| Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers | |
| Title Orig: | Rani jadi:za decu i osetljive |
| Translator: | Michael Henry Heim |
| Author: | Danilo Kiš |
| Country: | Serbia |
| Language: | Serbo-Croatian |
| Publisher: | Nolit (Serbo-Croatian) New Directions (English) |
| Release Date: | 1970 |
| English Release Date: | 1998 |
| Pages: | 118 (English 1st edition) |
| Followed By: | Garden, Ashes |
Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers (Rani jadi: Za decu i osetljive; Serbian: Рани јади: За децу и осетљиве) is a collection of nineteen short stories by Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš.
The book is part of what Kiš called his "family cycle" trilogy, consisting of the novels Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972).[1] Though Early Sorrows was published after Garden, Ashes, it is effectively the first novel in the trilogy.[2]
Early Sorrows is composed of vignettes about Andy Sam, a young Serbian boy who works as a cowherd to bring in money for his family. Andy spends most of the day reading.
Like much of Kiš's work, Early Sorrows deals with the Holocaust. Andy's father, like Kiš's own father, is sent to Auschwitz.[3] Notably, it is the only work of Kiš's in which he depicts a scene inside a concentration camp (Andy hallucinates about his relatives who were taken away by Nazis).[4]