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Upcoming Events

06/22/2021 - 6:00pm

DISTANT FATHERS BY MARINA JARRE WITH ANN GOLDSTEIN AND MARTA BARONE

TUESDAY, JUNE 22ND, 6 PM ET

Please join us for a virtual event with translator Ann Goldstein and curatore Marta Barone as they present "Distant Fathers", the singular autobiography from author Marina Jarre, translated into English for the first time.

We will be presenting this event virtually using Zoom.

PLEASE REGISTER HERE

DISTANT FATHERS is a singular autobiography that 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 multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father—a Jew who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother—an Italian Protestant who translated Russian literature. This memoir—likened to Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov or Annie Ernaux’s The Years and now translated into English for the first time—probes questions of time, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.

Marina Jarre was born in Riga, Latvia,and lived in Italy from 1935 until her death at the age of 90 in 2016. Cultural identity, personal character, psychology, and autobiographical themes are central elements of her novels and stories.

Ann Goldstein has translated The Neapolitan Novels and other works by Elena Ferrante, as well as writings by Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Anna Maria Ortese. She is a former editor at The New Yorker.

Marta Barone is the author of the novel Città sommersa and is overseeing the republication of Marina Jarre's writings in Italy for Bompiani.

Press:

The New York Times features DISTANT FATHERS 9781939931948 by Marina Jarre in its New & Noteworthy column:

"This impressionistic memoir by an overlooked Italian writer — the child of a Christian mother and a Jewish father killed in the Holocaust — is seen as her masterwork." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/books/review/new-this-week.html

“This is 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 and The Odd Woman and the City

“Ann Goldstein’s shimmering translation of Jarre’s prose delivers into English a European masterpiece.”
—Benjamin Taylor, author of Here We Are and The Hue and Cry at Our House

“Marina Jarre is an original, powerful and incisive writer ... Her works―true, small-scale, essential masterpieces―have found passionate readers and critics and have an indisputable place in Italian literature of the past fifty years.”
―Claudio Magris, author of Danube and Blameless

“Marina Jarre’s astonishing work reads like a dreamscape. Here, a Nabokovian memory mingles with meditations on homeland, womanhood, and sexuality. A book both sharp as a blade and glistening like a river in the sun.”
—Lila Azam Zanganeh, author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness