La trilogia di Ivan Klima: la storia, i primi amori, il dissenso

September 2012 | #27

by: Maria Teresa Iervolino
pp: 60
ISSN: 2038-632X

This study is an analyses for the guided reading of “Miriam”,
a short story of Ivan Klíma translated into italian.
“Miriam“ is the fisrt of the six short stories of My first
loves which, together with My merry mornings and My golden
trades constitutes a very biographic “triptych“ .
The intertextual lietmotiv of the author’s biography gives
thematic unity to the stories and it could be read as a tracing, or
a map for the dreams or real routes structuring the man and the
writer Ivan Klíma.
In My merry mornings, and My golden trades (both dedicated
to the personal experience of 60s and 70s dissent) are
analysed by the author’s point of view and His attitude towards
the limitations of totalitarian Regime, while in my first loves is examined
the author-protagonist’s adolescent life retraced by the
writer’s glance.
“Miriam” is set in the ghetto of the fortress city of Terezín
where Klíma had been imprisoned with His family from 1941 to
1945, because of their Jewish roots. The heart of the story is the
author’s childish love for Miriam, a girl who works in a soup kitchen
in duty with the distribution of milk to the prisoners in Terezín.
The knowledge of the „subtext“ allows to decode each story retracing
the historical reality through the author’s personal experiences.