A beautifully ingenious memoir, saturated in the history of the European
20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein's
luminous translation."
--Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments
This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native
Latvia during the 1920s and '30s and expands southward to the Italian
countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre
depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her
elusive, handsome father--a Jew who perished in the Holocaust; her
severe, cultured mother--an Italian Protestant who translated Russian
literature; and her sister and Latvian grandparents. Jarre tells of her
passage from childhood to adolescence, first as a linguistic minority in
a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents'
divorce. Jarre lives with her maternal grandparents, French-speaking
Waldensian Protestants in the Alpine valleys southwest of Turin, where
she finds fascist Italy a problematic home for a Riga-born Jew. This
memoir--likened to Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov or Annie Ernaux's
The Years and now translated into English for the first time--probes
questions of time, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement,
while asking what homeland can be for those who have none, or many more
than one.
Reading group guide to Distant Fathers is available for download
free of charge at newvesselpress.com.
