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Summary
Summary
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. Dasa Drndić has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of twentieth-century history.
Author Notes
Dasa Drndic was born in Zagreb, Croatia on August 10, 1946. Before winning a Fulbright scholarship to the United States, she studied philology at the University of Belgrade. She received a master's degree in theatre and communications at Southern Illinois University and a PhD at the University of Rijeka. She worked as a journalist and translator. She wrote several novels including Trieste, Leica Format, Belladonna, and Doppelgänger. She also wrote about 30 plays. She died of lung cancer on June 5, 2018 at the age of 71.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This moving novel of WWII and its aftermath is acclaimed Croatian author Drndic''s American debut. In 2006, elderly Haya Tedeschi is awaiting a reunion with her son, who disappeared as an infant during WWII. Haya's memory ranges over her family's past, their experiences in the war, and its effect on their lives. The Tedeschi family lived in Gorizia and nearby Trieste, northern Italian cities caught between the major powers of Europe in cycles of war. But little could have prepared the family for the extremes of German occupation. Haya's richly textured reminisces include biographies of the Reich's film stars, scathing exposes of the complicity of the Swiss government and the Red Cross in the transport of Jews to concentration camps, and harrowing details of sadistic acts committed in the camps. Interspersed with Haya's account are photographs, interviews, and personal testimonies, and, in one case, pages listing the names of all 9,000 Jews deported from or murdered in northern Italy during the war. There is simply too much pain and guilt in this novel for Haya's reunion with her son to offer catharsis, and readers who become more interested in the characters than the history may be disappointed. However, Drndic''s themes, use of history, and narrative technique invite favorable comparisons to W.G. Sebald, and the novel's relentlessly uncomfortable mood might be Drndic''s point: the historical crimes were great, and complicity of almost everyone was enormous. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Just as the river Soca wends through northeastern Italy, bearing witness to everything it touches, Trieste roams through the tragic array of Jewish experiences during the region's Nazi occupation. It centers on Haya Tedeschi, an elderly woman whose son, fathered by an SS officer, had been stolen away as part of the Lebensborn breeding program. During her relentless search for him, Haya revisits her family's lives over generations and collects artifacts about the atrocities from photos, songs, and testimonies from war-crime trials to heartbreaking stories that have waited too long to be heard. Drndic has assembled an angry scrapbook of searing memories, horror, and loss. For the Holocaust's victims, there is no hope; for its perpetrators, there is no punishment. Trieste's originality lies not just in its structure and forceful, unflinching imagery translator Elias-Bursac deserves acclaim as well but also in how it brings the lingering effects of the Nazis' merciless racial policies forward into the present. Here the past doesn't lie dormant and forgotten but is a cancer that can poison us from within.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JULY 2006: Haya Tedeschi, 83, waits at her home in Gorizia, on the Italian-Slovenian border, northwest of Trieste, for the arrival of the son who was stolen from her 62 years earlier, during the war. An American writer would no doubt focus on, or at least convey, the drama of their meeting. But "Trieste," by the Croatian novelist, playwright and critic Dasa Drndic, is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick. The first half of "Trieste" chronicles events in the lives of Haya and her recent forebears, multilingual Jews born under - or, for her generation, just after the fall of - the Hapsburg monarchy. These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory. There isn't much plot beyond births and deaths, comings and goings and the rise of fascism - which creates more anxiety for the reader, it seems, than for the family, who make it through the war (comparatively) unscathed. Haya's fate ensnares her one day in January 1944, when she's 20 and a handsome German officer, Kurt Franz, enters the tobacco shop she's tending. The following October their son, Antonio, is born. Franz soon deserts her ("My little Jewess, we can't go on like this"), and Toni vanishes from his pram while Haya's back is turned. In time, the mystery of this disappearance will be solved, but in a discursive rather than a dramatic fashion. There is no suspense. And the unsentimental Drndic won't offer Haya the sympathy you might expect. She condemns her, and Haya condemns herself. "The Tedeschi family," Drndic writes, "are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism." Bystanders: "For 60 years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn't know! ... these yes men, these enablers of evil." Almost halfway through, the novel stops abruptly to list, over 44 pages, the names of some 9,000 Jews for whose deaths Italy bears responsibility. From there, Drndic turns her attention to San Sabba, the gruesome concentration and extermination camp in a converted rice mill on the periphery of Trieste, and from there to the ghastly specifics of the Nazi extermination program. The connection is the same Kurt Franz, an all-too-real historical figure who was the baby-faced commandant of Treblinka before his transfer to Trieste. Drndic uses various methods to recall the horror: trial transcripts, witness statements, biographical sketches, photographs. The technique is Sebaldian, but the tone, especially surrounding Haya, is the old-man-in-a-dry-month rattle of T.S. Eliot. Allusions to "The Waste Land" recur, and the book ends with a collage of bleak lines from the poem. Beckett, too, is present in the insistent imagery of physical discomfort ("a nasty itch plagues her in the early evenings") and of putrefaction so extreme ("they even leap into the containers voluntarily, choke on the sewage sludge in their own fermented excrement") that if her tone wobbled for a moment it would cross the line into camp. But even at their most lurid, Drndic's sentences remain coldly dignified. And so does Ellen Elias-Bursac's imperturbably elegant translation: There isn't a sentence that you would guess had been born in another language. Drndic attempts to stave off despair with her faith in literature, quoting liberally from Borges, Pound, Montale, Bernhard, the Triestine poet Umberto Saba and quite a few other great writers - but then she uses their words to shore up her despair, especially when, in the last part of the novel, she enters the consciousness of Antonio Tedeschi, Haya's stolen son. We encounter him late in June 2006, when he is setting out to meet his mother at last. He's not looking forward to it. Since finding out he is the son of "that murderer," he has come to think of Haya as "that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him ... while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich." If the reader hesitates to judge Drndic's characters (the perennial doubt: would we have been bystanders? or worse?), the characters do not. They see themselves as trapped by history. Like the boots of a concentration-camp guard, Antonio says, "the Past, my Past, our Past, presses up against my face, which, beneath it, contorts in a grimace like the grimace of a crazed detainee whose innocence or guilt has yet to be determined." Innocence or guilt? But how can this man, born in 1944, be guilty? His near-hysterical determination not to let his generation off the hook for its parents' crimes verges on madness. Then again, madness may be the only appropriate response to the enormity of the Holocaust. To move on is unacceptable if not impossible; to succumb to obsession is self-destructive and potentially suicidal. Once Haya's son discovers his true identity, he does everything in his power to keep the horror and the pain alive. His anguish brings to mind an author Drndic doesn't quote: Faulkner, whose Quentin Compson kills himself because he fears that the pain he is feeling is going to fade. Which, thank God, is the nature of everything earthly, including history. The pain of the Holocaust has faded already; it's fading now. 'Bystanders ... keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism.' CRAIG SELIGMAN is a critic and the author of "Sontag & Kael."
Kirkus Review
An epic, heart-rending saga from the Croatian novelist about a forgotten corner of the Nazi Holocaust. The author offers no traditional novel. Its heart is the fictional story of Haya Tedeschi, daughter in a near-assimilated Jewish family from Gorizia, Italy, near Trieste. Interwoven with Haya's tale are brutal historical facts of bloodletting during World War II. One chapter, "Behind Every Name There is a Story," is simply "[t]he names of 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945." There are photographs. There are war crime trial transcripts and poetry excerpts, from Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges and others crying out against "the deafness that presses upon the earth." Haya's story begins as the family moves from their home in Italy to Albania and finally back to Gorizia as refugees. There, young Haya begins work as a store clerk. Haya's seduced and becomes pregnant by Kurt Franz, an SS officer and death camp participant who ultimately reveals he knows Haya's ethnicity, whispering "[m]y little Jewess, we can't go on like this....Besides, my fiance is waiting at home." Their child, Antonio, is soon kidnapped and spirited away to Germany to be raised as an ideal Aryan by a German couple. Antonio reappears at narrative's end as Hans Traube, a photographer, a metaphor for all consumed in the conflagration of the Holocaust. Offering "no mercy for the pathological debris of humanity," the author rains bitter condemnation on the International Red Cross, the Swiss, the Roman Catholic Church and the passive complicity of the German people. A brilliant artistic and moral achievement worth reading.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Outrage, horror, and grief simmer beneath the surface of this gripping novel by Croatian novelist/critic Drndic'(English, Univ. of Rijeka) about the experiences of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste, in northeastern Italy and under the occupation of Nazi Germany. A blend of fiction and nonfiction, this novel brings in testimony from the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials and eyewitness accounts by camp survivors as part of the research done by main character Haya Tedeschi in her quest to find her son, who was kidnapped by the Nazis as part of the SS-founded Lebensborn program. Drndic''s narrative is matter-of-fact, and the format is unusual, including photographs, lists of victims, court transcripts, interviews, and very short biographies of Nazis-mirroring the material collected over six decades by Haya. The effect is to immerse the reader deep into the wartime atrocities, and the result is an unbearable, unusual, and unforgettable tribute to a very dark period of history. VERDICT Highly recommended, this story's gripping historical approach calls to mind the work of Norman Mailer and Don -DeLillo. [See Prepub Alert, 7/22/13.]--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
For sixty-two years she has been waiting. She sits and rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro-Hungarian building in the old part of Old Gorizia. The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers. 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. She sits in front of her old-fashioned darkened window, her breathing shallow, halting (as if she were sobbing, but she isn't) and at first she tries to get rid of the stench of stale air around her, waving her hand as if shooing away flies, then to her face, as if splashing it or brushing cobwebs from her lashes. Foul breath (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her gravestone, now, just in case, in case he doesn't come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years. He will come. I will come. 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. This must be borne. Without the voices she is alone, trapped in her own skull that grows softer and more vulnerable by the day, like the skull of a newborn, in which her brain, already somewhat mummified, pulses wearily in the murky liquid, slowly, like her heart; after all, everything is diminishing. Her eyes are small and fill readily with tears. She summons non-existent voices, the voices that have left her, summons them to replenish her abandonment. By her feet there is a big red basket, reaching to her knees. From the basket she takes out her life and hangs it on the imaginary clothes line of reality. She takes out letters, some of them more than a hundred years old, photographs, postcards, newspaper clippings, magazines, and leafs through them, she thumbs through the pile of lifeless paper and then sorts it yet again, this time on the floor, or on the desk by the window. She arranges her existence. She is the embodiment of her ancestors, her kin, her faith, the cities and towns where she has lived, her time, fat sweeping time like one of those gigantic cakes which master chefs of the little towns of Mitteleuropa bake for popular festivities on squares, and then she takes it and she swallows it and hoards it, walls herself in, and all of that now rots and decomposes inside her. She is wildly calm. She listens to a sermon for dirty ears and drapes herself in the histories of others, here in the spacious room in the old building at Via Aprica 47, in Gorica, known as Gorizia in Italian, GoÅNrz in German, and Gurize in the Friulian dialect, in a miniature cosmos at the foot of the Alps, where the River Isonzo, or Soa, joins the River Vipava, at the borders of fallen empires. Her story is a small one, one of innumerable stories about encounters, about the traces preserved of human contact. She knows this, just as she knows that Earth can slumber until all these stories of the world are arranged in a vast cosmic patchwork which will wrap around it. And until then history, reality's phantom, will continue to unravel, chop, take to pieces, snatch patches of the universe and sew them into its own death shroud. She knows that without her story the job will be incomplete, just as she knows that there is no end, that the end reaches on to eternity, beyond existence. She knows that the end is madness, as Umberto Saba once told her while he was in hospital here, in Gorizia, in Dr Basaglia's ward perhaps, or maybe it was in Trieste with Dr Weiss. She knows that the end is a dream from which there is no waking. And the shortcuts she takes, the quickest ways to get from one place to the next, are often nearly impassable, truly goats' paths. These shortcuts may stir her nostalgia for those long, straight, rectilinear, provincial roads, also something Umberto Saba told her then, so she sweeps away the underbrush of her memory now, memories for which she cannot say whether they even sank to the threshold of memory, or are still in the present, set aside, stored, tucked away. It is along these overgrown shortcuts that she walks. She knows there is no such thing as coincidence; there is no such thing as the famous brick which falls on a person's head; there are links - and resolve - of which we seem to be unaware, for which we search. She sits and rocks, her silence is unbearable. It is Monday, 3 July, 2006. HURRY UP PLEASE IT 'S TIME Excerpted from Trieste by Dasa Drndic All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
