ALBAHARI, DAVID

ALBAHARI, DAVID (1948– ), Yugoslav author and translator. Born in Pec, Albahari graduated from Teachers College in Belgrade and settled in Zemun as a freelance writer of short stories and novels. His prose interweaves abstraction and reality, the lyric and the fantastic. He has edited literary magazines and translated literature from English, and is a member of the pen club, the writers' union of Serbia, and the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia. His books include the collected short stories Family Time (1973), Ordinary Tales (1978), Description of Death (1982), and Simplicity (1988); the novels The Judge Dimitrievich (1982), Shock in the Shed (1984), and Zinc; and the anthology Contemporary World Short Stories (1982), in two volumes. Some of his stories and novels have been translated into Hebrew, English, Hungarian, and other languages. In 1993 he was elected president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Belgrade, but in 1994 he resigned and immigrated to Canada. He settled in Calgary, continuing to produce new books in the Serbo-Croat language, among them Enticement (1996), The Snowman (1997), and Goetz and Meyer (1999). (Eugen Werber / Zvi Loker (2nd ed.)