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Summary
" Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Dasa Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are" MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King , shortlisted for the Booker Prize
"Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece" A.N. Wilson, Financial Times
"Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick" Craig Seligman, New York Times
An old woman sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy. She is waiting to be reunited with her son. He was fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her sixty-two years before by the Nazi authorities during the German occupation.
By focusing on the experiences of one individual, Drndic engages head-on with the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust and deals unsparingly with the massacre of Jews in Trieste's concentration camp.
A literary collage comprising photographs, scraps of poetry, interviews and testimonies from the Nuremberg Trials, it is a formally daring work of immense power and scope.
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Author Notes
Dasa Drndic was born in Zagreb, Croatia on August 10, 1946. Before winning a Fulbright scholarship to the United States, she studied philology at the University of Belgrade. She received a master's degree in theatre and communications at Southern Illinois University and a PhD at the University of Rijeka. She worked as a journalist and translator. She wrote several novels including Trieste, Leica Format, Belladonna, and Doppelgänger. She also wrote about 30 plays. She died of lung cancer on June 5, 2018 at the age of 71.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 exposes 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. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Just as the river Soca wends through northeastern Italy, bearing witness to everything it touches, Trieste roams through the tragic array of Jewish experiences during the region's Nazi occupation. It centers on Haya Tedeschi, an elderly woman whose son, fathered by an SS officer, had been stolen away as part of the Lebensborn breeding program. During her relentless search for him, Haya revisits her family's lives over generations and collects artifacts about the atrocities from photos, songs, and testimonies from war-crime trials to heartbreaking stories that have waited too long to be heard. Drndic has assembled an angry scrapbook of searing memories, horror, and loss. For the Holocaust's victims, there is no hope; for its perpetrators, there is no punishment. Trieste's originality lies not just in its structure and forceful, unflinching imagery translator Elias-Bursac deserves acclaim as well but also in how it brings the lingering effects of the Nazis' merciless racial policies forward into the present. Here the past doesn't lie dormant and forgotten but is a cancer that can poison us from within.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JULY 2006: Haya Tedeschi, 83, waits at her home in Gorizia, on the Italian-Slovenian border, northwest of Trieste, for the arrival of the son who was stolen from her 62 years earlier, during the war. An American writer would no doubt focus on, or at least convey, the drama of their meeting. But "Trieste," by the Croatian novelist, playwright and critic Dasa Drndic, is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick. The first half of "Trieste" chronicles events in the lives of Haya and her recent forebears, multilingual Jews born under - or, for her generation, just after the fall of - the Hapsburg monarchy. These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory. There isn't much plot beyond births and deaths, comings and goings and the rise of fascism - which creates more anxiety for the reader, it seems, than for the family, who make it through the war (comparatively) unscathed. Haya's fate ensnares her one day in January 1944, when she's 20 and a handsome German officer, Kurt Franz, enters the tobacco shop she's tending. The following October their son, Antonio, is born. Franz soon deserts her ("My little Jewess, we can't go on like this"), and Toni vanishes from his pram while Haya's back is turned. In time, the mystery of this disappearance will be solved, but in a discursive rather than a dramatic fashion. There is no suspense. And the unsentimental Drndic won't offer Haya the sympathy you might expect. She condemns her, and Haya condemns herself. "The Tedeschi family," Drndic writes, "are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism." Bystanders: "For 60 years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn't know! ... these yes men, these enablers of evil." Almost halfway through, the novel stops abruptly to list, over 44 pages, the names of some 9,000 Jews for whose deaths Italy bears responsibility. From there, Drndic turns her attention to San Sabba, the gruesome concentration and extermination camp in a converted rice mill on the periphery of Trieste, and from there to the ghastly specifics of the Nazi extermination program. The connection is the same Kurt Franz, an all-too-real historical figure who was the baby-faced commandant of Treblinka before his transfer to Trieste. Drndic uses various methods to recall the horror: trial transcripts, witness statements, biographical sketches, photographs. The technique is Sebaldian, but the tone, especially surrounding Haya, is the old-man-in-a-dry-month rattle of T.S. Eliot. Allusions to "The Waste Land" recur, and the book ends with a collage of bleak lines from the poem. Beckett, too, is present in the insistent imagery of physical discomfort ("a nasty itch plagues her in the early evenings") and of putrefaction so extreme ("they even leap into the containers voluntarily, choke on the sewage sludge in their own fermented excrement") that if her tone wobbled for a moment it would cross the line into camp. But even at their most lurid, Drndic's sentences remain coldly dignified. And so does Ellen Elias-Bursac's imperturbably elegant translation: There isn't a sentence that you would guess had been born in another language. Drndic attempts to stave off despair with her faith in literature, quoting liberally from Borges, Pound, Montale, Bernhard, the Triestine poet Umberto Saba and quite a few other great writers - but then she uses their words to shore up her despair, especially when, in the last part of the novel, she enters the consciousness of Antonio Tedeschi, Haya's stolen son. We encounter him late in June 2006, when he is setting out to meet his mother at last. He's not looking forward to it. Since finding out he is the son of "that murderer," he has come to think of Haya as "that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him ... while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich." If the reader hesitates to judge Drndic's characters (the perennial doubt: would we have been bystanders? or worse?), the characters do not. They see themselves as trapped by history. Like the boots of a concentration-camp guard, Antonio says, "the Past, my Past, our Past, presses up against my face, which, beneath it, contorts in a grimace like the grimace of a crazed detainee whose innocence or guilt has yet to be determined." Innocence or guilt? But how can this man, born in 1944, be guilty? His near-hysterical determination not to let his generation off the hook for its parents' crimes verges on madness. Then again, madness may be the only appropriate response to the enormity of the Holocaust. To move on is unacceptable if not impossible; to succumb to obsession is self-destructive and potentially suicidal. Once Haya's son discovers his true identity, he does everything in his power to keep the horror and the pain alive. His anguish brings to mind an author Drndic doesn't quote: Faulkner, whose Quentin Compson kills himself because he fears that the pain he is feeling is going to fade. Which, thank God, is the nature of everything earthly, including history. The pain of the Holocaust has faded already; it's fading now. 'Bystanders ... keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism.' CRAIG SELIGMAN is a critic and the author of "Sontag & Kael."
Kirkus Review
An epic, heart-rending saga from the Croatian novelist about a forgotten corner of the Nazi Holocaust. The author offers no traditional novel. Its heart is the fictional story of Haya Tedeschi, daughter in a near-assimilated Jewish family from Gorizia, Italy, near Trieste. Interwoven with Haya's tale are brutal historical facts of bloodletting during World War II. One chapter, "Behind Every Name There is a Story," is simply "[t]he names of 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945." There are photographs. There are war crime trial transcripts and poetry excerpts, from Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges and others crying out against "the deafness that presses upon the earth." Haya's story begins as the family moves from their home in Italy to Albania and finally back to Gorizia as refugees. There, young Haya begins work as a store clerk. Haya's seduced and becomes pregnant by Kurt Franz, an SS officer and death camp participant who ultimately reveals he knows Haya's ethnicity, whispering "[m]y little Jewess, we can't go on like this....Besides, my fiance is waiting at home." Their child, Antonio, is soon kidnapped and spirited away to Germany to be raised as an ideal Aryan by a German couple. Antonio reappears at narrative's end as Hans Traube, a photographer, a metaphor for all consumed in the conflagration of the Holocaust. Offering "no mercy for the pathological debris of humanity," the author rains bitter condemnation on the International Red Cross, the Swiss, the Roman Catholic Church and the passive complicity of the German people. A brilliant artistic and moral achievement worth reading.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Outrage, horror, and grief simmer beneath the surface of this gripping novel by Croatian novelist/critic Drndic'(English, Univ. of Rijeka) about the experiences of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste, in northeastern Italy and under the occupation of Nazi Germany. A blend of fiction and nonfiction, this novel brings in testimony from the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials and eyewitness accounts by camp survivors as part of the research done by main character Haya Tedeschi in her quest to find her son, who was kidnapped by the Nazis as part of the SS-founded Lebensborn program. Drndic''s narrative is matter-of-fact, and the format is unusual, including photographs, lists of victims, court transcripts, interviews, and very short biographies of Nazis-mirroring the material collected over six decades by Haya. The effect is to immerse the reader deep into the wartime atrocities, and the result is an unbearable, unusual, and unforgettable tribute to a very dark period of history. VERDICT Highly recommended, this story's gripping historical approach calls to mind the work of Norman Mailer and Don -DeLillo. [See Prepub Alert, 7/22/13.]--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.