SUMMER BOOKS Trieste

By Daniela Gross

In the first pages of Trieste, Haya Tedeschi, an elderly woman living in Gorizia in northeastern Italy, waits to be reunited with her son, who was born as part of Himmler’s Lebensborn project. Reflecting on her own life, Haya brings us in the middle of the tragedy of the World War II and of the Italian Holocaust. To tell this story, the Croatian novelist, playwright and critic Dasa Drndic mixes trial transcripts, witness statements, biographical sketches, photographs. Just in the middle of the book, stand out the names of some 9,000 Jews for whose death Italy bears responsibility. A monumental, Sebaldian and deeply painful reading.

Trieste
By Dasa Drndic
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
368 pp.