Have you ever seen something in the news or someone mentioned something to you that led you to research it and learn more? Something similar happened with Jordan Steven Sher. A fateful encounter piqued his interest and led him to write, And Still We Rise: A Novel About the Genocide in Bosnia, a truth-based fiction. Jordan is a former social worker and middle school teacher. He has always been an advocate for social justice. He happened upon the the topic of the war in Bosnia while interviewing two women for his first book who were children in 1992, and who, along with their families, suffered the trauma that befell all who were targeted by the nationalist Serb genocidal campaign, with rhetoric that continues even in today’s Bosnia.
Jordan immerses myself in writing about and advocating for truth and reconciliation for both survivors and those who were lost in the war, ever since. Let’s learn from him!
The Genesis of my Truth-based Fiction
By Jordan Steven Sher
To Begin With
During an interview in a recent presentation that I gave about my new book, And Still We Rise: A Novel about the Genocide in Bosnia, I was asked why I chose to write this story as a novel. Not that I hadn’t thought about this before, but when I first began this project of writing a novel, where previously I thought of myself as a non-fiction writer, the answer was, “to have more control of the content.”
Stepping back to 2019, I self-published a book called, Our Neighbors, Their Voices: True Stories of Immigrant Exodus. I had just decided to end my middle school teaching career of thirteen years, which had been preceded by twenty-two years in the non-profit sector that began as a social worker, and ended with a management position. I taught sixth grade Language Arts in a mostly poor, Latinx area in Northern California. Most of the students had parents and grandparents who had emigrated from Mexico and Central America, and many were undocumented. The end of my time as an educator was during the Trump Administration, and the hateful, xenophobic rhetoric was at a fevered pitch. Of course, this included his “Muslim Travel Ban”(here). He took his conspiracies a step further by attacking China and the Chinese here in this country as bringing the Coronavirus to America (here). But that came after my first book.
In addition to the divisive rhetoric, I thought back to my own roots where my grandparents escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe where Jews were being persecuted, and worse. The journeys they took to leave were nothing short of miraculous and spoke to the desperateness of their trek to New York, and subsequent attempts at assimilation.
And the last piece to what led me to write the “Our Voices” book was that my wife had immigrated from Italy as a young child with her mother and three siblings, crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the lower deck of a large ship to reunite with her father and older brother who had gone to Utica, NY to join other family there. They were seeking economic and educational opportunities, that which they would not have had in their poor, hilltop village.
Why a Book about the Genocide in Bosnia
So, the combination of these three factors led me to write a book to feature immigrants to this country, and to prove that people come here not to murder, rape, and sell drugs, as our former president wanted us to believe, but because they couldn’t stay where they lived due to war, crime, famine, poverty, repression and oppression. I interviewed fourteen people including my wife, who came from Lebanon, Iran, Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala, India, Ethiopia, and others to learn of their stories. It may not have been the most literary piece of non-fiction writing, but my heart was in it. I also interviewed two women who were children at the time of the war in Bosnia in 1992, and who were Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslim), the preferred nomenclature. Their stories gripped me. I knew little about what happened in Bosnia during the early ‘90s. I barely remembered the Srebrenica Genocide (here). I likely bought into “the West’s” public line that the war was just “long-standing ethnic tensions that just boil over periodically” (here). They were so wrong! I began to learn about the truth from those women. But I had only begun my journey into understanding that truth.
I asked one of the women if she would be interested in having me write her memoir in an “as told to” format. For the next six months, with her being in Utica, NY, and me in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had phone calls to learn of her and her family’s story, and to shape my new book. Her story was heartbreaking, of course, and I could feel the pull of needing to know more about what transpired in the din of the so-called “ethnic cleansing” (here) campaign by nationalist Serbs to exterminate the non-Serb population and culture that had existed for centuries. The primary target of the elimination being Bosniaks.
As we ended our interviews, and I got to a place where it was time to seek a publisher (I didn’t want to self-publish this one as I wished to access the services of professionals), the woman stated that her family no longer wanted the book published. I asked why, but didn’t truly need an answer. By that time, I had come to understand how profoundly difficult it is for people who suffer the way this family did, are hypersensitive about having others read about their intimate and harrowing experiences. This exposure would unearth deeply personal traumas that they were still trying to come to grips with twenty-seven years later.
I had to respectfully accept the fate of that book.
However, the woman had told me about the family’s experience with a concentration camp in Prijedor. Concentration camp? In 1992? (here) Wasn’t that relegated to the Holocaust? This set me on a journey to learn about the camps of Prijedor. It led to hours of research and reading about the horrors of the invasion by a newly-formed Bosnian Serb army fueled by years of hateful rhetoric by Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic (here) and led by the likes of Bosnian Serb political leader and genocidaire, Radovan Karadzic (here) and his general, Ratko Mladic (here), both spending life in prison for the crime of genocide. I learned about the outset in April 1992, of the “Siege of Sarajevo” and the small villages in Eastern Bosnia with the slaughtering of innocent civilians, who in the previous several years enjoyed peaceful coexistence with their Orthodox Christian Serb and Catholic Croat neighbors. I was stunned to know all this, and kicked myself for being so naïve about it in the first place.
The Decision to write a Novel-make that a Truth-based Fiction
I decided to write a novel, which is the initial question that I have been asked by others upon first meeting those curious enough to do so. Because I assumed I would have more control over the content than with the “as told to” memoir, which was ended by the family’s desire to keep their trauma close-to-home. So, I sought to find someone to corroborate the stories of the concentration camps I had read about in news articles, criminal proceedings, and had seen in documentaries. I found the right guy—Satko Mujagic.
In my journey to learn about the camps, I came across a YouTube video interview with Satko (here). He was quite willing to speak of the atrocities that befell him and his small city of Kozarac, in the Prijedor municipality. He spoke in detail about the invasion, and about the torture in the camps, both of the ones he was in for a total of six months, along with his father in the first one.
This is the guy I needed to reach out to. I had heard that he lived in Brussels, but maybe he’d be willing to share more of his story with me, so that I could write a more authentic book?
Have you ever spoken with someone who survived concentration camps? The stories are deeply disturbing. Nightmarish, really. Yet Satko was resolute in insisting that I make this book as close to the truth as possible. We talked for hours over several months. Zoom was quite handy, to be sure. I would write chapters about the family I wanted to feature who encountered the horrors, but used a good deal of what Satko had told me to shape my story. I would then give the manuscript, particularly the first half of the book that pertained to the camps, to him and he would put in comments. He is an exacting man. I quickly learned that the control I sought over the content was not going to fly with him—that if it wasn’t as close to genuine and real, even down to the names of characters, Bosniak, Serbian and Croat, he said he would not only not endorse the book, but if I had any notion of him writing a foreword, I could forget it.
In the process of my being an author, not just a writer, I had to learn some humility. I needed to know that if I wanted to make this story resonate, then it had to be as if it was non-fiction. And I believe this is what it turned out to be.
Satko did write that foreword for the book. In it, he tells a similar story to mine; that he wasn’t sold on the idea of a non-Bosnian writing this book because I just didn’t have the depth of what it means to be a Bosnian, especially one who was tortured because that person happened to be a Bosnian Muslim. He speaks of how I evolved in our “working relationship,” that I was willing to change course if warranted. In the end, he writes, “this is the best truth-based fiction that has been written about the concentration camps in Bosnia.”
And that is how I came to label my book as truth-based fiction. My book has many more resources for you to access.
What is the best way to promote my book with the goal of helping people understand what happened in Bosnia to include a brewing crisis there again? You can share the answers in the comments or connect with Jordan directly via email.
I hope you learned something new from Jordan today! It has been a pleasure to host him for this guest post. My knowledge is often limited by what I am looking for or what is popular. It has been great to learn from Jordan about Bosnia and writing a truth-based fiction about Bosnia as a non-Bosnian. Connect with Jordan on his website, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Check out the homepage of my Creator’s Roulette series and all the articles creators have contributed there so far!
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Mr. Sher’s insights here are both are articulate and exceedingly important NOW as nationalist rhetoric increases worldwide. “And Still We Rise” possesses heart and knowledge.
Thank you so reading and sharing your thoughts, Dina 🙂