Trieste

by Daša Drndić

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 clandestine Lebensborn project.

Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, dealing 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.

Written in immensely powerful language and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Daša Drndić has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of twentieth-century history.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Italy, World War II, Holocaust, War, Historical

412 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Daša Drndić (1946-2018) was a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, author of radio plays and documentaries. She was born in Zagreb, and studied English language and literature at the University of Belgrade. Drndić worked as an editor, a professor of English, and as a TV programme editor in Belgrade. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Rijeka in Croatia, where she later taught. She is the author of thirteen novels including Leica Format (2003), Sonnenschein (2007), Trieste (2011) and Belladonna (2012). Her works have been translated into many languages, and Drndić has won the International Literary Award “Prozart" in 2014, awarded to a prominent author for their contribution towards the development of the literature on the Balkans. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the inaugral EBRD Literature Prize.

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

“She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones.”

This is Haya Tedeschi who, at the beginning of the novel, is an old Jewish woman sitting in a rocking chair in the Italian town of Gorizia, near Trieste. She is surrounded by documents, photographs, cuttings. Her head is swarming with memories, “melting in her mind like chocolate”.

It should be remembered that Trieste was one of those places which was a disputed territory in both world wars. A kind of no-man’s land perennially awaiting the outcome of some new military action. Its inhabitants never quite sure of where they belonged, pressed in by borders that were continually shifting around them. In short, it’s an inspired place to set a novel about the horrors of world war two.

Haya’s story is constructed piece by piece with frequent brilliantly researched documentary interludes. The artistry with which this novel moves back and forth between the personal and the public, a microcosm and a macrocosm of the Holocaust is, for the most part, brilliant. Haya’s story is told with a kind of disarming playful lyricism at times which reminded me of Nicole Krauss but without Krauss’ whimsy, her artificial sweeteners (which I enjoy) . We learn about Haya’s family’s displacement during the first world war. We learn that, like most Italian Jews, they are integrated into Italian life and do not identify themselves primarily as Jewish. To outsiders they are essentially indistinguishable from any other local resident. We see how they are forced by events to become nomads. Work takes them to Albania, Milan, Naples, Venice and Trieste. The hub of the novel is Haya’s relationship with a seemingly and, relatively speaking, innocent German soldier who is also a keen photographer. Haya is a typical young girl. Wilfully ignorant. While transports are leaving Trieste in the middle of the night she is often to be found at the cinema or dining in a trattoria. (Drndic is very tough on Haya and her family: “The Tedeschi family are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism. 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.”) Kurt Franz, the German boyfriend, leaves her when she is pregnant. A year later her son mysteriously vanishes when her back is turned. The central mystery of the novel is what happened to her son. The personal horror of the novel is the gradual unfurling of who his father was, what he did.

There’s a sense we’ve become a little immunised to the horrors of the Holocaust. This novel rips through all those palliatives. It adds new horrors to the Holocaust. Some of the things you learn are as disturbing as anything you already know. I won’t spill any beans because these details are very much an integral part of the novel’s emotional charge. You also learn a few more light-hearted facts like, for example, how when Mussolini’s Ministry of Culture clamped down on the infiltration of foreign words into the Italian language they forbade Italians to refer to Louis Armstrong by his American name; instead he had to be called Luigi Braccioforte! More unsettling we discover that the Swiss allowed the transport trains to pass through their territory when the Brenner tunnel was snowed up on the provision that the Red Cross be allowed to serve the prisoners hot soup and coffee.


I read some of the other reviews of this and noticed one person objected to the Nuremburg transcriptions and especially the list of the 9,000 Jews deported from Italy. I found this list very moving because you knew every one of those people had a deeply moving human story like Haya’s. And you don’t have to read every name on the list so this seemed a rather querulous complaint. There might be a case for complaining that, at times, the documentary dwarfed the human story of Haya; that perhaps one didn’t quite get to know Haya as much as one would have liked and occasionally the large scale narrative detracted rather than added to the momentum of the small scale narrative. Personally, for example, I found the quoting of Pound, Borges, Shakespeare, Eliot and others clumsy rather than illuminating. But this is a small misgiving.

There’s also a fabulous twist when, late in the novel, we learn who is narrating the novel. This is without question one of the most painful novels I’ve ever read. It’s no Schindler’s List, softening the horror with acts of moving kindness. There’s nothing uplifting about this narrative - except the artistry with which it’s constructed.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy situated towards the end of the narrow strip of Italian territory lying between the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia.
This book by Dasa Drndic, had me 'google-reading' about the ancient history, the Middle Ages, the early modern days, 19th century, 20th century, ....WWI, annexation to Italy and the Fascist area, WWII and the aftermath, and the Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste in 1947-54.

Any reader who loves storytelling -- will be enchanted at the start of this novel. Haya Tedeschi, was born in 1923, in Gorizia....a time when the town and the whole region became officially part of Italy.
Haya, reflects back on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences. She's sitting in a rocking chair surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Haya was waiting to be reunited with her son after sixty-two years, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the Germans authorities. --part of Heinrich Himmler's clandestine Lebensborn project founded in 1935....( outlaws of intermarriage with Jews and others who were considered inferior). Children who were born by an interracial couple were believed to grow up to lead a Nazi-Aryan nation.

"I got in touch with the Red Cross. I hoped The Red Cross would help me find my grandparents' names. I might have relatives. I might have nephews. My mother had six brothers. My grandmother was a gypsy from Hungary and my grandfather was from Yugoslavia. I believe I have hundreds of brothers and sisters. Who knows how many women he slept with, and man who got my mother pregnant? Mother never told me my grandmothers' name. I am German property, because I was made in Germany at the behest of Heinrich Himmler. I was born in Germany, but when the war ended they forced Mary Bozic to take me with her, because they wanted to forget I existed. They did not want to see me. They wanted to forget that I had ever lived, but I'm not giving up. Germany owes me an apology. It owes me compensation. Me and my mother Mary
Bozic. I must find out who my family are and where my grandfather and grandmother are buried. Thank you for hearing me out".

In the middle of this book there are 44 pages of about 9,000 names of Jews...( tiny print) ... who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945. "BEHIND EVERY NAME THERE IS A STORY"
It's 'powerful' to see all these names - each in print!!!!! It kinda does something to you!

THIS is TERRIFIC historical novel. The reader gets a taste of the charming city- a cosmopolitan melting pot where at the beginning of the 20th century it was bustling with artist's and philosophers such as James Joyce and Sigmund Freud. Music, fashion, cuisine, politics, fishing, laughing, and the grand love of every day people....Dasa Drndic opened my eyes and gave me an experience of Trieste - past - and present-where I had none.
The last chapters especially got to me....they would anyone!!

Special thanks to *Violet* for recommending I read this. I bought the hard copy last 'year'. Sorry I took so long to read it.....and forgive me 'again' for going past my 3 sentence goal!!! Still need to try harder or read more average books.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The review below appears in The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 37: http://quarterlyconversation.com/trie...
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In the opening passages of Daša Drndić’s Trieste, an elderly woman, Haya Tedeschi, sits in a rocking chair in her third story apartment in the Northern Italian town of Gorizia, close to the port of Trieste:

Is that the chair whimpering or is it me? She asks the deep emptiness, which, like every emptiness, spreads its putrid cloak in all directions to draw her in, her, the woman rocking, to swallow her, blanket her, swamp her, envelop her, ready her for the rubbish heap where the emptiness, her emptiness, is piling the corpses, already stiffened, of the past.

As Drndić reiterates throughout the novel, “Behind every name there is a story.” And Haya Tedeschi’s story is draped in death. Born to a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism and tacitly supported the Fascists in Italy, Haya was a bystander to the Holocaust. She attended movies while Jews and partisans were transported to concentration camps; she pored over movie magazines while thousands of Jews and partisans were killed in the former rice mill San Sabba; she attended concerts with her Nazi lover, Oberscharführer Kurt Franz, while families were torn apart. And on April 13, 1945, the Holocaust was brought home to her when her infant son Antonio was stolen out of his stroller. Throughout Trieste, Haya waits for Antonio to be found, to return to her. As she waits, she echoes a refrain from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.”

In the novel’s epigraph, Drndić quotes Jorge Luis Borges: “A single moment suffices to unlock the secrets of life, and the key to all secrets is History and only History, that eternal repetition and the beautiful name of horror.” The central question of Trieste is the impossibility of coming to terms with the horrors of history, when historical cycles blend past, present, and future and there is no clear way to avoid repeating yesterday’s bloodshed. The novel itself is not built on character development or plot twists. Instead, Drndić amasses archival evidence that damns not only the Nazi regime but all bystanders for their complicity in the Holocaust. The novel bears witness, and demands its readers do the same.

Jan Morris describes the city of Trieste as “an allegory of limbo,” demonstrated by its shifting political allegiances—first as a part of the Habsburg empire, then later given to Italy, briefly ruled by the Germans during World War Two, and finally given back to Italy in 1954 against the wishes of Yugoslavia. In 1943, when the Germans took over Trieste, they established a police barracks and extermination camp in the former rice mill of San Sabba. Drndić’s documentary evidence of the horrors experienced there shines a light on an often-overlooked part of the Holocaust. And the ability of local families such as the Tedeschis to blend into the majority during periods of crisis presents questions of culpability and identity. What does it mean to be Jewish? How to cope with the human toll of a commitment to national identity? Are children guilty of the sins of their parents? Are any families free from the ghosts of ancestors’ mistakes?

Throughout Trieste, Drndić provides a wealth of historical evidence: trial transcripts, interviews, photographs, music, maps, genealogical charts. This documentary evidence is presented in overwhelming detail. In one 44-page span, Drndić provides a list “of about 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945.” Drndić’s approach recalls Roberto Bolaño’s list of murdered women in Mexico in 2666, and to a lesser extent his encyclopedia of fictional literary fascists, Nazi Literature in the Americas. Drndić’s approach is different in part because of the years of archival research behind the novel, in part because of the sheer variety of documents she presents. In some cases, she even brings the dead back to life, as when she presents testimony from those who died in the concentration camps. And in the rooms of archives like Bad Arolsen lie millions of stories waiting to be told:

At the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen, on huge sliding shelves marked with the names of the camps, cities, battles, regions, in alphabetical registers, lurk unfinished stories, trapped fates, big and little personal histories, embodied histories, there are people huddled there who languish, ghost-like, and wait for the great Mass of Liberation, the eucharistic celebration after which they will finally lie down, fall asleep or depart, soaring heavenward. Bad Arolsen, this vast collection of documented horror,preserves the patches, the fragments, the detritus of seventeen, yes, in digits, 17 million lives on 47 million pieces of paper collected from twenty-two concentration camps and their satellite organizations….

Drndić also provides a window into Haya Tedeschi’s thoughts through morbidly lyrical passages detailing Haya’s dreams and internal visions. Throughout the novel, during her decades of waiting, Haya is haunted by ghosts.

She hears voices where there are none. Her voices are dead. All the same, she converses with the voices of the dead, she quibbles with them, sometimes she slumps limply into their arms and they whisper to her and guide her through landscapes she has forgotten. There are times when events boil over in her mind and then her thoughts become an avenue of statues, granite, marble, stone statues, plaster figures that do nothing but move their lips and tremble.

Her memories a graveyard, Haya is surrounded by decay and rot. She dreams of corpses and skulls, of dragging her mother by her legs to hide her. She leafs through the archival records she has amassed, which she keeps in a red basket by her feet.

Now, in 2006, while she waits, while she sifts through the past as if opening dry beanpods from which the beans fall like sealed, enslaved little stories composed of images flitting by in flashes, while she digs through the red basket at her feet uncovering the crusty layers in the little piles of sealed lives, out slips the envelope, so she puts it on her lap and rocks it as if it is a stillborn child.

In 2006, as Haya walks the streets of Gorizia, the dead are more real to her than the neighbors she passes:

She cannot see, nor is she watching. She has wax plugs in her ears. She does not hear…. She has little memories, darting memories, fragmented. She sways on the threads of the past. On the threads of history. She swings on a spider’s web.

Haya used to look to literature for answers to her pain and guilt, and the novel is filled with quotations from T. S. Eliot and Romain Rolland, Jean Giono and Ezra Pound. She even engages in a debate with Kierkegaard over despair and memory. But by the end of her period of waiting, she has grown weary of words, preferring numbers and formulas instead, “because everything is in formulas, everything.”

Haya’s lover Kurt Franz lived the instability of language. An amateur photographer, he meets Haya in a tobacco shop, when he buys film. They soon begin to meet in secret, screening away the reality of war. Franz presents himself as cultured, handsome, charming, an avid gardener who loves his dog Barry, lives for music, and is a devoted son. In reality, before arriving at Trieste, Franz oversaw final operations at Treblinka, pushing through final executions and killing inmates by his own hand, or by ordering Barry to attack male inmates. And then, in 1943, he was assigned to Trieste, where he was responsible for overseeing the executions of Jews and partisans in San Sabba. Haya and Franz’s relationship illustrates the destructive power of relationships: “The way lives interweave yet never touch, only to collide in mutual destruction, inconceivably distant in their simultaneity.”

Haya is not the only character haunted by Kurt Franz’s crimes. Their son, Antonio Tedeschi, was kidnapped under the Lebensborn project, a German program designed by Himmler to ensure the racial purity of the German race by providing care for pregnant women, and later by enabling German families to adopt children who met the racial and biological standards set by the Nazis. Many of these children were kidnapped. Antonio provides his own testimony in the final chapters of Trieste, the only chapters written in the first person, adding to the immediacy and power of his witnessing. He speaks of his anguish in learning that the Traubes, who raised him as Hans Traube, were not his biological parents, as well as his pain and guilt in learning that his biological father was a Nazi. He holds himself complicit in his father’s actions by virtue of having Franz’s blood running through his veins.In a telling detail, Hans is a professional photographer, which both represents his bearing witness, and provides a link with his biological father, the amateur photographer.

My situation is complicated many times over. I was stolen. I am a Lebensborn child…. But theninto my life crept that murderer, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz and that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him, for the blonde angel of death, the admirer of music and nature, the bad amateur fanatic photographer, the baby-faced executioner, she spread her legs while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich.

Antonio notes that his story is shared by many others, as he provides testimony from other Lebensborn children. Their experiences reveal the continuation of hatred, secrecy, racism, and pain decades beyond the end of World War II. There’s no outlet for their pain, no compensation that can give them back, not only their childhood, but also their sense of self.Antonio’s voice is clear, strong, anguished. Like Haya, he attempts to reconstruct his identity through archival research. Crucially, they are both looking for some respite from the burden of history – but Drndić does not provide much hope. As Antonio says near the conclusion of the novel, “Together, we will drape ourselves in the histories of others, believing that those pasts are our pasts and we shall sit and we shall wait for those pasts to fall into our lap like a fat, dead cat.” And he concludes with a chilling reflection on the repetition of history:

We should probably be able to learn something from the repetition of history, repetitio est mater studiorum, but despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners, and History, brazen and stubborn, does not desist, it goes right on repeating and repeating itself, I will repeat myself until I faint, it says, I will repeat myself to spite you, it says, until finally you come to your senses, it says, yet we do not come to our senses, we just grow our hair, hide and lie and feign innocence. Besides, for some of us, those of us who like Santa Claus lug sacks on our backs, sacks brimming with the sins of our ancestors, History has no need to return, History is in our marrow, and here, in our bones, it drills rheumatically and no medicine can cure that. History is in our blood and in our blood it flows quietly and destructively, while on the outside there’s nothing, on the outside all is calm and ordinary, until one day, History, our History, the History in our blood, in our bones, goes mad and starts eroding the miserable, crumbling ramparts of our immunity, which we have been cautiously raising for decades.

[Jan-Maat]

Such a cheerful book ideal for children's parties and sunny days and journeys to tree ringed lakes. Perhaps that is even a semi-serious suggestion as the books related topics of the Holocaust and the Lebensborn programme require a counterweight to main the equilibrium of the soul or in the absence of a soul, moderate goodcheer .

This is a collage book like Berlin Alexanderplatz or indeed Stand on Zanzibar. There are two stories, one of a mother, the other of her son, his story predominates toward the end of the book, her's at first. Both are broken up by documentary sections, a forty three page listing in close small type of about 9,000 Jews either killed in or deported from territories controlled by Italy between 1943 and 1945, mini-biographies of SS men active in and around Trieste towards the close of the war, also photographs, reminiscences, and more.

Naturally this complicates the book - which is not necessarily a bad thing. However I wondered were the borderline was here between fact and fiction, were the photographs of who Drndic said they were, or were they of random SS men? Were the brief biographies true or created by her? Does it matter? Aristotle I believe felt that poetry was superior to history because it offered universal or general truths rather than specific ones, but then Aristotle said many things, plenty of which we would not take seriously. Of her fictional characters the mother is based on the life and family of an actual woman but Drndic has grafted on to the factual root stock her own fiction, perhaps that grafting metaphor is a way of approaching the whole book.

The distinct voices of Mother and son, also of these other elements - the list of names, the biiographies and so on are a collage but also a polyphony, and even within the narrative of the son in particular there are further polyphonic elements - discussions with other people including Thomas Bernard which raises further questions, are these extracts from actual conversations or documents, how has Drndc editted them, and with whose permission did she do so?.

Reading this book brought me back to where I started this year: reading Zeitenwende, one of the thoughts that the authors of that book share is the idea that there should be not only a cordon sanitaire sealing off far-right political groups from democratic government, but also around such political parties that are prepared to work with neo-fascists, not quite fascists, or apologists for fascism. On the one hand that would cause a political crisis in some countries, on the other hand reading a book like Trieste, they have a valid point.

The fictional, or fictionalised lives of Mother and son show not just the impact of the Holocaust, but also the results of persecution generally, the ongoing impact on later generations - she suggests here 250,000 children were removed from their families and given to politically and racially acceptable adoptive parents and those children, in the fullness of time have had children and grandchildren and so on.

Recvery of identity, she suggests, is complex and in many cases impossible because of the complicity of groups like the Catholic Church in particular, but also state authorities, and the International Red Cross with Fascist regimes, and in protecting themselves. There is a terrible sense of the book as an attempt to expose wounds. We are in The Waste Land and we must, or perhaps we can face that as a fact.. I wondered if Drndic herself had a dog in this fight? What were her parents up to during the war? A brief glance into the murks of the internet told me that she was only dead and so no longer answering questions. The mother's narrative tells us not to be too simplistic, you could be a victim and alongside the perpetrators too, which is born out in many of the stories in the son's narration about the Lebensborn children, some conceived to be Europe's elite but who due to defeat ended up in many cases as abused pariahs. I wondered what I would read differently if I knew precisely what was fiction and what was fact.

I wondered as I was saying where Drndic was in her creation, but that is one of the features of polyphony, it can thrust the author to one side while the voices shout, compete, and sing. From the correct perspective or vantage point, it can all sound harmonious, move half a pace to the left or the right and there is dissonance or the dominance of one voice. And as my literary mentor, former Governor of an island, Sancho Panza teaches, you can't separate the stories from the way it is told. So at this moment I think that polyphony itself is a response to Fascism and the Third Reich which sought to replace the mingled and mashed together heritages of Europe with one awful conformity.

just some notes "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" (p.285) Eliot the waste land? Also repeated. WWII and post war is the waste land in need of renewal, secrecy prevents regrowth and a new life
There is a story behind every name (3times) c/f bad arolsen every name counts
Translation asses to arses.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Trieste, when the Nazis came. . . . and so, from one Trieste to another.

It helped to read Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris first, giving me some sense of the history of the area and the people. A brief takeaway is that Trieste was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as being Italian. And even after the duality stopped, Trieste was never quite all Italian. Maps changed, and names changed, but Trieste was still . . . well, Morris would say nowhere. Daša Drndić writes that when the Nazis come Trieste lives its schizophrenic moment again, in war, its parallel lives, real and unreal, contradictory.

This Trieste is what I would call a docu-drama: part documentary and part novel. The novel threads itself through testimonies, pictures and a list of names.* It may look weird, but it works.

The atrocities are retold here, and graphically, using testimonies and memories. Small biographies let us know who the dozens of S.S.-Sturmbannführers and -Unterscharführers and -Stabsscharführers were. Plain people, opportunists really, who mostly melted back into society when their unspeakable acts were over.

The fictional part of this book – the novel, if you will – concerns the Lebensborn Project. The Lebensborn Project was designed at first to care for “racially and biologically quintessential” pregnant women who would give birth to racially and biologically quintessential sons of the homeland, perfect stallions at least one metre eighty centimetres tall, blonde and blue-eyed, muscles bulging, and sleek, disciplined Spartans. Soon, Himmler opened dozens of Lebensborn homes where certified Aryan women would give birth to their illegal children in secrecy.**

Other acceptable looking sons were just stolen.

The Catholic Church abetted this. A document, confirmed by Pope Pius XII, ordered that children who have been baptized must under no circumstances be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, because these agencies cannot guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, who were saved by the Church during the war and were Catholicized with such benevolence and salvation, especially if these Jewish agencies are handing these, during the war, benevolently Catholicized children back to the Jews. Meaning, the child’s mother and father.

Haya Tedeschi is there when the Nazis come. She becomes the secret lover of Kurt Franz. She will have his baby, a son, which Franz will see before he leaves for Treblinka, where he will be the camp commander. At his trials, many years later, Franz will deny everything. It is obviously false, Franz says. Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name.

The son is baptized by the local priest who then apprises the authorities. The acceptable looking child, now a Christian soul, is kidnapped. Lebensborn. Will they ever find each other?

Elvira Weiner testified: Later I wondered – not then, later – why I had been saved, and some others were not, now I know: no-one was saved.


_______________________________
*There are 44 pages with a list of the 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy or killed in Italy in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945. My first thought was: gimmick. But by the time I got to the list there was a heaviness that made me feel I would be disrespectful if I didn’t go through the names. It made me wonder. Did an Ottolenghi somehow survive and create a chef in a following generation? Did a Modiano make it to France? Did an American historian named Remini lose family that stayed? Behind every name is a story, the author tells us. I looked again, at two full pages of the surname Levi. I followed the alphabetical order and there it was: Primo.

**Synni Lyngstad was eighteen when she fell in love with a married S.S. sergeant. Their daughter was born in November, 1945. The mother and daughter were taken to Sweden as part of Lebensborn. The daughter was told her father was dead. Then in 1977 a German magazine published a story about my background and claimed that former S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase was alive. So I found my father, who came to Sweden to meet me. It was difficult to talk with him. He was an elderly S.S. man and a retired pastry chef. I don’t believe he was a war criminal; he was never taken to court. The two of us are physically similar and this disturbs me. My name is Anni-Frid Lyngstad. I was a singer in ABBA. The brunette.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very moving book that mixes a fictional personal story with history, including many detailed accounts of Nazi atrocities, focusing on the area around Trieste and its complex mixture of nationalities.

The central character Haya Tedeschi is a Jewish Italian with some Austrian and Slovenian ancestry - the first part of the book describes the lives of her parents and grandparents and some of the history of the region, including the bloody conflict between Italy and Austria during World War One.
Born in the small town of Gorizia in 1923, Haya's family is forced to move several times, spending the first part of World War Two in Albania before returning to the "Adriatische Künstenland" where she has a child fathered by an SS officer who is involved in running extermination camps (who is based on and shares the name of a real war criminal, though his relationship with Haya is fictional). Her son is abducted, and she spends most of her life amassing evidence and trying to trace him. In the final part the son discovers that he was adopted as part of the Lebensborn eugenics program, and their paths start to converge.

At one point over 40 pages are devoted to a list of 9000 Italian victims of the Holocaust, and much of the rest is devoted to case studies of various war criminals and other witnesses.

This is not an easy or comfortable read, but it feels weighty and important in the same way as Sebald's related books.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

For sixty-two years she has been waiting.

She sits rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro Hungarian building in the old Gloriza .The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers.
[...]
Foul breath fills the room (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her grave stone, now, just in case, in case he doesn’t come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years.

This is the 4th of Daša Drndić's 5 novels available in English translation (5 of her last 6 published in Croatian) which I have read, and as well as an excellent book in its own right, what is striking is how well the novels blend together, including intertextual elements, to form one overall impressive and powerful work.

Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać from the original Sonnenschein, opens in 2006 with the 83 year-old Haya Tedeschi waiting in her room in the town of Gorizia (in the area of Trieste) on the Italian-Slovenian border - waiting for the son who was snatched from her, as a baby, in 1944.

The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and I have reviewed Drndić's other translated novels extensively (see below), but I will just focus here on how she so cleverly combines archival fact with fictional characters and intertextual references to produce something unique.

Haya Tedeschi's early life and her family history, in the first third of the novel, set in the turbulent first decades of the 20th Century, are based (with permission) of the real-life Fulvia Schiff - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trieste-True....

But Fulvia Schiff married an allied soldier and settled in the UK, whereas Drndić has Haya instead meet a German soldier and become pregnant with his child:

A thirty year old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is handsome as a doll. The German already has the polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing german tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka.

This German soldier is based on (without permission) and indeed essentially is the real-life SS officer Kurt Franz (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Franz), who rose from a cook at the Sonnerstein euthansia camp to commandant at Treblinka. His nickname Lalka - baby face - wholly inappropriate for his sadistic behaviour (http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...) - in 1965 he was found guilty of collective murder of at least 300,000 people, and 35 counts of murder involving at least 139 people. The real-life Franz did spend time in the area of Trieste and Gorizia after the Treblinka camp was dismantled although is not known to have fathered a child with a local.

In the novel, Franz abandons his pregnant, Jewish, lover, but when she gives birth her child is snatched. She 62 years later, as the novel opens, finds that the boy was taken into the Lebensborn program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) and eventually placed with a German foster family.

Drndić has this boy be the photographer who accompanied the real-life journalist Niklas Frank when he interviewed in 1982 the author Drndić has acknowledged as her most important influence, the great Thomas Bernhard (https://www.thomasbernhard.org/interv... for translated extracts from the real-life interview)

This interview took place in Gmunden where Thomas Bernhard lived in his renovated farmhouse, close to Schloss Oberweis (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss...) which, during the war, was renamed Alpenland - the base of the Lebensborn organisation.

And the real-life Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_...) himself was to realise over time that his beloved father Hans Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank) who died when he was 7, was actually a Nazi war criminal, executed at Nuremburg.

In this novel, The son's adoptive parents are also closely acquainted with Isabella Fischer from the twin novellas Doppelgänger (published earlier than Trieste in the original Croatian), having acquired some of her confiscated property, and indeed they are the people who send her the chocolates she receives each year in the earlier book.

And Haya herself reappears in the later novel Belladonna, where Andreas Ban reads this novel, meets Haya Tedeschi, and later meets the English translator Ellen Elias-Bursać.

Stunning. 4.5 stars.

Bibliography.

Daša Drndić's last 6 works of fiction were:

Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Shortlisted for 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize

Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth

Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Shortlisted for 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated

Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Winner 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize

E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Dov Zeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read reviews in which people call this book a brilliant novel, and in my mind brilliance is beside the point and whether or not this is a novel I could not say. It is a powerful weaving together of prose, poetry, oral histories and other historical documentation. A book in which a character tries to come to terms with her choices during a time of war, and for all of her years lived after the war, forces herself to look unflinchingly at her complicity and tries to unravel the mystery of her son's disappearance (a good 60 years before this novel's chronological present.)

I've heard "Trieste" described as "documentary fiction", a category I didn't know existed, and one I like very much. People compare her to Sebald, and I don't know if I agree. Her writing is much messier and much harder to assimilate, there is none of Sebald's smoothness. Instead of walking and talking like a tour-guide, it is almost as if someone is talking in the way of the ancient mariner, but without any care as to who is listening. Haya doesn't seem to notice us, she is quiet and determined and perhaps a little monomaniacal (I realize that is a conflict of terms). Meanwhile, Drndic is screaming. I can feel her voice going hoarse, her mania, her horror and frustration as she uncovers more and more evidence of the horrors of history that go on unwitnessed, un-addressed, unjustified, still clawing into our collective consciousness. If only there could be some kind of reparation, so we can move onto a clean page. But there are no clean pages. Every page has the names of the dead, of the dead and forgotten who were killed unjustly and who suffered horrifically, and the dead and forgotten whose magnificent crimes were ignored. What is more horrific? That the victims are forgotten? That perpetrators, sadistic, more than willing engineers of vast killing machines, got a pat on the back and walked away to lead "normal" lives?

One goodreads reviewer said she wished Drndic had taken another year to assimilate her raw materials before putting it all into this novelistic form, but it is the failure of the novel to assimilate its own contents that, I think, makes it such a force of nature. It is the unresolvable tension between Haya's quiet plodding voice and Drndic's rageful despair that makes this book a thorn in an ocean-sized paw. In a way this book is a critique of assimilation and the novelistic form. People want well-crafted stories that have good table manners and even do most of the chewing and swallowing for them. Drndic kind of gives us all a big, beautiful fuck you, and says, look at this mess! This is what history is! It's an overgrown, underchewed, gristly, grizzly mess! But it doesn't have to be! Or maybe it does. Because we are pitiful, spiteful and frail. We either walk away from our genealogy and our mistakes, or we're destroyed by them.

I uniquely experience in this book the weight of and continuity between the two world wars, how they are part of the same inexorable tectonic shifting of history, and all of this through the life of a little port town and its own shifting national identities, and in particular, through the days of Haya Tedeschi, an Italian born Jew whose family is caught up in all the currents of these wars and doing its best to survive, often by keeping their world-view small and focused on not rattling any windows. In fact the family converts to christianity (I can't recall if it is a full conversion) and sides with the fascists because it is the path of least resistance (literally) and it is at this time, during the second world war, when the family is doing its best to stay under the radar and going so far as to resent the resistance fighters and see them as trouble-makers and the nazis and fascists as the civilizing force, that Haya meets a charming, boyish nazi officer and has an affair with him. She is around twenty years old and relatively innocent of critical thought, just letting herself be swept in the directions that bring her the most ease of pleasure and the least risk of pain. Something like that. And then she gets pregnant and her nazi reveals his true colors in an understated and chilling moment. He leaves Trieste and leaves Haya to manage on her own with the child, and she is happy to do that. But when her child disappears the course of her life changes. She spends much of the rest of her life trying to find him, and forcing herself to look at the horrors of the war and particularly those perpetrated by her sons father.

At the center of this work is the tragedy and crisis of the children, particularly Jewish children, kidnapped or held "hostage" by the church (i.e. never returned to their family of origin after the war) so they could be raised as proper christians (the mechanics of this continue long after the war) and of the lebensborn -- children conceived as part of the nazi project of spreading their genetics far and wide. Many of the former never discovered their true identities, or by the time they did, it too late for reparation. Many of the latter were horribly abused after the end of the war, and even those who weren't often suffered (and still suffer) greatly trying to make existential sense of being born of murderers. One of the more famous lebensborn, acknowledged in this novel, is Anni-Frid of Abba.

Also central to the novel is the history of the internment camp/death camp in Trieste called San Sabba.

Toward the end of the novel we move away from Haya and toward her son, a professional photographer (his father was an amateur one, and, as Antonio Tedeschi/Hans Traube tells us, untalented). While I am often distracted and disappointed by shifts in perspective, this shift deepens my experience of the story -- it is very meaningful given the address of trauma through generations. Though their life experiences quite different. their emotional struggles are hauntingly similar:

"When I write about the role of my mother in the universal history of infamy, I will not know who strolled around the San Sabba rice mill, who snapped pictures of San Sabba, my mother or I, who searched through the files of the officials of the Adriatisches Kustenland, she or I, who studied the detailed form the life of SS Untersturmfuhrer Kurt Franz, Haya Tedeschi or I, Hans Traube-Antonio Tedeschi, who was it that visited Treblinka. Together, we will drape ourselves in the histories of others, believing that those pasts are our pasts and we shall sit and we shall wait for those pasts to fall into our lap like a fat, dead cat." (351)



Some quotes from the novel (I could post many more, but not sure where to begin or end)

Her grandfather was born in Gorz. Her mother was born in Gorz. She was born in Gorizia/Gorica. When the Great War broke out, the began moving, living in many places. She doesn’t know what Gorz was, nor does she know what Gorizia is now though she has been here nearly sixty years. She take walks along Gorizia’s streets, but hers are brief forays, quick walks, walks with a purpose, jaunts. Even when she takes longer strolls, when her strolls are more leisurely (when the days are mild and her room feels stale, a humid inertia), Haya doesn’t notice the big changes in her surroundings. She feels as if she has been sitting for sixty years in a shrinking room, a room whose walls are moving slowly inward to meet at a miniature surface, a line, at the apex of which she sits, crushed. She cannot see, nor is she watching. She has wax plugs in her ears. She does not hear. Gore, Gorizia, are memories. She isn’t certain whose memories they are. Hers or her family’s. Maybe they are fresh memories. When she goes out she squints at the sun, picks daisies, sits at the Joy Cafe and smokes. She has not let herself go. She does not wear black. She is not forever rocking back and forth. All is as it should be. She has a television. She has little memories, darting memories, fragmented. She sways on the threads of the past. On the threads of history. She swing son a spider’s web. She is very light. Around her, in her, now is quiet. Giros has a history, she has a history. The days are so old. (8)

MINCULPOP is born, the Ministry of Popular Culture, and with it new dictionaries, orthographies, patriotism; the use of foreign phrases Is banned, and they are replaced by Italian surrogates. Maxim Gorky is dubbed Massimo Amaro, but he is swiftly removed from the libraries and bookshops; Louis Armstrong becomes Luigi Fortebraccio, and Benny Goodman is Benjamin Buonuomo; shortly thereafter MINCULPOP bans all jazz performance and broadcasts.
Life in the Tedeschi family goes on. For Haya it is altogether ordinary, completely forgettable, as ordinary life is, until the day when, at the beginning of the school year in September 1938, her teachers Nella Negri, Amato di Veroli, Samuel Tagliacozzo, Massimo Pavoncello and Viola Sass do not show up to teach Geography, Mathematics, History, Italian and Physical Education. Until the day when Florian, after dinner, whispering in a conspiratorial hush, as if about to say something obscene, declares, We are Jews, and [Haya] asks, What does that mean? (47)

On San Sabba

So in 1976 Haya makes a little file, utterly pointless. She writes out notes, arranges them, rearranges them, as if shuffling a pack of cards. I could play solitaire with these notes, she says, which, in a sense, she does. This dog-eared file, full of cracked photographs of people, most of whom no longer exist, becomes Haya’s obsession; over the year she supplements her collection, slips into it little oddities, terse news items which after two, three, four decades she digs out and peruses, as if grabbing at dry dandelion fluff, as if catching eiderdown in a warm wind. Pointless, pointless. Forgotten dossiers, sealed archives open slowly, slowly, and what emerges is no more than water dripping from cracked sewage pipes. During the Trieste trial in 1976 only the two ‘big fish’ remain: Josef Oberhauser, brewer in Munich, former San Sabba commander and - from 1941 to the end of the war - Dr. Dietrich Allers, a high ranking official, one of the executive directors of the T4 program, a lawyer and SS -Obersturmbannfuhrer (approximately a colonel). But Allers dies a year before the trial, in 1975. Born in 1910 in Hamburg, Allers worked as an attorney until 1968, when he is sentenced to eight years in prison, which he does not serve out. So all the fuss, all the pursuit of justice - for nothing, because according to the agreements in force at the time between Italy and Germany, only those suspected of crimes committed after 1948 may be extradited. The trial goes on literally in a void: no defendants sit in the courtroom, the judges natter on, journalists snap their cameras - at no-one. In a solemn voice the judgement is read out to unschooled farmer Josef Oberhausen, but Josef Oberhausen is nowhere to be seen, so to whom is the judgement read? Oberhausen is sentenced in Trieste to life imprisonment, yet in Munich he goes on selling beer, especially during the Oktoberfest, when he is in particularly fine fettle. Three years later, in 1079, fat Oberhausen dies of a heart attack.


~On Barry, the dog of nazi Kurt Franz

I don’t know how he was with children, but he was docile. After Treblinka closed, Barry was taken in by a Nazi physician and in 1944 the doctor sent Barry to his wife in northern Germany. Several years later they put Barry down, because he was old and feeble. Later, in 1965, veterinarians and psychologists from Dusseldorf asked the famous behavioral scientist Konrad Lorenz to shed some light on the dog’s behavior. Lorenz told them that such behavior in a dog is altogether plausible; that a dog’s behavior expresses the subconscious of the dog’s master, as Lorenz put it. If he has an aggressive master, the dog will probably attack other people, Lorenz said, and if the behavior of his master changes, the dog’s behavior will change as well, Lorenz said, and Lorenz can be believed, because during the war he was a loyal Nazi who ‘changed masters’ after the war and was given the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his research into animal and human behavior. (278)

On the church’s role in child kidnapping during and after the war.

It is known, writes Morelli, that at the time of the war many children found shelter in Catholic monasteries, in boarding schools and in schools, but not at the behest of the Pope, writes Morelli. It is well known that after the war the Jews who survived had serious difficulties locating their children, retrieving their children from Catholic institutions, writes Morelli, but until now it was only possible to surmise that the Church was systematically stealing Jewish children in order to indulge Jesus. For sixty years the Church and its ‘servants’ have been striving to prove to the world that they have no blemish on their conscience for their activities as far as World War Two is concerned, writes Morelli. For sixty years the Church has been trying to prove the innocence of Pope Pius XII and many of his bishops and priests. If there is anything that has been preserved with dedication and faith, anything that has been sacrosanct in the church books, then it is the dates of baptisms and deaths, writes Morelli, so it wouldn’t be difficult to ascertain what happened to the baptized Jewish children. If Switzerland, so-called neutral Switzerland, has mustered the strength to set up the edgier Commission, the I.C.E. - An independent commission of experts - though only on 12 December, 1996, writes Alfonso Morelli, to prove the ties between the Nazi regime and the Swiss banks who had at their disposal vast quantities of stolen Jewish property: if Australia has spoken out about the children kidnapped by their authorities, stolen from Aborigines during World War One, writes Morelli, then instead of obscuring history, the Catholic Church can get off its are and throw open its archives. And not only that, writes Morelli. It is time for the Church to stop pretending, to stop lying about how its greatest crime during the war was inadequate involvement in saving Jews, writes Morelli, it is time for the Church to stop believing that it is enough for it to launch anaemic apologies for its ‘inadvertent’ lapses, these ecclesiastical apologies, which are becoming more and more revolting over time, truly disgusting, insipid, writes Alfonso Morelli, because, he writes, it is reasonable to deduce that this letter written to Cardinal Roncalli is not the only incriminating document hidden in the vast secret archives of the Catholic Church. We are hopeful it has become clear by now, writes Morelli, that the Church should slow things down a bit as far as the panicked, nearly hysterical race to beautify, canonize, whatever, Pius XII, who, ah, now this is something that is widely known, writes Morelli, was at the head of a Church which was openly championing anti-Semitism at a time when the Nazis and Fascists were persecuting and murdering Jews on a grand scale. He, Pius XII, led a Church in which many German priests abused church birth registers in order to help the Nazis determine who should be first to wear a yellow star - and then be killed, and some German priests kept right on doing this officially for an entire decade after the Holocaust ended, in order to convince those Jews once and for all that they were guilty of murdering Christ. Just as a reminder, writes Morelli, the ‘Reichskonkodat’, a concordat signed on 20 July, 1933, between the Holy See and the Reich, is in force in Germany to this day. During that time, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, is Secretary of the Vatican, and he is the one who signs this concordat, while Cardinal Micheal von Faulhaber, writes Morelli, in a sermon given in Munich in 1937, says, ‘Now, when the leaders of the greatest world nations observe the rise of the new Germany with a dose of reservation and much skepticism, the Catholic Church, this greatest moral force on earth, is showing its trust in the new German authorities through this concordat, which is an act of vast significance, because it contributes to the strengthening of the renown of the new authorities throughout the world,’ says Faulhaber, writes Morelli. Abe Foxman tells me, continues Morelli, and Foxman is director of the Anti-Defamation League, writes Morelli, that they placed him, Foxman, with a Polish family and his nanny had him secretly baptized, and later there were terrible problems, all sorts of complications, before he was returned to his parents. I believe that today there are tens of thousands of Jewish children in the world who were saved and then baptized, Abraham Foxman tells me, writes Alfonso Morelli, children who do not know to this day of their origins, nor will they ever learn of them, says Foxman, writes Morelli. (284)

[Momčilo Žunić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Natežu konopac u "Sonnenschein-u" zebnja od zaborava i "take-no-prisoner" bes zbog zaborava - uh, koliko simpatišem pravedničku mahnitost! - drndajući tvrdoglavo i istrajno svakoga i sve, i po spisku i van spiska(preispoljne hulje, večito bezlične malograđanine, povijače i posmatrače, sastavljače redosleda vožnji, papu, kler, Crveni krst, zametače tragova,...), dakle, sve koji su ovako ili onako sudelovali u nastajanju, širenju i preživljavanju jedne monstruozne higijene. Njena obličja i koreni su mnogostruki, (NE nužno i isključivo germanski), ali se pripovedni interes ovde drčnije repetira ka domovima za proizvodnju i odgoj 24-karatne "naciščadi"(tzv. Lebensraum-domovi).

Pipke takve higijene Daša nemilice istrljava govnima do poslednje pore, sučeljavajući je u drugom uglu s tvrdoglavo nekultivisanijim vidom higijene: s higijenom sve-sećanja. Pa ko izdrži duže. Glavno da se u opštoj istoriji beščašća - jer je "Povjest - neumorna prostitutka, neuništiva.", kaže nam se u "Leica format-u" - niko od zaslužnih neopoganjen ne provuče. Posred zajedničkog, centralno faktičkog zjapa, govnari smrduckaju il' smrdljaju pod svojim "uzoritim" enciklopedijskim odrednicama, a devet hiljada žrtava dobijaju ime i mogućnost priče. Uz malu fusnotu doduše: bejavši pod stegom faktičke fikcije, valja uvek biti u oprezu s dokumentarnim. Ne samo zbog toga što najednom (mestu) proštrapacira sa sve amblematičnim špacirštokom stanoviti Eduard Sam, sučeljen onom faktičkom poslušniku što je zaista bio osmislio red za logoraški transport, negoli i zbog toga što ni "Stvarnost ne ulazi uvijek u statistiku."

[Lavinia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trieste e o carte-document cutremuratoare, care ar trebui studiata obligatoriu in liceu si discutata. Elevii ar trebui intrebati- credeti ca ceea ce s-a intamplat in Al Doilea Razboi Mondial s-ar putea repeta? Credeti ca oamenii din jurul nostru, cunoscutii nostri, cei cu educatie putina, analfabetii functional, frustratii, cei care nu vad mai departe de propriile interese, dictatorii sub acoperire din tarile democrate ar putea intr-o zi sa consimta la un genocid? Ar putea intr-o zi sa isi tradeze vecinii, prietenii, ar putea lua o mitraliera si sa ii impuste in cap, daca ar aparea conditii propice pentru asta? Din pacate raspunsul meu este “da”.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Holocaust And Trieste

I read Dasa Drndnic's novel, "Trieste" after reading Italo Svevo's famous 1923 novel "Zeno's Conscience" which is set in Trieste from the late 19th century through the beginning of WW I. At the time, Trieste was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. I was fascinated by "Zeno's Conscience", not least because of the praise and discussion it received in philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent book, "The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity". Appiah sees the Trieste of Svevo's day as well as his book and the author himself as illustrating a spirit of cosmopolitanism and shared human identity that he finds valuable.

Dasa Drndic's book offers a different picture than does Svevo or Appiah. Her novel is set during the years of the Holocaust although it ranges in time both before and after. After WW I, Trieste had become part of Italy. The book describes the Holocaust in Italy in detail while also covering much of the enormity of the evil. The primary character of the book is an elderly woman, Hasa Tedeschi, who lives in a town north of Trieste. The book opens in 2006 as Hasa, a retired mathematics teacher, waits for her long-lost son and gathers both her memories and factual information on the Holocaust.

Some of the details of Hasa's personal story are fiction but the Holocaust is all-too-real. The novel offers chillingly detailed portrayals of the camps, their leaders, and the unimaginable brutality of the era. The depiction of the people and places involved has a cumulative, shocking impact. A test of whether a book works for me is the extent to which it makes me want to move beyond the covers of the book and learn more. Drndic's book made me want to revisit and relearn what I knew about the Holocaust.

The book's writing is unusual in its long, heavily descriptive stream of consciousness sentences and paragraphs. The style makes for slow reading but it is fits the subject and the characters in capturing dizzying horror and a sense of disorientation brought on by events and memory. The book is highly allusive with many quotations from and references to T.S. Elliott, Ezra Pound, Kierkegaard, Thomas Bernard, Borges, among others. Much of the book is drawn from memoirs of Holocaust survivors and participants. Of many literary parallels to this book, I thought of Jena Blum's novel "Those Who Save Us" which, as does "Trieste" involves a relationship between a Jewish woman and a high-ranking S.S. official.

The immediacy and sharpness of this book will bring the Holocaust home to readers. The book is written from the perspective of its many characters and of the many victims of the Holocaust, survivors, and descendants. In places, there is a strong sense of unrequited vengeance and continued anger in the characters. The reader comes to understand these feelings. Some perspective between the points of view of the reader and the characters is suggested as most readers would understand the characters' feelings but not want to carry around such feelings of bitterness and anger in their own lives. It is valuable to read this book and also valuable to think about the difference between a well-done novel, such as this book, and a history. The tone and perspective of a history would be different from that of a novel even for a subject as horrific as the Holocaust.

Robin Friedman

[Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun)]

It says a lot about my year that I can't believe I actually finished a whole book (and wow, was it a good one).

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

"Me llamo Dara Virag. Hoy me asusta el más mínimo sonido. Todavía, si oigo los pasos de unas botas que resuenan en la acera, me estremezco y pienso, aquí están de nuevo, ya han llegado."

Qué autora tan apasionante y adictiva es Daša Drndić porque su texto está vivo de una forma tan tangible que es como si quisiera que todas esas voces del pasado a las que está recuperando, pudieran seguir estando presentes en un último acto desesperado. Trieste es mi segunda incursión en su obra después de Leica Format y aquí he tenido la misma sensación que tuve al leer Leica Format: detrás de cada nombre hay una historia, una frase que se repite una y mil veces en esta novela. En este sentido me ha recordado a Danilo Kis en su obsesión por recuperar la historia para narrarnos las pequeñas historias anónimas. Estos nombres ya no están pero hay que seguir manteniéndolos vivos para que no nos olvidemos. ¿Y de qué forma podemos conseguir que las aberraciones y la barbarie del pasado no queden en el olvido para siempre??? Daša Drndić lo tiene clarísimo: hay que seguir contando, narrando, desenterrando, el boca a boca, el libro a libro. Contarnos estas pequeñas historias es no dormirnos en los laureles porque el ser humano no ha superado nada, algunos hechos aberrantes del pasado podrían volver a repetirse en un simple chasquido de dedos, y de hecho se repiten, continuamente, ahora mismo. En Leica Forma ya lo había gritado a los cuatro vientos, y en Trieste vuelve a gritar su advertencia contra los nacionalismos, contra los fanatismos y por supuesto contra la barbarie de la limpieza étnica.

"Al volver del campo de refugiados, Ada encontró intactos los libros de su madre Marisa, desaparecida en circunstancias misteriosas, guardados en las repisas de la cocina donde se guardaban también los saquitos de nueces y el azúcar para los merengues. A hurtadillas leía y repasaba a toda prisa las páginas de una realidad que la dejaría completamente al margen. "

Trieste, y hasta que el lector no se ha afianzado en el estilo de Daša Drndić, puede resultar una novela engañosa porque su comienzo parece una novela histórica de las de siempre, pero Daša Drndić asimila la fragmentación de los tiempos que está narrando a su estilo: la Europa desorientada y caótica de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se refleja en la desorientación que sufre la familia de Haya Tedeschi, la protagonista, y por supuesto el estilo fragmentado va convirtiendo la lectura en una experiencia muy inmersiva, muy sebaldiana, en la que Daša Drndić mezcla ficción con hechos históricos, deteniéndose en algunos personajes reales y mezclándolos con los ficcionados. El hilo conductor va a ser la familia Tedeschi, y sus hijos, en este caso Haya.

"Haya se quedó mirando a la mujer que sacó de su bolso el espejo donde quedó atrapado un rayo de sol. Esa mujer sonreía a sus hijos como Ada nunca había sonreído a los suyos. Haya observaba a los chicos en sus trajes azules y sintió deseos de preguntarles: ¿En qué lengua hablan ustedes?. Y también le hubiese gustado decirles: Me llamo Haya y si quieren puedo cantarles una canción en esloveno."

Trieste comienza con Haya Tedeschi, una anciana frente a una cesta roja repleta de fotografías, recuerdos, artículos del pasado… esperando a un hijo perdido, un hijo que le fue arrebatado cuando apenas tenía un año de edad en plena ocupación alemana. A partir de aquí, la autora nos sumerge en el pasado de Haya en un capitulo que ocupa el primer tercio de la novela, titulado La Familia Tedeschi. Aparentemente lo que se nos cuenta en esta sección puede parecer tan tradicional como cualquier novela histórica: la historia de una familia, los Tedeschi, afincados en Gorizia, una ciudad italiana en la frontera con Eslovenia. Cuando nace Haya corre el año 1923, y anteriormente, Daša Drndić nos había narrado el discurrir de sus padres Florian y Ada hasta que se conocen. Es una sección narrada con una belleza que hechiza, contada como un cuento en el cual el horror queda siempre en un segundo plano.

"-Saben que soy judío-, dijo Florian Tedeschi. El aire de la noche era tibio. Las ventanas estaban abiertas. Se oía el rumor del mar. No había luna."

Los Tedeschi son judíos asimilados, reconvertidos en católicos en un intento por escapar de la persecución judia. Quizá este sea uno de los temas más fascinantes de esta novela, la forma en la que el ser humano intenta protegerse, mimetizándose, sobreviviendo como puede para resistir la barbarie de los tiempos. Su familia, al igual que Haya, quiere ignorar lo que sucede a su alrededor. La ignorancia quizás sea el estado más cómodo y si el problema no se verbaliza, se hacen a la idea que no está pasando, no hay crímenes, no hay trenes en dirección a los campos de concentración... Los Tedeschi son una familia de bystanders, no hacen preguntas, obedecen, callan, hacen bautizar a sus hijos convirtiéndose al catolicismo o haciéndose pasar por fascios, como cuando Florian, el padre anuncia “me he acercado al centro de los fascios y me he hecho miembro”. Nadie lo cuestiona, ni siquiera el lector porque entendemos que son una familia de supervivientes.

“Creían que al haberse convertido al catolicismo, estaban a salvo. Y creían en ese futuro mejor aunque las promesas fueron envolviendo sus vidas con una tela negra y espesa hasta convertirlos en grandes capullos de seda. Sus pulmones quedaban aplastados dentro del envoltorio, pero ellos se creían mariposas."

[...]

"Los que se quedan a un lado nunca expresan sus pensamientos, no dicen cuál es su equipo favorito, porque ellos simplemente están allí y miran lo que pasa como si no vieran nada, como si nada estuviera pasando. Ellos viven según las leyes de este u otro gobierno y eso a la larga resulta beneficioso, sobre todo después de una guerra. Hay muchos bystanders, de hecho son mayoría."

Es una atmósfera que Haya ha respirado desde niña y no cuestiona lo que está pasando a su alrededor, la barbarie, la desapariciones de los judíos. Pero los Tedeschi no están seguros en ninguna parte, y el dominio fascista los va haciendo recorrer diferentes lugares de Italia, Albania, hasta que también es ocupada, y la vuelta a Italia en 1943. El holocausto judio parece no afectarles, siempre con un perfil bajo esperando que los tiempos mejoren. Un día de 1944, cuando Haya tiene veinte años conoce a Kurt Franz, un oficial de la SS y un año después nace su hijo.

"Ella, Haya, nunca se había sentido nada en especial y aun se siente así. Se percibía a sí misma simplemente como la hija de alguien, la hermana, la amante, la amiga, pero nunca se había sentido obligada a una entrega sin condiciones a los que le eran próximos. Ella se sentía ligera, esto es cierto, liberada del peso muerto de la lengua materna, de la historia nacional, de la tierra de nacimiento, de la patria..."

A partir de esta primera sección en torno a la familia Tedeschi, Daša Drndić convierte su novela en una historia fragmentada, medio experimental con secciones de archivo en torno a los horrores del Holocausto, extractos de las entrevistas de Claude Lanzmann a las victimas, transcripciones de juicios, fotografías..., y no se corta un pelo para relatar algunos hechos: la implicación ambigua de la Cruz Roja suiza en las deportaciones de los judíos en los trenes que los llevaban a los campos de concentración, el tormento que sufrieron los hijos de los nazis que tuvieron que cargar con una culpa que convirtió sus vidas en una pesadilla e incluso en una incursión totalmente kamikaze, dedica varias decenes de páginas a un listado de nombres, judíos, erradicados de la faz de la tierra, nueve mil nombres y cada uno de estos nombres sobre el papel contenía una historia, una vida. "Castración, esterilización, procreación controlada, fornicación y prostitución fueron las armas más potentes del Reich, fueron la obsesión mayor del Reich, lo mismo se puede decir de la Iglesia." Daša Drndić no está aquí para juzgar, sino para relatar, para mantener vivas las historias. La técnica de Daša Drndić nos recuerda continuamente a Sebald, ficción y realidad y al mismo tiempo sazona el texto con momentos dedicados a Claudio Magris, Borges. Thomas Bernhard o Danilo Kis, entre otros. Es una estructura fascinante porque en algún momento el lector se puede encontrar perdido en la fragmentación pero es que está leyendo sobre unos personajes que también andaban perdidos, asi que la inmersión es completa... la autora está llevando hasta sus últimas consecuencias esta fragmentación porque los tiempos fueron una aberración y Daša Drndić nos enfrenta a ello a corazón abierto. Una novela fascinante, absorbente y a flor de piel sobre la memoria, y hasta qué punto el pasado nos sigue condicionando. Maravilla.

"Y el pasado es una dama elegante que no se quiere morir. El pasado se viste siempre con nuevos trajes, se esconde detrás de nuevos rostros, pero los conecta a todos en un solo relato. El pasado es como Drácula, el pasado es un vampiro, el pasado vive una existencia parasitaria. El pasado bebe la sangre de los vivos. El pasado es una dama que se ha reservado el papel de una amante."

[Pedro · Rating 3 out of 5]

El libro fue denominado originalmente Sonnenschein (alemán: brillo del sol), aunque en varias de las ediciones traducidas tomó el nombre de Trieste.

Trieste es una ciudad ubicada en el nordeste de Italia, con una rica diversidad étnica, ya que en distintos momentos de su historia, formó parte de Eslovenia y también de Austria, y es un símbolo de la ciudad cosmopolita (y tal vez la menos puramente italiana). En esta ciudad funcionó también el principal campo de concentración para judíos italianos.

Y en la ciudad de Gorizia, ubicada unos kilómetros al norte, con un mosaico cultural y antecedentes históricos similiares, se desarrolla la historia de la protagonista, Haya Tedeschi, remontándose a su historia personal así como la de sus antepasados, mayormente judíos italianos.

La historia de Haya y su familia, se alterna con una crónica documentada de las acciones del nazismo con los judíos italianos, incluyendo entrevistas a sus víctimas y testigos (al modo de los de
Svetlana Alexievich); y con el agregado de las historias de los lebensborn (niños ilegítimos o nacidos del amor), de Himmler.

Un libro, muy bien escrito y documentado, que se encuentra a medio camino entre la novela y la crónica documental, lo cual podría ser todo un símbolo del mosaico cultural local; aunque me pareció que no se pudo lograr adecuadamente síntesis armónica, lo que perjudica la fluidez y atracción de la narración.

Daša Drndić (1946-2018) fue una distinguida escritora croata.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Behind Every Name There is a Story

Abeasis Clemente
Abeasis Ester
Abeasis Giorgio
Abeasis Rebecca
[…]
Zundler Henriette Cecilia
Zwirblawsky Enoc Hersch
Zylber Szaya
Zynger Jerachmil.

These are the first and last of a list of around 9,000 Jews from Italy or Italian-occupied countries killed between 1943 and 1945. Forty-four pages printed in four columns of small type, they stand like a granite wall separating the first half of this book from the second. Although visually the most unusual feature in this totally extraordinary Holocaust novel, it is not the only one: there are court transcripts, poems, entries from a biographical dictionary, fragments in many languages, and even grainy photographs in the manner of W. G. Sebald. And names, names, names.

The protagonist, though based on fact, is fictional. Haya Tesdeschi, an old woman of 83, sits in her room in Gorizia, on the border between Italy, Austria, and Croatia, and waits to meet her son, stolen from her by the Germans as a baby, 62 years before, in 1944. But the photos in the basket at her feet go back even farther, to when her parents had not yet met and Gorizia was an international spa. As she does throughout the book, Drndic paints the picture in Homeric fashion, by conjuring up names:

Ah, all the actresses, duchesses, dancers; all the poets, journalists, singers and marquises whom He gets to know and love long after his first forays to local brothels at sixteen (when He pawned His grandfather's watch); ah, Teodolinde and Clemenze, and Giselda Zucconi, and Olga Ossani; Maria Luisa Casati Stampa, amasser of exotic animals and bizarre furniture; oh, Ida Rubinstein, Isadora Duncan, the singer Olga Levi Brunner, and after her, the pianist Luisa Baccara, then the wealthy American painter Romaine Goddard Brooks, who later comes out as a lesbian; then, oh Lord, celebrated Eleanora Duse…

It goes on, the list of names, famous and forgotten, beginning as an unstoppable lyrical stream, but changing eventually to a meticulous accounting of atrocity. Haya is born, grows up, meets a charming young German soldier nicknamed "The Doll," bears his child. Meanwhile trains pass through Gorizia, trains whose schedules are notated in numbing detail. A nearby rice factory is converted as a detention center. The parade of names continues, but now they are the biographical entries of personnel from Sobibor or Treblinka, excerpts from their trials, and a note of what happened to them after the war (in most cases, nothing).

Haya becomes a mathematics teacher, retires, and waits. She still amasses information, but the witnesses in the trials she now sees in her mind are mostly ghosts. The poets Elliot and Pound have more to say to her than the voices of living people. But her story is still about names. Somewhere in Germany, in the small town of Bad Arolsen to be precise, there are millions of them, archived documents that might reunite her with her son. And so the focus passes to the next generation, people who wake up one day to discover that they are the children of mass murderers.

With the one exception of its central character, this is a book of facts. But facts marshaled with such variety of technique, such ingenuity, such anger, and such compassion that the book makes compelling reading from its beautiful start to an ending that, with so much purged away, has its own very different kind of beauty. A masterpiece.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A singularly unpleasant and gruelling read, Trieste rambles through the fictional history of an Italian-Jewish woman in a narrative that reviewers are contractually obligated to describe as Sebaldian. The similarities to W.G. Sebald’s novels start and end at the insertion of low-res photographs into the text—narratively, Drndić’s style is more restless, patchwork, and less conservative in its graphic descriptions of horror. Riddled with fascinating stories drawn from years of painstaking research, concise information on the lesser-known Nazi war criminals whose butcheries deserve a public airing, and a moving 40-page list of those Italian Jews murdered in the holocaust, Trieste provides a striking and original insight into the endless excavation of horror that is WWII history. My only real issue with the novel is the digressions gradually consume the fictional story of Haya Tedeschi which remains (intentionally?) unresolved.

[Lisa Lieberman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Assembly required.

Daša Drndić says she spent two years researching this book. Much of that time seems to have been spent online, downloading documents from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's collection and other Holocaust related sites. Witness testimonies, lists of Jews deported from Italy or killed in the countries occupied by Italy (43 pages of names!), photocopied photographs inserted, W. G. Sebald-style, into the text, transcripts from the Nuremberg Trials, capsule bios of prominent Nazis.

Collecting all this stuff took time, but the hard work of extracting meaning from it is left to the reader. Maybe Drndić was overwhelmed by the task she set for herself, but I'd have liked it if she'd spent another year at the very least reflecting on her material, distilling it (as Sebald does). I see this as the responsibility of an author who takes on a topic like the Shoah, to help readers navigate those dangerous shoals. The line between Holocaust literature and Holocaust porn is easily crossed.

What's the difference? I'm going to let Imre Kertez, the author of Fatelessness (which I reviewed here a few weeks ago) answer that one:

I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon’s head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become educated, to be entertained, so we can’t ask them to deal with such gruesome visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this being an ugly literature of horrors.

Perhaps I’m being impertinent, but I feel that my work has a rare quality—I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trieste is a work of documentary fiction about Holocaust survivors. The author invents a female Jewish character who has a child by a Nazi. One day while her back is turned the baby is snatched from its pram. What happened to him remains a consuming mystery to her throughout her long life. Hana discovers the child's father is an SS officer. A monster who reigned at various death camps, including Treblinka. Her desire to track down her son take her deeper and deeper into the incomprehensible insanity of Nazism.
Her son, we learn, was snatched as part of the lebensborn project and then adopted by a German family. When his dying mother reveals to him he was adopted he too is constrained to research the holocaust. The text quotes lots of first hand accounts of Nazi atrocities. An incredibly clever and powerful book.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inside this book there is a beautiful novel. Inside this book there's also way too much historical trivia. (I say trivia not to denigrate the war criminals and horrors it depicts, but because these characters and their deeds are recounted in snippets and lists, presented as if they were trivia.) There's also many scenes or testimonials of WWI, WWII, and post-war horrors. You will occasionally lose several pages to some particular act of brutality you know is historical fact and it will disallow your concentration for some time--horrors are horrors and the effect us this way, therefore a dramatic text should probably use them sparingly both to keep the reader engaged and so as not to deaden us to horror through repetition.

The narrative does come together, explain itself and the amassing of related war trivia, in the end, on its own terms, as a pastiche of two characters' powerless to either renege or capture their own histories search though documents and information to come to some sort of terms with their place in history... Still, as I read I was often furious at the book for the incessant trivia and the battering horrors when they preempted, deferred, or weakened the slightly more traditional narrative. I'm not a technique hater either. I love experimental and postmodern fiction. But frequently Trieste abused technique rather than used it to scale new heights. This is a beautiful novel with some deep flaws in its experimental form, I think. Maybe I'm wrong. I actually want to be wrong, for the novel's sake.

I'll be writing about it for my newspaper and I'll publish the essay here after we go to print.


Here's the promised article:


Borderland literature: Daša Drindiċ’s Trieste


Borders, languages, national identities, and particularly nation states, are neither stable nor clear-cut. Case in point, the farthest Northeastern corner of Italy, the Friuli region and its largest city, Trieste. Like most of the regions of the country now known as Italy, the Friuli was a Roman province, a medieval semi-democratic duchy, and then by turns annexed by succeeding and overlapping early modern empires: the Austrian, the Kingdom of Hungry, the Venetian Republic, and finally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since 1954, its been a region of the Italian Republic. From 1943 until liberation by the Allies in ‘47 the Friuli was, along with sections of what are now Croatia and Slovenia, part of the Adriatisches Küstenland, an SS-run vassal state of the Third Reich. Between liberation and opting to join Italy (‘47-54) the Friuli was an independent city-state protected by the United Nations. The people of the region have many mixed cultural identities: Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Austrian, Catholic, and Jewish. Besides its own local dialect, the languages of all of the above nationalities are spoken in Trieste and environs as well as several overlapping and mixed dialects.

Daša Drindiċ’s 2007 novel Trieste (published in English in 2012 by Britain’s Maclehose Press) is a post-modern historical novel set in Friuli (despite its title the action occurs mainly in Gorizia and Nova Gorica). The novel beautifully and, at times, horrifically charts the family tree of its protagonist, Haya Tedeschi, (herself a cross-current of identities: Italian, Slovene, Jew) through the shifting political boundaries that sweep across the region during the two World Wars and the destructive and tragic consequences when state-sponsored nationalisms come calling in a soldier’s uniform. Alongside the traditional narrative of our protagonist, her parents and grandparent’s stories of WWI, her own WWII romance, the kidnapping of her child, and her years spent searching for him, the text is peppered with historical documents, bits of well-known poems and novels, and testimonials of the perpetrators and victims of the holocaust drawn from the Nuremburg trails and other sources. Like the novels of W. G. Sebald, lists, charts, and photos heighten the reality of the story’s background, making it difficult to dismiss as "mere" fiction. The artistry of interweaving fact with fiction will excite many readers. While I believe it to be an alluring technique, it also prompts my sole negative critical opinion of the novel: there’s a bit too much of it. I loved the story so much I sometimes grew impatient to get out of historical trivia and return to Haya and her drama. I felt this especially during the long section of short biographies of the guards at Trieste’s San Sabba transit camp.

Originally a rice husking plant, the Nazis transformed the San Sabba complex into, at first, a detention and transit center for deporting dissidents, partisans, and Jews to Auschwitz. Later, outfitted with a crematorium, San Sabba saw its own share of systematic, state-sponsored killing. Today the Risiera is an important Holocaust museum. Still, San Sabba is relatively peripheral to the novel’s plot and, although of great historical interest, I felt that it got more attention in Trieste than the narrative itself demanded. And, anyway, few things I have read have moved me like my own visit the Risiera museum.

Flaws aside, Trieste is an important and beautiful novel. I feel we will always need art that reminds us that our constructed identities are far from stable or singular and that the politics surrounding them will always lead to little more than divisive chaos. Each of us is far more than a skin color, a gender, a language group, a dialect, a city, a nationality, an ideology, or a flag. We also live in the fluidity of time, which will one day become history. Trieste confronts not only the horrors of Irredentism and Nazism and how national identities can torture and exterminate so many of its own citizens for a misguided and absurd sense of purity—as if, within the many crosscurrents of identity there could be any such thing! The novel also emphasizes our responsibility to our descendants. Trieste’s stunning final section deals with the irreversible damage done to the children of Nazi war criminals and, by extension, to European consciousness and culture of the following generation, because of the horrors committed by their fathers and mothers. More than anything else Trieste illustrates the danger of constructing national identities and imposing them militarily. We are human first and foremost; most of the rest is posturing.


Second reading:

This novel was better the second time through--both clearer and more aesthetically satisfying.

Obviously I was a bit annoyed at the percentage of historical info., testimony, and short biography on a first reading--much of this made more sense during my second reading as I knew where the story was going. Therefore much of the information seemed less casual because I understood better the thematic links between some information and the main narrative itself. A lot of that had to do with the female experience of World War II, which makes this novel very interesting. Since war is "man's work" and villains are most commonly male in novels--certainly more frightening because usually both physically and culturally more powerful than female characters--it's refreshing to read of not only the female victims of the Third Reich, the hardships of the innocent bystanders of WWII, but even some of the German women who participated in the monstrosities of the regime.

The final chapter was also much more pointed and satisfying to me the second time through. It seems to me now that a major theme of the novel is the paradox that we humans live mostly through text, history, narratives, and cultural context and yet we feel like free, self-defined actors and want to be judged on our own actions. Obviously a historical/cultural event as devastating and morally suspect as the Nazi movement opens up a legacy for the next generation impossible to accept, bear, or even stomach. Hence the desire to escape history in conflict with the longing to belong, to have a history and a culture behind one. The fact that in the final scene the two protagonists can only communicate by reciting lines from Eliot's "Wasteland" is a fit end to the story of these equally lost characters looking for identities in a mass of historical documents and ephemera. Identity is grounded in culture but is voiced by individuals, art, documentation. (It also explains the form of the novel and its need to present oodles of ephemeral information outside of the main narrative.) This might be the main reason history is always spun so positively by the "winners"--it's not the conscience of a nation, but rather the foundation of a culture meant to gift the next generation a positive birthright.

4th time through: Teaching it this semester it occurred to me (spoiler alert) that the whole thing is written by Antonio and that Haya is actually long dead. He only imagines she's there in Gorizia waiting for him. This explains all of the digressions: they are his research into his own past and the history surrounding it. Also why when he gets to Gorizia there's no reunion scene. Also the cannibalized literary texts--again, Antonio's piecing together of his family and his own past through literature as well as history--and perhaps imagination as well?

I love this novel more each time I read it.

[Rowizyx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Niente, io ad agosto leggo più che impegnato, riesco a essere bastian contraria anche sui libri da ombrellone.

Trieste è una lettura terrificante, un docuromanzo dove la vicenda di Haya e del suo bambino rapito è un filo per parlare di Treblinka. Di Sobibór (non ricordo di aver mai sentito parlare di questo lager in particolare, nel corso dei miei studi) e del terribile programma di Himmler per la perfetta razza del superuomo ariano, con le case per le donne ingravidate (volenti o nolenti) da SS per avere bambini perfetti, oltre ai bambini rapiti per preservarne "l'arianità", bambini che in molti casi hanno poi conosciuto la violenza della società post-bellica, colpevoli di essere figli dei loro padri. Pagine di storia che si preferisce dimenticare. È particolarmente crudele la parte sui bambini ospitati nelle case del progetto Lebensborn in Norvegia, poi abbandonati al loro destino, spesso poi messi in manicomio. Bambini di tre, quattro anni in manicomio. Perché colpevoli di essere figli dei loro padri.

Come la Risiera di San Sabba, unico lager con camere a gas e crematorio attivato in Italia. Da ragazzina mi colpì molto, perché comparve in una ricerca stupida fatta per scoprire avvenimenti importanti nel giorno del mio compleanno. Compio gli anni nella data in cui il Senegal festeggia l’indipendenza dalla Francia, Martin Luther King è stato assassinato... e in cui fu messo in funzione il crematorio di San Sabba.

L'autrice in questo libro ricostruisce il contesto friulano e dalmata durante la seconda guerra mondiale, e racconta anche da dove provenissero le SS incaricate di portare a regime la Risiera. Il loro bel curriculum di omicida di massa. E riporta tutti i nomi dei deportati dalla Carinzia, 9.000 nomi elencati in poche pagine, che fanno veramente male.

Così come le testimonianze di Treblinka e di Sobibór, intervallate dalle deposizioni in tribunale degli ufficiali SS accusati di crimini di guerra. È un libro che fa male, che deve far male, e che deve ricordarci l'orrore di quegli anni, oggi che viene troppo facile a troppe persone inneggiare a roghi in piazza o a una bella doccia nelle camera a gas per chi è diverso o la pensa diversamente.

Un libro che si dovrebbe leggere.

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading Daša Drndić, I am reminded of other writers and their works, Svetlana Alexievich, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, others. There are similarities among these works, sure, but it’s also just that feeling reading something that is so powerful and remarkable-- works that take on both literature and the greater world beyond the page in original ways. I hear the list of possible Nobel Prize contenders and then I read another Drndić and all I can say is ‘Damn! Why did she have to leave us so soon!’

Trieste (tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać) is my fourth Drndić. This is the first of her three major and last novels before her death in 2018. It is a very Drndić novel—a blend of fact and fiction, intertextual elements, photographs, a disgust towards silence and the coverups of history’s greatest atrocities, a willingness to dig through all the sh*t of the past and drag the reader along with her (I imagine her asking the reader if it smells nice down here in the sewers of mankind, a smirk on her face).

But I also felt a tonal shift from the first 3 earlier books of hers. She still has her delightful sense of humor and irony, but with Trieste, it feels that she is more serious and focused, maybe even more passionate about her subject. She batters the reader with facts and details, it is overwhelming (she even includes 40+ pages of names—the 9,000 Jews deported from Italy or killed in the countries occupied by Italy). Trieste is work, it’s emotionally draining, but damn, Drndić is really something special.

“War has many truths, or perhaps no truths at all.”

“She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones. Like little Sisyphuses they lug this wretched and perilous load through life, these clusters of tuberculosis and syphilis germs, these elusive, invisible, and oh so infectious containers of putrescence.”


“The way lives interweave yet never touch, only to collide in mutual destruction, inconceivably distant in their simultaneity.”

[Weltschmerz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Postupak je isti kao kod Zebalda, ali je suština ispisanog kompleksnija i sama priča mnogo surovija, eksplicitnija, samim tim efektnija.
I da, bila bi odlična lektira.

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

She isn't certain whose memories they are. hers or her family? Maybe they are fresh memories. p1

But history has no interest in frames. History wants to remain open. So that it can be filled in and multiplied. p27

Can I see it like that?
I have tended to regard history suspiciously, it's tendency to authoritarianism, the final word of those who wrote or revised it. History is made by popular opinion.

Those who know what is happening do not speak. Those who don't know ask no questions. Whoever asks gets no answers. Then, as now. p74

But we forget that illusion has essentially two forms: the form of hope, and the form of recollection.Youth has the illusion of hope, age-the illusion of recollection. p252

This is a documentary fiction that concerns itself with remembering; about individual memory and its place in the collective consciousness; and history, the record of our collective acts. Details get lost to history. Trieste, the novel is crammed with small details, overlooked,forgotten, erased; and details that try to disguise themselves as insignificant. So this book is also history, off the record no longer.

...despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners and History, brazen and stubborn, does not desist...I will repeat myself...until you finally come to your senses, it says, yet we do not come to our senses, we just...hide and lie and feign innocence. p338

It seems DD has set out to give name to every lost soul in her passion to honour their memories.
The story of Hannah Tedeski and the final disclosure enfolded in the text remains with the reader long after we put the book down.

My recollections are not the past. My memories are my present. p252

.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having been led Virgil-like by Daša Drndić through the Darkness, through Belladonna [2015], EEG [2016], and Doppelganger [2018], I was in familiar territory when I entered TRIESTE. Perhaps I should have begun here, the earliest of the books, though ending up where it began seems fitting. Daša Drndić doesn't write easy books. They're not meant to be. She has an obligation. She's there to witness. Daša Drndić extracts memories, reconstructs histories.

For those who cannot.

Haya Tedeschi, now an old woman, searching through her past, meditates on the atrocities that took place during the Nazi occupation of northern Italy, the concentration camps near her own door in Trieste, and her lost son, fathered by an SS officer.

As in all her books, Daša Drndić uses a whole range of narrative techniques, mixing fact with fiction, photographs, lists, eyewitness accounts. It's a style fitting her subject and reminiscent of only one other in my reading, and that's W.G. Sebald. I don't know why, but Daša Drndić seems like a person I would have liked to have met. Through her books and passion for her subject, I've developed a real affection for her and her work. I can't say that about many authors. I'm sorry her unique voice is forever silent.

[Titi Coolda · Rating 5 out of 5]

E greu de vorbit și de apreciat o carte care abundă în atrocități. Auzisem vag de programul Lebensborn prin care erau răpiți copii, blonzi și cu ochi albaștri, băgați în orfelinate și adoptați ulterior de către familii germane, crescuți și educați în spiritul nazist. Sute de mii de oameni, au trăit, muncit, iubit și murit fără să-și cunoască cu adevărat identitatea. Cutremurătoare mărturie a unor vremuri în care Dumnezeu și-a luat vacanță.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trieste, shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is a shattering book, even if you’ve already read a few books about the Holocaust. That’s because it brings those events firmly into the present, not neatly tucked away in the category of events some would rather forget. Daša Drndić’s powerful story repudiates anyone who thinks it’s ‘time to move on, it was all so long ago’. The book, in revealing the existence of the Nazi’s Lebensborn Program tells us that there are men and women living today who, whether they know it or not, have identities that are false, and that the parents of some of these people are – after all this time – still searching for them.

In the author’s note at the back of the book Drndić explains that her story is based on fact, and the construction of the book is testament to that. It includes family trees; archival records; newspaper clippings; photographs and testimony from various war crimes tribunals. In the middle of the book Drndić lists 35 pages of the names of the 9,000 Jews deported from Italy or killed in Italy between 1943 and 1945. I was shocked to find there the surnames of Italian families I know, and now I wonder whether their extended families were among the victims. There are also brief biographies of the SS – their backgrounds, their crimes, their court proceedings, and all too often, their contented post-war lives amid sympathisers and the world turning a blind eye. The book also includes snippets of music, and poetry and prose from writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Jorges Luis Borges, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other authors and poets perhaps more familiar to European readers. It is not easy to read, not just because of the subject matter, not just because not everything is translated into English, but also because of the accumulation of detail and the way fragments leak into the narrative.

It is the story of an old woman, Haya Tedeschi, whose infant, was stolen from his pram in late 1945. In July 2006 having spent a determined lifetime trying to find him, she waits to be reunited with this child.

He was stolen during the period of Nazi control

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/05/05/tr...

[Rick Harsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is an excerpt from my Diary/Memoir Walk Like a Duck, a Season of Little League Baseball in Italy, from River Boat Books:

June 8, 2018 - Daša Drndić has died
Two days ago The Guardian newspaper reported that Daša Drndić died earlier this week, age 71, of a cancer that had been at her for at least two years. Much of the material I have presented regarding Trieste and environs during WWII came from and/or was confirmed by her extraordinary, fierce novel, called Trieste in English. At this point I know very little about her life.
When I was about 23 and had dropped out of university for the first time, I landed on welfare, back when in the US even a young healthy male could survive by the grace of the government. I was provided my share of rent, food stamps for three weeks, and 15 dollars because with food stamps one could only buy food and not soap, for instance, or toothpaste. In exchange, I was forced to keep a record of my job searches: I had to fill in two applications per week and make three contacts (phone calls would suffice). It was a fair exchange, and I spent about half a year, happily, in this way. I developed the habit of leaving the welfare office with my 15 dollars, going to a used book store, buying something that would leave me enough money for a gyro at a Greek joint, and spending several hours by the door off the alley where I could be forgotten by the staff. I did not know at the time, but my lifestyle, or my behavior, was destroying my family relations. In fact, it took many years for me to fully comprehend the meaning of what had happened, and I never did uncover the skeleton my family constructed of me during those years. We were classically middle class, my parents lived in generally supportable debt, often both of them working in order to not only provide for a middle-class lifestyle in which a family could sample a new shampoo every trip to the grocery store, but also strive to send each child to college. I was the best student and so more was expected of me than

the others. I would be a lawyer or doctor, though the others would hardly be failures, one studying chemical engineering at a good school, getting a good job right out of the university despite mediocre grades, one studying police science, and one, unable to enter a good university, embarking on a career as a pilot that did not require anything more than that he attend one place or another that allowed him to accumulate enough hours to become a commercial pilot. Yet my education took a turn toward the anarchic and I lost any will I had to become a lawyer, and, feeling like I really ought to commit myself to writing as that seemed what I felt the quietest, most insistent urge to do, I became a dropout and an occasional visitor to the welfare rolls. Apparently, my parents were ashamed, and the relatives I was closest to outside the nuclear, an aunt and uncle and their daughters, my younger cousins, diagnosed the discomfort of my parents as a sort of poisoning administered in steady doses by me. I will never forget the first time the eldest of those girls I grew up with shocked me with a bizarre, hateful clause of condescension—between events on the day of the funeral of my beloved grandfather. This was the first hint that I was a cancer in my family. A strong artery of memory grew to connect the good of great book stores to the misery of the dissolution of family.
Only for me in my betrayed privacy could this too familiar familial tale be connected to Daša Drndić’s book Trieste, about a far more nightmarish disruption and tragedy of family that elicits much of the worst that fascists clawed out of the region during WWII and which is well represented by a quote of Drndić’s from The Guardian obituary:
“Recently in Charlottesville, but throughout Europe and beyond, the extreme right is approaching, fortunately still on tiptoe and in les petits pas, which of course does not make it

less dangerous. There are no small fascisms, there are no small, benign Nazisms,” she said. “That is what I try to talk about in my books, the importance of remembering. In this age of aggressive revisionism – which tends to brainwash our already damaged, deformed minds – without memory, we are easy prey to manipulation, we lose identity.”
Not only have I spent most of my life stomping for the toes taking these petits pas, and tracking their faintest outlines, I have also somehow become part Istriano, as Drndić, who died in Rijeka, had to have been to write the book she wrote with such transcendent intimate morbidity. Whoever has come to understand the absurdity of national borders as practical and emplaced concepts knows that the true border is the expansive space where continuums extend unpredictably from a wide band of community, not lines, of all asininities. Yet to this day, a man will violently froth at the suggestion that Istria might extend as far as Rijeka or Trieste, the two of those cities as Istrian in their marrows, in their shifting subterrains, as any town within the disconfines of mapped Istria.
In moving to this Slavic nation, this mongrel paradise, I had sacrificed the used book store, for even where a large store exists in Slovenia, there are few books in English, and I am not yet linguist enough to read beyond borders. Yet one day I walked into a shitty little book store in Koper and in a very small section of English books I found Trieste, by Daša Drndić, one of the most stunning books I have ever read. One day I will learn more about her, one day I will read more of her writing. For now, I will only say that in a book about little league baseball in Italy, played by an Indian-French-English-Danish-Scots-Irish-Irish-Scottish-German kid living in Izola, Slovenia, her presence fogged into the book long before this passage mourning her death became necessary.

The original title of Trieste, written in Croatian, is Sonnenschein, a perversity apparently her English publishers found troubling, like her book, like the memory of her book, like the need for her book.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I read a book that I’d generally consider as essential reading – looking back through my reading, even amongst a number of books that I personally loved, I’d say the last for me was Oğuz Atay’s “The Disconnected” (which is damned disappointing, seeing as I don’t even see an overpriced second hand copy of that available, thanks to its shockingly low 200 copy print run) – but here we are; this book should be considered absolutely essential reading; it’s that good, and it’s doing it in a way that is unique (ugh, I hate using the descriptor) and thrilling.

As I mentioned in my brief review of Belladonna, Drndić’s writing/composition-style reminds me a great deal of W.G. Sebald’s stuff; both fall neatly into the grouping of “documentary fiction” where photos / interviews / scans of documents / historic records are intermingled with fictional characters and their journey’s / explorations (and in some way the exploration part is essential, as the fictional character’s explorations are the reader’s explorations, emulating a dusty crate-digging through history); and both Drndić and Sebald and exhuming the Holocaust; different focuses, different theses, same sandbox. In Belladonna Drndić was exploring her own country’s complicity during the Holocaust; here she is focused on Italy’s part in these events.

About halfway through the book there is a specific narrative device that Drndić uses that I’ve not seen any other author use (she somewhat uses it in Belladonna); I’m not going to get into it specifically as I personally appreciated coming across it in situ - I will say that you’ll know it when you get to it, as it’s 43 pages long, and that should be enough to give it away – but its positioning, between the framing of the first half of the book and the narrative shift that follows it (and takes up most of the second half of the book), was one of the most perfectly executed literary moments I’ve come across, and punched me right in the sternum and guaranteed that I wasn’t putting the book down until it was done (and I didn’t).

A heartbreaking and incendiary read; completely and absolutely recommended.

[Elalma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una delle critiche che i sopravvissuti hanno fatto alla letteratura della Shoah è quella di non rendere mai abbastanza l'orrore con le parole. Gli stessi testimoni, grandi scrittori, come Primo Levi o Boris Pahor si sono rammaricati, per la loro (presunta) incapacità di testimoniare e rendere l'indicibile a parole. Perché l'orrore più grande lo fa la Storia, quando ti sbatte in faccia le testimonianze nude e crude, senza filtri, senza emozioni, perché sono parole di uomini "morti" dentro, sia vittime che carnefici. Qui è riportato tutto il marciume, lo scandalo, l'abominio che risulta dalle testimonianze, dai documenti, dalle liste sotto il pretesto di un romanzo e fa male, molto. Sì, perché mentre scorre la storia di finzione, emerge una ricerca di materiale vero, le biografie di tutti i gerarchi che stettero a Trieste tra il 1943 e 1945, gli stessi boia di Treblinka, la storia della risiera di San Sabba, gli ignavi, i sadici, i bambini rapiti; tutto ciò diventa l'ossessione dei protagonisti e diventa anche quella del lettore. Mi sono chiesta anche io se tutto ciò non rasentasse quella che chiamano "pornografia dell'olocausto", come alcuni recensori hanno sottolineato, ma poi mi sono detta che il voltastomaco, il disagio era giusto che ci fossero, perché quando ci si volta dall'altra parte, quando si lascia scivolare la storia, quando ci si abitua, tutto diventa di nuovo possibile. Perché "I bystander", e cioè gli ubbidienti, i taciturni, coloro chesiamo innocenti perché non sapevamo, i neutrali, gli osservatori ciechi , gli adattati c'erano allora e ci saranno sempre. I bystander siamo noi. Ecco il perché, forse, di questi pugni nello stomaco: sono i sensi di colpa dei protagonisti. La scrittura è curata, profonda, sempre adatta al contesto: rapida e concisa nella finzione, fluente quasi ridondante nei pensieri, oppure ossessiva e claustrofobica nella descrizione degli orrori, ma sempre e comunque colpisce.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 5 out of 5]

"History is in our marrow, and here, in our bones, it drills rheumatically and no medicine can cure that. History while on the outside there's nothing, on the outside all is calm and ordinary, until one day, History, our History, the History in our blood, in our bones, goes mad and starts eroding the miserable, crumbling ramparts of our immunity, which we have been cautiously raising for decades." - Daša Drndić, Trieste

A claim I'm still unqualified to make, but I'll make it yet again in this review of the second novel I've read by Daša Drndić--Drndić is Croatia's finest, most immediate, and important novelists. Trieste is an atypical novel, a documentary novel, a novel that is as much about its form and its source material as it is about its narrative, but it is also deeply and intimately concerned about characters as well, crescendoing in its final 50 pages. Through documentary, Drndić brings profound complexity to character, and to History.

The first portion of the novel is of pasts and of a familial history of the Tedeschis across several generations beginning before the first world war and the kidnapping of a child--the son of Haya Tedeschi and SS Officer Kurt Franz. Then the center of the book focuses on the lives between. The stories not told, untold, forever untellable. The countless millions, 9,000 of whom (a paltry, yet still overwhelming number) named in the text, and reminding us that Behind Every Name There is a Story as rich and complex is the Tedeschis's. Drndić includes bios of many of the SS who were responsible for operating the camps around Italy, Poland and surrounding areas, covering the heinous crimes committed, the punishments they received (and mostly did not receive), and a mix of real and imagined transcripts from Nazi trials. The final section takes the perspective of the generational heir to tragedy--the genetic material of men and women who did monstrous things.

It is a formal structure that allows Drndić to not only explore the horror of humanity, but the impact of History on our inheritance as humans. Particularly moving are Hans's (formerly Antonio Tedeschi) meditations on the meaning of being the offspring of not only an SS who committed some of the most atrocious acts even within the context of an already atrocious act, but also of a Jewish woman who watched as the trains full of people being shuffled to some of the worst camps in all of Europe. The complexity of human character borne out in this familial strife--a trauma inflicting its pain across generations. A horror of a son realizing his likeness in the face of an evil man. A risk in meeting a woman who may hold horrors of her own not yet seen or known.

How can we get past History--History makes policy, it shapes nations and ideas, it forms the basis for societal function, it creates the narratives that underpin how our world works (and doesn't), but History is also in our genes. We are everything that came before us, distilled into a repetition, an echo of History. How could we do anything but repeat History's mistakes, for we are History and we are its mistakes.

This is not a book that can be read lightly. There are passages that etch into your soul. It's a mysterious experience I have when reading detailed accounts of genocidal acts: that the more you learn about these atrocities, somehow the more you're marveled that they were yet more atrocious than you had known yet. Atrocities that we wear to this day in our blood, and so will our children, and so will their children, into forever.

This is one of those books that is not easy to read; not easy because of the horrors within it, not easy because the documentary style has to hold its subjects at a certain distance, not easy in any regard. But it is essential reading. Daša Drndić's voice is as vital today as yesterday, as it is tomorrow and every day until humans learn how to get beyond History.