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Return to Latvia
Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood. Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2003
About the author
Marina Jarre
17 books6 followersMarina Jarre è stata una scrittrice, drammaturga e insegnante italiana.
Nata in Lettonia, da padre ebreo lettone, Samuel Gersoni, e madre valdese italiana, trascorre l'infanzia nella capitale del paese fino al 1935, quando, dopo la separazione dei genitori, si trasferisce con la sorella Annalisa a Torre Pellice, paese piemontese dove vive la nonna materna: essendo di lingua madre tedesca, da quel momento apprenderà la lingua italiana.
Nel 1941 il padre viene ucciso dai nazisti insieme agli altri ebrei che appartenevano al ghetto della città di Riga.
A diciotto anni approda a Torino per frequentare l'Università di Torino e, dopo la laurea in letteratura cristiana antica ottenuta nel 1948, per oltre venticinque anni si dedica all'insegnamento del francese nelle scuole pubbliche del capoluogo. Nel 1949 sposa l'ingegnere Giovanni Jarre, da cui ha quattro figli.
Nel 2004 vince il Premio Grinzane Cavour con il romanzo "Ritorno in Lettonia", edito da Einaudi.
Muore a Torino il 3 luglio 2016.
Nata in Lettonia, da padre ebreo lettone, Samuel Gersoni, e madre valdese italiana, trascorre l'infanzia nella capitale del paese fino al 1935, quando, dopo la separazione dei genitori, si trasferisce con la sorella Annalisa a Torre Pellice, paese piemontese dove vive la nonna materna: essendo di lingua madre tedesca, da quel momento apprenderà la lingua italiana.
Nel 1941 il padre viene ucciso dai nazisti insieme agli altri ebrei che appartenevano al ghetto della città di Riga.
A diciotto anni approda a Torino per frequentare l'Università di Torino e, dopo la laurea in letteratura cristiana antica ottenuta nel 1948, per oltre venticinque anni si dedica all'insegnamento del francese nelle scuole pubbliche del capoluogo. Nel 1949 sposa l'ingegnere Giovanni Jarre, da cui ha quattro figli.
Nel 2004 vince il Premio Grinzane Cavour con il romanzo "Ritorno in Lettonia", edito da Einaudi.
Muore a Torino il 3 luglio 2016.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 1, 2023
Marina Jarre was born in Riga, Latvia in the 1920s, her father was Jewish, her mother an Italian Protestant. When she was ten years old her parents’ marriage fell apart and she left Riga with her mother. The bitter divorce meant that it was only years later that she found out her father and the rest of his family had been murdered by the Nazis during WW2, victims of programmed massacres of Latvian Jews. Her latest memoir marks her return to Latvia, over 60 years since she left. There along with her son Pietro she visits the sites of her childhood and the place where her father most likely died.
Jarre’s account brings together personal memory, recollections, and historical fact. Jarre's father’s death haunted her for many years, her guilt at leaving him behind when she chose to live with her mother made it difficult to give herself permission to grieve for his loss, as well as mourn the six-year-old, half-sister she never met. This is her attempt to come to terms with the past. The result's a moving personal testimony, its fragmented style echoing Jarre’s encounter with the scattered pieces of her family’s past. It’s also a detailed historical survey of Riga in wartime, during which Riga’s non-Jewish residents were sometimes heavily implicated in the Nazis’ treatment of their Jewish neighbours. Admittedly, there were sections of Jarre’s account that I found harder to engage with than others, but overall, it’s a fascinating account. Translated by Ann Goldstein.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher New Vessel Press for an ARC
Rating: 3/3.5
Jarre’s account brings together personal memory, recollections, and historical fact. Jarre's father’s death haunted her for many years, her guilt at leaving him behind when she chose to live with her mother made it difficult to give herself permission to grieve for his loss, as well as mourn the six-year-old, half-sister she never met. This is her attempt to come to terms with the past. The result's a moving personal testimony, its fragmented style echoing Jarre’s encounter with the scattered pieces of her family’s past. It’s also a detailed historical survey of Riga in wartime, during which Riga’s non-Jewish residents were sometimes heavily implicated in the Nazis’ treatment of their Jewish neighbours. Admittedly, there were sections of Jarre’s account that I found harder to engage with than others, but overall, it’s a fascinating account. Translated by Ann Goldstein.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher New Vessel Press for an ARC
Rating: 3/3.5
July 23, 2016
Nel mio personale decalogo del lettore c'è scritto bene in chiaro di non leggere mai autori appena scomparsi, ché sull'onda emotiva (e a causa dei troppo celebrativi memoriali) si rischia spesso di valutare in maniera sbagliata i loro libri. Ho fatto un'eccezione con Marina Jarre, scomparsa lo scorso 3 luglio, per il semplice motivo che se n'è andata completamente in silenzio, tanto che pochi hanno trattato della sua dipartita e neanche i suoi due editori principali si sono sentiti in dovere di ricordarla. È strano perché in vita Marina Jarre ha sempre cercato di non far passare nel silenzio quello che lei stessa era stata, raccontando attraverso i suoi libri soprattutto delle minoranze e sperando di lasciare una voce forte in ricordo di avvenimenti che sempre di più voce necessitano.
Figlia di padre ebreo e madre italiana, nata in Lettonia ed emigrata in Italia poco prima della seconda guerra mondiale, poliglotta e appartenente alla comunità valdese, Marina Jarre ha raccontato nei suoi libri anche della sua vita e di quella dei suoi famigliari. È proprio in "Ritorno in Lettonia", forse il suo libro più noto, che troviamo l'esperienza più autobiografica di tutte: a sessant'anni dalla sua partenza, Marina Jarre ritorna per la prima volta a Riga, la città dove nel 1935 aveva lasciato suo padre e una sorellina mai conosciuta. Questo abbandono, obbligato dal disgregarsi dei rapporti fra i genitori, portò Marina a Torre Pellice (Torino), dove fu allevata dalla nonna materna. Nel frattempo la storia della Lettonia venne macchiata dalla seconda guerra mondiale: dopo una prima deportazione nei gulag siberiani ad opera dell'armata sovietica, l'arrivo dei tedeschi nel novembre dello stesso anno, il 1941, costrinse un numero imprecisato di ebrei prima nel ghetto cittadino, quindi in un massacro che ancora oggi gli storici fanno fatica a quantificare.
È probabilmente in questo massacro che il padre della Jarre e la sorella persero la vita, e la scrittrice, dopo tanti anni, affronta una ricerca personale tanto sul piano spirituale quanto fisico: camminando per la prima volta per le strade di Riga riconosce a stento alcuni dei luoghi della sua primissima infanzia, ma anche un piccolo incontro può bastare per riportare alla mente vecchi ricordi. "Ritorno in Lettonia" alterna così la sua personale ricerca delle origini della famiglia del padre al racconto di una delle più grandi esecuzioni di massa di ebrei della seconda guerra mondiale, in una ricerca filologica che cerca di mettere in ordine i ricordi e le ricerche personali non di uno storico, ma di una scrittrice direttamente colpita dalla vicenda.
Chiuso questo libro, ennesima testimonianza di un orrore vecchio di neanche 80 anni, rimane l'idea che su molti eventi dell'ultima guerra mondiale non si sia ancora fatta luce. Ma soprattutto rimane impressa la sensibilità dell'autrice, a partire dal suo non voler mai esplicitare il numero degli ebrei che in Lettonia persero la vita. Un piccolo segno che potrebbe passare inosservato, ma che sottolinea come, che siano stati cento o alcune migliaia, l'orrore causato da quel genocidio non deve passare inosservato.
3.5/5
Figlia di padre ebreo e madre italiana, nata in Lettonia ed emigrata in Italia poco prima della seconda guerra mondiale, poliglotta e appartenente alla comunità valdese, Marina Jarre ha raccontato nei suoi libri anche della sua vita e di quella dei suoi famigliari. È proprio in "Ritorno in Lettonia", forse il suo libro più noto, che troviamo l'esperienza più autobiografica di tutte: a sessant'anni dalla sua partenza, Marina Jarre ritorna per la prima volta a Riga, la città dove nel 1935 aveva lasciato suo padre e una sorellina mai conosciuta. Questo abbandono, obbligato dal disgregarsi dei rapporti fra i genitori, portò Marina a Torre Pellice (Torino), dove fu allevata dalla nonna materna. Nel frattempo la storia della Lettonia venne macchiata dalla seconda guerra mondiale: dopo una prima deportazione nei gulag siberiani ad opera dell'armata sovietica, l'arrivo dei tedeschi nel novembre dello stesso anno, il 1941, costrinse un numero imprecisato di ebrei prima nel ghetto cittadino, quindi in un massacro che ancora oggi gli storici fanno fatica a quantificare.
È probabilmente in questo massacro che il padre della Jarre e la sorella persero la vita, e la scrittrice, dopo tanti anni, affronta una ricerca personale tanto sul piano spirituale quanto fisico: camminando per la prima volta per le strade di Riga riconosce a stento alcuni dei luoghi della sua primissima infanzia, ma anche un piccolo incontro può bastare per riportare alla mente vecchi ricordi. "Ritorno in Lettonia" alterna così la sua personale ricerca delle origini della famiglia del padre al racconto di una delle più grandi esecuzioni di massa di ebrei della seconda guerra mondiale, in una ricerca filologica che cerca di mettere in ordine i ricordi e le ricerche personali non di uno storico, ma di una scrittrice direttamente colpita dalla vicenda.
Chiuso questo libro, ennesima testimonianza di un orrore vecchio di neanche 80 anni, rimane l'idea che su molti eventi dell'ultima guerra mondiale non si sia ancora fatta luce. Ma soprattutto rimane impressa la sensibilità dell'autrice, a partire dal suo non voler mai esplicitare il numero degli ebrei che in Lettonia persero la vita. Un piccolo segno che potrebbe passare inosservato, ma che sottolinea come, che siano stati cento o alcune migliaia, l'orrore causato da quel genocidio non deve passare inosservato.
3.5/5
July 4, 2016
Tornare.
La lettura di questo libro mi ha scossa, profondamente.
Lo sterminio degli ebrei dei paesi baltici è una Shoah nella Shoah che ancora chiede di essere riconosciuta e portata alla luce.
Marina Jarre, nata in Lettonia da madre italiana e padre ebreo lettone, viaggia dentro se stessa, prima di tutto, per ritrovare tutti quei frammenti che compongono la storia della sua famiglia, divisa da un divorzio, quello dei genitori, e dall'avanzata nazista in Lettonia.
Il suo è un percorso doloroso, solitario, una ricerca delle proprie radici che la porterà non solo a tornare a Riga, dalla quale era partita appena dodicenne, in compagnia del figlio Pietro, ma a seguire le esili tracce dei Gersoni, la sua famiglia d'origine, dispersi per il mondo.
Ricomporre la storia dimenticata degli ebrei lettoni, il loro massacro, cercare di comprendere il perché non solo dell'indifferenza della popolazione lettone ma anche della malvagità e dell'accanimento contro gli ebrei, la porterà lentamente ad un percorso interiore che finalmente, dopo più di cinquant'anni, riuscirà ad aprire la serratura del suo cuore, quel cuore all'interno del quale aveva seppellito il ricordo del padre per poterlo finalmente piangere e chiedergli perdono.
Marina Jarre è un'autrice straordinaria, la sua prosa è così colta e raffinata da risultare sicuramente non di facilissima presa ma è accresciuta dal valore della sua testimonianza e della sua continua ricerca storica e individuale che la porta più che a scrivere per il pubblico a dare voce ai propri pensieri e ai propri sentimenti, in un alternarsi continuo di emozioni e di rabbiosa indignazione, di sottile ironia e struggente rimpianto, capaci di creare così un'intimità unica con il lettore.
In certi momenti, proprio a causa di questo raccontarsi senza filtri, ho provato l'imbarazzo fortissimo di essere dentro la storia di una famiglia che non era la mia, la sensazione di frugare dentro ad un dolore talmente grande da dover essere protetto dagli sguardi estranei, quindi anche dal mio.
Ma questa è una storia che doveva essere raccontata e di questo ringrazio Marina Jarre che, abbandonando ogni pudore e ogni desiderio di custodire dentro di sé la storia della sua famiglia, ha trovato la forza ed il coraggio per raccontarla anche me.
Vidi al margine di una macchia di alberi una lapide, mi pare, coperta di fiori. Non ebbi tempo per chiedermi che cosa fosse perché un attimo dopo, molto in alto, a destra, scorsi una scritta enorme, «Rumbula» - l'insegna della stazione -, e proprio nel medesimo momento, dall'altra parte della strada, una pietra nera con incisa, ben visibile, nell'angolo superiore a sinistra, la stella di Davide.
Ecco i miei, mio padre, Irene, e Levin e Beile e Frume e Juddel e Abraham e Isacco, Ecco i miei.
(...) Adesso, al contrario, ciò che diventava vero e presente, in quella stella di Davide che segnava il luogo dove lo avevano ucciso, non era la morte di mio padre, era la sua vita. Lo ritrovavo vivo.
Scesa dalla macchina, mi fermai piangendo davanti alla pietra nera posta su un'altra pietra nera. Sopra questa, alcuni sassolini. Pietro stava in silenzio alle mie spalle. Non lessi la scritta, mi asciugavo gli occhi e pregavo. Così, pregando, chiesi perdono in tedesco, la nostra lingua, a mio padre, al mio Papi, per quello che gli avevano fatto e per essere uscita, quel mattino di dicembre, senza tornare indietro.
La lettura di questo libro mi ha scossa, profondamente.
Lo sterminio degli ebrei dei paesi baltici è una Shoah nella Shoah che ancora chiede di essere riconosciuta e portata alla luce.
Marina Jarre, nata in Lettonia da madre italiana e padre ebreo lettone, viaggia dentro se stessa, prima di tutto, per ritrovare tutti quei frammenti che compongono la storia della sua famiglia, divisa da un divorzio, quello dei genitori, e dall'avanzata nazista in Lettonia.
Il suo è un percorso doloroso, solitario, una ricerca delle proprie radici che la porterà non solo a tornare a Riga, dalla quale era partita appena dodicenne, in compagnia del figlio Pietro, ma a seguire le esili tracce dei Gersoni, la sua famiglia d'origine, dispersi per il mondo.
Ricomporre la storia dimenticata degli ebrei lettoni, il loro massacro, cercare di comprendere il perché non solo dell'indifferenza della popolazione lettone ma anche della malvagità e dell'accanimento contro gli ebrei, la porterà lentamente ad un percorso interiore che finalmente, dopo più di cinquant'anni, riuscirà ad aprire la serratura del suo cuore, quel cuore all'interno del quale aveva seppellito il ricordo del padre per poterlo finalmente piangere e chiedergli perdono.
Marina Jarre è un'autrice straordinaria, la sua prosa è così colta e raffinata da risultare sicuramente non di facilissima presa ma è accresciuta dal valore della sua testimonianza e della sua continua ricerca storica e individuale che la porta più che a scrivere per il pubblico a dare voce ai propri pensieri e ai propri sentimenti, in un alternarsi continuo di emozioni e di rabbiosa indignazione, di sottile ironia e struggente rimpianto, capaci di creare così un'intimità unica con il lettore.
In certi momenti, proprio a causa di questo raccontarsi senza filtri, ho provato l'imbarazzo fortissimo di essere dentro la storia di una famiglia che non era la mia, la sensazione di frugare dentro ad un dolore talmente grande da dover essere protetto dagli sguardi estranei, quindi anche dal mio.
Ma questa è una storia che doveva essere raccontata e di questo ringrazio Marina Jarre che, abbandonando ogni pudore e ogni desiderio di custodire dentro di sé la storia della sua famiglia, ha trovato la forza ed il coraggio per raccontarla anche me.
Vidi al margine di una macchia di alberi una lapide, mi pare, coperta di fiori. Non ebbi tempo per chiedermi che cosa fosse perché un attimo dopo, molto in alto, a destra, scorsi una scritta enorme, «Rumbula» - l'insegna della stazione -, e proprio nel medesimo momento, dall'altra parte della strada, una pietra nera con incisa, ben visibile, nell'angolo superiore a sinistra, la stella di Davide.
Ecco i miei, mio padre, Irene, e Levin e Beile e Frume e Juddel e Abraham e Isacco, Ecco i miei.
(...) Adesso, al contrario, ciò che diventava vero e presente, in quella stella di Davide che segnava il luogo dove lo avevano ucciso, non era la morte di mio padre, era la sua vita. Lo ritrovavo vivo.
Scesa dalla macchina, mi fermai piangendo davanti alla pietra nera posta su un'altra pietra nera. Sopra questa, alcuni sassolini. Pietro stava in silenzio alle mie spalle. Non lessi la scritta, mi asciugavo gli occhi e pregavo. Così, pregando, chiesi perdono in tedesco, la nostra lingua, a mio padre, al mio Papi, per quello che gli avevano fatto e per essere uscita, quel mattino di dicembre, senza tornare indietro.
August 19, 2024
I received a review copy of this book from New Vessel Press via Edelweiss for which my thanks.
Distressing, heartbreaking, even shattering, Return to Latvia, originally published in Italian in 2003 and in this edition by New Vessel Press in 2023 translated by Ann Goldstein, is a book around author Marina Jarre’s journey in 1999 to Latvia, the country of her birth and also the place where her father, half-sister Irene (barely six) and many of his family were killed in 1941 in the Shoah or Holocaust, in which both Nazis and Latvians were complicit.
Jarre was born to a Latvian Jewish father and Italian Protestant mother in Riga where the family (including her younger sister Sisi) lived till about 1935 when her parents underwent a bitter separation followed by an equally acrimonious battle for custody of the girls. Consequently, the author and her sister were taken away by their mother, first to temporary quarters (literally in hiding) in Latvia and later to her own parents in Italy where the two girls grew up, their relationship with their father also impacted and they too seeing him with eyes of hate and suspicion as did their mother. He did try to see them and even communicated by letter, the last of these a plea for help after the country had fallen to Germany. Only later did they discover that he, little Irene (his daughter with his subsequent German partner) and many others of the family had lost their lives. After spending almost all her life in Italy where she went on to have a family, children and grandchildren, and after plans that fell through in 1998, in 1999, Jarre travelled with her youngest son to Latvia where they spent five days tracing out the few places she remembered, the homes of her parents when they lived there and her grandparents, the place her school had once been, that where she and her sister stayed six months before going on to Italy as also the Jewish Museum and Rumbula, the site of amongst the worst atrocities of the Shoah.
The account moves back and forth between memories of the past, the leap she had to make to actually take the journey, the time spent in Latvia and the memories evoked and also the process of writing the book after her return to Italy, even taking us into the materials consulted. These included not just not just memoirs and historical sources but also letters from her own family and friends and conversations with various people, among them possible family members from distant branches she came across and reached out to.
In tracing out the story of what might have befallen her father and his family, of which actual facts can never be ascertained, Jarre weaves an account that links the personal with the broader state of things, of what unfolded in Riga. This exercise also takes her further, into trying to identify the origins of her father’s family, into genealogical searches and also into the historical journey of possible ancestors over many generations that might have brought them to Latvia. And what emerges is a picture that can’t but be heartrending, can’t bit leave one without words, of people brutally deprived of their humanity and of their lives by those that seemed to have no humanity. And for those that suffered, those that were lost and those that lost, even acknowledgement of what had happened was hard to find, let alone reparation with blame being shifted, Latvians and Latvia particularly trying to deny any part. With this also are explored other parts of the story including the persecutions suffered by Jewish people even previously in Russia and on their journey through Europe and the hardships that others like prisoners of war faced during the Nazi regime.
Jarre’s own story which weaves into this one had an added layer of poignancy due to the difficult family relationships in this period. While her childhood was a fairly happy one, it was also one where there was estrangement with her father (who may have had a bitter relationship with her mother but did love his children), resentment that likely reflected in her and her sister’s own attitudes to him from how her mother viewed him.
Jarre’s journey is not only one of attempting to discover what might have happened but also of the pain, the loss and the guilt that were necessarily part of her life as a result.
Emotionally heavy and a hard book to read but nonetheless also a powerful and relevant one.
Distressing, heartbreaking, even shattering, Return to Latvia, originally published in Italian in 2003 and in this edition by New Vessel Press in 2023 translated by Ann Goldstein, is a book around author Marina Jarre’s journey in 1999 to Latvia, the country of her birth and also the place where her father, half-sister Irene (barely six) and many of his family were killed in 1941 in the Shoah or Holocaust, in which both Nazis and Latvians were complicit.
Jarre was born to a Latvian Jewish father and Italian Protestant mother in Riga where the family (including her younger sister Sisi) lived till about 1935 when her parents underwent a bitter separation followed by an equally acrimonious battle for custody of the girls. Consequently, the author and her sister were taken away by their mother, first to temporary quarters (literally in hiding) in Latvia and later to her own parents in Italy where the two girls grew up, their relationship with their father also impacted and they too seeing him with eyes of hate and suspicion as did their mother. He did try to see them and even communicated by letter, the last of these a plea for help after the country had fallen to Germany. Only later did they discover that he, little Irene (his daughter with his subsequent German partner) and many others of the family had lost their lives. After spending almost all her life in Italy where she went on to have a family, children and grandchildren, and after plans that fell through in 1998, in 1999, Jarre travelled with her youngest son to Latvia where they spent five days tracing out the few places she remembered, the homes of her parents when they lived there and her grandparents, the place her school had once been, that where she and her sister stayed six months before going on to Italy as also the Jewish Museum and Rumbula, the site of amongst the worst atrocities of the Shoah.
The account moves back and forth between memories of the past, the leap she had to make to actually take the journey, the time spent in Latvia and the memories evoked and also the process of writing the book after her return to Italy, even taking us into the materials consulted. These included not just not just memoirs and historical sources but also letters from her own family and friends and conversations with various people, among them possible family members from distant branches she came across and reached out to.
In tracing out the story of what might have befallen her father and his family, of which actual facts can never be ascertained, Jarre weaves an account that links the personal with the broader state of things, of what unfolded in Riga. This exercise also takes her further, into trying to identify the origins of her father’s family, into genealogical searches and also into the historical journey of possible ancestors over many generations that might have brought them to Latvia. And what emerges is a picture that can’t but be heartrending, can’t bit leave one without words, of people brutally deprived of their humanity and of their lives by those that seemed to have no humanity. And for those that suffered, those that were lost and those that lost, even acknowledgement of what had happened was hard to find, let alone reparation with blame being shifted, Latvians and Latvia particularly trying to deny any part. With this also are explored other parts of the story including the persecutions suffered by Jewish people even previously in Russia and on their journey through Europe and the hardships that others like prisoners of war faced during the Nazi regime.
Jarre’s own story which weaves into this one had an added layer of poignancy due to the difficult family relationships in this period. While her childhood was a fairly happy one, it was also one where there was estrangement with her father (who may have had a bitter relationship with her mother but did love his children), resentment that likely reflected in her and her sister’s own attitudes to him from how her mother viewed him.
Jarre’s journey is not only one of attempting to discover what might have happened but also of the pain, the loss and the guilt that were necessarily part of her life as a result.
Emotionally heavy and a hard book to read but nonetheless also a powerful and relevant one.
August 30, 2023
what a heartbreaking book! Jarre explores the destinies of her Jewish family - including her father and little half-sister - brutally murdered during WW2. she manages to perfectly intertwine personal narrative with historical research and numerous facts that make the book very informative.
August 29, 2025
Rating: ?
The Publisher Says: Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood.
Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: If you're Jewish and support this administration, you should realize how extremely delusional you are after you read this book. It does not start with Jews, not this time, but it won't stop before it gets to you.
Don't beleve me? Neither did the Jews who smiled smugly as "gypsys" and fegelehs and communists went to the camps.
Hate can not be satisfied. Hate cannot be appeased. Hate cannot be directed.
Stand up to it or be consumed by it.
There is no healing from hate. It deforms and disfigures and eats its fuel as certainly as their targets. It's the same bitter irony: To combat the thing, you must adopt the thing. Controlling evil, paradoxically, requires doing evil, thus scaring the haters into silence.
The lesson of history is the bitter, horrifying truth: Nothing can ever stop hatred. Scare haters into silence, and never, ever stop suspecting the grim, ugly truth is they're still there. Make it too expensive to their own lives to enact hatred like we are seeing roar back to life in the world today. The camps are real. The "news" is reporting on them and y'all aren't out in the streets...those who can be physically...calling attention to them. That is called "complicity".
Future Marina Jarres will write this story again, and again, and again, unless y'all pull your thumbs out and start doing the hard, icky work of combating hatred with hatred. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But if you can read this story and not see how hugely much it costs not to do it...
...
...I've answered my own question. Signed, one your inaction has doomed to the camps unless I get lucky and die first.
The Publisher Says: Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood.
Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: If you're Jewish and support this administration, you should realize how extremely delusional you are after you read this book. It does not start with Jews, not this time, but it won't stop before it gets to you.
Don't beleve me? Neither did the Jews who smiled smugly as "gypsys" and fegelehs and communists went to the camps.
Hate can not be satisfied. Hate cannot be appeased. Hate cannot be directed.
Stand up to it or be consumed by it.
There is no healing from hate. It deforms and disfigures and eats its fuel as certainly as their targets. It's the same bitter irony: To combat the thing, you must adopt the thing. Controlling evil, paradoxically, requires doing evil, thus scaring the haters into silence.
The lesson of history is the bitter, horrifying truth: Nothing can ever stop hatred. Scare haters into silence, and never, ever stop suspecting the grim, ugly truth is they're still there. Make it too expensive to their own lives to enact hatred like we are seeing roar back to life in the world today. The camps are real. The "news" is reporting on them and y'all aren't out in the streets...those who can be physically...calling attention to them. That is called "complicity".
Future Marina Jarres will write this story again, and again, and again, unless y'all pull your thumbs out and start doing the hard, icky work of combating hatred with hatred. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But if you can read this story and not see how hugely much it costs not to do it...
...
...I've answered my own question. Signed, one your inaction has doomed to the camps unless I get lucky and die first.
July 14, 2023
Return to Latvia, written by Marina Jarre and translated by Ann Goldstein, is a memoir that is both personal and historical, allowing the reader to both accompany Jarre during this part of her life as well as think about how we, as humans, can so easily be swayed by evil while never thinking ourselves evil. And that second aspect is one we all need to consider during our current environment of authoritarianism and the othering of various groups of people.
As a memoir this is a powerful book. It is hard to separate the personal from the historical in part because they are heavily intertwined but also because of how Jarre weaves them together in her telling. Personal recollection, genealogical searches, and historical information become one story. At times it may seem that the historical aspects takes center stage, then the personal, but due to the often quite short sections of each they blend together in the reader's mind to form a coherent whole.
I would certainly recommend this to anyone with an interest in memoirs, I also think this will be of interest to those interested in history more broadly and Holocaust history in particular. It is also a cautionary tale for those of us trying to eliminate or, more realistically, limit the prejudices and biases currently plaguing not just any single country but the entire world.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.
As a memoir this is a powerful book. It is hard to separate the personal from the historical in part because they are heavily intertwined but also because of how Jarre weaves them together in her telling. Personal recollection, genealogical searches, and historical information become one story. At times it may seem that the historical aspects takes center stage, then the personal, but due to the often quite short sections of each they blend together in the reader's mind to form a coherent whole.
I would certainly recommend this to anyone with an interest in memoirs, I also think this will be of interest to those interested in history more broadly and Holocaust history in particular. It is also a cautionary tale for those of us trying to eliminate or, more realistically, limit the prejudices and biases currently plaguing not just any single country but the entire world.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.
November 12, 2023
Lasīju šo grāmatu pēc "Tālie tēvi" izlasīšanas. Šī grāmata savā ziņā ir kā turpinājums iepriekšējai - tajā ir pat atsauces uz "Tālajiem tēviem", sīkāki skaidrojumi tajā minētajiem faktiem. Tomēr, ja "Tālie tēvi" ir literārs mākslas darbs, šī - "parasta" cilvēka sarakstīta autobiogrāfija - autores atgriešanās Latvijā, lai uzzinātu vairāk par Rumbulā nošautā tēva-ebreja likteni un izcelsmi. Cita starpā arī "parastas tūristes" vērojumi Rīgā, kas tā kontrastē ar romāna "Tālie tēvi" meistarīgajām vārdu virtenēm. Neliela "vilšanās", ka izcila rakstniece arī var būt "parasts" cilvēks. Tomēr vēstures notikumu traģiski ietekmētais dzimtas stāsts vēlreiz skaudri atgādina par neskaitāmajām ļaunuma izpostītajām dzīvēm, ko, sirdij nesažņaudzoties, lasīt nav iespējams...
February 15, 2023
A moving look at the author retracing her family heritage and coming to terms with what happened to her father.
I enjoyed all the family history and how far back the author researched, which led to relatives reaching out she had never thought about.
Jarre does get sidetracked and spent pages on people who didn’t really fit in the story. It was almost as if she was trying to fill up pages.
Thanks to New Vessel Press and Edelweiss for the early read.
I enjoyed all the family history and how far back the author researched, which led to relatives reaching out she had never thought about.
Jarre does get sidetracked and spent pages on people who didn’t really fit in the story. It was almost as if she was trying to fill up pages.
Thanks to New Vessel Press and Edelweiss for the early read.
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