Miljenko Jergović

The story begins with great-grandfather Karl Stublar, an ethnic German from Banat, a railway worker in Bosnia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who speaks German at home and Serbo-Croatian outside of it. His family goes through multiple identities: Yugoslavia, World War II, partisan camps, exiles and the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

The novel is divided into three parts: "The Stublars, a Family Novel" – a chronicle of ancestors; "Mama Ionesco, a Report" – a story about the mother; "Calendar of Everyday Events, Fiction" – fragments about secondary characters. Key events: grandmother Olga sends her son Mladen to an SS unit in 1943, thinking it would be safer than the partisans, but he dies in Slavonia; the family erases his trace, leaving Olga with guilt; daughter Javorka lives in instability, abortions and depression; the narrator (Jergović) grew up with her grandmother, and is faced with her mother's illness and death.

Thematically, "Gender" explores the tension between individual and collective identity in a multi-volume, "snugget" world of migration – from the Ottomans to the post-Yugoslav wars. The family is a microcosm of a heterogeneous Bosnia: stateless life, inherited traumas (migraines, accidents), criticism of nationalism and fascism, agnosticism inherited from Karl. History is discontinuous, and the story of decay – of family, culture, country – is framed by personal losses.

The postmodernist structure, with fragments, epistolary and metalepsis, mixes the real and the fictional, turning the novel into a monument to a vanished world. Jergović writes: "Family is the place where history happens in miniature." "Gender" is a hymn to lost Bosnia, a bridge between the intimate and the universal, reminding us that "identity is not blood, but a story".