THE VISION OF ANDRIĆ OF OTHERNESS: THE JEWS AS "IMAGINED COMMUNITY"

Resumen

Through Anderson's concept of "imagined community", we interpret Andrić's romantic understanding of Jews in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Namely, in their prose texts, the dichotomy "we" and "they" is appreciated, that is, the Jewish community is presented as separate and substantially different from the others in the complex Bosnian-ethnic-religious environment. Despite the fact that the writer feels the Jews, especially the native Sephardim, as members of an exotic "otherness", he writes about them with great empathy while continuing to reaffirm diversity. Their feelings culminate in passages related to the Holocaust, in which the "otherness" is erased and they become "our destroyed and annihilated Sephardi".