A civilian internee of World War II, a fugitive in Rome from 1941-44, a partisan, and a member of Tito's Yugoslav army, the author fought against the German occupation of Yugoslavia. After the war, as a foreign editor of the Belgrade daily, Borba, he covered the 1946 Paris Peace Conference, the 1948 Tito-Stalin rift, and the 1951 Panmunjom talks to end the Korean war. In 1956, as a UN and US correspondent, he resigned over Tito's refusal to support the Hungarian Revolution, sought and was granted political asylum in the US. Requiem for a Country is about the destruction of Sephardic life in Bosnia, as well as about the dissolution of what used to be a harmonious coexistence of multiethnic people of Yugoslavia.

The road from Sarajevo in 1921 to New York in 1956 and up to the present covers a distance. It was a particularly winding and long one for the author, from the student protests against pro-Nazi government in pre-war Yugoslavia, WWII civilian confinement in Italy under Mussolini, fighting against German troops and Quislings in Dalmatia in 1944-45, battling Soviet attempts to dominate Yugoslavia, reporting from the world and the UN, and finally taking asylum in the US in despair over his country ever becoming a democratic one. In The Last Exile, Jasha Levi opens himself and the mosaic of his turbulent life and times to the public scrutiny, His readers should find his memories as compelling as his intimates always did.