The Holocaust And Trieste
I read Dasa Drndnic's novel, "Trieste" after reading Italo Svevo's famous 1923 novel "Zeno's Conscience" which is set in Trieste from the late 19th century through the beginning of WW I. At the time, Trieste was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. I was fascinated by "Zeno's Conscience", not least because of the praise and discussion it received in philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent book, "The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity". Appiah sees the Trieste of Svevo's day as well as his book and the author himself as illustrating a spirit of cosmopolitanism and shared human identity that he finds valuable.
Dasa Drndic's book offers a different picture than does Svevo or Appiah. Her novel is set during the years of the Holocaust although it ranges in time both before and after. After WW I, Trieste had become part of Italy. The book describes the Holocaust in Italy in detail while also covering much of the enormity of the evil. The primary character of the book is an elderly woman, Hasa Tedeschi, who lives in a town north of Trieste. The book opens in 2006 as Hasa, a retired mathematics teacher, waits for her long-lost son and gathers both her memories and factual information on the Holocaust.
Some of the details of Hasa's personal story are fiction but the Holocaust is all-too-real. The novel offers chillingly detailed portrayals of the camps, their leaders, and the unimaginable brutality of the era. The depiction of the people and places involved has a cumulative, shocking impact. A test of whether a book works for me is the extent to which it makes me want to move beyond the covers of the book and learn more. Drndic's book made me want to revisit and relearn what I knew about the Holocaust.
The book's writing is unusual in its long, heavily descriptive stream of consciousness sentences and paragraphs. The style makes for slow reading but it is fits the subject and the characters in capturing dizzying horror and a sense of disorientation brought on by events and memory. The book is highly allusive with many quotations from and references to T.S. Elliott, Ezra Pound, Kierkegaard, Thomas Bernard, Borges, among others. Much of the book is drawn from memoirs of Holocaust survivors and participants. Of many literary parallels to this book, I thought of Jena Blum's novel "Those Who Save Us" which, as does "Trieste" involves a relationship between a Jewish woman and a high-ranking S.S. official.
The immediacy and sharpness of this book will bring the Holocaust home to readers. The book is written from the perspective of its many characters and of the many victims of the Holocaust, survivors, and descendants. In places, there is a strong sense of unrequited vengeance and continued anger in the characters. The reader comes to understand these feelings. It is valuable to read this book and also valuable to think about the difference between a well-done novel, such as this book, and a history. The tone and perspective of a history would be different from that of a novel even for a subject as horrific as the Holocaust.
Robin Friedman
