Trieste: A Novel

Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs & newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer & stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine Lebensborn project. 

Tedeschi reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, in a narrative that deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, & fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials & interviews with second-generation Jews, & to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. 

From this broad collage of material & memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy that “explores the 20th century’s darkest chapter in an original way . . . an exceptional reading experience” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).

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 "Trieste achieves a factographical poetry, superbly rendered by Ellen Elias-Bursac, implying that no one in Axis-occupied Europe stood more than two degrees from atrocity." – Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 

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Daša Drndić (1946-2018) wrote Trieste—“splendid, absorbing” (NY Times)—shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, & Belladonna—“one of the strangest & strongest books” (TLS)— winner of the 2018 Warwick Prize, & EEG–“a masterpiece” (Joshua Cohen). She also wrote plays, criticism, radio plays, & documentaries.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (born 1952) is an American scholar & literary translator. Specializing in South Slavic literature, she has translated numerous works from Bosnian, Croatian, & Serbian.