Marina Jarre, a writer to be rediscovered on the occasion of her centenary

Of Anna Toscano

Marina Jarre’s books, writer whose centenary from birth falls on August 21, have had that alternate fortune over the decades that often concerns books written by women: very public, many readers and readers, and then the dust on the work. Moreover, For Jarre. However, this editorial movement is even stranger as he wrote a lot, at least sixteen titles from the sixties to 2011 with different publishers, from Einaudi to Bollati, just to name a few. Moreover, A little at a time these first editions have started circulating in the banquets. Meanwhile, used bookstores by composing under the “Jarre files that are ever longer.

I met marina jarre, writer rediscovered occasion Jarre for the first time with Ascanio and Margheritareleased in ’91 for Bollati Boringhieri, a historical novel that runs around a love story within a large and painful affair for the history of our country: the epic of the Waldensians in the Ducal Piedmont. Furthermore, A historical novel. Similarly, mixed with history and invention, not without cruelty and ferocity, in which little humanity and rare happiness emerges: it tells the decimation of a religious minority. In addition, The living. Nevertheless, powerful vintage picture that emerges is thanks also to Jarre’s writing, so hass and composed, as if it had sank her hands inside the story to testify to her, do not forget it.

His writing is, especially for the years in which he was writing and publishing his first novels, very original and complex, a narrative writing composed of an incredible variety of expressive registers. A marina jarre, writer rediscovered occasion part of his books are mixed works between memoir. autobiography and novel, another part are historical novels: in both there is a matrix, the first religious one anchor of the linguistic one.

The religious question is of great importance in Jarre: he was born in Latvia on August 21, 1925 from Mother Valdese Italiana and Latvian Jewish father. For the first ten years he lives in Riga with his sister. parents, always on the war footing between them, and with his grandparents; In ’35 the mother will run away from her husband’s house with both daughters to take refuge first by the maternal grandparents and then in Turin, where Marina completes the schools and will be a teacher. Once the war. family traumas has been overcome, the change of language and affections, it should be said survived to all this, his life gives way to eternity with marina jarre, writer rediscovered occasion children and grandchildren. The religious wound always remains open. in fact he will never see his father and grandparents and the friends of Riga again, all killed in the Shoah, and will have a dominant presence of the mother in his life. The religious question. Jewish father and Valdese mother, becomes the main question in the reconstruction of her memory: the father and grandparents killed for their religion and she and her mother hi because Valdesi, but only a few decades earlier they would have died in the clashes in Piedmont.

The Father absence and the mother presence, the father removed in memory also by the words of his mother and maternal grandparents, a wretched father, and over time a father absolutely to be recovered from his own and others’ warp of his memory.

In 1987, always for Bollati Boringhieri, a collection of short stories marina jarre, writer rediscovered occasion was released Galambra. Four stories with ghosts In which. with a very classic and poetic style, it stages the absences that become presences in the newspaper scene. These two books. very composed and narratively classic, open the way to focus the narrative, in some of the following books, on its family affair. In 87 he came out for Einaudi The distant fathers In which Jarre slowly enters the autobiography. as if until then he had been looking at his past and that’s it: “I was stopped on the threshold of myself”. A book without nostalgia. regrets, almost a classification of the facts of the past, of his years in Riga: a review of his mother, father, sister and grandparents as for the movement, to remember them to fix them. A writing detaches. stops his, far from self -pity, sometimes ironic and not free of colds: a writing that places a marina jarre, writer rediscovered occasion right distance between itself and the world that is reached from the past.

He will then be in 2004 with Einaudi, then reprinted by Bompiani in 2023, with Return to Latvia Which sinks in his biography and tells of the journey made with his son to seek the places that are no longer there, the people who have been shot, including the father with a hand -by -hand daughter, but above all a reflection on the Holocaust, on the language that divides and unites and on the silence that often kills.

Jarre like Edith Bruck on his journey between Hungary and Italy, survival to extermination camps, Jewish identity; Or as Inscorg Bachmann, from Austria to Italy, also in exile on the run from the war, poised between several languages.

Women who with their writing have faced borders, different languages, religion, identity. Claudio marina jarre, writer rediscovered occasion Magris said about Jarre at the beginning of 20 thousand “with an indisputable place in Italian literature”. but the lights on her faded until 2021 when Bompiani began to re -propose her books with the supervision of Marta Barone.