Ozren Karaman
Quick Facts
- Role: Chief librarian of the National Museum in Sarajevo; the kustos (custodian) of the Sarajevo Haggadah
- First appearance: Present-day Sarajevo, where his wartime heroism is recounted
- Key relationships: Hanna Heath, Aida Karaman (deceased wife), Alia Karaman (comatose son)
Who They Are
Boldly introduced as the man who pulled a medieval manuscript from a city under fire, Ozren Karaman is the present-day story’s anchor—part guide, part skeptic, part wounded romantic. His rescue of the Haggadah crystallizes the theme of Courage and Moral Choice, yet the same history that makes him a hero also makes him hollowed by grief. He embodies Sarajevo’s brilliance and devastation at once: an intellectual guardian of culture whose private losses shape every choice he makes.
Ozren also stands as a living emblem of Sarajevo’s layered identity—its cosmopolitan learning, its interfaith heritage, and the price exacted by war—connecting him to the novel’s meditation on Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict. With Hanna, he becomes the novel’s uneasy conscience, insisting that pain resists neat restoration even as he tries, against the odds, to preserve what is precious.
Personality & Traits
Ozren’s personality fuses erudition with survivalist grit: a scholar’s delicacy carrying siege-made calluses. His humor is dry, his self-assessments unsentimental, and his love—when given—absolute. Beneath the modesty lies a man who cannot forgive the “safe world” its optimism, and cannot stop showing up for a child who might never wake.
- Brave and selfless: He cracks the museum safe “under intense shelling” to save the Haggadah and other artifacts, driven by the calculus that “one phosphorous bomb could burn the whole thing down.”
- Modest to a fault: He refuses the hero label—“Please… Don’t make me out to be a hero”—revealing a survivor’s ethic that measures worth by what was lost as much as what was saved.
- Scholar’s grief: “I feel like shit, because of all the books I couldn’t save.” His sorrow extends beyond people to knowledge itself, underscoring his vocation as moral duty, not mere profession.
- Witty, sardonic observer: His “counter-tourism monologue” through the ruined city and teasing of Hanna—“a heavenly face with such an earthy appetite”—mask tenderness with bite.
- Traumatized and fatalistic: The murder of Aida and Alia’s catastrophic injury feed his contempt for the “safe world,” culminating in a hospital outburst that rejects hope as superstition.
- Tender, ritual-bound father: “I read to him. Every day.” His daily stories to Alia enact a stubborn love that refuses to let a childhood vanish, even in coma.
- Lived-in, unvarnished presence: Duct-taped glasses, a scuffed leather jacket, and “wild, curly” hair telegraph a man focused on what matters; the “long and delicate” scholar’s hands marred by siege calluses show intellect married to endurance.
Character Journey
Ozren’s arc unfolds as revelation rather than reform. First glimpsed through the glow of wartime valor, he gradually reveals the abyss behind the legend: a widower raising hope against reality at a hospital bedside. With Hanna, professional collaboration gives way to intimacy, only to collide with his rage at the “safe world” that, in his eyes, refuses to accept that not every wound heals. That clash—central to The Relationship Between Past and Present—pushes him toward a grim logic: if institutions failed Sarajevo, then only personal intervention can safeguard what remains. His contemplated conspiracy to steal the Haggadah is less greed than despair, a broken custodian’s attempt to keep one sacred thing truly safe. The journey brings him to a precipice where he must choose between cynicism’s false safety and the harder restoration of integrity.
Key Relationships
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Hanna Heath: What begins as professional friction becomes a charged romance defined by competing philosophies. Hanna’s faith in solutions—new tests, second opinions—meets Ozren’s refusal to dress tragedy in hope. Their nights together show how near healing lies; his hospital rage shows how far away it is. He is drawn to her vitality but punishes her for belonging to a world that, to him, can afford optimism.
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Aida Karaman: Though dead, Aida dominates the space of Ozren’s life through the large painting in his attic—a domestic altarpiece of what was destroyed. Aida’s absence structures his presence: love transmuted into grief, warmth into watchfulness, memory into the standard by which all new attachments (including Hanna) are measured.
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Alia Karaman: Alia is Ozren’s daily liturgy. Reading to a child who may never answer, he enacts a fatherhood defined by fidelity over outcome. Alia concentrates the novel’s moral questions—What do we owe the helpless? How long do we keep vigil?—and explains both Ozren’s tenderness and his fury.
Defining Moments
Ozren’s most vivid scenes braid heroism with helplessness, showing how courage can coexist with, and even be warped by, despair.
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Saving the Haggadah under shellfire
- What happens: He enters the shelled museum, cracks the safe, and carries out the manuscript and other treasures.
- Why it matters: It defines him as custodian by conviction, not title, and anchors the theme of cultural guardianship in wartime risk.
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The “counter-tourism” tour
- What happens: He walks Hanna through Sarajevo’s scars with mordant wit.
- Why it matters: His humor is a defense mechanism; the tour teaches Hanna to read ruins as texts, and reveals the mind that both loves and resents the city.
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Nights at Sweet Corner
- What happens: He and Hanna share brief intimacy beneath the ever-present portrait of Aida and infant Alia.
- Why it matters: Their closeness is real but provisional, shadowed by grief that refuses to cede the room; love becomes an intermission, not a cure.
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Hospital outburst
- What happens: When Hanna suggests a second opinion for Alia, he explodes—grabbing her face, condemning the “safe world,” rejecting happy endings.
- Why it matters: The scene exposes the fault line between hope and acceptance; it’s the moment his trauma dictates terms to love.
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Conspiring to protect the “real” Haggadah
- What happens: Despair drives him toward a plan to secure the manuscript outside official channels.
- Why it matters: It’s a paradoxical betrayal born of devotion—a kustos endangering trust to save what trust failed to protect—forcing a reckoning with his own ethics.
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Daily readings to Alia
- What happens: He reads children’s stories at the hospital, insisting, “It is not possible for a childhood to pass by without these stories.”
- Why it matters: This quiet ritual is his truest heroism—love as practice, time as offering—countering the world’s randomness with fidelity.
Essential Quotes
“But you must also understand: I am the kustos, the book is in my care.”
This line locates Ozren’s identity in stewardship. “Kustos” isn’t a job but a vow, binding him to culture as if it were kin. The duty justifies his wartime risks and later tempts him toward extra-legal protection, for good and ill.
“Please,” he interrupted, wrinkling his face with distaste. “Don’t make me out to be a hero. I don’t feel like one. Frankly, I feel like shit, because of all the books I couldn’t save. . . .”
His anti-hero speech reframes heroism as a ledger of losses. The diction—distaste, “feel like shit”—rejects glorification and insists that moral worth is measured by responsibility, not applause.
“Bad things happen. Some very bad things happened to me. And I’m no different from a thousand other fathers in this city who have kids who suffer. I live with it. Not every story has a happy ending. Grow up, Hanna, and accept that.”
Here, private grief expands into collective suffering—“a thousand other fathers.” The imperative to “accept” signals his governing ethos: survival requires relinquishing narrative closure, even if that stance endangers love.
“I read to him. Every day. It is not possible for a childhood to pass by without these stories.”
This is Ozren at his most tender—and most stubborn. He asserts that story is a human right, independent of consciousness or outcome, turning literature into an act of care that answers the novel’s larger question: what, finally, can be saved?