With Their Backs to the World- Portraits from Serbia-Asne Seierstad

Serbia is one of the most peculiar, yet fascinating countries in the world, yet With Their Backs to the World is perhaps one of the only non-academic accounts of modern Serbia that isn’t focused primarily on Serbian atrocities during the Balkan wars of the 1990’s. Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, and A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal, is a brave journalist that has the courage to ask the difficult questions and the good judgment to avoid clichéd reporting. This is a nuanced and balanced portrait of the Serbs told through the lives of a convicted war criminal’s wife, a musician, a senior citizen that lives in the countryside, a journalist, a political reformer, a nationalist politician, an orthodox priest, Kosovo Serb refugees, and a liberal student. In reading about the lives of the Serbs profiled in each chapter, the reader gains insights into a beleaguered and often misunderstood people.

Serbs want to join the E.U. yet many are still focused on historical grievances and perceived injustices. They believe that the world has demonized them for atrocities committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia without understanding that Serbs too were ethnically cleansed from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. They believe that the western media, and particularly Americans, have focused on Serb violence against Muslims from Bosnia and Kosovo, while ignoring violence against Serbs and the burning of Serb churches in Kosovo. Readers may be able to empathize with some of their grievances, however, one also gets the undeniable impression that Serbs are still a very proud people that are reluctant to come to grips with their dark history in the 1990’s. Seierstad’s book gives us a very readable portrait of a small, proud, post-war country that is caught between Yugo-nostalgia, the moral outrage of having been attacked by NATO, and hopes that perhaps a future in the EU will bring some semblance of normality to a traumatized country.

Highly Recommended