Summary

“Switzerland” is narrated by a woman recalling a year from her youth. When she was 13 years old, she and her family spent a year living abroad in Switzerland. The narrator is Jewish and American, and some of her ancestors were killed in the Holocaust. Her father worked as an emergency room doctor. They spent a year in Switzerland because the narrator’s father was doing a medical fellowship in the field of trauma. During that year, the narrator lived at a Swiss boarding school near Geneva. She befriended two older students: a Thai-American teenager named Marie and an Iranian teenager named Soraya. The narrator quickly began to enjoy Switzerland and her life there. Sometimes, when she walked through Geneva on her own, men would make passes at her, which would make her uncomfortable.

As the narrator became further acquainted...