Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Fiction Literary

Trieste

by (author) Dasa Drndic

Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Initial publish date
Mar 2015
Category
Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780544538504
    Publish Date
    Mar 2015
    List Price
    $28.99
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780547725147
    Publish Date
    Jan 2014
    List Price
    $38

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

“Splendid and absorbing . . . [Drndic] is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick . . . These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory.” —New York Times Book Review
 
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern 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 SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestineLebensbornproject.

Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, in a narrative that 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, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy.
 
“Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece.” — A. N. Wilson,Financial Times
 
“A book of events that have made the last century infamous for the ages, a book that, if it moves you as it moved me, you will have to set down now and then, to breathe." — Alan Cheuse, NPR

About the author

Contributor Notes

DASA DRNDIC is a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright, and literary critic. She teaches in the department of philosophy at the University of Rijeka.

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC is the leading translator of Serbo-Croatian writing into English.