Name: Trieste
ISBN: 9780857050229

Daša Drndić

"Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, waiting to be reunited, after fifty-two years, with her son. He was fathered by a S.S officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the war. Haya's reflections on her family's experiences deal with unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camp at Treiste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, 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 the doorstep"--OCLC

Trieste

Ezra Alie

Trieste, written by Croatian author Daša Drndić, is one of the best books I've ever read, as well as one of the most challenging. The experimental novel is centered on Haya Tedeschi, an elderly woman raised in an Italian Jewish family that converted to Catholicism during the Mussolini era. Trieste details Haya's family's complicity with the fascist order around her, which has agonized her for the rest of her life. Even as the horrors around them grow, the Tedeschis purposely remain as ignorant as possible to avoid persecution. As Drndić writes, "the Tedeschi family are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism." The most striking feature of the book is the testimonies and anecdotes of real Nazi officials and collaborators, as well as Jewish victims and refugees, interspersed throughout the novel. Drndić's eloquent prose is translated powerfully by Ellen Elias-Bursać, to the point I forgot I was reading a translation, which almost never happens. Ultimately, Trieste is a haunting mediation on complicity, moral responsibility, and justice. Rating: 5/5

Trieste

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