Nightmare of the Embryos

Historical trauma, unusual figures, and marginalized outsiders shape this kaleidoscopic volume of vignettes, prose poems, and fables from Swiss writer Mehr (Words of Resistance), who died in 2022. In the title story, Mehr draws from the abuses she and her own family endured as Yenish people under Switzerland’s Charity for the Children of the Country Road, a program of forced assimilation and eugenics that removed Yenish and Sinti children from their parents and sterilized adults. The story’s unnamed narrator recounts her experiences in orphanages and foster homes, where she is subjected to psychiatric experimentation by doctors who deem her “hereditarily polluted.” Some stories render the horrors endured by the Yenish in stark realism, as when a Romani woman in “The Souls of my Sisters and Brothers” faces discrimination at a Holocaust remembrance event. Others showcase a stylistic playfulness that often subverts narrative logic, as in the surreal “Island Body,” which takes the perspective of an island’s beach grass and sand dunes to portray the end of a love affair. In the closer, “Dorian Dreamed,” 13-year-old Dorian and others at a children’s home are led by dreams, along with Earth’s animals and plants, to the safe, joyful new planet of Lux. Mehr bears witness to the traumas suffered by the Yenish community and immortalizes their enduring joy and resilience in this masterfully translated collection. It’s not to be missed. (Mar.)