Having remained in Trieste for the summer while her parents Selma and Zeliko and her younger sister Majda, like every year, return to their homeland, Bosnia, to Zvornik this year, the young Amila begins to work odd jobs on the Carso, in Bristie, helping with the household chores of two elderly people, Norina and her husband, Mariano, Istrian exiles who took refuge in Trieste after the war.

They are two 'foreign' families whose stories intertwine in the undefined border city that is Trieste, families with feelings as hard as stones, as immovable as mountains; only another feeling - light, fresh and unexpected - can make that mineral brittle and tame and push towards self-understanding and absolution, for oneself and others.

Emigrating is like getting into a psychological labyrinth. Emigrating to escape a war is like ending up in a labyrinth with narrow, sharp corners and constant references from dazzling mirrors.

A journey of generations that ends in multiculturalism, at best, rarely in interculturalism. Federica Marzi knows the sensation of feeling different in a country that is the one where you stopped after fleeing your own, she calls it 'foreignness', and breaks it down into 'foreignness' and rectitude. Her book 'My home elsewhere' is a stop, a refreshment point in the slow marathon that leads those who have been uprooted to find themselves. Or, at least, to try.
A journey of generations, in fact, that an interested person can learn from history books, from the stories of the protagonists, from fiction. 'My home elsewhere' intertwines two very well-known episodes of History: the exodus of the Italians from Istria when Tito took power and the slaughterhouse that was the war in the Balkans. If up to now historical and historiographical studies have reconstructed what happened, narrative journalism has in most cases stopped a few years ago. Federica Marzi therefore moves the chronological bar forward by a generation. In the sense that the protagonists are not (only) the Istrians who took refuge in Trieste to end up in the harsh refugee camp of Padriciano – as Marisa Madieri delicately described in Verde acqua – but the children and grandchildren of those, scattered around the world. It is not just the dijasporci, the Bosnians who took refuge (also) in Trieste – as Elvira Mujcic describes – but their children, born there and raised on this side of the border, those who in 2005 (when the book ends) were about twenty years old and had an unnamed restlessness.
From a pain drunk to the bottom like hemlock, hopes can incredibly blossom and find vitality new energies, harbingers of a reconstruction. The border to the North East is not just any border: the line between the East and the West of the world passed there, the Iron Curtain was lowered here with hundreds of thousands of soldiers deployed, the communist world and the world with a capitalist economy. The atrocious events that marked it during and after the war - as if the massacres here in the First World War were not enough - followed by the Balkan war, make it a place of mystery and tension. Federica Marzi's debut novel describes well the complex scenario of languages, religions, histories: an area of ​​which Trieste, placed floating between the past and geography, seems a place of reference, a saving capital. (ANSA).

Federica Marzi, My home elsewhere, Bottega Errante Edizioni, Udine 2021, pp. 336, €17,00.

Francesco De Filippo 
Source: ANSA.it – 03/02/2022