Sea of memory

the long version

"During a summer holiday on an island off Naples in the 1950s, a sixteen-year-old boy, feeling guilty about Italy's recent wartime past, is chagrined to find his family reluctant to answer his questions. Go read books, they tell him; it's all there, but leave us alone. A local fisherman who befriends him is drawn into laconic replies that fill the gaps in the boy's awareness of both Italian and German responsibility."--BOOK JACKET. "As the holiday progresses, the boy becomes obsessed with a mysterious, slightly older girl who is also vacationing on the island, and from her he learns what it meant to be a Jew under German domination. Through her story, the boy is consumed with the emotional experience of belonging to another time, another people, another place. Now, a few years after the war's end, Germans have once again invaded the Bay of Naples, but this time as well-heeled tourists. The boy's newfound resentment bursts into a flame of retribution in a remarkable climax that leaves him, and the reader, with the understanding that the past can never be forgotten, nor can it be corrected."--BOOK JACKET.