Roses of the Wind

Avtor: Widad Tamimi | Založnik: Sanje

Prevod: Gašper Malej

Redna cena: 17,95 €

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Datum izdaje: 19. 12. 2017

264 pages
Trade paperback
Product dimensions: 152 mm x 235 mm

Podrobnosti

How many generations does it take to lay exile to rest?

Carlo is a Jewish boy, born in Trieste in 1924. He wears shorts and knee high socks. During the early years of Fascism he wears a black shirt, unaware of the weight this will have later in life. His family is well off, educated, employed in banking and insurance in Vienna, Trieste and Zurich. The villa where he grows up is frequented by musicians and intellectuals.

Khader is born to a poor Palestinian family in 1948, the year Israel is founded. He wears UN donated clothes, rags patched by his mother, often a size to big. He studies for school by the light of an oil lamp, in a room he shares with nine others. At night, they hang their hammocks beneath the tin roof. When it rains, the roof leaks and the dripping water fills the containers dotted around the room.

It seems impossible for the fates of these two boys, so different, to become entwined. And yet they do, because of the woman they both love.

The Roses of the Wind is a true story. It is a story of love, light and darkness, birth and death, and the endless ripples of life.

Odlomek

My mother died on a Monday. It was November and she had recently reached the age of forty. She was born on the third. The third of November 1951. She hadn't lived with us for a long time. She moved between clinics and anonymous apartments, in the solitude that eats away at life in deep depressions.

They said that her heart failed.

In my childhood memory there is impressed only a nose, covered with a large scab. Then they pushed the body back into cold storage. I touched her icy forehead in a last goodbye and then stood with my right hand clenched against my chest. In the middle of the puzzle of cold tiles in the mortuary the counting off began, at that time unconsciously, of the first ten years of my life.

Mama had planned for us to go to New York for Christmas. Just the three of us, mama and her two daughters, to get to know the “American” part of the family. But she did not live to see December.
There remained an emptiness in the silence of the heart that stopped beating and we didn’t know why. The prevailing feeling was fury, which smothered all my questions,
thickening to the point that it left no air for reflection.

It was a fog that shrouded me, in a prison of blessed unawareness that preserved the appearance of peace and deterred remembrance.

The need to understand came about a year later, like the spark of an explosion in the midst of night shadows. Wanting to know is not a decision but a need.
I became a chest of fragile treasures, between the memories and pains, the joys and resentments, the longings and fears of my family.

Like a centrifuge, I was absorbed by questions, echoes of the horror in silence.

I felt alone, looking for a lamp that would cut through the darkness.

Medijski odzivi

“It is a complex novel, full of events and fascinating characters, leading the reader through crucial moments of the twentieth century.”
- Sul Romanzo

“Widad’s book is like a family gathering at moments of tragedy or birth. Many of them are at odds, especially with themselves. But they have learned how to flee and, much more difficult, how to return.”
- Delo

“Among the many literary experiments of recent times, this spontaneous chronicle has the power to stun the reader.”
- Sole 24 ore