Playing with the Past

Cory Oldweiler reviews Federica Marzi’s novel “My Home Somewhere Else,” newly translated by Jim Hicks.

By Cory OldweilerNovember 8, 2024

• Fiction

IN THE FIRST NINE months of 2024, as in each of the three prior calendar years, more refugees arrived in the European Union through Italy than via any other entry country, including Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Malta, and Cyprus. (Serbia, which is also an entry country for irregular immigrants, is not a member of the EU, though it has been a membership candidate since 2012.) While the majority of refugees come to Italy by sea, risking a perilous crossing of the Mediterranean, many thousands each year arrive overland by way of the Western Balkans, traveling from homes as far away as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This latter group of refugees ultimately make their way through Slovenia or Croatia into the northeastern Italian port city of Trieste. According to the International Rescue Committee, more than 16,000 migrants arrived in Trieste in 2023, nearly 3,000 of whom were unaccompanied children.

Trieste has a long history of welcoming refugees, but in the last several years, the lack of adequate reception centers has led them to seek shelter near the city’s train station in a large, abandoned warehouse known as the Silos. During the summer of 2024, Trieste’s center-right mayor Roberto Dipiazza evacuated the Silos, forcing its inhabitants onto the city’s streets where, months later, most of them remain. While the move was justified for health and safety reasons, it must also be viewed in the context of right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-line stance on irregular immigrants, an effort that has seen mixed results but includes the construction of two refugee camps in Albania, where migrants will be sent for holding while their asylum requests are pending.

In the 20th century, Italy was better equipped, and perhaps more politically willing, to formally welcome refugees and migrants, with large groups arriving in the aftermath of both World War II and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Italian author Federica Marzi’s 2021 novel La mia casa altrove intertwines the stories of two such refugee families who settle in her hometown of Trieste. Newly available in Jim Hicks’s well-considered English translation (as My Home Somewhere Else), the novel centers on twined protagonists—septuagenarian Norina, whose family left the nearby Istrian Peninsula soon after it was ceded to Yugoslav authorities in 1954, and 20-year-old Amila, whose family fled eastern Bosnia days before the “tanks arrived and the National Army barricaded the bridge” in 1992. The narrative jumps between Norina’s younger years in Istria in the 1950s, Amila’s adolescence in Trieste in the 1990s, and the period in the summer of 2004 when Amila goes to work for Norina as a factotum of sorts, running errands and helping around the house.

My Home Somewhere Else is a bildungsroman, or rather a romanzo di formazione, for Amila, who confronts and attempts to come to terms with her feelings for the homeland she left behind. Born in 1984, Amila grew up in Zvornik, on the Bosnian side of the Drina River, which forms much of that country’s border with Serbia. During the war, the town was in “the heart of the tragedy” about 30 miles from Tuzla to the northwest and Srebrenica to the south, both sites where Serbs massacred Bosnians. Each July and August, the Hadžigrahić family—Mamma Selma, Papà Željko, Amila, and her younger sister Majda—return to Sarajevo, where they have a second apartment, but only Željko has returned to their hometown since the end of the war. For Selma, it’s their “duty to go back,” but Amila is at a point in her life where she is much more interested in spending time on Trieste’s beaches and finding a boyfriend.

Norina’s family hails from Buie, today’s Croatian town of Buje, less than five miles from the Slovenian border. In 1934, when Norina was born, Buie was part of Italy, which took possession of both the Istrian Peninsula and Trieste at the end of World War I when the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had administered both locales for decades, ceased to exist. Germans occupied the area during much of World War II, and in 1947, the Free Territory of Trieste was established, comprising some 300 square miles divided—much like Berlin—into Zone A, controlled by British and US troops, and Zone B, controlled by Yugoslav troops. Buie was in Zone B, which officially became part of Yugoslavia when the Free Territory was dissolved in 1954. Zone A became part of Italy—and, more importantly, part of the West. The realignment may have been peaceful, but dislocation takes many forms, and for Norina’s family and so many like them, the decision to seek a “better life” in the West has the same result: “Families broke up. Friendships crumbled like pastry crust. The ties that had bound a community together were cut.”

One of those broken ties is between Norina and her first love, Franco, who keeps his distance from her once they are both living at the Padriciano refugee camp on the Karst Plateau overlooking Trieste. Another is between Norina and her younger sister Nevia, who hops a steamer bound for Australia shortly after the family arrives in Italy. Norina, heartbroken, soon marries Mariano, the steady “counterexample” to Franco. The couple can’t have children, which contributes to Norina’s bitterness that “happiness continued to turn only in one direction”—namely, toward her sister, whom she slowly cuts out of her life.

The arrival of Simon in 2004 unwittingly drags both Amila and Norina into their pasts. Norina’s “blond Australian great-nephew with glasses, the future lawyer who liked to windsurf,” is exactly what Amila has been looking for, though she is initially unaware of his attraction. It’s only on a trip to Istria, where Simon hopes to document his grandmother’s past and seek out clues to his own true lineage, that Amila falls in love. Once Simon starts “playing with the past—the one thing you should never mess with,” Amila gets drawn into his orbit in more ways than one. While his inquiries into his parentage pique Amila’s interest in the war that drove her family out of their home, his mere presence is enough to get Norina thinking about her broken home too, and whether it is ever too late to try and rebuild her family.

Novels about migration often deal not only with the loss of homes, family, and friends but also with the loss of language, which makes them full of opportunities and challenges for translators. Hicks takes full advantage of these openings and rises to these potential pitfalls. Norina speaks the local dialect (“she never spoke Italian except with the dog”), and Hicks starts by italicizing her dialogue. While authors and editors are rightfully abandoning the practice of setting non-English words and phrases apart by changing their styling, there is nothing potentially othering about italicizing English words in order to emphasize something distinctive about them. Hicks also goes further by making the dialect contain more contractions and read a bit slangy, with words like “c’mon” and “kiddo.”

He also retains untranslated words, such as the Croatian “propusnica” (border-crossing permit) or phrases like the Italian “da via” (from outside), which are defined in context and help emphasize movement throughout the region. The mood on the day that Norina’s family crosses into Italy from Yugoslavia is memorably described via two phrases meaning “good day,” one Italian, one heard with slight variations throughout the Balkans: “No ‘buongiorno,’ no ‘dobar dan.’ That day wasn’t good for anyone.” This regional multiculturalism is also highlighted when Papa Željko discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Trieste’s panificio: “Then, with gusto, he bit into a piece of bread he’d bought next door, from the Turkish shop. They sold good somun there, but he was also fine with any sort of hljeb or hleb from the Serbs on the corner. Or bread rolls, small loaves, or struzze.”

In many novels dealing with the Balkans, translators find ways to smuggle in a pronunciation guide for some name that might daunt readers who don’t speak the language. In this case, credit probably redounds mainly to Marzi, who was writing for an Italian audience, but both she and Hicks do a great job with the classroom scene portraying how the name Hadžigrahić would “stop [instructors] in their tracks.” What can be harder to convey, for translators and authors alike, is the utter devastation of leaving behind one’s home. Marzi’s ancestors, like Norina’s family, are Italian refugees from Istria, and the scenes from Norina’s past often feel more fleshed out. My Home Somewhere Else details seminal moments in Norina’s adolescence, accompanies her family during its border crossing, and remains with them for several months in the refugee camp, while it only offers glimpses of Amila’s life outside Trieste, whether before the war in Zvornik or after her family’s arrival at the Jesolo Reception Center. The vague recollections of Zvornik in particular—which are, to be fair, the memories of a child—really only made me want to know more of what was being alluded to.

One sentiment Marzi conveys particularly well is the complex survivor’s guilt that burdens Amila’s family:

The pain of having been betrayed by their country, and of also being the ones who had betrayed it. Of having escaped from the slaughter without a scratch. Pain that they were ashamed they even had, compared to those who’d lived through something much worse. And then the pain of having rebuilt a life for themselves in some other place, while still remaining different, suspended within this sense of difference.

What is unsaid, but unfortunately also true, is the fact that stories can only be told by those who escape slaughter, those who survive to rebuild a life. As is being borne out in far too many locations to this day, tens of thousands are being betrayed and killed and will never be able to tell their tales, will never have a chance to find a home somewhere else, or anywhere at all. We need the survivors, like Marzi’s ancestors, and their allies, like Marzi and Hicks, to tell their stories.