"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.
A rediscovered Italian author returns to her Baltic homeland to come to terms with widespread Latvian complicity in the massacre of Jews that consumed the father she lost in childhood.
“A noble book … that like those of Primo Levi should be read by everyone.”
—L’Indice dei libri del mese
“Jarre has a moral motivation: to understand behavior as much as possible, to peer into the abject abyss, to probe the reasons for a conspiracy of silence.”
—Corriere della Sera
“Marina Jarre is an original, powerful and incisive writer ... Her works―true, small-scale, essential masterpieces―have found passionate readers and critics and have an indisputable place in Italian literature of the past fifty years.”—Claudio Magris, author of Danube and Blameless
