I DISCOVERED Giorgio Bassani a year after leaving Rome and settling in New York. I was seventeen that year and totally transfixed by a city the likes of which I’d never seen before. Yet within two or three months, I found myself increasingly, almost desperately, homesick for Italy. The only way to quell the crippling nostalgia for what seemed a world I’d left behind was to lay my hands on every Italian writer whose books I could find at Rizzoli, located in those years on 56th Street, off Fifth Avenue. While living in Rome, I had always been reluctant to read Italian authors—now I devoured them: Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Vasco Pratolini, Carlo Cassola, Elio Vittorini, Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Curzio Malaparte, Ignazio Silone, and, of course, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Lampedusa was already a classic, and in a category all his own. But most all the other writers, with the exception of Pirandello, Svevo, and D’Annunzio, whom I also read that year, had started to publish under Mussolini and established themselves after the fall of Fascism and the end of the Second World War. They were still alive and writing in a contemporary, almost spoken, idiom. In their words I found inflections of the Italy I missed and feared I wouldn’t revisit in a long time.
Of all of these writers, the only one whose sensibility struck an immediate chord in me was Giorgio Bassani. He wrote with an intimate understanding of how devastating it can be for some to witness the end of an era, while the experience almost rolls off the shoulders of others. He understood both the helplessness of those who’ve suffered irreparable horrors and the shrug of others who watched these crimes committed but chose to turn a blind eye. It is hardly surprising to learn that, while Elio Vittorini refused to publish The Leopard, by his fellow-Sicilian Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, it was Bassani, a Jewish northerner who had lived through the virtual end of Ferrara’s Jewry, who upheld its publication. Perhaps the two authors shared a vivid sense of how tragic and ultimately ugly and destructive the end of a way of life can be, whether of Lampedusa’s declining nineteenth-century Sicilian aristocracy or, more violently, of Bassani’s deported Jews of Ferrara. Bassani could never undo the haunting end of Ferrara’s Jewish life, the way I too, as an expelled Jew born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, am still unable to forget—or forgive—the rapid extinction of Jewish and cosmopolitan life in what was once my homeland.
Bassani had lived through Fascism and under Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938. These laws prevented Italian Jews from practicing several professions or from hiring help or attending university. Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler eventually sent many Italian Jews either into voluntary exile or into hiding, or ultimately to death camps. Some, as Bassani himself records, were shot dead by Mussolini’s squadristi; others, however, had been fervent Fascists before the advent of the racial laws and didn’t quite know now how to navigate a world that was changing faster than they could reckon. They never found their bearings again.
Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, and Natalia (herself née Levi) Ginzburg, as well as Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, were also Jewish or partly Jewish, though most were indeed totally secularized; Natalia’s husband was killed by the Fascists, and as for Primo Levi, he survived Auschwitz and left perhaps the most clear-eyed portrait of life in the German camps.
Still, Bassani’s world is different; it is about people who for one reason or another find themselves suddenly pushed to the margins of a world where, until intolerance became the norm in the late 1930s, they had thrived and led secure, highly respected lives in Ferrara. But things don’t last and, for all their stature and position, they don’t fight back, or don’t know how. The dazzling, wealthy heartbreaker Micòl Finzi-Contini becomes an easy victim of the Shoah; the prestigious Dr. Athos Fadigati turns into a hapless homosexual who loses everything from his wealth to his reputation because of a thuggish slap in public; the camp survivor Geo Josz can never undo the memory of what he saw; and the syphilitic, reclusive, frightened Pino Basilari won’t even testify to a crime he witnessed from his very window. Some of Bassani’s characters are what the Portuguese call retornados, people who return after years, sometimes after generations, to their place of origin, to feel no less uprooted in their own homes than in the places left behind. In Bassani, however, they return to live among those who robbed them of everything.
Bassani left Ferrara, moved to Rome, and made Rome his home. But his prose teems with the names of Ferrara’s streets and piazzas, its buildings, movie theaters, restaurants, even brothels. In Bassani, one will always watch a young man riding a bicycle and parking it against a wall somewhere to feel one with a city he still loves but probably foretells won’t ever be home again. Bassani’s world is a cartography of a city that could only be restored with words, restored to what it was before Hitler, before Fascism, before the war shook the ground beneath him and took so many loved ones away, restored to what perhaps it never really was but might have been. In this the imagination of the historian and the memory of the fiction writer are constantly trading places and can no longer be told apart.