By now, readers and critics—both in Italy and abroad—consider me a “Jewish writer.” I accepted this definition gladly, but not immediately and not without resistance; in fact, I didn’t accept it in its entirety until quite late in life, and late in my journey as a writer. I adjusted to the condition of Jew only as a consequence of the racial laws issued in Italy in 1938, when I was nineteen, and of my deportation to Ausch-
witz, in 1944. I adapted to the condition of writer even later, when I was over forty-five and had already published two books, and when the profession of writer (which nonetheless I have never considered a true profession) had begun to overshadow my “official” profession of chemist. In both cases, it was more a matter of destiny than of deliberate and informed choice. No matter, I will review here my works as a “Jewish writer,” dwelling in particular on my books of autobiography or memoir, or on those otherwise relevant to the subject of this conference. I will follow the actual sequence of events rather than the sequence reflected in my writings; in other words, I will follow a biographical rather than a bibliographical order.
Like most Jews of ancient Italian descent, my parents and grandparents belonged to the middle class and were fully integrated into the country in terms of language, habits, and moral values. In my family, religion mattered little; I think that this can be explained by the fact that equal rights, obtained by non-Catholic Italians only around the middle of the last century, were a consequence of the largely secular nature of the Italian Risorgimento. Participation in the struggles of the Risorgimento included, if not an obligation, at least strong encouragement toward secularism. Nevertheless, in my family—as among most Italian Jews—awareness of our Jewishness had not died out. It manifested itself in the preservation of certain family rituals (especially the celebrations for Rosh Hashanah, Passover, and Purim), in the importance attached to study and education, and in a modest but interesting linguistic differentiation. As with the famously hybrid structure of Yiddish, in the Jewish families of the various Italian provinces odd variations of the dialects had developed, with Hebrew insertions that were more or less adapted to conform to local phonetics. Since early childhood, I had been fascinated, and also moved, by this touching survival of the language of the Bible in family jargon and in our dialect. This inspired, many years after my literary debut, the first chapter of The Periodic Table.
At first glance, the book is a summary of my life as a chemist. Indeed, at the end of my professional career, I felt the need to explain what I owed to my job—almost manual, often tiring and dirty, at times even dangerous. It seemed right that, so to speak, the man of letters should give thanks to the chemist who had opened a pathway for him. On closer scrutiny, however, critics recognized in the book a range wider than pure autobiography. It holds the history of a generation. Many of its pages reflect the traumatic experience of the segregation of Jews in Fascist and National Socialist Europe, the blind rush to war and slaughter, and also the renewed pride that fatally accompanies every separation and act of discrimination. The book is divided into twenty-one “moments,” each taking its subject and title from one of the chemical elements. For the purpose of this conference, the chapters titled “Argon,” “Zinc,” and “Gold” are especially relevant, as they relate to circumstances and events that preceded my deportation, and reflect my condition as a Jew, assimilated and integrated—but not Fascist—in Mussolini’s Italy. Argon is a gas that does not react with other gasses. It is present in a tiny quantity in the air we breathe. In the chapter with that title I proposed a humorous analogy between this “rare” and “noble” gas and our ancestors in the small rural Jewish communities of Piedmont, isolated in small groups, at times single families, aloof, still mindful of long-ago persecutions, never much loved or much hated, at times the object of contempt or mistrust. No trace remains of these odd and remote characters, except for some funny anecdotes, some “sayings” that were handed down, almost a parody of the famous rabbinical “sayings” collected in the Talmud. In these pages, with ironic and gentle affection, I tried, for instance, to bring to life again the story of a legendary uncle from Chieri, near Turin, who had fallen in love with the Christian maid of the house. As his parents opposed the marriage, the uncle went to bed and stayed there for twenty-two years, until his parents died and he could marry the girl. In relating these amusing and unusual family tales, I also tried to record that hybrid language I mentioned earlier, basically a minor, Mediterranean Yiddish, more local and less renowned, in which I nevertheless recognized my domestic roots:
Its historical interest is small, because it was never spoken by more than a few thousand people, but its human interest is great, like that of all fluid border languages. It has a marvelous comic force, arising from the contrast between the fabric of the speech, which is the rough, sober, and laconic Piedmontese dialect, never written except on a bet, and the Hebrew framework, plucked from the remote language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geologic, smoothed by the millennia like a riverbed by the glaciers. But this contrast mirrors another, that essential conflict of the Jews of the Diaspora, scattered among “the peoples” (the gôjím, that is), and stretched between divine vocation and the daily misery of exile; and still another, more general, and innate in the human condition, for man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, of divine breath and dust. The Hebrew people, after the dispersal, lived this conflict long and painfully, and drew from it not only its wisdom but its laughter, which is missing from the Bible and the Prophets. Yiddish is pervaded by it, and, within modest limits, so was the strange speech of our fathers in this land, which I want to recall here before it disappears: a skeptical, good-natured speech that might upon superficial examination appear blasphemous, but in fact has a richly affectionate and decorous intimacy with God.
The chemical analogy, still subtly ironic, changes focus in the chapter “Zinc.” It is 1938, the racial laws have not yet been promulgated in Italy, but they can be felt in the air. Newspapers and magazines, orchestrated by the totalitarian regime, write insistently about the Jews as different, as potential (or current) enemies of fascism, as damaging “impurities” in the pure body of the Italian nation; they cite as an example to be followed the Nuremberg Laws and repeat the arguments of Dr. Goebbels’s fanatical propaganda. The Jew, represented in cartoons with stereotypical Semitic features, is at the same time the capitalist who starves the “Aryan” peoples and the bloodthirsty Bolshevik, destroyer of Western civilization. It should be recalled that zinc reacts with acids only if it contains certain impurities: if it is extremely pure, it does not react. The young self whom I describe here is in a confused way proud to be “an impurity”:
For the wheel to turn, for life to live, impurities are needed. . . . We need dissent, difference, the grain of salt, the mustard seed. Fascism doesn’t want them, forbids them, and so you’re not a Fascist; it wants everyone to be the same, and you are not the same.
And a little further on:
I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt, the mustard seed. Impurity, certainly: since La Difesa della Razza1 had just begun publication in those months, and there was a lot of talk about purity, and I was starting to be proud of being impure. The truth is that until then being Jewish hadn’t much mattered to me: privately, and with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as a nearly negligible but curious fact, a small, cheerful anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles; a Jew is someone who doesn’t have a Christmas tree, who shouldn’t eat salami but eats it anyway, who learned a little Hebrew at the age of thirteen and then forgot it. According to the periodical cited above, a Jew is miserly and clever: but I was not especially miserly or clever, nor was my father.
It seems to me that this last passage closely reflects the state of mind and the circumstances of the majority of Italian Jews on the eve of the racial laws.
In the chapter “Gold,” things have come to a head. The Second World War is raging, in 1943 the Allies landed in Italy, fascism fell, and the German Army invaded northern Italy. Although unprepared, both politically and militarily, I considered that the only proper choice was to join the anti-German resistance. This was what many of my friends, both Jewish and Christian, had done. Indeed, Jewish participation in the Italian resistance was relatively substantial in terms of both numbers and leadership. But my partisan activity was destined to be short-lived. Owing to an informer, on December 13, 1943, I was captured by the Fascists in the mountains of Valle d’Aosta. Under questioning, I admitted to being Jewish. This was due in part to exhaustion but in part also to a resurgence of that pride I mentioned earlier, which is a product of persecution, and whose intensity is proportionate to the harshness of the persecution itself.
In February 1944, the Fascists handed me over to the Germans, who deported me to Auschwitz. The convoy that transported us to the Lager contained 650 people; 525 of them were killed right away; 29 women were interned in Birkenau; 96 men, including me, were sent to Auschwitz-Monowitz, a “Nebenlager” owned by I.G. Farbenindustrie. Of these, only about 20 men and women returned home. I survived imprisonment because of a combination of lucky circumstances: I never fell ill, I was helped by an Italian bricklayer, I was able to work for two months as a chemist in an I.G. Farbenindustrie laboratory. I was liberated, thanks to the rapid advance of the Red Army, in January 1945.
Already during captivity, in spite of the hunger, the cold, the beatings, the exhaustion, in spite of the gradual death of my comrades and the crowded living together at all times, I had felt the urgency to relate my experience. I knew that my chances of survival were very small, but I also knew that, if I survived, I would have to tell the story, I could not avoid it. Further, I knew that telling the story, bearing witness, was a purpose worth surviving for. Not surviving and telling the story but surviving in order to tell the story. In Auschwitz, I was already aware that I was living the fundamental experience of my life.
Indeed, as soon as I returned to Italy (in October 1945), I began writing, with no plan, with no concern about style, giving precedence to events that were fresher in my memory, or that seemed important in themselves, or charged with symbolic meaning. I was not aware, nor did I have the intention, of writing a book. Rather, I felt I was fulfilling a duty, paying a debt to dead comrades, and at the same time answering a need of my own. I must add that neither in this book nor in the subsequent ones did I ever face language problems. My education was exclusively Italian, Italian is the only language I know well, and I could not imagine using any other.
I was alerted to the fact that I was writing a book by friends who were reading my pages. They suggested that I organize these pages and finish them. This is how If This Is a Man, published in 1947, originated. Later, the book showed its vitality: it has been translated into nine languages and adapted for radio and the theater in various countries. Excerpts appear in many anthologies; the book is reprinted frequently; and to this day young people read it, as confirmed by the many letters I receive.
It is not a book purely of testimony. Reading it after many years, I recognize many intertwined themes: the effort to understand “how could it have happened,” the almost scientific study of human behavior (of myself and others) under those extreme circumstances, the painful and daily comparison with life as a free man, the reappearance (sometimes intentional, sometimes unconscious and spontaneous) of literary reminiscences from Dante’s Inferno. But among these themes there is one in particular that I would like to highlight here: the evocation of the Bible.
For the first time in my life, starting in the Italian transit camp of Fòssoli, I found myself segregated from the “normal” world and forcibly plunged into an exclusively Jewish environment. It was a brutal confirmation of my condition as a Jew: a sentence, a relapse, a revival of the Biblical tales of exile and migration. A tragic return, in which, however, alongside the despair stood the surprise and pride of a recovered identity. The following passage refers to the evening of our departure for Auschwitz from Fòssoli:
In Barrack 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and numerous children and grandchildren and his sons-in-law and hardworking daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters; they had come from Tripoli after many long journeys, and had always carried with them the tools of their trade, their kitchen utensils, and their accordions and violins, so they could play and dance after the day’s work. They were happy and pious folk. Their women, working silently and quickly, were the first to finish the preparations for the journey, in order to have time for mourning. When all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied up, they loosened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the funeral candles on the ground, and, lighting them according to the customs of their fathers, sat on the bare soil in a circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping through the night. We gathered in a group before their door, and experienced within ourselves a grief that was new to us, the ancient grief of a people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus, renewed in every century.
This theme and the Biblical tone reappear often as the months of captivity go by. At times, what emerges is the perception of a fate decided far above man by an incomprehensible God:
On the march to work, limping in our clumsy wooden clogs on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived in Paris for twenty years but still speaks an implausible French. He is thirty, but, like all of us, could be taken for anywhere from seventeen to fifty. He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel, and moving story; because such are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, shocking necessity. We tell them to one another in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine—simple and incomprehensible, like the stories in the Bible. But are not they, too, stories in a new Bible?
The confusion of languages as a punishment for man’s hubris is a theme that recurs frequently. Here, however, the legend is transformed; the hubris is that of Hitler’s Germany forcing its slaves with a hundred languages to build its bold towers. For this, it will be punished:
The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak, and they were cemented by hate, hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel; and that is what we call it, Babelturm, Bobelturm; and we hate it as our masters’ insane dream of grandeur, their contempt for God and men, for us men.
And finally, at the moment of liberation, the memory of Biblical rescues returns but with utter ambivalence:
The Germans were not there. The towers were empty.
Today I think that if only because an Auschwitz existed no one in our age should speak of Providence. But in that hour the memory of Biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity undoubtedly passed like a wind through the mind of each one of us.
After writing If This Is a Man and seeing it published, I felt at peace with myself, like someone who has fulfilled his duty. I had borne witness, whoever wanted could read it. As a matter of fact, not many people did, because the book had been brought out by a small publisher, in a printing of only 2500 copies. Reviews were positive, and every now and then I would receive a letter expressing solidarity and praise, or would meet someone who had read the book; but there was no mention of reprints or translations and two years later the book was forgotten. I had committed myself wholeheartedly to my work as a chemist, I had married, I had been classified among “single book” authors, and I was hardly thinking of this one little book, although sometimes I dared to believe that the descent into hell had given me, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a “strange power of speech.”
Almost ten years later, I began thinking about the book again, on the occasion of an exhibit on the deportation that was held in Turin and elicited extraordinary interest, particularly among the young. I had contributed to the commentary on the exhibit, and young people (I was also relatively young) were crowding around me, asking questions, showing that they knew my book almost by heart, asking whether I didn’t have other stories to tell. I offered the book to the publisher Einaudi, which published it again, in 1958. Since then, the reprints have never ceased.
Yes, I had other stories to tell. My liberation was not followed by a speedy return home. Instead of being repatriated by the shortest route, along with tens of thousands of other former prisoners of the Germans, military and civilians, Christians and Jews, French, English, Americans, Greeks, etc., I was sent to the interior of the Soviet Union, where I spent the entire summer of 1945. We were not treated badly, but we were suspicious. The excuses of the Soviet authorities (that there were no trains, that the war with Japan was not over yet) were not convincing. We were terrorized by the thought of a new imprisonment, knew nothing of the fate of our loved ones, and were tormented by homesickness.
Encouraged by the success of the new edition of my first book, in 1961 I began writing a memoir of my return: in the evenings, on Sundays, during the breaks in my job as a paint technician. The moment was favorable for two reasons: in Italy, a wave of optimism and relative prosperity prevailed after the hardship of the postwar period; internationally, the cold war had been followed by détente between the United States and the USSR. This made it easier to talk objectively about the latter country without being accused of either anti-communism or subservience to the Italian Communist Party. In this second book, The Truce, I tried to depict the Soviets as I had seen them, “from below,” and living among them, especially among the soldiers of the Red Army, tired of war, intoxicated by victory, totally unaware of the Western world.
That journey home was not pleasant, but it proved to be a remarkable observatory for realities normally inaccessible to an Italian. Among them, I must mention here the direct contact with Ashkenazi Judaism. The image of it that I had acquired in the Lager was distorted (everything in the Lager was distorted) and, above all, schematic. There were millions of Jews in Russia and Poland, and the Nazis had sent them to the Lager to be exterminated. The endless journey imposed on us by the Russians added details and nuance to this image. I was passing through countries very different from Italy, barren and wild, primitive and violent. Hostility toward the Jews long preceded the German invasion; it was endemic and constant. For centuries, Jews had been living in a state of segregation, linguistically as well. Wandering through Ukraine, then in White Russia, we encountered Jewish soldiers of the Red Army; young people who had fought with the partisans; families that had escaped the Einsatzkommandos by hiding in faraway places and who were now returning home by whatever means possible; villages deep in the forests whose once flourishing yeshivas were now destroyed—shreds of an exploded, mortally wounded Jewish world that was now seeking a new equlibrium. A few years later I drew inspiration from it to write this short poem:
Our fathers on this earth,
Merchants of many gifts,
Shrewd wise men whose fertile progeny
God sowed across the world
As mad Ulysses sowed salt in the furrows:
I have found you everywhere,
As many as the sands of the sea,
You stiff-necked people,
Poor tenacious human seed.
I will not devote much space here to the two books of short stories, Natural Histories and Flaw of Form, as they are little known abroad and are less committed, and the Jewish theme appears only intermittently. The stories vary in content, some bordering on science fiction, and they were written at different times and with different motivations. Yet some of them relate (maybe unconsciously) to the midrashic tradition of the moral tale. For instance, “Angelic Butterfly” imagines that a Nazi scientist discovers that man is merely the larva of a different animal, just as the caterpillar is of the butterfly. However, man never undergoes mutation because he dies too early. Would mutation transform man into an angel, or maybe a superman? The scientist gives a group of prisoners in a Lager medicines intended to speed up mutation. Rather than angels, however, they become huge, monstrous, flightless birds that are devoured by the starving inhabitants in the days of the battle of Berlin. “The Servant,” an ironic reinterpretation of the Golem legend, imagines that Rabbi Loew of Prague knew the secrets of genetics and informatics, and so the Golem, his creature, is nothing other than a robot. Elsewhere I assume that, on the sixth day of Creation, a technical commission discusses in strictly business terms “Project Man.” It decides to create a man-bird, but God the Father intervenes, with his full authority, and instantly creates a mammalian man, vaguely apelike, making the woman from his rib.
I’ve already mentioned passages of The Periodic Table that touch upon Jewish themes. The following book, The Wrench, is my only work that does not have Jewish references. The central message of this novel is the dignity of work, especially the artisan’s work, as today’s substitute for adventure and original research. This is a topic that I consider relevant in any time, place, or social structure. However, as I was writing the book, I was not unaware of the many references to the nobility of work, and its necessity, which are scattered throughout the Talmud.
The volume Lilith and Other Stories includes thirty-six short stories, most of them first published in newspapers or magazines. The first twelve, which have earned more attention from the critics, contain (in my own words, taken from one of the stories) “what was left out of my first two books.” After approximately thirty years, I felt that the patrimony of memories from the Lager had not yet been entirely expended and that it was worth going back to it. Obviously, the perspective had changed. I no longer felt the urge to bear witness and liberate my inner self; I thought I had said everything about the sociology of the Lager, its essential horror, its nature as a distorted reflection of today’s world, its laws. In a fairly serene mood, I wished instead to study again from close up certain individuals from that time, victims, survivors, and oppressors, who stood out in my memory against the gray, collective, and impersonal background of the “drowned.” In If This Is a Man, I described the latter as follows:
Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they have no fear, because they are too tired to understand.
They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could encompass all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image, which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, head bowed and shoulders bent, on whose face and in whose eyes no trace of thought can be seen.
Among these “revisited” characters there is an honest and gentle fellow prisoner whom I tried to convince of the necessity of stealing from the Germans in order to survive; another comrade, a practicing Jew, who on the eve of Yom Kippur refused to eat his soup; a third who told me the troubling legend of Lilith, the first wife of Adam and God’s concubine. One of these stories—in my view, the most important—summarizes in a few pages the tale of Chaim Rumkowski, the president of the Jewish council in the Lodz Ghetto. It’s well-known that this man accepted all kinds of compromises in order to preserve the pitiable authority vested in him by the Germans. He adopted without hesitation, and without feeling ridiculous, all the exterior, “royal” symbols of power, bravely defending it against the Germans themselves. According to a rumor circulating at the time in Poland, when the ghetto was liquidated and he was to be deported to a Lager like everyone else, Rumkowski requested and was allowed to make his last journey in a special railway car. In this grotesque and tragic tale, with its Shakespearean flavor, I recognized a metaphor of our civilization: especially of the imbalance we experience, and are used to, between the enormous amount of time and energy invested in the pursuit of power and prestige and the basic futility of these goals. We tend to “forget that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that outside the fence are the lords of death, and a little way off the train is waiting.”
I still have to talk about my latest book, If Not Now, When?, which was published last April. It is a novel, and its origins go far back in time. The seeds of its development are basically two. The more remote is the almost photographic memory of an episode of our adventurous return from deportation. In October 1945, at the Italian border, we realized that the very long freight train that was taking us home no longer had sixty cars but sixty-one. In The Truce, I described the event thus:
At the tail end of the train, traveling with us toward Italy, was a new car, crowded with young Jews, boys and girls from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them looked more than twenty, but they were extremely determined and confident; they were young Zionists, they were going to Israel, taking any route they could and by any means they could. A ship awaited them in Bari. They had bought the train car and to hook it up to our train had been the simplest thing in the world, they hadn’t asked permission from anyone—they had simply hooked it up. I was amazed, but they laughed at my amazement. “Is Hitler not dead?” their leader asked me, with the intense gaze of a hawk. They felt immensely free and strong, masters of the world and of their destiny.
The more recent seed of the book is a story I was told by a friend in 1971. In the summer of 1945 my friend, a former refugee in Switzerland, had volunteered to assist foreign Jews who were flocking in disarray to Italy from Central Europe. They were miserable, traumatized people, who had lost relatives, home, homeland, money, health—everything but the hope of building a future for themselves somewhere else. Arriving in Milan along with them, however, were a few small groups of refugees of a different kind. These men and women refused the designation of “displaced persons.” They called themselves partisans and spoke about their years of guerrilla operations and sabotage against the German troops.
These two seeds remained dormant for a long time. They were revived by the intergenerational controversy that arose a few years ago (in Israel and elsewhere) over the behavior of the Jews in response to the Nazi massacre. Had they truly let themselves be led to the slaughter without any resistance? If so, why? If not, how many had resisted and when, where, how? In my opinion, this debate flies in the face of history and is tainted by prejudice. As a former partisan and former deportee, I know well that there are political and psychological circumstances when resistance is possible, and others when it is not. It was not my intention to join the discussion, but I believed I had enough narrative energy to extract from those seeds a story worth reading. Obviously, it would be a historical novel; maybe also, in a more nuanced way, a novel with a message. Most of all, however, it would be a wide-ranging action novel. Further, I wanted to pay homage to those Jews, whether a few or many, who in despair had found the strength to oppose the Nazis and in that unequal struggle had recovered dignity and freedom.
The topic suited me well. My ordeal in the concentration camp, my reading of Yiddish authors, business trips to the Soviet Union had left me with a lively interest in the culture of Eastern Jews, a fabulously rich and vibrant culture, yet destined to be transplanted or to die out. But it wasn’t my culture: my experiences and knowledge were not enough, and a period of study was indispensable. Before I began to write, I devoted almost a year to collecting and reading documents and books. While I wanted to write a novel, I did not want in any way to be at odds with historical events or to diverge from reality. I consulted documentation from Allied, Soviet, and Italian sources, and even a chronicle of the Jewish partisan war (Di milchamà fun di Jiddische Partisaner in Mizrach-Europe; The War of the Jewish Partisans of Eastern Europe) written by Moshe Kaganovich, a partisan commander, and published in Yiddish in Buenos Aires in 1956. Since it’s difficult to depict a social environment and to have characters speak if you do not know their language, I studied some Yiddish grammar and vocabulary. And since Yiddish culture, like all preindustrial and patriarchal cultures, is imbued with popular wisdom and proverbs, I also studied collections of sayings and proverbs and the “Yiddishe Witze” compilations. It is no accident that the very title of the book is taken from a well-known verse of the Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot).
This may be the only occasion when I had to confront a real (but unusual) linguistic challenge. I had to give the reader the impression that the dialogues between my characters, obviously in standard Italian, were translated from Yiddish, a language that I do not know well and that the average Italian reader does not know at all. I can’t tell whether the challenge was met; the verdict is left to those future readers who actually know Yiddish.
I did not set out to write a true story. Rather, I wanted to reconstruct the hypothetical but plausible itinerary of one of the groups described in the texts that I had read and which indicated that, within the vast network of European resistance, the Jewish presence was more important than is commonly believed.
The characters of If Not Now, When? are about thirty Russian and Polish Jews, men and women. Soldiers separated from the Red Army, survivors of the ghettos and of the massacres of the Einsatzkommandos, they do not initially have a definite political or ideological education. Only one of them—a woman—professes herself to be at once Communist, Zionist, and feminist. The others are driven mostly by the necessity of defending themselves and by a vague longing for revenge, rehabilitation, and freedom. They meet and join together “like drops of mercury,” individually or in groups, in the forests of White Russia and in the swamps of the Pripet Marshes, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected, by the Soviet partisan units:
Each one, man or woman, carried a different history, as heavy and scalding as molten lead; each would have been grieving over a hundred dead if the war and three terrible winters had left the time and the leisure to do so. They were weary, penniless, and filthy, but not beaten; the children of merchants, tailors, rabbis, and cantors, they had armed themselves with weapons taken from the Germans, they had won the right to wear those tattered uniforms without insignia or rank, and they had tasted more than once the bitter food of killing. . . . In each day’s new adventure in the partizanka, on the frozen steppe, in the snow and in the mud, they had found a new freedom, unknown to their fathers and their grandfathers, a contact with other men, both friends and enemies, with nature and with action that intoxicated them like the wine at Purim, when it is customary to abandon the usual sobriety and drink until you can no longer tell the difference between a blessing and a curse. They were cheerful and ferocious, like animals released from a cage, like slaves rising up to take vengeance. . . . Many of [them] had never tasted freedom, and [they had] learned to appreciate it here, in the forests, in the marshes, and amid much danger, along with adventure and brotherhood.
Following orders from Moscow, they move westward in order to stay close behind the retreating Germans but also because they no longer have a homeland, a home, a family, and they hope to start a new life in the land of Israel, of which they have a millenary and mythical image. The harshness of the life forced upon them—endless marches, battles, round-up operations, escapes, hardships—makes them uncivilized and wild. Yet they haven’t lost certain traits that make them different from the other partisans they meet: the creative imagination, the old Jewish self-irony that immunizes them against any rhetoric, the passion for dialectic discussion, the conflict between traditional gentleness and the necessity of killing. Accepted for a time by a unit of Soviet partisans, they participate in the diversion of German airdrops, seize and destroy a train, help Polish peasants with the harvest, kill the guards of a small German Lager and free the surviving prisoners. Overtaken by the war front, they are interned by the Russians but escape in a stolen truck. The war ends, in Germany a sniper kills one of the women, and the group avenges her in a bloody reprisal. At last they cross the Italian border, in a railway car bought on the black market, and reach the Refugee Assistance Center in Milan, where one of the women delivers a baby. It is August 7, 1945, the day of Hiroshima. The story ends with this twofold, deliberately ambiguous message.
In Italy, the book has had an excellent reception from both critics and the general public. It was widely read during the summer season and was awarded two of the three most sought-after Italian literary prizes, the Viareggio and the Campiello. A French translation is under way. The fortuitous coincidence of the publication of the book with the war in Lebanon has helped its editorial success, and, at the same time, has distorted its meaning for some critics and readers, who have taken it for an “instant book.” In fact, today there is no longer any need to prove that, under certain circumstances, the Jews, too, know how to fight.
In La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 50 (May–August 1984). (Originally presented at a conference on Jewish writing
since the Second World War sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation,
held in Bellagio from November 29 to December 3, 1982.)
1. La Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race) was a violently anti-Semitic biweekly that began publication in 1938.