Never Let It Go
Novelists ask whether societies can rebound from tragedy—and live to forget.
by ADAM KIRSCH
Aug 01, 2016
3 minutes
In 1993, during the Bosnian war, the American journalist David Rieff went to Belgrade to interview a leading Serbian politician. “As I was leaving his office,” Rieff writes in his new book, In Praise of Forgetting, “one of his young aides pressed a folded bit of paper into my hand. It turned out to be blank except for a date: 1453—the year Orthodox Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottomans.” The religious and ethnic war of the 20th-century Balkans, the note implied, was rooted in injuries dating back centuries. This anecdote gets straight to the moral
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