Editors’ note: Abdulah Sidran (1944–2024) was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims during the occupation of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. After World War II, the region became, under Tito, a part of the new socialist republic of Yugoslavia. Following Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet-led alliance known as Cominform, Tito’s government arrested suspected Soviet sympathizers en masse, imprisoning them in the forced-labor camp of Goli Otok, a formerly uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea.

OUR HOME HAD NO PAST

Our home had no past. I recall no family get-togethers, no dinners, lunches, holidays, no walks on Trebević, no trips to Faletići to see my aunt Rabija—not a single moment when someone brought up the past, when anything was so much as mentioned about the past. In the home of Mehmed Sidran, the past didn’t exist. It was as though there was something in my father’s family history that called for shame, so dense were the sullen clouds of silence over everything.

“Imagine, I went to school with nanule on my feet!” Dad would say on rare occasion, and only in those moments did the past, passing over his tongue, flick its own.

I imagined him, his feet red and blue from wearing nanule in the snow, staggering through the streets of Vratnik, and wondered: How did he, nearly barefoot, kick a ball? How did he go into the woods to hunt for snakes? How did he manage to lock eyes with girls?

“I went to school wearing nanule!”

It was only fitting, then, that we respect our sock slippers—the fabric ones that resembled shallow shoes and were fastened with a button. It was only fitting that I accept my brother’s hand-me-downs and rubber boots without complaint. Only fitting to respect my father’s implicitly difficult childhood.

But my father’s father, Hasan Sidran? My father’s mother? What even was her name—Naza? Who were they? Where had they come from? I was told nothing about them, so there was nothing for me to retain.

Sure, but given my age, and the semblance of knowledge that has come from experience, I should be capable of finding the root of this familial silence.

For one, it wasn’t embarrassment, or shame—there was never a cause for embarrassment or shame in our family—but fear. There were plenty of reasons for fear, and they never receded but were passed down from generation to generation, the sole dependable inheritance. From Hasan to Mehmed, from Mehmed to Abdulah, a Sidranian fear, a Goli Otok–sized fear, and an older, Herzegovinian fear that equally saturated thought and bone, flesh and eyelash, nail and cuticle and every millimeter of skin with which God wrapped man so he wouldn’t spill, so he wouldn’t seep out.

THE HOUSEHOLD

Mehmed (son of Hasan) Sidran and Behija Sidran (née Jukić) had four children, in the following order: Ekrem, 1942; Abdulah, 1944; Nedim (Edo), 1947; and Edina (Dina), 1953.

Back then, if you were to find, in a single urban family, four children, the brow of the younger aligned with the ear of the elder, this would warrant a pause. What compelled Mehmed and Behija, comrade Meho and comrade Peka, not to cease the production of offspring after the birth of their second child? My father, a former railway trade worker and unionist, was standing, in the first years after World War II, before a truly dynamic career. The multitude of books read (in line with party loyalties), a talent for drawing, the penmanship of a master calligrapher, the dialect of his parents’ homeland of Nevesinjsko Polje, Herzegovina, and the gift of plain speech common to its locals made Mehmed Sidran an ideal representative of a laborer capable of flying up the rungs of the political ladder—and who knew to what heights!

Deciding on even a third child had to be grounded in a spirited self-confidence, in the belief that a bright future personally awaited each of us. (The brightness of a more generalized future was implied.) But later, based on the beatings Mehmed doled out to his three sons, you could tell they didn’t take up equal space in his heart. These beatings were rare, but unsparing, and could be earned in a thousand different ways. I was an achiever—boy, was I ever. One time, I was frightened to the bone: my father held the head of an ax in his hand and beat me with its short handle. For fear of the blade, I felt no pain from the wooden club. I never saw him beat Ekrem. He must have “paid his dues”—but I never saw, or else can’t recall. Edo? He suffered. One time my father slammed him against the bedroom door. Down goes the child onto the rug, all of us screaming—and my mother shrieks: “You could’ve killed the boy!” Meho sits on the bed, puffing: “It’s fiberboard. It’s fiberboard, calm down.” In that little house in Sarajevo, two rooms of which we called our apartment—no kitchen, no bathroom, no lavatory—all the walls and all the doors were made of fiberboard. Slightly firmer than paper. Punch it, and it broke open. And in the summer, swarmed with bugs.

And Edina? With little exaggeration I can say that from her birth until 1965, when Mehmed died, that little pet of his never left his arms. His cooing was, however, admittedly altogether original: “Daddy’s little whore, Daddy’s little whore!” Immense, apparently, was the love and respect my venerable father, Mehmed Sidran, felt for whores.

SIDRANS-SIRDANS

Stored inside my mother’s couch were family documents—arranged in the pedantic fashion expected of a senior accountant, because Behija Jukić was, truly, an expert accounting professional. From the cardboard boxes where I now keep this archive, swarms of moths fly out. Never do I find the paper I seek with ease, though many other documents reveal their potent ability to steal for themselves the time I’d allotted elsewhere. I find, shared between my father’s family and my mother’s—prior to their joining forces—an absolute lack of paperwork regarding inherited real estate: no property, house, or apartment. On the subject of the families’ former homes, there is nothing.

So the question hangs—and screams—in the air: Where, what planet, were these Sidrans from? And with that surname, which sounds more Arabic than Slavic?