Description

A memoir by Jasmin Hodzic

Paperback: 164 pages (84 English / 80 Bosnian)
Publisher: Blue Cedar Press (2018)
ISBN: 978-9926-442-89-7
COBISS.BH-ID 24994566 (International)

TELEGRAMS TO ANGEL PALMERAS, is a brief, bi-lingual and powerful book written by Jasmin Hodzic (translated into English by Elmedin Zubovic), telling the true stories of a child facing the tragedy of war. Mr. Hodzic, now a professor at the University of Sarajevo, married and raising children of his own, gives a glimpse of the Bosnian war of the early 1990’s from his viewpoint as a child living with his family in the south of Bosnia, or the region of the second name of the country, Herzegovina. Much of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was related to the rest of the world from the north: Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Tuzla. However, the war, actually two wars, was particularly brutal and bloody in the south, in Herzegovina:  Mostar, Stolac and other towns and regions. Mr. Hodzic uses a style of writing that brings the reader into the childhood of the writer as he tells of the strange, mysterious then the horrors of the war with Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) under siege from the Serbs (1992-3) and then from the Croatians (1993-4). This is a beautiful, powerful and sad book, written in the original Bosnian with an English translation that is excellent and moving.  Blue Cedar Press (Wichita, Kansas) is honored to be asked to reprint this book, with the permission of the author and translator, initially for the Bosnian diaspora community in the United States, but also for any reader interested in a unique, carefully written, portrait of a war childhood.

PRAISE FOR TELEGRAMS TO ANGEL PALMERAS:

“This is another story of the profoundness of human evil but also of the humanity fighting it. An interesting moment in the book is that vengeance is nowhere mentioned; the author, most importantly, manages to focus on sheer testimony.”

—Dr. sc.Esad Boskailo, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, The University of Arizona, and Co-author of Wounded I Am More Awake—Finding meaning after terror.