The Middle East is enduring another fragile pause. The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah holds uneasily. The understanding with Iran remains precarious. The war in Gaza continues to define daily life in stark and immediate ways. In this suspended moment of instability, a small, quietly remarkable book has now appeared in Hebrew. Jardins en temps de guerre (Gardens in Wartime), by the Bosnian writer Teodor Cerić, was born in a similarly unsettled time. Unfortunately, an English translation has not yet been published.

In the spring of 1992, Cerić, then a young student, was forced to flee Sarajevo as war engulfed the city. What followed was not a conventional story of exile but a restless journey across Europe. For seven years, he moved through cities, towns, and rural landscapes with no fixed destination. Along the way, he found gardens. Some were grand and historic, such as the Tuileries in Paris or the landscape park at Painshill outside London. Others were marginal and improvised, shaped by solitary figures at the edges of society.

Derek Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden marked a turning point for Cerić, allowing him to see these spaces not as aesthetic luxuries but as responses to catastrophe. When the world trembles with death, he suggests, the only meaningful act may be to turn any fragment of land into a place that invites life.

The Europe Cerić traverses is more than a backdrop. It is a cultural terrain where gardens reflect centuries of artistic ambition and philosophical inquiry. From French geometry to English pastoral design, they express a recurring effort to impose order on a fractured world. Cerić reads them against this tradition and arrives at a different conclusion: refuge.

Each garden becomes a place where the pressure of history softens, and catastrophe recedes into echo. His writing, which fuses diary, essay, and nature writing into a single sustained voice, becomes a shelter in its own right, mirroring the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)