Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort

A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the reader engaged. The Bosnian–American author Aleksandar Hemon, now in his mid-fifties, takes the risk the better to recollect his past. While no two generations can completely avoid the proverbial gap, he ‘never (until fairly recently) felt guilty about that discontinuity’. The first half of his new book, My Parents, comes across as an attempt to address this guilt.

The family chronology is traced from the early 20th century to the second world war, when Hemon’s parents were growing up, to their upward trajectories in postwar Yugoslavia, to 1993, when another war forced them to move to Canada and build a new life there, and all the way to their ageing together today. Focusing on a range of themes — ‘Homeland’, ‘Music’, ‘Marriage’ — the narrative cuts between the family and the society around it, with its freedoms and lack thereof.