Saving the Sounds of Sarajevo
An upcoming book will shed light on a World War II freedom fighters’ Haggadah.

By Ilan Ben Zion
D irty jokes told by gun-
toting, Ladino-speaking,
Jewish Communist par-
tisans in Bosnia are not the
first thing that usually comes
to mind when talking about the
Holocaust. A book soon to be
published in English, however,
may change that perception as
it sheds light on a lesser-known
story about Jews during the
Second World War.

The Partisan Haggadah is
a bawdy, grotesque parody of
the Passover tale composed by
a Jewish guerilla fighter, which
Sarajevo’s Jewish community
continued to recite each year at
the end of the seder for decades
after the war. Through frank
vulgarity and disjointed as-
sociation of the sacred and the
mundane, the comedic account
of partisans fighting (and flee-
ing from) the Nazis distills the
essence of the Bosnian Jewish
experience. Bosnians, especially the Jews
that have called Sarajevo home
since the 16th century, are “hard
working at being funny,” ex-
plained Professor Eliezer Papo,
author of Fighting, Laughing
and Surviving, which examines
the unique riff on the Passover
story. Told in a blend of Ladino
and Serbo-Croatian
corre- sponding with Aramaic lines
from the Passover seder, the
Partisan Haggadah provides
a glimpse of the brutal real-
ity of guerilla warfare against
the Nazis, stripped of the glo-
ry commonly accorded to the
fallen. Refrains of dayenu —
“enough!” — recount the anti-
Fascist partisans’ advances
and retreats; fatigued fighters
bemoan how unrelenting rains
left the ragtag troops “soaked
like rats, like monkeys — dear
God — from great fear we wet
our pants.”
Humor is “a cultural im-
perative” in the multiethnic
Balkans, explained Papo as
we sat in his south Jerusalem
apartment bedecked with para-
phernalia from back home —
swords and flintlock pistols,
paintings of Bašaršija, old Sara-
jevo’s iconic main pigeon-filled
square and miniature model
4 MARCH 19, 2015
mosques, his
bookshelves weighed down with innumera-
ble tomes on Jewish literature.

An expert in Sephardic litera-
ture at Ben-Gurion
University of the
Negev by profes-
sion, with a knack
for storytelling, he
said comedy was
the ideal instru-
ment for a religious
group to vent frus-
tration. Papo grew up
as an active mem-
ber of the Sarajevo
Jewish community
before moving to
Israel in the 1990s
after the outbreak
of civil war in Yu-
goslavia. While
Jewish comedy is
typically associ-
ated with Yiddish-
keit, he pointed
out that Sephardic
Jews for centuries
had a rich tradition
of parody — typi-
cally playing off the
familiar material
found in the Hagga-
dah. The Partisan Haggadah is
just one piece of a larger mosaic
of Ladino parodies that date
back at least to 1789, and were
popular among Sephardim
from Suriname to Istanbul.

Before World War II, Saraje-
vo was 20 percent Jewish, home
to eight synagogues and over-
whelmingly Sephardic. The
city fell to the Fascist Ustase
regime in 1941 after Yugosla-
via was invaded, occupied and
divided between the Axis pow-
ers. Over the course of the war,
10,000 of the country’s 14,000
Bosnian Jews were killed.

Many Yugoslav Jews fled to
the Italian-controlled sectors
along the coast, where Ital-
ian authorities interred them
in concentration camps, but
didn’t engage in systemic mass
murder of Jews like the Ustase
or Nazis.

Šalom “Šani” Altarac was
one of the several thousand
Jews who were interned at the
Rab concentration camp off the
coast of modern-day Croatia.

With Italy’s surrender in Au-
gust 1943, Altarac and 244 other
young, untrained Jewish men
and women formed a Jewish
Sani Altarac
battalion. Altogether, 691 Jews
fought in Yugoslav leader Josip
Broz Tito’s 7th Partisan Divi-
sion; 100 died before the end of
the war.

“When the partisans arrived
from Crikvenica on the Island
of Rab, whoever wanted to join
the partisans could join them,”
recounted fellow camp survi-
vor Elvira Kohn years later.

“A group of young Jewish boys
registered and was sent to Kor-
ski Kotar. Most of them didn’t
know how to use weapons —
many of them lost their lives
soon after they were liberated
from Rab.”
Altarac, 29 years old when
the camp was liberated, was a
talented wordsmith and musi-
cian. Scion of a prominent Sa-
rajevo Jewish family, he had
received an extensive Jewish
education. Isak Levi, a fellow
camp prisoner and, later, a par-
tisan, recalled in an interview
with Papo that “in the most dif-
ficult times of World War II, in
the times of the persecution of
PASSOVER PALATE
the Jews, [Altarac] succeeded
with his humor to stir within
us a type of hope in some bet-
ter tomorrow that is about to
come.” Altarac
be- came an educa-
tion officer and
the following
spring performed
a sort of stand-up
routine for the
Jewish partisan
troops hiding in
the thickly wood-
ed mountains of
the Yugoslavian
hinterland. It was
a parody of the
familiar Passover
Haggadah, sung
to a traditional
Sephardic tune
and accompanied
by guitar, and it
reframed Holo-
caust life in the
mold of an ageless
story of redemp-
tion. The familiar
opening lines
of the Passover
story as recited at
the beginning of the seder are
rendered at the opening of the
Partisan remix thusly:
“This is the bread of afflic-
tion — what a severe situation;
That our ancestors ate —
woe unto us;
In the land of Egypt — chok-
ing and drowning am I.

Let all who are hungry come
and eat — miserable suffering
and great pain.

Let all who are in need come
celebrate Pesach — planes and
great fear.

Now we are here — lice and
fleas as a gift.

In the land of Israel as free
men — until Comrade Stalin
rescues us.”
The irreverently told story is
peppered with colorful charac-
ters such as a “well-hung fellow,”
“the fat whore” and Jakica Abi-
nun, who “said that Levi Miša
taught him to say [to the British]
that he constantly pisses.”
As a young man growing
up in Sarajevo in the 1970s and
‘80s, Papo would hear the elders
reciting snippets of Altarac’s
parody from memory after the
famed ex-partisan songwriter
died in 1975. Intrigued by the
story he only partly under-
stood, Papo asked his friend,
who happened to be Altarac’s
grandson, whether there was a
hard copy of the Partisan Hag-
gadah anywhere. Altarac, who
went blind in 1963, had appar-
ently never written his routine
down, but had taken pains to
record himself singing it to mu-
sical accompaniment.

Papo made a copy of the tape
recording in 1989 and brought
it with him to Israel in 1991.

During the ensuing Yugoslav
civil war, when Sarajevo came
under a brutal two-and-a-half-
year siege, the original was de-
stroyed. (Only years later, after
presenting a paper on the sub-
ject, did he find an alternative,
cleaned-up version that Alterac
wrote down for a friend.)
In his book, which was first
published in Hebrew in 2012,
Papo renders the original text
into English. While some of the
nuance — let alone the rhyme
scheme — is lost, Altarac’s
blend of satire and anguish is
universal. “How is this night differ-
ent,” a stanza opens with one of
the familiar four questions in
Hebrew — “This whole deal is
worthless,” comes the response
in Serbo-Croatian.

“From all other nights? —
Hitler is the beast of beasts.

On all other nights — [Ustase
leader Ante] Paveli is an idiot,
too. We eat — and they drive a
nail into us.

And tonight it’s all matzah
— and we ate only corn mush.”
While Bosnian Jews have al-
ways had a unique connection
with Passover (the Sarajevo
Haggadah, a magnificent 14th-
century Spanish manuscript
that survived two Inquisitions,
the Holocaust and the civil war,
is the community’s most re-
vered artifact), under commu-
nism it became the central holi-
day for Yugoslav Jews, and was
rebranded as an ethnic rather
than religious festival.

The survivors of the war,
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