Na prelomu.

Mihailovich, Vasa D.

The second volume of Sava Jankovic's tetralogy, Na prelomu (Turning Point), covers the period from the summer of 1942 to the spring of 1943 in war-ravaged and occupied Yugoslavia. In the process the protagonist, Slobodan Spasojevic, undergoes a metamorphosis from a young, idealistic high-school student to a soldier in the army of the Serbian president Milan Nedic, fighting the communists and the Croatian ustashe while walking the tightrope of collaboration with the Germans, with the sole aim of saving as many Serbian lives as possible from German reprisals following the rebels' attacks.'

As in no other occupied country, the Germans carried out in Serbia a ruthless policy of killing a hundred Serbs for every German soldier slain and fifty for each one wounded. Spasojevic and other like-minded people used simple arithmetic to reach an appalling conclusion: by employing such tactics, the Germans would need only a few months to wipe out the Serb population altogether, with the help of other Serbian enemies, the ustashe, Hungarians, Albanians, and Bulgarians. Added to the equation was the fact that Hitler carried a World War I grudge against the Serbs; that the Serbs had delayed his attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 did not help matters either. The Serbs' perilous situation is best illustrated by Jankovic's concluding chapter, wherein the Germans are seen getting ready to execute 1,700 Serb civilians in response to the deaths of seventeen of their soldiers at the hands of the partisans. Nedic and Spasojevic's commander save them at the last moment by convincing the Germans that innocent people are not responsible for the acts of the partisans.

All this is made clear through the thoughts and actions of Spasojevic and his comrades. At the very beginning of the second volume, his buddies fight the ustashe and partisans in Bosnia in order to save the Serbs there fleeing for their lives - a frightening parallel to the situation in Bosnia today (and offering some clues to the present conflict as well). Later on, the fighting spreads to Serbia proper. Spasojevic has no doubt that he is on the right side, bolstered by the teachings of a remarkable Serbian (and Yugoslav) politician, Dimitrije Ljotic, who has imbued him and others with devout religiosity, passionate patriotism, and unwavering anticommunism. Most of the novel is devoted to expounding the views of Ljotic and Nedic during this extremely difficult period in Serbian history, thus offering a view of the events that is different from the official line. It is therefore remarkable that the novel was issued by a leading publishing house in Yugoslavia.

Not all of the novel deals with this overriding concern of the people involved. Jankovic, as he did in the first volume (see WLT 70:2, p. 611), skillfully weaves into the plot other elements of life in an occupied country: love affairs, loyal friendships among men, camaraderie, even comic relief. His literary approach is that of a traditional realist, and his language is pure, nonexperimental, tinged with poetry here and there. His dexterity in building the plot and keeping up the suspense is commendable. One senses that, as the action of the novel thickens with the eventual resolution of the war situation, the concluding two volumes will heighten the drama, leading to a crushing end for Spasojevic and his comrades and a triumphant beginning for the victors, the partisans. By then, Jankovic will have left behind a truly dramatic and tragic saga of the people at war in the first Yugoslavia.

Vasa D. Mihailovic University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill