Putujuće kazalište

A family saga running through the whole 20th century and its three wars, built from the author's own family. In the 1920s the nurse Ivka Benceković, a girl from Zagreb's Trešnjevka, meets the surgeon Benjamin Bernstein, a Jewish émigré who fled Petrograd for Paris when the October Revolution broke out and found his odd way to Zagreb. On the other side, a grandfather is taken prisoner by the Russians as an Austro-Hungarian soldier, and a great-grandmother elopes with Petar Ćirić, a travelling actor with his own company. The narrator's parents barely survive the Second World War: his father fights through the Syrmian Front, his mother hides in Zagreb as a Jewish girl with a Catholic prayer book in her pocket. From Petrograd, Paris and Tangier to Hrvatska Dubica and Zagreb, the family is marked by wars and hatred, and by moving love stories.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

475 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Historical, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

Croatia, 20th century

First published

2020 by V.B.Z.

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9789535203391 (original)