Distant fathers

In an equally vivid and precise manner, Italian author Marina Jarre describes the story of her extraordinary youth, which begins in Latvia in the 1920s and 30s. She was born into a complicated family: her elusive, handsome father - a Latvian Jew who died in the Holocaust in 1941 -, her strict mother - an Italian Protestant who translated Russian literature; her sister, her Latvian grandparents. Jarre tells of her childhood and adolescence, first as a German-speaking minority in Riga, and then about her life in Italy. After her parents' divorce in 1935, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents, French-speaking Protestants in the Alpine valleys southwest of Turin, not an obvious home for a Jew in fascist Italy.

These memoirs are on the level of Memory, think of Vladimir Nabokov or Annie Ernaux's The Years. They are about time, language, femininity, connectedness and alienation, and at the heart of them is the question of what a home means to those who have none, or more than one.