Drndic describes this novel as documentary fiction. Using poetry, encyclopedia entries, photos, and archival lists, she assembles a faintly traced fictional story based on the true story of a German-Italian-Slovenian-Jewish woman who spends most of her life on the Adriatic coast near Trieste, a city in present-day Italy which, like Haya, has a Babel-like heritage. Haya has an affair with an SS officer and later gives birth to his son. At five months of age the boy is kidnapped to increase the ranks of Aryan-ish boys for the
Lebensborn. [From Wikipedia:
Lebensborn e.V. (literally: "Fount of Life") was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the goal of raising the birth rate of "Aryan" children via extramarital relations of persons classified as "racially pure and healthy" based on Nazi racial hygiene and health ideology.]
So. As confusing as the above is, it's crystal clear compared to Drndic's impressionistic approach to storytelling. Which is not to say that it's not a brilliant piece of work, at least in part. It demands a tremendous effort on the part of the reader, though, and in the end, the story itself is thin. She's done something worthy, and certainly interesting, but it's hard to evaluate a work which is nearly a scrapbook. Laundry lists of atrocities are not, in themselves, novels, at least I don't think so. And ending a 'novel' with a page of text from The Waste Land seems wrong, somehow.
Nevertheless, I appreciate Drndic's reveal of the specific world of Italian Jews which is a story less told (at least in English) than some others.
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