Marina Jarre

Return to Latvia, written by Marina Jarre and translated by Ann Goldstein, is a memoir that is both personal and historical, allowing the reader to both accompany Jarre during this part of her life as well as think about how we, as humans, can so easily be swayed by evil while never thinking ourselves evil. And that second aspect is one we all need to consider during our current environment of authoritarianism and the othering of various groups of people.

As a memoir this is a powerful book. It is hard to separate the personal from the historical in part because they are heavily intertwined but also because of how Jarre weaves them together in her telling. Personal recollection, genealogical searches, and historical information become one story. At times it may seem that the historical aspects takes center stage, then the personal, but due to the often quite short sections of each they blend together in the reader's mind to form a coherent whole.

I would certainly recommend this to anyone with an interest in memoirs, I also think this will be of interest to those interested in history more broadly and Holocaust history in particular. It is also a cautionary tale for those of us trying to eliminate or, more realistically, limit the prejudices and biases currently plaguing not just any single country but the entire world.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.… (más)

Marina Jarre's memoir was published in 1987 when she was 62 and in the middle of her writing career, according to the introduction. Now it's available in an English translation by Ann Goldstein, and I'm glad. Jarre tells her story from the perspective of herself at 62, but often in the voice of whatever age she was at the time she is telling us about. As a little girl she worries "that I will grow up suddenly, in a single night," and will need to go buy clothes that fit her adult size while other grownups laugh at her in child's clothing.
That's in the first of three chapters, "The Circle of Light." The second, "Pity and Anger," is about growing up through World War I in fascist Italy to adulthood. The final Chapter, "As a Woman," takes her to the time of writing her book, though she lived for another 29 years. There is much about her parents, a strong willed mother, an absent father, a grandmother who raised her, and the people around her.
Jarre slips from one time period to another, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, until I'm no longer surprised to realize that, for example, she is no longer talking about aiding the resistance fighters in a mountain village in 1940, but is now telling about her time teaching French and raising her children in post-war Turin.
So the memoir comes to be about growing and becoming and memory, and trying to understand who she is and how she became the person she is. The book is worth planning a second read for me, to enjoy again and to notice some of what I've missed the first time through.… (más)