Distant Fathers

"A beautifully ingenious memoir, saturated in the history of the European 20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein’s luminous translation.”
—Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre’s native Latvia during the 1920s and '30s and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally complicated, multinational family: her elusive, hands...