Slavko Goldstein | The New York Review of Books

Slavko Goldstein

Award-winning publisher, editor, and author Slavko Goldstein was born in 1928 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and grew up in Karlovac, Croatia. During the Holocaust, he lost his father and most of the members of his father’s and mother’s families. His mother saved him and his brother Danko by joining the Partisans in 1942, in which he served until 1945, achieving the rank of lieutenant at the age of seventeen and becoming one of the youngest officers in the Partisan army. After the war, he worked as a journalist and editor for several leading Croatian newspapers and as a scriptwriter for feature and documentary films. As the director of University Publisher Liber Zageb and then as the publisher and editor of Novi Liber for more than forty years, he has been responsible for the publication of many important works of Yugoslav and Croatian literature and on Croatian social life. He was president of the Jewish Community of Zagreb from 1986-1990 and the founder and president of the first non-communist political party in Croatia from 1989-1990. From 2001 to 2005 he was the president of the Council of the Jasenovac Memorial Center. He has been awarded about twenty prizes for his journalistic, film, and editorial work. The Croatian edition of his latest book, 1941: The Year that Keeps Returning, won four different prizes as the best publication in Croatia in 2007, and the Krunoslav Sukić Award as the book of the decade in the field of nonviolence, human rights, and civil society.

A Turning Point for Croatia

June 23, 2011 issue