Böcker av Marina Jarre

A harrowing, culturally rich memoir.Kirkus ReviewsBuilding upon her celebrated autobiographyDistant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. InReturn to Latviaa masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essayshe looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto of Riga and its southern forest where tens ofthousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood. Piecing together documents and memories,Return to Latviaexplores immense guilt, repression, and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps and in plain view.

An extraordinary, luminous memoir that unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia in the 1920s and expands southward to the Italian countryside. 'Beautifully ingenious... Saturated in the history of the European 20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein's luminous translation' Vivian Gornick'Her masterwork' New York Times'Ann Goldstein's shimmering translation of Jarre's prose delivers into English a European masterpiece' Benjamin Taylor'Lucid, luminous prose... The first of her books available in English [and] it must not be the last' Los Angeles Review of BooksIn distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father - a Jew who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother - an Italian Lutheran who translated Russian literature; and her sister and Latvian grandparents. Jarre narrates her passage from childhood to adolescence, first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents' divorce, where she lives with her maternal grandparents among a community of French-speaking Waldensian Protestants and discovers that fascist Italy is a problematic home for a Riga-born Jew.First published in 1987 and now translated into English for the first time, this powerful and incisive memoir is steeped in the history of twentieth-century Europe, and probes questions of time, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.