שלך, סנדרו

Their mother, an eighteen-year-old Jewish dancer, ran off on an Italian tour with a much older Hungarian singer, and had four children by twenty-three. Touring from town to town, the couple placed the babies with Italian foster mothers; three were taken back, but one, Romolo, was never reclaimed and vanished from their lives. When war came, the father went back to Hungary for good, and the mother, hiding her Jewishness, worked as an interpreter for the German army in Italy and raised the children as Christians. They learned they were Jews only after she died at thirty-two. Her youngest, Sandro, who later made his life in Israel, had stopped hoping to find Romolo until in 2004 he chanced on an article by a Rome professor of ecology. Now, writing to that brother, he tells him the family story, drawing on Hungarian letters from a grandmother killed in the Holocaust.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

344 pages in the original

Genres

Family, War, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Italy, Second World War

First published

2006 by Keter

Author's age

71 when first published

ISBN

9789650714987 (original)

More

Wikidata