University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
Memories of Jewish Life: From Italy to Jerusalem, 1918–1960, by Augusto Segre, translated by Steve Siporin. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 507 pp. $40.00.
North American readers especially should welcome this latest addition to the growing collection of materials on Italian Jewry. Although the English translation comes nearly twenty years after the publication of the Italian original Memorie di vita ebraica (Rome: Bonacci Ed., 1979), this volume proves to be well worth the wait as it renders accessible to the English-speaking world the important memoirs of Augusto Segre, Italian by birth, Israeli citizen by choice.
Translated by Steve Siporin, professor of folklore at Utah State University, the book includes a moving foreword by Segre’s children, Tamar and Daniel, who characterize the memories “as witnesses from the past” which “will open a unique window on the unknown world of Italian Jewry, as it was lived in small Communities during tragic and difficult times.”
The memoirs are preceded by an insightful and important introduction by the translator who well recognizes the need to situate the memoirs in the larger context of the history of Italian Jews, their unique culture and their “italianità”—from the details of language (“Italian Jews, except in a few instances, never spoke Yiddish, the language often taken to be the universal touchstone of traditional Jewish culture”) through the emancipation of the Jews during the period of Italian Unification (“Jewish citizenship became incorporated in the laws of the nascent Italian state”) to the patriotism exhibited during World War I (“Italian Jews were encouraged by their religious leaders to be patriotic Italians even more than to be observant Jews. In fact, they sacrificed themselves as soldiers in disproportionately high numbers”).
Prof. Siporin justly notes that “the discord between tradition and assimilation, as an intracommunity conflict, is at the heart of Segre’s memoir,” and while rightfully assigning Segre a place among the best-known Italian authors of Jewish ancestry—Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Alberto Moravia, and Italo Svevo—he dutifully notes that while the others were “assimilated and nonobservant,” “Jewish identity, religion, and culture form the soul of Augusto Segre’s memoir.”
As Segre had intended his memoirs for an Italian public, Siporin rightly acknowledges the need for annotation and historical introduction for the non-Italian reader and generously provides for this in the introduction and copious footnotes to the chapters. He also includes, in an appendix, a glossary of terms in Jewish Italian dialect and Hebrew that Segre had compiled for his Italian readers.
It is Segre’s constant vigilance against the dangers of assimilation, his unwavering support of the growing Zionist movement in Italy, his indefatigable efforts to help refugees escape to Israel, and his own emigration to Israel in 1979 which mark a strident contrast between these writings and those of the other better known Italian Jewish authors.
What Segre does share with the others, Bassani in particular, is the gift of hindsight in his writing—that dual level of historical awareness which allows him to reflect on the pro-fascist sympathies of many of his coreligionists with the full knowledge of the ultimate fate they were later to meet at the hands of the Nazi-fascists. In relating the adherence to fascist doctrine and the anti-Zionist stance of Ettore Ovazza, for example, Segre’s disclosing of his ultimate fate heightens the ironies (“But when, after the war, I learned of the horrible end that Ovazza and his family came to—butchered by the Nazis and burned in the furnace of the heating system in the school at Gressoney—a sense of pity always prompted me to place a veil over them, as well as over the other fascist coreligionists who met the same tragic end . . .”).
Similarly he shows the futility of total assimilation, as the most zealous proponents, the young, are not spared the ultimate tragic fate:
Young people maintained, above all, that the ‘old ones’ had already had their time, as had their ideas, which were altogether old and obsolete. What mattered now was the Fatherland and being equal to others in every way. Later, when the murderous wave of fascist and Nazi persecution swept away every trace of Jewishness without pity, maybe even the young could understand their Jewish reality better. But the gas chambers did not permit them any second thoughts. (p. 61)
Particularly effective is Segre’s attention to the bewilderment and disbelief of Italian Jews in the face of the discriminatory Racial Laws of 1938; the steadfast belief that being patriotic Italian citizens would shield them from harm: “certain things can’t happen here, because we’re Italians, in Italy and not in Germany. . . .” Perhaps this is the most eloquent illustration of Segre’s definition of the Jews as “prisoners of hope.”
The oral, conversational style of the original Italian has been masterfully rendered by Siporin’s translated prose, and readers will delight in the discovery that this important book, which sheds light on a little known community and a very dark chapter in Italy’s past, proves moreover to be a most enjoyable reading experience as the memoirs of an individual become the collective history of an entire community.
Rachele Longo Lavorato
University of Toronto
|
