Novi Bečej is a small town that, before liberation, was considered a town with about 7,000 inhabitants. And when you consider that many of its residents engaged in literature over a period of just about 30 years, and most of them wrote poetry, it can be boldly said that there was a real poetic school in Novi Bečej. Especially when you take into account that a group of the local youth at the time, part of its young intelligentsia, wrote poems as if by some mutual agreement, and some even by an explicit agreement — so much so that they almost literally formed a genuine poetic school.
These young people at the time read their poems to each other, discussed them, organized public literary evenings (with an audience), and some (like the author of this text) even printed their books at the old manual printing press in Novi Bečej (owned by Giga Jovanović, a well-known banker).
It might not hurt, and I believe it won't be boring, but rather will pique curiosity: who were those who, in my estimation, constituted the Novi Bečej poetic school? The oldest among them was Darinka Nerandžić Brašovan, a teacher. Around 1910, she published several books in the Novi Bečej printing press, including "Seja from Bečej," which was interspersed with verses.
Following her in seniority came Dr. Jovan Pivnički, an educated and highly literary Novi Bečej royal public notary, who, though secretly, wrote poems. From what I know, those poems could still be considered modern and very individual.
At the same time as Dr. Pivnički, around 1930, a Dalmatian lawyer, Dr. Šime Čipčić, lived in Novi Bečej. He only confided in me that he wrote poems because he had caught me writing poems on his office typewriter (when I worked for him as a clerk during my student years). He even scolded me for it, asking if I had ever caught him writing poems during work hours — though he also wrote poems, but not at the time when we both needed to earn our daily bread. While Dr. Pivnički's verses were lyrical, Dr. Čipčić's, as I recall, were satirical and political in nature.
The next Novi Bečej resident to be mentioned as part of the Novi Bečej poetic school is Božidar K. Jovanović, a teacher at the civil school. He was my first Serbian-Croatian language teacher. He would always talk about poets and quote them, and I was convinced that he also wrote poems. He never revealed that side of himself. On a jubilee of Vasa Stajić, whom he greatly admired, he published a booklet of maxims and thoughts of this significant educator and progressive teacher.
Much more connected and oriented together in literature, especially in poetry, was the group whose main instigator and ideologist, one could say, was my younger brother Miloje. He held the view that anyone could write poems, and should do so, since every person has poetic feelings, they just need to get used to expressing themselves in verse. He constantly encouraged his closest friends to write poems. Bogdanka Malešev, Fedor Kiselički, and even I wrote under his immediate literary and poetic influence. I brought the poet Jefta Mendebabu from Srpski Elemir and Radivoje M. Jerinkić from Kikinda into the Novi Bečej literary and poetic circle. Miloje also introduced Vladimir M. Kolarov Koča, with whom he went to high school in Veliki Bečkerec, to this circle.
The fact that these three young poets, who were outside of Novi Bečej, belonged to the Novi Bečej poetic school is best demonstrated by the fact that when I launched the literary magazine "Život" in Timișoara in 1935, following my brother Milivoje's suggestion, I went ahead with a ready-made poetic group. In the first two (and only) issues of "Život," all these poets appeared together. They were all connected either by shared childhoods, friendships, political orientations, or a combination of all of them.
This generation of the Novi Bečej literary school also included Živojin Boškov, who directed his literary interests toward the history of literature.
In Novi Bečej, the poetess Marija Glavaški, the novelist Stojan Piroški, and the poet Vojislav B. Pecarski were also born and lived, or merely lived. They did not directly belong to the aforementioned new generation in terms of literary and poetic direction or political-social alignment, but I believe that the fact that they were somehow part of this town (or the nearby inseparable village of Vranjevo), where such a strong group of young writers and poets existed, influenced them to write and develop literarily in this poetic climate.
I will also mention another prose writer from Novi Bečej during the peak of the Novi Bečej literary school — my schoolmate Voja Avramov. He wrote prose that I gladly read.
The most indiscreet (and modest) of all Bečej poets was, besides Dr. Jovan Pivnički, my older brother Jovan, a teacher who died young. He left behind a sizable collection of handwritten lyrical poems, which — except for me — he never read to anyone.
Of course, many members of the Novi Bečej "school" who wrote poetry and prose did not become writers, but they nevertheless carried the "burden" of that beautiful, yet difficult, vocation for their entire lives.
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