»DER ALTE JUDE UND DAS MEER«

Author reading from the latest novel by the Serbianwriter, honorary citizen of Weimar and contemporarywitness Ivan Ivanji

Aaron, a high school teacher, lives an unspectacu- lar life in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He is married, has a son, and occasionally has affairs. His whole passion is swimming in the sea. During one of his stays on the Adriatic coast, he is approached by an obese, good-humoured man with whom Aaron also becomes friends. Greg offers the bored teacher a new job: running a summer academy for scientists. Aaron accepts, moves into a cottage by the sea with his family and gets to work. One day, however, he receives a call from his son, who is in distress. Greg will bail the junior out, but now Aaron is in his debt. This is how Picus Publishing announces Ivan Ivanji's latest novel »The old Jew and the Sea«, which will be published on 30.08.2023. 

Ivan Ivanji was awarded the Thuringian Order of Merit in 2019, and the city of Weimar made him an honorary citizen in 2022.
He was born in 1929 as the son of a secularised Jewish family of doctors in Veliki Bečkerek, now Zrenjanin, in the Yugoslavian Banat. During the Hungarian occupa- tion he was deported to Auschwitz in April 1944, from there to Buchenwald.

After the war he studied architecture and German in Belgrade, worked as a construction technician, teacher, journalist, dramaturge, diplomat, interpreter – among others for the Yugoslavian head of state Tito – and from 1982 to 1988 Secretary General of the Yugoslavian Writers' Union. From 1992 he lived alternately in Vienna and Belgrade. His first book of poetry was published in 1951, followed by 17 more books.