparts and the ditch!/Don't wait for mercy from anyone! In this most Christian of worlds/ the poets are-Jews.
The poet is Filip David. You ate fear as a child, my friend. And for half a century you have been resisting with dignity. Ethically and aesthetically, revolutionary and partisan. You were a Partizan fan. You paved the way for the Chetnik scum to be wiped out. Thanks to you, I became a fierce Jew. Happy new life to you, prince of revolt, Filip David. It's not the end. Finally the secret password, finally the secret password has been signaled. Now is the time. Attack, because the sounds of jazz are heard. And the cowards surrender.
Or, a ballad in honor of Filip: My job is so hard/I paint the sky every morning/while you all sleep/wake up and look, it's blue/someone once tore the sea apart/you don't know who sewed it: me/to soar into the sky under the clouds/and that's my task....
At noon on April 14, Filip David threw himself from the rock of Sto rabbi Melek. He heard the heartbeat of the world and his own heart. In which of the countless worlds he will find himself, we will see, in Filip's new story, The Green Blueness in David's Garden.
Bonus video:
