Danilo Kiš

Danilo Kiš was a Yugoslav novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. His best-known works include Hourglass, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, and The Encyclopedia of the Dead. Kiš was born in Subotica, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Serbia). Kiš was the son of Eduard Kiš (Hungarian: Kis Ede), a Hungarian-speaking Jewish railway inspector, and Milica (née Dragićević), a Serbian Orthodox Christian from Cetinje. 

His father was born in Austria-Hungary with the surname Kohn but changed it to Kiš as part of Magyarization, a widely implemented practice at the time. Kiš's parents met in 1930 in Subotica and married the following year. Milica gave birth to a daughter, Danica, in Zagreb in 1932 before the family relocated to Subotica.

Kiš's father was an unsteady and often absent figure in Danilo's childhood. Eduard Kiš spent time in a psychiatric hospital in Belgrade in 1934 and again in 1939. Kiš visited his father in the hospital during one of his later stays. This visit, in which, Kiš recalled his father asking his mother for a pair of scissors with which to commit suicide, made a strong impression on young Danilo.

For many years, Kiš believed that his father's psychological troubles stemmed from alcoholism. Only in the 1970s did Kiš learn that his father had suffered from anxiety neurosis. Between stays in the hospital, Eduard Kiš edited the 1938 edition of the Yugoslav National and International Travel Guide. Young Danilo saw his father as a traveler and a writer. Eduard Scham, the eccentric father of the protagonist of Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass, is largely based on Kiš's own father.

Kiš's parents were concerned with the rising tide of anti-Semitism all around Europe in the late 1930s. In 1939, they oversaw three-year-old Danilo's baptism into the Eastern Orthodox Church in Novi Sad, where the Kiš family resided at the time. Kiš later acknowledged that this action likely saved his life since, as the son of a Jewish convert to Christianity, Danilo would probably have been subject to persecution without definitive proof of his Christian faith.

In April 1941, Hungarian troops, in alliance with Nazi Germany, invaded the northern Yugoslavian province of Vojvodina. After Hungary declared war on the Allied powers in 1941, the territory was annexed, and officials began to persecute Jews in the region. On January 20, 1942, gendarmes and troops invaded Novi Sad, and two days later, gendarmes massacred thousands of Serbs and Jews in their homes and around the city. 

Eduard Kiš was among a large group of people rounded up and taken by the gendarmes to the banks of the frozen Danube to be shot. Eduard managed to survive only because the hole in the ice where the gendarmes were dumping the bodies of the dead became so clogged with bodies that the commanders called for the officers to stop the killing. Kiš later described the massacre as the start of his "conscious life."

Following the massacre, Eduard relocated his family to Kerkabarabás, a town in southwest Hungary. Danilo attended primary school in Kerkabarabás. Through 1944, Hungarian Jews were largely safe, as compared to Jews in other Axis-occupied countries, since Hungarian officials were reluctant to hand over Jews to the Nazis. However, in mid-1944, authorities began to deport Jews en masse to concentration camps.

Eduard Kiš was sent to a ghetto in Zalaegerszeg in April or May 1944, then was deported to Auschwitz on July 5. Eduard, along with many of his relatives, was murdered in Auschwitz. Danilo, Danica, and Milica, perhaps owing to Danilo and Danica's baptism certificates, were saved from deportation.

Kiš's father's murder had a massive impact on his work. Kiš crafted his own father into Eduard Scham, the father of the protagonist of Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass. Kiš described his father as a "mythical figure" and would continually claim that his father had not been murdered in Auschwitz but had "disappeared."