"A harrowing, culturally rich memoir."--Kirkus Reviews
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 of Riga and
its southern forest, 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 and in plain view.