The Middle East is enduring another fragile pause. The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah holds uneasily. The understanding with Iran remains precarious. The war in Gaza continues to define daily life in stark and immediate ways. In this suspended moment of instability, a small, quietly remarkable book has now appeared in Hebrew. Jardins en temps de guerre (Gardens in Wartime), by the Bosnian writer Teodor Cerić, was born in a similarly unsettled time. Unfortunately, an English translation has not yet been published.
In the spring of 1992, Cerić, then a young student, was forced to flee Sarajevo as war engulfed the city. What followed was not a conventional story of exile but a restless journey across Europe. For seven years, he moved through cities, towns, and rural landscapes with no fixed destination. Along the way, he found gardens. Some were grand and historic, such as the Tuileries in Paris or the landscape park at Painshill outside London. Others were marginal and improvised, shaped by solitary figures at the edges of society.
Derek Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden marked a turning point for Cerić, allowing him to see these spaces not as aesthetic luxuries but as responses to catastrophe. When the world trembles with death, he suggests, the only meaningful act may be to turn any fragment of land into a place that invites life.
The Europe Cerić traverses is more than a backdrop. It is a cultural terrain where gardens reflect centuries of artistic ambition and philosophical inquiry. From French geometry to English pastoral design, they express a recurring effort to impose order on a fractured world. Cerić reads them against this tradition and arrives at a different conclusion: refuge.
Each garden becomes a place where the pressure of history softens, and catastrophe recedes into echo. His writing, which fuses diary, essay, and nature writing into a single sustained voice, becomes a shelter in its own right, mirroring the spaces it describes.
That this deeply European work now appears in Hebrew carries significance beyond the pleasures of literature. The gardens Cerić encounters belong to a continent inseparable from Jewish history. Europe is not incidental to that story. It is one of its central arenas. Jewish communities lived and created across this landscape for centuries, from Paris to Vienna, from Amsterdam to Sarajevo itself. These places also became sites of expulsion, persecution, and destruction. To read Cerić in Hebrew is to encounter Europe as a shared and fractured inheritance.
The relationship between Jewish life and Europe has long been unsettled. Europe offered intellectual belonging while repeatedly denying security. Zionism emerged in part from this contradiction, shaped by European ideas and by the recognition that Europe could not sustain Jewish existence. Those who came to build Israel carried Europe with them, not only in language and thought but also in memory.
Among the images they carried was the garden: cultivated, ordered, and fragile. Yet the soil into which they planted that image was not empty. The Shamouti groves around Jaffa, tended by Arab families across the nineteenth century and shipped from its port to Liverpool and Trieste long before the First Aliyah; the olive terraces of the central highlands, worked since the Iron Age; the biarah and the bustan, Andalusian and Persian forms that had reached Palestine through centuries of Mediterranean and Ottoman exchange – these were the ground onto which the European imagination was grafted. The orchards of the early settlements were acts of translation, and translation is rarely a transaction with a blank page. Israeli gardens are what European gardens became under pressure, set into a Levantine bed that already knew the work of cultivation.
This continuity rests on a deeper foundation. In Jewish thought, the garden is never merely decorative. The Garden of Eden is not simply a lost paradise but a place of responsibility. Adam and Eve are placed there to work it and guard it, establishing a relationship with the earth defined by care and obligation. Their expulsion marks an entry into moral awareness, into a world where cultivation requires effort and judgment. The garden becomes both origin and horizon.
In the Song of Songs, gardens are charged with vitality and intimacy, filled with pomegranates and flowing water, where the boundary between the human and the sacred dissolves. The law of Shmita, which requires the land to rest every seventh year, resists exploitation and affirms the earth as a partner rather than a possession. In this tradition, to cultivate is to be answerable to the ground beneath one’s feet.
Modern Israel carries these layers into a present shaped by both innovation and unresolved tension. The early builders of the state, many reared within European intellectual and agricultural traditions, sought to cultivate the land in ways that fused ancient obligation with modern aspiration. Gardens in Israel today range from memorial landscapes to botanical collections and community plots woven into urban neighborhoods. They are not merely ornamental. They are places where history, identity, and daily practice converge.
Since October 7, 2023, and through the wars in Gaza and Iran, their role has shifted into something rawer and more necessary. The soundscape of daily life has changed. Sirens, cellphone alerts, and the constant awareness of threat have become part of ordinary experience. Within this reality, gardens across the country have taken on a new function. They have become shelters.
To call them bomb shelters is not rhetorical excess. It captures precisely how these spaces absorb and soften surrounding pressure. The noise of conflict does not disappear within a garden. But it does recede. In these spaces, people plant, tend, harvest, and watch as growth unfolds. These acts are modest, yet under conditions of instability, they carry exceptional weight.
Each seed placed in the soil asserts that the future exists. Each act of care stands against the logic of destruction.
These gardens also offer relief from internal strife. Israeli society has been marked by deep disagreements over the judiciary, governance, and identity. Those tensions do not vanish in a shared garden, but they are reframed. Cultivation demands attention and cooperation. It shifts focus from abstract conflict to concrete responsibility and creates a space where difference becomes bearable within a shared commitment to sustaining life.
War disrupts and fragments. It interrupts continuity and erodes what has been built. A garden moves in the opposite direction. It requires time, care, and a belief in renewal. Cerić is clear on this point: gardens do not resolve the crises that surround them. They respond to them, creating moments of stability without dissolving the forces beyond their boundaries.
In Israel today, that response carries particular weight. The pressures of security, the burden of history, and the intensity of political life make sustaining ordinary acts a form of resilience. The European dimension of Cerić’s work sharpens this insight. The gardens he describes belong to a continent that Jews once inhabited, shaped, and were forced to leave. The Hebrew translation brings that history into quiet dialogue with the present.
Cerić’s insight, forged in the upheaval of a 20th-century European war, finds its echo in 21st-century Israel. Any piece of land can become the ground of life. In a region where the ceasefire with Hezbollah can fracture overnight, where the understanding with Iran remains one provocation away from collapse, and where the wounds of October 7 remain open, the garden offers something quieter but essential: a space where memory and hope take root together, and where the future is not just imagined but cultivated. It is not an escape from history. It is one of the ways history is endured.