Trieste
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany.
Haya's reflection on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled.
Written in immensely powerful language, and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Dasa Drndic has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This moving novel of WWII and its aftermath is acclaimed Croatian author Drndic's American debut. In 2006, elderly Haya Tedeschi is awaiting a reunion with her son, who disappeared as an infant during WWII. Haya's memory ranges over her family's past, their experiences in the war, and its effect on their lives. The Tedeschi family lived in Gorizia and nearby Trieste, northern Italian cities caught between the major powers of Europe in cycles of war. But little could have prepared the family for the extremes of German occupation. Haya's richly textured reminisces include biographies of the Reich's film stars, scathing expos s of the complicity of the Swiss government and the Red Cross in the transport of Jews to concentration camps, and harrowing details of sadistic acts committed in the camps. Interspersed with Haya's account are photographs, interviews, and personal testimonies, and, in one case, pages listing the names of all 9,000 Jews deported from or murdered in northern Italy during the war. There is simply too much pain and guilt in this novel for Haya's reunion with her son to offer catharsis, and readers who become more interested in the characters than the history may be disappointed. However, Drndic's themes, use of history, and narrative technique invite favorable comparisons to W.G. Sebald, and the novel's relentlessly uncomfortable mood might be Drndic's point: the historical crimes were great, and complicity of almost everyone was enormous.
