Distant Fathers

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia during the 1920s and 30s, and expands southward to the Italian countryside. Jarre depicts a multinational and complicated family: her Jewish father, her Italian Lutheran mother and her sister and Latvian grandparents. She recounts growing up in a Baltic nation where she spoke German surrounded by many other tongues and religions, and then in traumatic exile to fascist Italy after her parents divorce. A memoir probing questions of time and language, while asking about the nature of a homeland.