The Crime of a Soldier

An aging war criminal and his daughter are dining in a mountain lodge in the Dolomites; they find themselves at a table next to the narrator, who is working on a translation from Yiddish. In two stories, side by side like restaurant tables, Erri De Luca evokes his love for the Yiddish language and its literature, and then, through the voice of the woman, the life of a man with no remorse, someone who believes his only crime is to have lost the war. The Crime of a Soldier is a book just as sharp as it is short, and it offers us a new and unexpected reflection on the complex memory of our great twentieth-century tragedies.