Microcosm of Sarajevo

The bloody civil war in Bosnia during the early 1990’s is summed up through one street that is supposed to be a microcosm of the entire ethnically and religiously diverse city of Sarajevo.

The six-block stretch of Logavina Street included roughly 240 families of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. The author, Barbara Demick, a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries best to depict how all families, hailing from all religions, were impacted.

The key word there is tries.

Demick focuses on four families from the street, all ethnically diverse. And yes, if you wanted to describe Sarajevo at the time, this would be a perfect street to do so. The problem is, Logavina Street wasn’t nearly as impacted as some other areas. A few of the family members of Logavina Street lost their lives, but at the end, the families Demick focused on survived.

Being from the area, I have an unfair (or fair) advantage of how other area really was. Granted, I never been to Logavina Street, but I did live in areas that Demick mentioned such as Grbavica, Dobrinja and Bascarsija.

All the facts in the book are correct. One can easily tell Demick did extensive research on the street and the people of Sarajevo. The number of people that died and the inhumane way people were treated was correctly depicted, just not on the right street to represent the city.

How the families survived was also spot on.

Demick notes that one woman from the street used a variety of canned good, airlifted by the United Nations, to create baked goods, if you can call them goods. Most families survived only on the canned goods, but families such as the Stanic’s, a Serb-Croatian family on Logavina Street, improvised to make the food more edible and enjoyable, mainly for their children.

The chapters were fast-paced and hardly connected. Reading through it, I had to go back to the character list to figure out who was who and where they came from. Some scenes made no sense. For example, Demick spends a good amount of time talking about a “unified” soccer team from Logavina Street that earned national recognition. But the team was hardly unified. Only one Orthodox (Serbian) teen played on the team.

It would have been better to use the soccer team as a microcosm of Logavina Street then it was to use the street to represent the entire city.

Demick mainly focuses on the hardships of Ajla, Haris and Delila, teenagers living in the orphanage house on Logavina Street. Their journey deserves to be told. But the way Demick describes it; it wasn’t true in all cases.

However, Demick beautifully captures the mood of Sarajevans during the war. As she notes, most residents weren’t religious before or during the war. In one scene, Demick describes how 2,000 residents, Muslims, Serbs and Croats, went to mass for Christmas. During the scene, Zijo, a Muslim character in the book, recounts how this was done for tradition, not religion.

There are many instances in the book where the characters describe how they lived in harmony, but towards the end, it turned into bitter spite and hatred.

For example, a resident of the street was Jovan Divjak, an ethnic Serb that was second in command of the Bosnian militia. Throughout the book, Demick notes the mistrust he felt from the Bosnian soldiers, even Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic.

But, it was not uncommon for ethnic Serbs to fight for the Bosnian side. At the beginning of the war, Demick notes that roughly 30 percent of Ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo fought with the Bosnian side. Towards the end, the number dwindled to the teens. Yet, Demick continually notes that Divjak was not trusted and an ethnic Serb.

That was the tone for the majority of the book. As its own body of work, the book describes horrific scenes and general feelings from the Bosnian War through the eyes of long-time residents of Sarajevo. However, it does not paint the entire picture of Sarajevo how Demick intended.

The book is boiled into beautifully written short stories of a few families, mainly Muslim families, and their hardships of the bloody war that let over 100,000 people dead.