Fiction Meets Reality in Croatian Novel About Nazi's Son

Dasa Drndic's Work Invites Comparisons With 'War and Peace'

By Todd Gitlin for The Jewish Daily Forward
In Gorizia, near Trieste, near Italy’s border with Slovenia, an 83-year-old woman named Haya Tedeschi has been waiting 62 years — since 1944 — for the return of her abducted little boy, Antonio. For years she has been collecting shards of the history that surrounds her life story — writing notes, collecting old, cracked photos and news clippings, rearranging them “as if shuffling a pack of cards.” The promise of this grave, staggering book by the Croatian writer Daša Drndić is that we will eventually get to the bottom of a mystery. We will find out not only what became of Tedeschi’s son but why, as his mother awaits him, she remains “wildly calm.”

“Her story is a small one,” Drndić writes, but a necessary one, for Tedeschi, a mathematics teacher, knows that if she succeeds in “sweeping away the underbrush of her memory,” her testimony will take its place in “a vast cosmic patchwork,” and some truth might emerge about the grotesquely unnerving history she’s lived through.

Tedeschi’s forebears were citizens of the republic of displacement. They spoke Italian, German and Slovenian. Their saga begins long before 1944, in the southern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand pays a visit not long before heading for Sarajevo in 1914. From there, the saga bulges out in many directions, heading forward, backward and sideways, folding back upon itself more than once, swelling into a boundless weave of facts and inventions, so that everything in Tedeschi’s story touches a million other stories in a delirium through which a historical sequence pokes out, like bones.

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