Ellen Elias-Bursać

"Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler's clandestine Lebensborn project. Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences, dealing unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the...

Lucija opens her eyes to find that she is in a hospital, paralyzed and incapable of speech. Though she is immobile, her mind reels, memories of the past a salve and a burden. She sifts through her life: a family split apart by the Croatian War of Independence, a difficult and overbearing mother, a strained relationship with a lover who struggles to feel at home in his own body. Lucija's mother and lover, the other two narrators in the novel, aren't...