Elle Venait de Marioupol written by Natascha Wodin

 It's important, where not indispensible to understand our origins, maybe just for going on in peace in this world.

I felt a strong attraction for this book, Elle Venait de Marioupol written by

Natascha Wodin, published by Métailié. 

That sweet and melancholic picture in the cover intrigued me a lot. There were the premises for a beautiful story. And I was right. This one is a genealogical research, started by Natascha, after years and years of temptatives without any kind of results and successes about the past of her mother. 

The net sometimes does miracles and one day Wodin discovered where her mother was born in. She didn't know where her mother was from, but the search engine "told" her that her mother was born in Marioupol, Ukraine. 

Wodin wouldn't never ever believed it. Wodin was born in Germany, in fact, and she currently lives in Berlin: her mother was deported for working in camps. Stories of Jewish, deported from their countries for concentration camps are known and largely treated; there are also other people as write Wodin who were constricted at abandoning their lands for that horrible camps. Her mother is one of these cases.

Attracted by an endless research, she discovers that Mariopoul was a wonderful place where living in; after all weather was good, seasons not too rigid and when her mother, Eugenia, Iakovlena Ivachtchenko lived there, the place was a fertile one where afforded people from all over the world. There were many jews, but also folk from the rest of Europe. There was expansionism, but also poverty and various temible infections. 

With the help of several important and crucial connections, Wodin also discovers who the father of her mother was: a rich italian merchant: he had had six children! So, Wodin understands immediately that the family is potentially very large, searching for other connections! 

She will discover also that one of her ancestrors was a famous relative, a singer of opera pretty appreciated and once deported in Siberia.

In their family unfortunately several cases of suicides funested the harmony of the entire family; all of them, maybe caused by a genethical illness, but, as also remarks the author, it was probable, also because of the big depression that Communism brought with it; many cases of suicides were registered during the Communism because, simply, it was impossible to develop any talent. Her mother killed herself, but also other members, all women! of their family; in a case the two girls decided to take poison the same day and hour, but then, one killed herself, the second one preferred to give another chance at the existence, living with the remorse of what planned with her relative.

Natascha will reconnect in this book her personal life-story, at first she writes that she had just three pictures of her mother and few other objects; she lived in an hangar the first years of her existences, with changes of school, sad stories of abuses, and she will also tell us the straining moment of the disappearance, forever, of her mother. A mother loved, appreciated. The book is written with splendid words, in grade of capturing the imagination of readers; I think at the description of places, photographs; Wodin is a real artist of the words and she offers to the reader very detailed description so that you are there, imagining protagonists town, cities.

Precious! You have the sensation that to her every person, every place, is a great discovery treated with respect, admiration and surprise.

Highly recommended.

Merci beacoup Editions Métailié pour le livre.

Anna Maria Polidori