Adriana Altaras writes about her aunt, the beautiful Teta Jele: a woman who lived to be 101 years old, who survived the Spanish flu, a concentration camp and her northern Italian mother-in-law.
When her parents are forced to flee Zagreb when Adriana is four, she goes to live with her aunt in Italy. She will return there again and again throughout her life: during summer vacations as a teenager, with her entire high school class – and with all her boyfriends, who must bear up under Auntie’s aristocratic gaze.
They can’t celebrate Teta Jele’s 100th birthday together, of all things: Adriana’s aunt is in a nursing home and, because of the pandemic, is not allowed to have visitors. So the two of them speak on the phone all the more often, looking back over Jele’s century of life: her childhood and youth in Zagreb, her rescue by Giorgio, who brought her to Mantua and whom she married purely out of gratitude. Her love for Fritz Epstein, who fled to Australia in time. How she deals with growing old and her own history in the midst of world events.
