The Endless Chairlift

Two front covers. Two languages. One story.

The Endless Chairlift / Beskonačna uspinjača is a bilingual memoir in a tête-bêche format: one cover opens the story in English, while the other opens it in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Turn the book over, and the two narratives meet in the middle through a shared collection of photographs — just as two languages, two cultures, and two lives meet in one human story.

Born in Sarajevo, Ognjen Gajić lived through war, rebuilt his life as a refugee in the United States, and became an intensive care physician, educator, and researcher at Mayo Clinic. Through personal, often humorous, and deeply human vignettes, he reflects on family, friendship, patients, loss, love, exile, gratitude, and the search for what remains when everything else changes.

Rather than offering simple answers, The Endless Chairlift invites readers to consider what is truly bitno — what truly matters.

This dual-language edition is especially meaningful for immigrant families from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia: for grandparents who read in naš jezik, for grandchildren who read in English, and for everyone living between languages, cultures, and memories.