Shaf and the Remington

Shaf, a physics teacher and a philosopher, fought as a partisan in the Balkans during the Second World War. He has not been heard from for 40 years. How could such an ubiquitous and expansive person disappear? Did the murder of his mother and girlfriend by fascists during the War spark his sporadic displays of insanity? Rumours had him teaching in the United States and Europe during the Cold War.

Ben, Shaf?s former student and now a lawyer in Zurich, has never given up looking for him. He finally meets up with Shaf in his home town, where they first met. The encounter does not turn out as expected.

Peopling the story are four generations of a Balkan family. They include Ben?s grandfather, a vicious bureaucrat and admirer of Mussolini, his father, an enigmatic doctor and partisan leader, his mother, a professor of Electro-Magnetism in a Polytechnique, and his sister Nika, whose fate is characteristic of the times. An 1890 Remington double-barrel shotgun appears and disappears throughout the story.

Set in Sabzic, a fictitious town in an unnamed country in the Balkans, Shaf and the Remington chronicles the lives of a family, a people, a town and a nation, from dawn at the time of the first great War to dusk as the Cold War sputters to an end.