Archaeologists reveal secrets of Roman prison that held both Christian saints and Jewish rebels

The Tullianum dungeon, older than Rome itself, was where Romans locked up their worst enemies: from the Great Jewish Revolt leader to (supposedly) St. Peter and St. Paul.

One of the world’s oldest and most terrifying prisons, reserved for ancient Rome’s fiercest enemies, has reopened to the public after years of excavation that have revealed new clues about the very birth of the Eternal City itself.

The Carcer Tullianum (Tullianum Prison in Latin) is notoriously known as the squalid underground dungeon where the Romans would lock up enemy leaders, including Simon Bar Giora, one of the architects of the Great Revolt of 66-70 C.E. Other honored inhabitants, according to medieval Christian tradition, were the apostles Peter and Paul.

But the three-year excavation has shown that the structure, located between the bottom of the Capitoline hill and the entrance of the Forum, was much more than just a prison, and may in fact predate the founding of Rome itself.

Before Romulus killed Remus

Archaeologists were surprised when they turned up walls made of tufa stone blocks and other finds dated to the late ninth or early eighth century B.C.E.

Ancient Roman historians believed their city was founded around 753 B.C.E. on the nearby Palatine hill, and modern archaeologists have found some evidence supporting this.

But by the time Romulus supposedly founded Rome and killed his twin brother Remus, structures like the Tullianum were already standing. In fact, the building was apparently part of a wall that surrounded the Capitoline, defending a village on top of that hill.

The discovery of such important structures predating the city’s legendary birthdate supports the theory that Rome did not rise from a single foundational act, but from the union of several communities that may have inhabited its famous seven hills from the late Bronze Age, says Patrizia Fortini, the archaeologist who led the dig.

Puzzling finds

Researchers also discovered that the round building, with walls up to three meters thick, did not start out as a prison, but as a cultic center built around a small, artificially-dug spring that gushes into the lowest cell of the dungeon to this day.

This may also have given the place its name, as tullius means “water spring” in Latin. Other scholars link it to the name of two of Rome’s legendary kings, Tullus Hostilius or Servius Tullius.

It was next to the spring that Fortini and her colleagues discovered a grouping of votive offerings: ceramic vessels, remains of sacrificial animals and plants, dating back as far as the sixth century B.C.E.

Alongside fairly mundane offerings such as grapes and olives, they also found the seeds and rind of a lemon. This is the first appearance of the fruit in Europe and is somewhat of a head-scratcher for archaeobotanists, who had thought the citrus reached the continent from the Far East at a much later date, Fortini said.

While it is unclear which deity was being worshipped in the Tullianum, the cult was probably not just about offering up animals and exotic fruits. The site also yielded the grisly burial of three individuals: a man, a woman and a female child, all dated to the earliest stage of the monument. The man was found with his hands bound behind his back and signs of blunt force trauma to the skull.

Were the burials connected? Was it a human sacrifice? Or an execution? We don’t know, Fortini admits.

The gates of Hell

The archaeologist says that all these activities were probably connected to the spring, which the ancient population may have been seen as a conduit between the world of the living and the underground world of the dead.

This religious connection to the underworld may have inspired the later use of the site as a prison, she told Haaretz during a tour of the site, which reopened late last month.

“The prisoners held here were all leaders of enemy populations or traitors, all people who were believed to have endangered the survival of Rome,” Fortini said. “The idea was that they had to disappear, they had no right to be a part of human society, so they were symbolically removed from the world and confined to the underworld.”

The use of the Tullianum as a prison became common sometime during the Roman Republic, around the fourth century B.C.E. The once large, airy sanctuary was divided into two vaulted, claustrophobic levels, the lowest of which encased the spring and was accessible only through a tight opening, still visible today, used to lower prisoners into what must have seemed like a dark and foul-smelling antechamber to Hell.

“It was not a prison in the way we think of it today,” Fortini said, noting that long-term incarceration was rare in the Roman world. Monetary fines, enslavement, and various cruel and inventive forms of execution were a more common fate for criminals or captured enemies.

The Tullianum usually served as a holding cell for high-value captives waiting to be paraded in the triumphal procession led by the general who had vanquished them. They would then be returned to jail, to be starved to death or quietly executed, usually by strangulation, Fortini said.

A deadly bath

Besides Simon Bar Giora, other enemies of Rome who spent their last days in the Tullianum include the Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, who united the Gauls in revolt against Julius Caesar. He languished in the dungeon for six years awaiting Julius Caesar’s triumph, and was executed in the prison after the procession.

The historian Plutarch tells us that Jugurtha, the defeated king of the north African reign of Numidia, mocked his jailers as he was lowered naked into the dark, damp dungeon, exclaiming: “By Hercules, o Romans, this bath of yours is cold!” He succumbed to hunger and exposure a few days later.

One of the few who made it out alive was Aristobulus II, the Hasmonean king of Judea who had been imprisoned there by Pompey.

The Jewish historian Josephus relates that when Caesar took control of Rome he freed Aristobulus, hoping to use him to foment rebellion in the Levant against his rival, but the Judean king was soon poisoned by Pompey’s followers.

Holy again

As the Roman Empire became Christian, use of the Tullianum as a jail declined. By the 7th century it was back to being a holy site, revered as the place where Peter and Paul were held before their martyrdoms.

The ancient water source was repurposed by Christian tradition, and was said to have been miraculously sprung by the apostles to baptize their jailers. Now called the Mamertine (possibly because of a temple of Mars that had stood nearby), by the early Middle Ages the dungeon was transformed into a church, and a second church was built on top of the prison during the Renaissance.

Archaeologists have found a trove of medieval artifacts, including rare glass and ceramic vessels, connected to the cult of the saints, all displayed in a new museum at the site, which is managed by the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi, a Vatican office that organizes pilgrimages and protects holy sites..

Actually, there is little evidence to support the legend that Peter and Paul were held there. But Fortini says this tradition made sure the building was protected from looting during the Middle Ages – preserving this monument from the archaic Roman period to this very day.

In the chapter Phosphorus in the Periodic Table Levi tells us of a love story that took place in 1942, when he was employed in futile research after an oral cure for diabetes. Beatrice and Virgil in one, Giulia Vineis was responsible for the job offer and becomes his guide, in the factory as well as in life and love. They knew each other from school she was strong, passionate, and catholic and above all engaged. Phosphorus, the luminous burning noxious element is all about life under Fascism and the racial rules, about the way a regime insinuates itself in human intimacy and its language.

Brave and honest Giulia thinks that “Racial laws are a bunch of stories, what importance could they have anyway?”[1] And one night during a storm, life for Levi almost became wholly other:

There was a fierce storm; Giulia endured two thunderclaps and at the third sought refuge with me. I felt the heat of her body against mine, Dizzying and new, known in dreams, but I did not return her embrace; if I had, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone crashing off the rails, toward a common, completely unpredictable future.[2]

The sum of these thoughts is about, fortuna, an Italian term Levi employs frequently and seriously to consider ethically his own luck.[3] We know they discussed the matter in their meetings after the war as Levi discreetly informs us. Inevitably Phosphors it is about a light that had not been lighted and above all about how a Christian love would have most likely avoided Auschwitz, though one can never know. It is also just as much about the intervention of law on the proper body, the insecure Jew frozen by law into the impossibility of masculinity. One day Giulia asks him to drive her on his bicycle to do battle with the parents of her fiancé that did not approve of her:

Giulia was arguing with me like I was her Don Rodrigo, I was overcome by an absurd hatred for my unknown rival. A gòi and she a gòia, according to the atavistic terminology: and they would be able to marry. I felt, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness growing inside of me: this, then, meant being other; this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on the crossbar of your bicycle the girl you desire, and to be so distant from her that you can’t even fall in love: to carry her on the crossbar to Viale Gorizia to help her become another’s, and disappear from my life.”[4]

The weight of such considerations is largely attenuated in this story by a the form of the telenovela, the allusion that catches our eye is to Alessandro Mazoni’s novel, I Promessi Sposi – The Bethrothed as translated into English. The allusion is comically inverted, Levi cast in the role of Don Rodrigo, the maleficent nobleman that separates Renzo from Lucia. Marco Belpoliti and Giovanni Tesio have already shown that the The Betrothed is of great importance to Levi, one of those books that he didn’t include in his personal anthology “La ricerca delle radici”, because their presence is so obvious “it would have been like describing under ‘particular signs” a person as having two eyes”.[5]

According to Belpoliti, Manzoni is central to Levi regarding physical gestures and the theme of the oppressed.[6] This might be true, though what is certainly missing is the role of The Betrothed in figuring love, especially in its particular Italian Catholic sense. As Levi has stated, The Betrothed is the bedrock of Italian identity as such. In the novel, Renzo and Lucia are separated by the will of Don Rodrigo, forcing them apart and abducting Lucia, in a land of perverted justice.[7] Only in the end, through the destruction brought on by the plague, is Renzo miraculously reunited with his love.

The irony of Levi cast in the role of Don Rodrigo, the perpetrator, should not occlude how the allusion here highlights the importance of the Betrothed in allowing Levi to meaningfully engage a Christian concept of love, one that brings together, survivor perpetrator and carnal love. Renzo, the survivor of the plague, arrives in death stricken Milano, where he heads to the Lazzaretto, a space much like the infirmary of Buna where the sick and dying are confined. The images are eerily reminiscent of the last part of If This is a Man, as the Germans leave Levi and the other inmates to die of their maladies. In the Lazaretto Renzo meets Fra Cristoforo, who in the first part of the tale, tried to help the couple, and when Renzo vows to avenge himself on Don Rodrigo, if he cannot find Lucia, Fra Cristoforo responds with a vehement reproach:

You have dared to meditate revenge; but He (God) has power and mercy enough to prevent you…You know, and… He can arrest the hand of the oppressor: but, remember. He can also arrest that of the revengeful… You may hate and be lost forever; you may…rest assured that all will be punishment until you have forgiven—forgiven in such a way, that you may never again be able to say, I forgive him.”

“Yes, yes,” said Renzo, with deep shame and emotion: ” I see now that I have never before really forgiven him I see that I have spoken like a beast, and not like a Christian : and now, by the grace of God, I will forgive him; yes, I’ll forgive him from my very heart.”

” And supposing you were to see him ?”

” I would pray the Lord to give me patience, and to touch his heart.”

“Would you remember that the Lord has not only commanded us to forgive our enemies, but also to love them ?

” Yes, by His help, I would.”[8]

The importance of this episode cannot be underestimated, as this demand returns to haunt Levi in later years in the form of a demand, cultural and not even tacit, by the perpetrators, Germans and Fascists for forgiveness, indeed for love. Levi, who was separated from his love at Auschwitz, indeed from his life, by the Don Rodrigo of Salò and Auschwitz, found the demand for love perverse, radically rejecting the very form of Christian love with force, finding the meagre form of revenge allowed by the victors, through testimony, unsatisfactory to say the least.

Love as Wittgenstein observed is “Less an irrecoverable, private inner state than it is a response deeply implicated in the social world… in the weave of life”.[9] And here in the question of Levi’s love we are made acutely aware of the implications. Levi’s account in Phosphorus is loaded with bitter dark irony. The thought of what might have been avoided through the love of Giulia is further poisoned by the abject position of the non-rejected, non-attempting Jewish male. In Levi’s words one can immediately individuate the thick layers of the anti-Semitic discourses that systematically emasculated the Jews as Italian men. What kind of men they could be as Jews is left unsaid, but the weight of fascist virilities to quote Barbara Spackman, is crushing.[10]

Of Levi’s love what is known has been uncovered by his biographers and recently exhaustively discussed by Sergio Luzzato in Partigia, a book that minutely examines Levis brief experience as a Partisan.[11] Her name was, Vanda Maestro, Mesto Xanda in the Fascist police files, a Jewish girl from Torino about the same age. Levi had been friends with her brother, Aldo, and together they were part of a group of Torino Jews forced together by the race laws of 1938. With Lucianna Nissim they went into the mountains to fight as partisans, and soon were captured by Fascist militias. They arrived at the Fossoli camp in January 1944 before being sent to Auschwitz.[12]

Luciana Nissim having survived Auschwitz confirms that Levi loved Vanda and there are also good reasons to believe that Levi wrote the loving and tender portrait of Vanda in “Donne piemontesi nella lotta di liberazione.[13]:

No one who saw her in those days, climbing up the snow-covered paths, can ever forget the tiny, gentle face, marked by the physical effort, and also by a deeper tension: because for her, as for the best of that time, and in that position the choice had not been easy, or joyous, or free from doubt…. [14]

The use of no one – nessuno – is central in Levi and the figure of Ulysses famously telling Polyphemos that he is nobody – is present but it is also the reality of the group’s brief days of being partisans in which literally no one who saw her had survived besides Levi himself and Luciana Nissim.[15] Luciana may talk about love but Levi has a very difficult time doing so.

The first place in Levi’s writing where Vanda is mentioned is implicit mode when Levi describes their last night before deportation:

Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain.[16]

Vanda is one of those among whom these things were said and done and for a work of testimony this is an enigmatic proclamation. How is it better that no memory rests of the things said and done, and isn’t he leaving a trace of memory just by saying so? There is no simple answer to this query and since Levi describes the night, we are forced to believe that he is talking here of some part of the experience that cannot be touched. A sliver of life that escapes discourse and has no place in the tale of the survivor – a piece of life that has been forced upon the survivor by the perpetrator but in which he has no part and cannot be contained within the narrative of “that which had happened”. It is almost the case of the purloined letter – it is there and yet cannot and should not be seen. The impossibility persists in the account of the transport to Auschwitz:

Next to me, crushed, like me, body against body for the whole journey, there had been a woman. We had been acquainted for many years, and the misfortune had struck us together, but we knew little of one another. Now, in the decisive hour, we said to each other things that are never said among the living. We said farewell and it was short; everybody said farewell to life through his neighbor. We had no more fear.

There is a curious mistranslation here, and the translation errs precisely where Levi would like us not to read. The minor mistranslation is that misfortune “struck” where the Italian uses “la sventura ci aveva colti insieme” colti – means that it collected us, took us, it is a soft enveloping verb – indicating a shared intimacy and pointing precisely to their capture in the mountains, thus naming Vanda. The crucial misinterpretation is in the translation of “ciascuno salutò nell’altro la vita” – in the English ciascuno becomes everyone instead of each other – turning the heart breaking intimacy into a collective ceremony. The short wrenching sentence “Ci Salutammo, e fu breve” is lost and with it the memory of the moment of love shared between the two – “crushed against each other” completely misses the original “serrata” accanto a me – literally “locked” next to me. Not only does the original create a movement of intimacy, it also harkens to the historical “Serrata Venziana” of 1296 and canto X of the inferno where “seculars” will be sealed in their tombs forever after the last judgment. Excluded from the polity they reach into each other – the brevity of this salutation of life seems to speak of physical contact, and perhaps this is what is described.[17] One hesitates when confronted with the depth of this closing, in Italian the literal and figurative closing of the heart and of the throat are indicated aligning the infinite forms of being locked out of society, love and in the end life itself; Levi locks us out of that which is most intimate and the most public in Christian discourse, out of love. The discourse of survival is closed to the redemptive power of love, refusing it consistently, erecting an impenetrable wall between his inferno and Dante’s. It is the one place in Levi’s work that consistently behaves as a black hole, not the camp, not death, but in love, the moment of transfer being the moment of love locking him forever inside. [18]

Further evidence of the particularity of this bond can be found at the end of the second chapter of “The Truce” when Levi, in the Big Camp meets Olga, a Croatian Jew that befriended Vanda:

They had all died. All the children and the old people, immediately. Of the Five hundred and fifty people I had lost track of when I entered the Lager, only twenty-nine women were admitted to Birkenau: of these, only five had survived. Vanda had been gassed, fully conscious, in the month of October; she herself, Olga, had obtained two sleeping pills for her, but they were not enough.[19]

The utterly amazing part of this quote from Levi’s second book is that the reader cannot have any idea who Vanda is and why her story told in such detail. It is a kind of slip that is uncommon in Levi’s work. We understand that Vanda is someone he cares about, one that has a continuous presence that her name appears so naturally next to the nameless; some may have noted that she is mentioned in passing in If This is A Man but it is impossible to see that she is a significant figure. It requires extra-textual knowledge and a reconstruction across various texts to know that she is a figure of love, the woman that was present in the camp, next to him in the, mountains, jail and transport. It is a sign of love, a point in which the real buried story, the story that can never be told is revealed, allowing us a glimpse at the otherwise very serrated heart of the survivor.
Levi tacitly returns to tell of Vanda in the chapter Chromium of The Periodic Table. Chromium the substance that covers metals with a fake precious shine, tells the story of a chemical investigation conducted by Levi, the returned survivor working in a factory on the shore of a lake reminiscent of the only recently fallen Republic of Salò. The recently employed Levi, is presented with a coagulated batch of varnish leftover from that war and is charged with finding a way to melt it, indeed to resurrect it.[20]

But I had been back from prison for three months, and I found life hard. The things I had seen and suffered burned inside me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and guilty for being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had swallowed up millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to me (che me stava a cuore). It seemed to me that I would be purified by telling the story, and I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who grabs the wedding guest on the way to the wedding, to inflict on him his story of evil.[21]

So Levi is this man who feels guilty for what man has done to man. Returning from the Lager, he is man once again, and as such he is already betraying the woman that drowned, a last solitary moment of love, in a sealed wagon forever.[22] Levi’s writing cannot and does not try to resurrect though; writing can only return, just ruining the party for the guest bound to a wedding. In the same chapter there is a turn in love that corresponds perfectly to the chemical story, one of the moments when The Periodic Table reaches perfect resonance between the language of chemistry and the language of the heart:

Now it happened that the following day destiny had reserved for me a different and unique gift: a meeting with a young woman, of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our coats…Within a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for a meeting but for a lifetime, as in fact it had been…likewise, the world around me was cured, and the name and face of the woman who had descended to hell with me and had not returned were exorcised. My writing itself became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a beggar seeking compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid construction and no longer solitary: the work of a chemist.[23]

The passage gives us a very candid account of the composition of If This is A Man. It is a book that does not ask for compassion, unlike Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Irony is clearly at play, since the quote from the Ancient Mariner will eventually be the motto of The Drowned and the Saved. Love is not mentioned, it is not a love story nor a simple story of a world restored to health; desperate writing turned to pleasure. Vanda is replaced with a real woman and writing becomes an adventure – the work of a chemist, one who measures and weighs.

Next, Levi proceeds to solve the mystery of the livered paint discovering the solution to the mystery in the “poison exuded by companies”: paperwork. The solution he finds, adding ammonium, seems to be part of finding a way to write. Levi here embraces literary growth with an image of the plant, so untypically banal, that it can only be explained by the figure of Cato in the first canto of Purgatorio, a canto that ends with Virgil wiping the Infernal soot of Dante’s face girding him with a plant he plucks and then immediately regrows:

“Amonium Chloride” the twin of a happy love and liberating book” (159) Makes perfect sense here, where for a moment all three seem to have melted that which was coagulated. But this is not the end of the story, the story can be liberating but it is also poisonous especially when it is the only form of revenge allowed the survivor. The perpetrators demand that is be so, that the victim content and confine himself to telling the story, reliving hell, as they go on with their lives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the chapter Vanadium, named, clearly after Vanda Maestro his first love and in a sense, the only one, at least as the man he was before he was undone.

Vanadium is the penultimate chapter in the Periodic Table. It tells of a defective resin that arrived at Levi’s factory from an ex I.G. Farben subsidiary in Germany. The varnish just wouldn’t dry. In the course of a terse and courteous correspondence with his German counterpart, he discovers that it is Dr. Muller, one of the men in charge of the laboratory in Buna where Levi was employed as a slave. A private communication between the two accompanies the commercial one. Muller, it turns out, had read Levi’s book in German – Is das Eine Mench? As the commercial issue is resolved, a private letter arrives at Levi’s home. In the letter Muller “attributed the facts of Auschwitz to Man, without differentiating”.[24] In his opinion he had friendly relations with the prisoners and I.G. Farben employed these prisoners only in order to protect them.

He perceived in my book an overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony to faith in Man, and he concluded by insisting on the necessity of our meeting, in Germany or Italy, where he was ready to come when and where I pleased: preferably the Riviera –[25]

“In Sinne der Bewältigung der so fruchtbaren Vergangenheit” —

to overcome the past, to rape it if you will.

As Carol Angier noticed this episode has a counterpart in Levi’s correspondence with one Ferdinand Meyer who was introduced to him by Hety Schmitt-Maass. Marco Belpoliti has reconstructed the affair in detail, all the while believing that the biographical story is the truth behind the fiction that is nothing more than a “rounding” of the truth as Levi usually does.[26] There is little need to argue that truth in a poet lies in poetry not in biography, the events as they happened are never the truth of fiction, only its circumstance. Meyer’s incomprehension is of little consequence, Muller’s incomprehension is fatal since it is also a demand for love, a demand for Christian love from the Jew. This proximity between loves is the reason why Muller’s story appears in reference to Vanda in the form of Vanadium, a resonance that stands in spite of Christian love.[27] The letter would be comic if it did not express a truth about the world. Muller, a perpetrator, a collaborator, like many others demands of the Jews to overcome their Jewish system of revenge and embrace Christian love of the enemy. This is what the theologically unified world of Dante’s love has come to, and Levi refuses, consistently, because that possibility of love is sealed in a tomb, in the sealed wagon:

He gave me undeserved credit in attributing to me the virtue of loving my enemies: no, despite the distant privileges he had secured for me, and although he wasn’t an enemy in the strict sense of the term, I did not feel like loving him. I didn’t love him, and didn’t want to see him, and yet I felt a certain measure of respect for him: it is not easy to be one-eyed.[28]

The reference to Cyclops, the one eyed monster underlines the acidic irony of the words. Muller is a Cyclops and the Cyclops are Nazis of sorts, Ulysses is rendered nobody by the encounter with Polyphemos. Like poyphemos, he grants the survivor the sordid favor of being eaten last. Struggling to respond Levi drafts a letter in which he claims that perhaps one could love, but the enemy must cease to be such which means accepting responsibility for Auschwitz by people like Muller. Levi does not send the letter and eventually he receives another from Muller’s wife informing of his death at the age of sixty.

This is one ending of the The Periodic Table – in the acidic refusal of Christian love, in the wish for revenge or at least a longing for justice that is not equal to love, a justice that does not weigh on the victim like the crime. Love for Levi, does not survive Aushcwitz and the connection between Dante and Levi rests in literature’s place and means for love and revenge. Dante gets his revenge quite clearly, his love is there, as are his old enemies, all punished in grueling ways. Levi does not have the privilege of a unified system. His love, for Vanda, or indeed for Western culture is lost, burnt, and irretrievable. Yet there is no other world for him, as there might be for those who have faith. The secular Jew, that product of European enlightenment is a survivor of a world that has gone up in smoke, and the love it fostered is sealed and buried, lurking under the ground of what is being written, there, waiting, like revenge, like Renzo for Lucia, like love.

Endnotes

[1] The Periodic Table, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 2 pp. 516. Primo Levi, Opere, Vol. 1, pp. 533 translation modified

[2] The periodic table, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 2 pp. 518;Il sistema periodico, opere vol 1. Pp. 538

[3] Robert Gordon, Sfacciata fortuna, La Shoa e il caso, Torino: Enaudi, 2010.

[4] Opere I, pp. 544., Works vol. 2, pp. 520-521

[5] Primo Levi, Levi, Primo. Conversazioni E Interviste : 1963-1987. Torino: Einaudi, 1997, pp. 154.

[6] Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi. Milano: B. Mondadori, 1998, pp. 111-114.

[7] See: “Renzo’s Fist” in Other People’s Trades, Works, Vol. 3, pp. 1266-1268.

[8] Alessandro Maznzoni, I promessi sposi, Torino: Enaudi, 1971, pp. 535-536

[9] This idea of love has been mostly explored in theatre studies and is historicized especially in Shakespeare, see: David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service, Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2008; Theodore Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 1999.

[10] Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities : Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[11] Luzzatto, Sergio. Partigia : Una Storia Della Resistenza. Milano: Mondadori, 2013, pp. 127.

[12]The story of Vanda Maestro and the resistance episode had been told by all three biographers, Mansardi and Luzzatto and others, I have nothing to add beside interpretation. See: Mesnard, Philippe. Primo Levi : Una Vita per Immagini. Venezia: Marsilio, 2008.

[13] Carol Angier’s reasons for that identification seem correct and the style certainly is very different from the other entries, see: Angier, Carole. The Double Bond : Primo Levi, a Biography. New York: Viking, 2002, pp. 64; Chiappano, Alessandra. Luciana Nissim Momigliano: una vita. Casa Editrice Giuntina, 2010, pp. 144.

[14] The Double Bond, pp. 248

[15] Cohen, Uri S. “Consider If This Is a Man: Primo Levi and the Figure of Ulysses.” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 40–69.

[16] Primo Levi, If This is A Man, Works Vol. 1, p. 33

[17] Elie Wiesel describes a similar scene in an early version of Night, that was removed from the final version, see: Ofer Aderet, “Newly Unearthed Evidence”, Haaretz, 5/1/2016; See also Naomi Seidman’s illuminating discussion of the Yiddish and French versions: “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage.” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–19.

[18] Just like Dan Pagis in describes in Gilgul, see: Ezrahi, Sidra Dekoven. “Dan Pagis—Out of Line: A Poetics of Decomposition.” Prooftexts 10, no. 2 (1990): 335–363.

[19] Primo Levi, The Truce, Works, Vol. 1. P. 159.

[20] It is well known that Levi was employed at the time by Duca-Montecatini in Avigliana, the vagueness of the description makes it very clear that literary construct is not intended as a representation of current employment but rather of something of general significance.

[21] Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Works vol. 2, p. 535

[22] This is not very different from the love Auerbach is trying to resurrect in Mimesis, “to reunite those who have not lost it, a love for the west as a literary vision of humanity is shared by the two.” See: Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 518

[23] Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Works vol. 2, p. 535

[24] Ibid. p. 570

[25] Ibid. p. 571

[26] Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo, Milano: Ugo Guanda, 2016, pp. 261-273

[27]Levi has written another story about the lab and a Doctor Mertens this time. It is indeed a different story with a different meaning even though it stems from the same exchange. Levi, perhaps foreshadowing the futility of future research includes the following observation about the: “essential inadequacy of the documentary page: it hardly ever has the power to restore the essence of a human being. The playwright or the poet is more suited to this purpose that the historian or the psychologist”, Primo Levi, “The Quiet Town of Auschwitz”, Works, Vol. 3, p. 1386.

[28] Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Works vol. 2, p.572

In this conversation Judge Guido Calabresi, a long time friend of Centro Primo Levi, shares stories of his family’s flight from Fascist Italy —from Milan to Yale— and the ways his childhood experiences have shaped his personal and professional life in the USA.

This spring, Calabresi has appeared as a panelist in our presentation of Giana Pontecorboli’s  Americordo.The Italian Jewish Exiles  in America, and of Patrizia Guarnieri’s Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism.

Guido Calabresi is a legal scholar and senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A former Dean of Yale Laws School where he has been teaching since 1959, he is now Sterling Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer in Law. He has been awarded some fifty honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, and has published widely on the Law and related subjects.

AC Unlike most Italian Jews who came to the US, fleeing the Italian racial laws, your father was an anti-Fascist and realized long before the discriminatory measures where Italy was going.  You family’s decision was not so much a consequence of the laws but rather a political decision.

GC We are unusual because we were antifascist. Most of the people who came as refugees were not particularly active antifascists, perhaps they thought fascism was wrong, but it was not a reason for taking political action. And then there were some who had been actively fascist, because some Italian Jews as every other group had embraced fascism. What was unusual about us was that both my father and my grandfather were fiercely antifascist from the beginning. My father was beaten and jailed in 1924, when he was a student, from then on he and his sisters became very active in Giustizia e Libertà the movement led by the Rosselli brothers. The second time he was beaten and jailed was when he and others put a wreath by a statue of Garibaldi on the first anniversary of Mateotti’s murder.

My father had wanted to leave Italy in the late twenties early thirties, when it became clear that Mussolini was not going to fall. My grandfather who was a patriot of the old school, said: “No, one does not leave one’s country”. Despite patriotism, his fierce anti-Fascism, made some call him a traitor. One of Ferrara’s most prominent fascists, his name escapes me now, would correct them:” You can call Ettore Calabresi anything: he is wrong, his is terrible, but don’t call him a traitor, because in the First World War he behaved heroically even after Caporetto”. Because of his antifascism and his prestige in the city, my grandfather was barred from returning to Ferrara. Once he returned to his city to attend a funeral they put him in jail.  In such a small city they could not tolerate a powerful industrialist married to a woman from a great land owning family, who was outspokenly against the Regime.

AC Was there a catalyst for your parent’s decision to leave?

GC After my grandfather died in the fall of 1937, and at the same time his friends Carlo and Nello Rosselli were murdered, my father decided it was time to leave. He tried to get out then, but as it happened, the Fascists did not want people to come to the US and speak out against them, so they denied us the necessary exit visas. My father was repeatedly denied permission to leave until the racial laws were passed. So we came to the US because we were anti-Fascists, but we left at a time when most Jews were in fact fleeing the racial laws.

AC For centuries Italian Jews had lived in tightly knit communities. Increasingly in the times of Fascist persecution, mobility between cities was dangerous. During the difficult times that it took your parents to arrange for the family’s departure for the US, you moved all over Italy: from Bologna, Milan, Genoa and Cortina D’Ampezzo, making it literally an escape out of Italy, rather than one out of Milan. What do you recall of the actual departure?

GC What had happened is that with the help of Giuseppe Levi, a professor of Physiology in Turin —the father of Natalia Ginzburg— a fellowship had been arranged at Yale, through the Damian

Foundation, and that is what allowed us to come. But my mother’s parents thought one should not leave, so the compromise was that my father was going to come see what it was like and we would join a bit later. When our father was scheduled to leave, my brother and I were in Cortina with our maternal grandparents. My father was supposed to leave on the Conte Di Savoia, in late August 1939, and my mother was there seeing him off. But the ship did not sail: they said it had engine trouble and that it might leave the next day. Some body we knew in Rome told us that the delay was because war was about to break-out.

I had gone to bed thinking my father had sailed, when we were phoned in the night: it was my mother saying that the ship had not sailed, it might sail tomorrow. If it is war we don’t want to be separated, bring the children to Genoa, and we will leave the next day. She went back to Milan and told the maids to put everything that was in the wardrobe rooms, into trunks.

AC one of the difficulties is that you were not allowed to bring money abroad…

GC Exactly. My father had had enough shirts made so that he did not need shirts for fifteen years!  What the maids took from the wardrobes and put into the trunks was not necessarily what we needed in the US. For instance upon opening them we found diapers from when we were small. Those were eventually sewn together and made into sheets for my father’s examining room here…

AC How did you get to Genoa?

GC My brother and I, our maternal grandparents, and our nanny — a wonderful woman from Friuli, very religious, very Catholic and fiercely anti-Fascist— she had been with us since the time my brother was born, took a train. I remember that ride very well because we could not get a sleeper, it was too late, and so we all were in a first class carriage, which was unusual.  In families of our sort parents would typically go first class, the children and the nanny would go in second class, not to disturb the people in first. I thought those red plush cushions in first class were lovely, and was very excited that we were going to America. My brother and I were shouting “We are going to America!” without knowing at all what that meant, while our grandparents, looked like death, because their daughter was leaving, their other daughter having already left for Brazil. We arrived in Genoa, and the ship did not sail.

So we thought, war is really coming. Obviously, we did not want to go back to Cortina, near the German border, and we also did not want to go back to Milan because it might be bombed.

AC You had to separate again?

GC Yes. My father went back to Milan to see if there was some other way to leave the country, while we went to our maternal grandparents’ villa, L’Uccelletto, on the Via Emilia, just outside Bologna. —L’Uccelletto, has become over the years a collective dream for our family, everyone has been trying to rebuild l’Uccelletto—

While we were there, my father was frantically searching for other ways to have us leave. The President Monroe, of the American President Lines, was despatched to bring American nationals back home because of the war crisis. The ship was so full that they needed an extra ship doctor and offered the spot to my father. His reply was that he would only go if his family could travel with him. So again we thought we would be leaving… Our trunks were somewhere between Genoa and Bologna.

But eventually they found another doctor who wanted to leave and did not have a family with him, so our departure was postponed again

The evening that the trunks arrived at L’Uccelletto —I had a little earphone radio—I heard that the Rex — the flagship of the Italian lines (which appears in Fellini’s Amarcord)—  was leaving on the 8^th of September. What had happened was that war had broken out, but Italy had not joined. So the ship was sailing. I turned to tell my mother that I heard this, I was six but I knew what was going on. The phone rang: it was my father from Milan saying he had tickets for us on the Rex. We immediately went back to Genoa with the still unopened trunks. We got on board on the 8^th of September, and arrived in New York on the 16^th.

AC How was the beginning of your American life?

GC Not easy. The problem was that, because of the uncertainties of our departure my father’s fellowship at Yale had been arranged for the second term. So when we arrived my father did not have a job, and things were not easy. We went to a dismal hotel on the West Side that a distant cousin of ours, the only person we knew in the US, had indicated. This cousin, Paolo Contini, because he was tall and handsome, had been sent by the Fascists to study law in Berkley, California.

My parents had sent Paolo a telegram from the ship asking him to find us a really cheap hotel in New York where we could stay a few months. The hotel was cheap indeed: it cost $10 a month for four people with food — if you can call what they gave us, food—

I know this because my father kept the receipts for the first two months, obviously one for my brother and one for me, so we would always know how it all started in the US.

AC Your memories are so vivid and precise. Did you commemorate your beginning in the family over the years?

GC Yes, we always celebrated the anniversary of our arrival. The night before the 16^th, we often would go to an excellent Italian restaurant, as a reminder of our life in Italy and on the ship; and then the day after, we would go and eat hamburgers…

We had been very, very wealthy, but arrived with nothing and had to rebuild from scratch.

AC Since your father was going to start his fellowship in New Heaven in just a few months, why did you remain in New York City?

GC We stayed in New York because my father thought that the New York License Exams had more reciprocity. If we were going to starve, he thought, we might as well starve here, as there. He took his exams in New York and luckily he passed them. We did not know that we would end up staying in New Haven. His fellowship was only for a year…

A Dean at Yale recently found the letter from back then giving the fellowship, and sent it to me. It is the most offensive letter you can imagine. My parents never said a word about it to us, but it said: “Yes we will let you come, somebody has given the money, try to get them to give more, but you cannot do this and you cannot do that … and don’t think it will last…” They really did not want us: I’m not sure if in their eyes it was worst that we were Italian, or Jewish, but they made it clear they did not want us. The Medical School like the Law School was more open, than the rest of the University, which was certainly not open to Jewish or to Italian faculty members at that time, but it wasn’t very open!

AC What was it like for two young children such as you and your brother, to find yourselves in New York under these new circumstances, as refugees?

GC We landed on a Saturday and on Monday we were in school. I was six, almost seven and my brother was nine years old. That’s what you did with kids. My brother was lucky because in this little public school somewhere in the West Side, they had a class for people his age and older, who were non English speakers. We spoke German and French, we had had a German governess and a French one, but we did not speak English. My brother immediately fit in with his classmates who were German, French and Spanish refugees, and learned English perfectly in a short time and with no accent at all.

I instead, was too young to go in that class, and was put back in kindergarten, while I should have been beginning second grade. I could already do math at a 5^th grade level and instead was in a class were all we did was make necklaces and tie knots … I did not understand what was going on, and naturally did not like it.

Further I was teased pretty badly and did not have enough English to respond.

AC As children did you sense or absorbe the anxieties your parents must have felt about employment, the war, and the future?

GC Our parents were very good at keeping from us their underlying anxieties. I did not think about the future much, but the present was sometimes puzzling. There were things I didn’t like: I did not like the food! Until we found an automat where they had chicken potpie, I really had trouble eating. I loved the automat, it was very flashy and something children could play with: you put in money and things spun around…

Remarkably our parents kept us from feeling really anxious about things, so that our anxieties were more our own, the smaller anxieties of all children trying to adjust to a new environment.

I have long been full of admiration for the strength of my parents.

AC Did you realize that the family was suddenly out of money?

GC Our parents did not talk about it in front of us but there were plenty of indications. For example my father was a well known cardiologist but without a license he could not practice. Someone at the Italian Consulate, a Count of some sort, heard about him and asked to be treated.  My father took care of him but explained he could not accept money. So instead the Count kept sending elaborate flower arrangements for us at the cheap hotel. My mother would only comment that he could have send fruit…In truth I am sure the Count had no idea how poor we really were.

AC In that period, the fall of 1939, there were a number of other Jewish families, who had escaped from Italy and were living in New York. Did your parents socialize with some of them?

GC There was a significant Italian Jewish community in New York, and there were also some non-Jewish anti-Fascists: the two groups pretty much became one. My father, of course, fitted in both camps because of his early anti-Fascism. We did see a fair amount of them. There was the whole family of Paolo Calabi. One of the daughters, Serena Calabi Modigliani, who later married the famous economist Franco Modigliani, was a distant relative on my mother’s side.

My parents almost never went out in the evenings, because it cost money to do anything. One evening they did go out, I think to a movie, and our baby sitter for that evening was Tullia Calabi, who later married Bruno Zevi. She must have been 17 or so and I remember liking her very much. After that, we did not see her again for years and years.

AC When you moved to New Haven, that kinship with other Italian Jews must have ended abruptly.

GC Certainly in a certain sense by moving to New Haven we distanced ourselves from the Italian Jewish community in New York. We did socialize with the very few Italian Jews who had come to New Haven. There were the Orefice, an insurance family, Giorgio Cavalieri’s sister had married one of them and they were in New Haven. For a time, Cesare and Piera Tedeschi (John Tedeschi’s father and mother) were there and we would see them. But in New Haven we had to be part of a broader community.

The Italian Jews who remained in New York in fact remained very much part of that community of exiles, and while my parents stayed in contact with them, we progressively became separate from them.

AC In a sense you were becoming “Americans”?

GC Well, what did we become? We were outsiders in every possible way; we were Jews but not like most American Jews. We were Italian, but not like most American-Italians. We did things for them and with them. My mother after the war was made Cavaliere for all she had done for the Italian Americans in New Haven.  And my father was met immediately by those —very few— Italian Americans who were or had been anti-Fascist, and had been ostracized, because the Italian American community, mislead  by propaganda, had become quite pro Fascist. Several of them made my father (a doctor, not a lawyer) the executor of their wills, because they trusted and shared his political views.

AC Were did you live in New Haven?

GC That is interesting! When we first arrived, a real estate agent took us to the Wooster Square area, which is where all the Italians lived —New Haven was very segregated— and to Westville, were most of the Jews tended to live. But the people from the Medical School, my father’s colleagues to be, immediately swept in and said: “No, no, no that is not were you are going to live. You must live in a certain area between Whitney Avenue and Orange Street, between the Park and Edwards Street, (which is where all the Yale fellows, assistant professors, graduate students still live.) What they meant to say was: you are “ethnically Yale”.

AC Yale in turn was less than welcoming to Jews…

GC Yes, we were at Yale, and we were part of Yale, but we were completely different from most of the Yale people. With the exception of a few people in the Law School, and fewer people in the Medical School, there were no Jews on Yale faculty and no Italians either. So we were part of something of which we were not part, and not part of those things one would have thought we would be part of. My brother and I recognized this immediately, and not as a negative thing; that rather than being part of any group, we were ourselves. And that we did. We spoke Italian at home, and we spoke English outside. Italian remained our language: to my brother’s dying day, when I spoke to him I would speak in Italian. This has much to do with what all of us became.

AC Can you talk about your family’s relationship with Italy. In three generations of Calabresi men, we find Ettore, your grandfather, who having fought for a unified Italy, could not imagine leaving. Your father, Massimo, whose anti-Fascism made him want to leave in the early 1930s, and yourself who despite having grown up largely in the States continue to see Italy as a point of reference.

GC I think, that in an interesting way, all of us have always thought of ourselves as being Italian. Though they decided ultimately to stay in America, in part for my brother and me, my parents never thought of themselves as being really American. They became American citizens but they were Italians in a very deep sense. To their dying day, they were Italians who were living here.

My brother and I were, in some fundamental sense, both. We went back to Italy after the war, and both of us had the same experience. This was right after the war when Italy was very poor and just beginning to reconstruct. Both of us had the sensation that while it would be extremely difficult to live in Italy if one were poor, it would be intolerable for people like us who had grown up in America with egalitarian principles, to be rich there, as we would have been. So we said to our parents that we wanted to remain in the US.

There is a time related irony: our trip and our impressions were of Italy in the late 1940’s, before the Italian economic boom of the 50’s and 60’s, when Italy became immensely egalitarian, while in America African Americans were virtually not seen; desegregation had not yet happened. In a sense we made a decision, based on egalitarianism, which was a good thing, but we may have decided wrong because now America is less equal in many ways than Italy.

My wife, who is as American as they come, and has fallen in love with Italy (her work is there), says that I am never fully at home until I am in Italy.

AC How does one deal with in effect being, both Italian and American?

GC One summer I had a group of students from all over the world. A youngster who was born in Pakistan, and grew up in Denmark, said: “Look, I think I know what it means to be two things, but what are you really, are you Italian or are you American?” And I said, “ I am both, I really am both”. “OK” he said, “but whom do you root for in the World Cup?” “Of course, in the World Cup I root for Italy” I answered “but if there were a World Cup in baseball I would root for the USA”.

In other words, in those things that I associate with Italy, I am very Italian and in the things I associate with the US I am very American.

Now that is a difference from my parents, who though they were here felt so deeply Italian, and with my grandfather, born in 1870, who no matter how bad things got, could not conceive of leaving Italy.

AC Much of the Calabresi’s American experience is intertwined with Yale. It was Yale that offered your father an initial fellowship, and Yale is the place were first you studied, and later became Dean of the Law School and eventually Professor Emeritus.

GC We grew up in New Haven, where we first were at the fringes of Yale —my father was hanging on by his fingernails to a tenuous affiliation while my mother flat out could not teach at Yale, as women were not on the faculty back then— Nonetheless both my brother and I attended Yale and did very well there. Yale recognized this very early, so that when I got a prize as one of the top students in my freshman year, in the motivation they wrote “Guido Calabresi first generation American, second generation Yale.” Both my parents had gotten Yale degrees and that, in an odd way, became part of our identity. In a strange way I think that Yale changed more than we did and it became more like us, than we became like it.

AC How much do you think that your family history, you emigration story has informed your professional life as a United States Court of Appeals Judge?

GC The way we came to this country certainly influenced me as a lawyer and as a judge.

I became a lawyer because I loved the study of law so much… that I practically fell in to it. At the time I did not realize how much this was the ancient tradition of my family.  Especially on my maternal side, the Del Vecchio’s, who originally were Rabbis, had later had a long tradition in the Law. In my immediate family (grandfather, father and brother) they were all doctors and I thinking I was doing something different, fell into an even longer family tradition. I was reverting…

What became of me as a lawyer and a Judge is this: the most important part of my legal education, of my formation as a lawyer, and as a Judge is that I am a refugee. That I am an outsider.

People don’t believe that I am an outsider, because now I seem to be so much of an insider. But I am not.

My wife Anne recognizes that and loves that in me. It is that sense of not being part of the system, that has made me, I think, the kind of scholar, the kind of Judge, that I am. In the same way that my student, colleague, and now boss Sonia Sotomayor, has always seen things as an outsider, so do I.

I could not be the judge that I am if I had come up entirely in an American system. In a strange way I have Mussolini to thank for that; the difficulties he presented us with made us the people that we have become.

Should we assume, as we usually assume in ordinary parlance, that the word “symbol” signifies something beyond what appears at first glance, we should, I will argue, agree that Venice is indeed a symbol, a most intriguing element of cultural discourse, in need of what we call interpretation. For most people, Venice sends an inspiring message as a cultural symbol of west European history—through painting and poetry, prose and sculpture. It emerges from what historians have called the “myth of Venice”: a myth of internal security, stability, conservatism, and economic prosperity, rooted in a domestic  order guaranteed by the most judicious—and pragmatic—institutions. Yet, for the Jewish people, Venice is also the city of the “ghetto,” a linguistic term for which this city may claim “copyright,” though the concept itself was scarcely

a novelty in 1516, the year the Ghetto was established, and therefore also sends a really disturbing message. Can these contradictory messages merge in a congruent one?

Is Venice unique in such opposing situation? As everybody knows, the answer to that is definitely no. One could easily reel off dozens of analogous historical ones. One could recall, for example, the so-called “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” yet an age that remained dark for the Jews. Or, one could recall the so-called discovery of the New World in 1492 and the resultant restructuring of Western civilization within the framework of the other so-called Renaissance, at the very same time the Jews were expelled from Spain, indeed from all Western Europe. One could further mention the experience of our own epoch, recalling how this age of unprecedented technological and scientific progress has also been the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Assuming then axiomatically that Jewish culture and history are integral parts of world culture and history, our first question is but a part of a more general one: How are we to assess phenomena which we believe represent positive moments in world history and culture as being coherent with such disturbing ones for the Jewish people? Can Venice be a symbol of Jewish history in the sense that we posit its symbolism for history in general? The answer, I will now argue, is definitely yes—Venice must be viewed as a most efficient metaphor, a visible case study of the enigmatic allegory of Jewish history, concretely proposed, among other things, to sensible observers leaning against the bridge at the Rialto and weighing the purely human dimensions behind the aesthetic perfection of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, following one of those casual incidents that so often set historical forces in motion, the most Serene Republic  found itself facing “the Jewish question.” After having permitted the Jews of its territory to enter the city as war refugees, the end of that war made it a compelling matter of deciding how to deal with them. In the eyes of the Venetians themselves, the issue at stake was the defense of the cultural values fundamental to their own self-perception. All the values, as it were, that the “myth of Venice” held most essential: justice, liberty, and welfare, all rooted in perfect government, and, most importantly, a defense of the Christian ethos, without which no justice or welfare was conceivable. Opinion was divided, yet what is most striking today is how compelling the persuasive

force was on both sides. Arguing for principles of pragmatic utility or even humanity was certainly no more convincing than arguing for the divine majesty of law.

Let us listen to the Venetians themselves: “If they [that is the Jews] are kept,” warned one of the most powerful senators, “we should beware of the wrath of God, for in France and in Spain there are no Jews, and God makes those monarchs prosper.”1 These words were pronounced in November 1519—three years

after sealing the Jews off in the Ghetto, when the terms for their residence were up for renewal. The Venetians had their own categories for looking at history, and a profound respect for its teachings. France was then riding the crest of glory, guided by the bold self-assurance of the twenty-five-year-old Francis i, while Charles, the nineteen-year-old monarch of Spain, was only five months away from becoming Holy Roman Emperor. And France and Spain, of course, held most of Europe in sway. For Venice, which was then

licking its wounds after the recent war against the Empire (that very same war which brought the Jews into the city proper), it was certainly no easy task to know which of these two kingdoms would eventually have the upper hand, once the inevitable showdown took place. Nor were their deliberations made any easier by the fact that yet another royal stripling, Henry viii of England, was moving toward a rapprochement with France, or by the reports filtering back from the Pontifical Court of Leo x, hardly a grey-beard himself. For the Venetians, who were traditionally deferential of wise and experienced leadership, all these boy–kings playing at war and politics were undoubtedly a source of anxiety. And for the religiously-oriented, this was no doubt a time to be wary of God’s wrath. To clinch the argument, yet another great senator stood up and reminded the Assembly that not only had Spain driven the Jews out of its lands, but that they went to Naples and, there you have it, King Alfonso lost his throne. Moreover, the Duke of Milan had also been driven from power for showing the Jews favor. “And now,” said the amazed senator, “we are going to do the same thing and incur the wrath of God up against us”!2 Thus the tradition of centuries, supported by a genuine piety and fear of God’s wrath, no less than a healthy respect for the teachings of history, all conspired to keep the Jews out.

But there were other voices abroad in the Senate, one of which belonged to an eighty-six-year-old man, for whom the prospect of God’s wrath was no doubt a matter of greater concern than for the younger politicians with a career to carve out. The main argument now was that the Jews had to be kept for the

poor. If before we saw the Venetian categories of political thought in action, inspired by their own “myth of Venice,” we now find another category at work, and another perception of that myth, one that combined the concept of perfect government with the Christian ethos of charity. Such is to say, the argument pointing to the wrath of God could be countered with another example of recent Venetian experience: After all, was it not “during the time that they [that is, the Jews] lived in Mestre that Mestre was burned down by our enemies, and then, when they came to live in the city, [that] we recovered our dominions?” Moreover, “when the Jews were driven out of Spain, they took with them much gold. They went to Constantinople, and Selim conquered Syria and Egypt.”3 History’s teaching, then, was not at all linear. From the Venetian standpoint, concerned with Turkish aggression no less than with the threat posed by France and the Holy Roman Empire, the growing prosperity of the Ottoman Empire was no less paradigmatic than that of France or Spain. For these men, then, history was telling them to harness the mythical Jewish riches to the service of Christendom. Hence a consciousness of the Venetian tradition of perfect government, sensitive to the needs of the poor, and a no less healthy respect for the teachings of history than the other side of the body politic, all conspired to keep the Jews in.

Given such conditions, little wonder that public opinion was seriously divided. The vote that followed the discussion we have just cited resulted in ten abstentions, sixty-four in favor, sixty-six opposed, so that for a while the Jewish settlement was seriously threatened. A subsequent vote reversed the previous decision and left the Jews where they were. So it was that the Ghetto became a permanent fixture in the Venetian landscape.

To be sure, any actual view of the Ghetto must conjure up a sense of basic intolerance, of frustrating constriction of vital living space, of the compelling necessity to expand vertically, and its axiomatic metaphor of yearning upwards, towards heaven, far away from earthly care. What, then, kept the Jews of the Ghetto from leaving? After all, they were not totally deprived of viable alternatives, as some of us might imagine; the road to the Eldorado of the Ottoman Empire was wide open to the Italian Jews, and a considerable number of them indeed took that route.

The Jews, it would seem, preferred to see the institution of the Ghetto as a step towards a new era of tolerance. They could thus quite reasonably even consider their situation as having turned the tide of Jewish exclusion from the European west. In Venetian parlance: a first fragile bridge between two diametrically opposed ideologies—Christianity on the one side, and Judaism on the other. Yet, from the vantage point of some five hundred years, historians less worried by pragmatic considerations and more inclined to ponder on the sense of history sine ira et studio may very well hold such opinion.

In fact, we may do well to rethink the Venetian experience, for this specific Ghetto conveys not only the idea of exclusion but also of inclusion, not only of segregation but of integration. As a mirror of exclusive, even imperialist, ideologies, the Ghetto forced these ideologies to come to terms with their own reflected image and, ultimately, to wear them away. Seen in retrospect, the Venetian Ghetto thus embodies a compromise as organic, as evolutionary—and yet as ambiguous—as any history has to show. As a symbol of Jewish History, this Ghetto may thus represent not only the enigma of coping with General History, but also offer a first step towards its solution. It may, that is to say, symbolize a major aspect of the convoluted path of Jewish experience in Western Europe, through the ambiguous and laborious process of bridging over exclusively imperialist ideologies. As a paradigm of Jewish integration in the fabric of Western society, the judgment of history cannot, in the final account, be wholly negative.

The special functional model of community life that took root in the Ghetto, devised by the various ethnic groups of Jews clustered within, is a phenomenon of the late sixteenth century, thus more or less contemporary with the institution of the Ghetto itself. Of course, the novelty was not in the mere fact of pluralism within Judaism: this was a tradition of old. In Venice itself, Italian and Ashkenazi Jews had lived under the same roof since the very beginning of Jewish settlement there. The novelty was, rather, in including the Portuguese Jews under that roof, and in their integration within the framework of community life. While it is true that the Portuguese Jews belonged to the same Iberian stock as the Levantine Jews, who came to Venice from the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese were not simply one more variety of Judaism. They were Jews who had formally returned to the ancestral faith after having spent two or even three generations as nominal New Christians in the lands of the Iberian Peninsula. There was another aspect of Venice that brought the Portuguese Jews to its shores: the bustling commerce of a maritime power still capable of bridging between East and West and thus maintaining the vitality of that route, despite the fact that the sea-lanes of international commerce were shifting, and the discovery of the New World had affected Venetian trade routes. The economic activity in which the Portuguese Jews engaged, principally trade, was conducted through a ramified network of contacts stretching from the Netherlands to the Ottoman Empire, and extending over much of Italy.

But if the economic role of these Portuguese Jews was unassailable, their religious identity was another matter. Many of them did not openly return to Judaism, preferring to conceal their Judaism and to remain as Christians among Christians. A considerable number of these Jews settled in Venice. They lived outside of the Ghetto, even though it was common knowledge that they were Christian in appearance alone. Thrown into a world where religious identity was rigorously defined, the Portuguese Jews brought, then, a whole new set of meanings to the terms Jewish and Christian, simply by their very being. They ran the entire gamut, from being a hundred percent Jews living inside the Ghetto to a hundred percent Christians living among Christians, all of them interrelated by ties of both family and business. A New Christian who returned to Judaism and lived in the Venetian Ghetto might quite often be related to genuine Christians living in Spain or in Portugal, to less genuine Christians living outside the Ghetto in Venice itself, as well as to genuine Jews off in the Ottoman Empire.4 In other words, the converso phenomenon had thrown down the gauntlet to Jews and Christians alike, for according to the reigning mentality, ethnic and religious self-definition was still coterminous with precisely defined norms of behavior. Hence it was not only the traditional stereotype of the money-lending Jew that the Portuguese helped to dispel, there on the banks of the Venetian canals, but also the traditional categories of religious self-definition. One might almost see them as harbingers of the modern Jew, defining him- or herself more in terms of ethnicity than religion. And so it was that however unconscious, however unintentional or even unwilling, these Portuguese Jews helped to mediate between the old and the new, and to build yet another bridge between Jewish and Christian preserves.

Once Judaism was permitted to take root again in Western Europe, the Jewish self-government of later Sephardi communities such as those in Amsterdam and London modeled itself on the Venetian example. In other words, one may safely say that after having been eradicated from Western Europe, the Judaism that regenerated there followed the institutional and cultural model of Venice, which had first integrated the emerging new kind of Jew into its institutional and cultural melting pot. However, triumphant though the picture may be—and what is the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam, for example, if not an expression of confident Judaism—it must have been quite a painful experience, attended by a lingering sense of alienation born of the inability to integrate smoothly into the existing structures of Judaism, try as they might to discard the residuals of Christianity. Yet all in all, it must also have been a very rich and creative experience, one that was to have, in the long run, a tremendous impact for the shaping of European Jewish history.

From this perspective, both aspects of the Venetian Jewish experience symbolize the uneasy, often painful maneuvering between mutually exclusive ideologies, and of regenerating by setting across bridges of understanding and communication, to meet the rejecting as well as rejected Other. Both are equally representative of the ambiguity inherent in the very nature of such cultural bridges.

Venice is certainly the most appropriate place for talking about bridges. Those piles and bricks thrown over a tamed yet very often threatening sea are themselves part of the visual translation of the myth and history of Venice, as much as the great art and architecture with which the city abounds. And from the perspective of Jewish memory, the essential prerequisite of myth and history, these fragile bridges may be even more powerful symbols than all the gilded splendor of St. Mark’s Square. Steering our representation of the past and our quest to find meaning in the present, they inspire us while building our future.

While we are not so naive as to believe that history can teach us in the way that we were once told (historia magistra vitae), we should not feel too confident in dismissing it either. History can inspire by its symbols, in the sense that it can cause their interpretation to give meaning to cultural tradition, itself the only way of consciously perceiving one’s existence in the present. That is to say, our task is one of balancing the demands of universal culture with the search for a proper definition of a specifically ethnic one—no matter whether Christian or Jewish culture—the task of translating the Venetian vestiges of the past into the concrete experiences of the present, of becoming a cultural bridge between East and West, in every possible sense of the word, one to which we must be as dedicated, as committed and, in short, as wedded, as ever Venice was wedded to its sea.

Endnote

1 M. Sanudo il giovane, I Diarii [mccccxcvi-mdxxxviii], ed. R. Fulin, 58 vols. (Venice, 1879–

1903, reprint: Bologna, 1969), vol. xxviii, col. 62.

2 Sanudo, vol. xxviii, col. 63.

3 Sanudo, vol. xxviii, col. 64.

4 B. Pullan, “‘A ship with two rudders’: ‘Righetto Marrano’ and the Inquisition of Venice,” in

The Historical Journal, xx, 1 (1977): 37.

The Tragic, Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Work on Statelness

While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions of how one might be at home in the world into sharp relief. The fact that she was Jewish and German during the first half of the twentieth century profoundly influenced her life and writing. Given today’s refugee crisis, Arendt’s work is being examined anew in order to understand the ways in which mass statelessness has influenced the world since the twentieth century. As historian Jeremy Adelman wrote in The Wilson Quarterly: “Arendt’s voice is one we can turn to as we grapple with the spread of statelessness in our day. Camps and pariahs are still with us.”[1]

More than 70 years ago, Arendt wrote about the refugee crisis during World War II in a brief essay entitled, “We Refugees.” Published in a small magazine, Menorah Journal, it was re-printed in various anthologies, but often overshadowed by Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and Eichmann, as well as her relationship with Martin Heidegger.[2] In 1993, fifty years after the publication of “We Refugees,” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben reflected on Arendt’s essay within the context of his time. If the refugee was regarded “as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness,” the camp became the symbol of modernity itself.[3] In his reading of Arendt’s essay, the refugee is a kind of homo sacer. Arendt’s argument that statelessness is a consequence of the modern nation-state forms the backbone of much of Agamben’s powerful critique of sovereignty. The political and legal structure of the nation-state based on the rights of man and citizen excludes those who are not citizens. The exclusion of the stateless, as we witness today, results in the administration of the excluded by national agencies, smugglers, strangers, charities, international organizations and, most tellingly, the police. Agamben is, of course, right. “We Refugees” needs to be read in the context of Arendt’s writings on the Jew as pariah and her analysis of imperialism and rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism. But there is also a more immediate context to Arendt’s brief essay — that of her own life experience as a stateless person and her participation in a generation who shared the same fate.

After leaving Germany for Paris in 1933, Arendt worked with Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization helping Jewish children emigrate to Palestine. In 1940, with the Vichy occupation, she was sent as an “enemy alien” and “undesirable” to an internment camp in Gurs. After a fortunate escape, Arendt joined her husband, Heinrich Blüchner, and eventually received an emergency visa for the United States through Lisbon. Although she knew that she was lucky to obtain this visa, she was not yet a citizen when she wrote “We Refugees” in 1943. She did not yet have what she would spend much of her life writing about — the right to belong to a political community. Most tellingly, “We Refugees” was written in the aftermath of the death of two fellow Jewish refugees who identified themselves as Europeans: Walter Benjamin took his life in September 1940, and Stefan Zweig ended his in February 1942.

Arendt had become friends with Benjamin during their time in Paris and had received her visa for America a few months after him. As fate would have it, the border to Spain closed the day Benjamin attempted to cross and re-opened the next day. With his hopes to emigrate to America dashed, he took his life in September 1940. Arendt carried his last manuscripts when she took the very same route, a short time later from France to Spain, arriving in New York in May 1941. In her essay on Benjamin, she retraced his flight from Germany and noted how his world had been steadily taken away. His apartment in Paris had already been confiscated by the Gestapo and part of his library given to the Bibliothèque Nationale. “There were few who still knew his name when he chose death in those early fall years of 1940.”[4]

If Benjamin saw his individual fate as part of a break in civilization, Arendt looked towards the political foundations of the nation-state: “All politics dealing with minorities, and not just with the Jews, have foundered on the existent and abiding fact of state sovereignty.”[5]World War I meant the end of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires and the creation of newly independent states with “Minority Treaties” to protect those whose ethnicity did not coincide with the state that they suddenly resided in. As a consequence of these treaties, a new class of people emerged: the stateless, or as Michael Marrus phrased it in his remarkable book, The Unwanted. “If one regards European history as the development of the European nation-state, or as the development of European peoples into nation-states, then these people, the stateless, are the most important product of recent history.”[6] The stateless became “modern pariahs.”

Jeremy Adelman writes: “The real plight of the pariah is not just to be driven from home. That has been a misfortune of our world for a long time. God did it to Adam. Rulers have made outlaws from time immemorial. No, what singled out the modern age was that no one would take in the pariah.”[7] Benjamin despaired when the Spanish police closed the border and feared that no one would take him in. Although Zweig was able to take refuge in Brazil, for which he was grateful, he was unable to cope with his degradation to a pariah, and he and his wife took their lives in a hotel room in 1942. Zweig’s suicide note is the chilling testimony of a person wrenched out of his world:

Every day I learned to love this country more, and I would not have asked to rebuild my life in any other place after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.

But to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom — the most precious of possessions on this earth.

I send greetings to all of my friends: May they live to see the dawn after this long night. I, who am most impatient, go before them.[8]

Zweig identified himself with “my spiritual homeland, Europe.” His last book, The World of Yesterday (1942) recounts his exile from Austria and Europe. “So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars.”[9] In her essay “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday,” also written in 1943, Arendt reflects on Zweig’s inability to cope with being a refugee. “That he himself, only yesterday so famous and welcome a guest in foreign countries, should also belong to this miserable host of the homeless and suspect was simply hell on earth.”[10] Stefan Zweig, the famous Austrian writer, had been degraded to “Jew Zweig.” He could not come to terms with being labelled a Jew and a pariah. “Without the protective armor of fame, naked and disrobed, Stefan Zweig was confronted with the reality of the Jewish people.”[11] To be thrown onto his bare humanity meant that he was rights-less and stateless. By his own account, The World of Yesterday was both an autobiography and portrait of a generation. “The times provide the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation — our unique generation carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.”[12]

Arendt recalls Zweig’s last article, “The Great Silence,” from March 1942, in which he writes how Europe — Central Europe in particular — was “shocked into silence” at the rise of National Socialism and anti-Semitism. In the wake of today’s rising populism, the building of walls in Central Europe and fear of mass immigration of non-Europeans into the continent, one wonders whether history is repeating itself. Is Europe, and by extension, the United States, shocked into silence when confronted with the mass of refugees seeking asylum? Does the agreement between the European Union and Turkey in 2016 represent silence towards those waiting in refugee camps or those hiding in war-torn Syria?

Read in the context of Arendt’s reflections on Benjamin and Zweig, “We Refugees” is a portrait of a particular generation of extraordinary Jewish intellectuals, who were not only able to find a place in a new country, but who also contributed greatly to the world we live in today. Such people include Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hans Cassirer, Siegfried Kracauer, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Erwin Panofsky, Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. But, unlike Zweig, Arendt did not limit herself to those who enriched the sciences and humanities; rather in “We Refugees” and later in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she gives voice to ordinary people who were somebody in their world and in their language. “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.”[13] These people, most of whom were European Jews, in seeking refuge had to leave everything behind, only to become “the stateless” or modern pariahs.

At the very beginning of “We Refugees,” Arendt is at pains to distinguish between how the stateless are identified by sovereign states (as “refugees”) and how those same people view themselves. “In the first place, we don’t like to be called refugees. We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants’”[14] The title “We Refugees” emphasizes the shared experience of flight, homelessness, loss and adjustment to a new home. In the essay, she writes less about her own private life, and more about what the stateless have in common. “A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held… Now ‘refugees’ are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees.”[15]Even though they are identified as “refugees,” Arendt foregrounds their fierce desire to be someone who belongs to a community. Using irony and dark humor, she portrays those who try to integrate into their new world, like Mr. Cohn, the Jew from Berlin, who was “150 percent German” while living in Germany. However, when forced to leave, in Prague, he became “150 percent Czech.”

From being someone who belongs somewhere, Arendt describes the radical loss of the world experienced by many refugees. They seem to be nobodies who belong nowhere. Moreover, “We Refugees” includes poignant reflection on those who took their lives. “We are the first nonreligious Jews persecuted — and we are the first ones who, not only in extremis, answer with suicide.”[16] Stefan Zweig felt degraded, from being a famous Austrian and European writer, to simply a Jew. Walter Benjamin was humiliated by the experience of hiding and fleeing. Their deaths were not rebellious but a desire to end their uprooted wandering. “Yet our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a quiet and modest way of vanishing; they seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found for their personal problems… If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.”[17] What binds refugees together as a “we” is the fact that they were once somebodies. In their new state of limbo, some were able to cope; others could not. “Once we were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent properly.”[18] Indeed in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1946, Arendt writes of waiting for an end to her statelessness. “I am still a stateless person, and your picture of me living in a furnished room is to some degree still accurate… As you see, I haven’t become respectable in any way.”[19]

Whether pariah or parvenu, once Jews lost their citizenship and political rights during the Third Reich, they lost their own distinct place in the world. “The pariah Jew and the parvenu Jew are in the same boat, rowing desperately in the same angry sea. Both are branded with the same mark; both alike are outlaws.”[20] Can we not say the same about today’s refugees, who are “rowing desperately” to avoid war and violence, but who are regarded as “outlaws” when they reach the borders? At the end of “We Refugees,” Arendt outlines a way to overcome the stigma of being refugee, pariah or outlaw. By becoming a “conscious pariah,” she was able to speak for those in her generation and maintain her identity. “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their people — if they keep their identity.”[21]

The stateless, as an unwanted and superfluous product of the international order, are a fact that can neither be ignored nor wished away. Today, more than seventy years after the publication of “We Refugees,” we face a similar problem. There are approximately 60 million refugees in the world, half of them children, who will spend much of their childhood in a refugee camp. What is, of course, different about the refugees then and now, is that today’s refugee is not European, and often Muslim. And yet the question remains: how should we respond? Arendt reminds us that patterns of exclusion, the proliferation of refugee camps and masses of people seeking refuge, bear more than a passing family resemblance to 20thcentury statelessness. “We Refugees” is more than an early essay outlining her later analysis of rights and the nation-state. It speaks both to the refugee crisis of the 20th century and to ours.

Endnotes

[1] Jeremy Adelman, “Pariah. Can Hannah Arendt Help Us Rethink out Global Refugee Crisis?” Wilson Quarterly, June 2016.  Accessed 27 August 2016.

[2] Originally published in 1943 in Menorah Journal (January 1943), pp. 69-77. It was reprinted in The Jew as Pariah, edited by Ron H Feldman, New York: Grove Press in 1978, pp. 67-90. It is currently printed in The Jewish Writing, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H Feldman, New York: Schocken Books in 2007, pp. 264-274.

[3] Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000, p. 14. Also see his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

[4] Arendt, Hannah “Introduction. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940” in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, p.1.

[5] Hannah Arendt, “The Minority Question” in The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, New York: Schocken Books, 2007, p. 127.

[6] Ibid., p. 128.

[7] Jeremy Adelman, op.cit.

[8] National Library of Israel,  Accessed 28 August 2016.

[9] Zweig, Stefan The World of Yesterday. Trans Anthea Bell, London: Pushkin Press, 2014. Foreword, p. 2.

[10] Arendt, Hannah, “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday” in The Jewish Writings, op.cit., p. 318.

[11] Ibid., p. 328.

[12] Zweig, Stefan op.cit. p. 1.

[13] Arendt, Hannah “We Refugees” in The Jewish Writings, op.cit., p. 264.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.,p. 268.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., p. 269.

[19] Correspondence 1926-1969 by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992, p. 29.

[20] Arendt, Hannah “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” in The Jewish Writings, op.cit., p. 269.

[21] Arendt, Hannah “We Refugees,” op.cit., p. 274.

Levi’s experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans’ capacity for extreme violence.

A review of Sergio Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance and Collaborators in Occupied Italy. Metropolitan Books, 2015. Translated by Frederika Randall

In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer since the age of 14, for Levi the Alps had long been a sanctuary for physical release and spiritual recovery. High up in the alpine tundra, he exulted in hard battle with the elements, the same “Mother-Matter” he confronted at the Chemical Institute in Turin, where he worked as a chemist on the molecular structure of carbon. The mountain’s geological morphologies, the combined sense of its instant creation and eternal presence, the fellowship amongst climbers roped together across pleated terrains: these had been Levi’s greatest pleasures. “Evenings spent in a mountain hut,” he later wrote in a short story called “Bear Meat” (1960), “are the most sublime and intense that life holds.” But after the Nazis established Mussolini’s Republic of Salò and occupied the north of the country, intensifying the roundup and deportation of Jews, the “rocky gymnasiums” became his place of greater safety.

Levi had never intended to pursue armed resistance against the Germans. “I was a young bourgeois pacifist and I’d rather have died than shoot anyone”, he recalled in an interview with his biographer, Ian Thomson. Like a lot of Italian Jews, he thought the best option was to wait for an Allied liberation. But Nazi-Fascism presented an unforgiving choice for most Jewish citizens of occupied Europe: hide, resist, or, as Arendt documented in Eichmann in Jerusalem, cooperate. Levi’s initial concern was for the safety of his mother and sister, and on September 9 they left for St. Vincent, a spa town 100 kilometres north of Turin in the Valle d’Aosta, where they stayed with friends. But after the Nazis drowned forty-nine Jews in Lake Maggiore near Switzerland, including Levi’s uncle, Mario, any hesitations he had about armed resistance disappeared. On October 1, along with a couple of disbanded Italian soldiers, as well as other Jewish refugees and anti-fascists, Levi became part of a small and shambolic resistance group.

Sergio Luzzatto’s newly translated Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy is the story of Levi’s time as a partisan. Drawing on materials housed in local archives throughout northwest Italy, as well as interviewing many of those involved in the early Resistance, his book is a micro-history of what happened in the two months between Levi becoming a partisan and his arrest and deportation to Auschwitz in December 1943. The most intriguing part of Luzzatto’s story, though, is an event that took place a few days before Levi’s capture, when his band executed Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano, two teenagers accused of threatening the secrecy and survival of the rebel group. After the war, Levi remained disturbed by the execution, and questioned the lengths people in conditions of weakness go to survive. His writings were not just shaped by his experience of Auschwitz, but by a life at the frontier of powerlessness as both a partisan and a prisoner.

It is still Levi the prisoner that we know best, and this is what informs much of his writings. Levi recorded his experience of the Holocaust in If This Is a Man (1947), and over the following decades gained success as a writer who, with astonishing self-control, chronicled Europe’s tragic danse macabre. Yet as Ann Goldstein—editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi—notes, the tag “Holocaust writer” does Levi “a regrettable injustice”. A remarkable three-volume set of memoirs, novels, short stories, essays, commentary, book reviews, and poetry, the Complete Works now enables us to appreciate the tangle of forms and identities that defined Levi as a writer: memorialist and fantasist, scientist and sensationalist, puritan and jester, poet and political commentator.

What most clearly stands out from this body of work is the experience of violence in service of the absolute—absolute racial purity, for example, or absolute security and freedom, or absolute control over people through force, or even the absolute mastery of the material world through scientific endeavor. He even argued that “perfect happiness” was unattainable, owing to the certainty of our death, nor “perfect unhappiness”, since death saves us from the daily agonies of existence. For Levi, then, the twentieth century was so violent because societies strove for the absolute and infinite, and much of his work documented the experience of the powerless when confronted by that ambition.

In contrast to fascism’s hate of difference and irregularity, Levi celebrated the fine gradations of being in The Periodic Table (1975), a memoir of his life in chemistry:

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is know, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist…. Immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

Natural Histories, a collection of Huxley-esque science fiction stories first published in 1966, is another example of the cohabiting themes and anxieties that imprinted themselves on Levi after what he witnessed between 1943 and 45. Written in an absurdist key, he mixed the potential of science to attain absolute control and understanding of the physical universe with a deep paranoia of its subversion by the wild spirit of the innovator, the unpredictability of experimentation, and the consequences of human vanity.

In “Angelic Butterfly,” one of Levi’s most disturbing fictions, Dr Leeb, a researcher based on the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele, transforms humans into birds, which are then devoured by hungry crowds (the story takes place in post-war Germany, which Levi said was “a civilized form of reprisal”). Similarly, “Versamnia” is about the attempt to convert complete pain into pure pleasure, during which the human subjects loose their minds and the inventor commits suicide. And in “The Magic Paint,” in which Levi displays a dark comedic genius, it is the pursuit of everlasting luck that causes death. Having discovered a paint that brings good luck to anyone exposed to it, the scientist-narrator calls on an old friend, Michele Fassio, whose gaze from the right eye brings him eternal misfortune. After having the right lens of his glasses coated in the magic paint, Fassio puts them on and dies immediately—the lens was concave, reflecting his powers of bad luck off the paint and back into himself, a “blameless victim of our experiment”.

But Levi wasn’t just concerned with the tragic, usually violent, consequences of pursuing the absolute. He also grappled with the origins and nature of that violence. As a partisan, he participated in a brutal execution in the winter of 1943, and as a Jew he witnessed the industrial murder of entire peoples. Both issued, in different magnitudes, from what Levi called “the sleep of reason”. But they also resulted from contrasting positions of power: the paranoid fragility of the early partisan movement on the one hand, and the “indiscriminate power” of Nazi Germany on the other. Levi’s writings are not celebrations of the human spirit, as is so often claimed, but reflections on the effects that power and powerlessness have on the human capacity for violence.

Levi’s mountain rebels in Aosta were too weak and inexperienced for effective guerrilla warfare. His only weapon, he recalled, was a tiny pistol, “all inlaid with mother of pearl, the kind used in movies by ladies desperately intent on committing suicide”. The group’s leader, Guido Bachi, would later admit that they weren’t really partisans at all, but simply “refugees—Jews on the run”. Many rebels also mistook banditry for resistance. Partisans were free from the codified norms of national armies, and could devise their own protocols. Young men, armed and proud, descended into towns and villages in the name of resistance and assaulted locals, hijacked cars, plundered food, and burnt property—willful violence cloaked in the mantle of anti-fascism.

Luzzatto ascertains that Oppezzo and Zabaldano’s unruliness ultimately led to their executions. They had terrorized locals around the village of Amay, threatening to denounce to the fascist authorities anyone who tried to prevent them. On 8 December 1943 they joined up with Levi’s band of rebels. The next day, their new alpine comrades executed them. There was no trial, no solemn march to a remote clearing where deadeyes lined up and fired. The killing was sudden and without warning, a volley of bullets in the back as the youngsters walked through the snow—it was known as “the Soviet method.”

Luzzatto is less concerned with who actually shot them. What’s important is the severity of the punishment, which, he writes, Levi’s partisans “can only have arrived at after searching their consciences”. The decision to execute was a collective one, which Levi granted in The Periodic Table. In the chapter ‘Gold’, an account of his arrest and imprisonment by fascist militiamen, he admitted publicly for the first time his part in the ‘ugly secret’:

an ugly secret weighed on us, in every one of our minds…. Conscience had compelled us to carry out a sentence, and we had carried it out, but we had come away devastated, empty, wanting everything to finish and to be finished ourselves; but also wanting to be together, to talk, to help each other exorcise that still so recent memory. Now we were finished, and we knew it; we were in the trap, each one in his own trap, and there was no way out but down.

Like so much of the early days of anti-fascist resistance, seen close-up, the application of physical force is stripped of all romanticism. Levi’s partisans weren’t indomitable heroes in steadfast pursuit of victory. Even if their original intentions were good, they were neophytes who, weak, powerless, and desperate to survive the Nazi dragnet, turned to violence and immediately regretted their decision (Levi said that afterwards, they lost the will “to resist, even to live”).

Levi’s participation in the execution is well known. Ian Thomson mentions it in his biography Primo Levi, as do Carole Angier in her book about Levi The Double Bond and Myriam Anissimov in Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. But Luzzatto zeroes-in specifically on this episode, and in so doing, is more judicious and systematic. He writes with verve (rendered beautifully into English by Frederika Randall), and has mined a great many sources to provide a decent account of life under arms in the Aosta Valley.

Yet his conclusions are no more assured than previous interpretations. It still remains unclear how much Levi was involved beyond the debate to execute (was he
a triggerman, for example?). Nor whether the lawless behavior of Oppezzo and Zabaldano was the real reason for the execution. It also cannot be proved that Levi participated in the burials of the two teenagers. Luzzatto speculates that he did, pointing to his poem ‘Epitaph’ (1952) that is “far from any kind of historical proof”, but that provides the strongest suggestion. The narrator in the poem is a dead partisan, buried beneath the soil of Aosta. Like Oppezzo or Zabaldano, he was condemned to death by his comrades:

Here where my comrades dry-eyed buried me, […] I, Micca the partisan, lie here. Brought down by my comrades
For no small wrong, and not many years ago,
Nor many years did I have when I met the night.

The sporadic clues in Levi’s writings that allude to his “ugly secret” are tantalizing in their promise to yield more treasure about a darker past. Luzzatto’s book is in part hostage to this temptation. He readily admits that he might be “insisting on a very minor episode in the overall experience of the Italian Resistance, not to mention in Primo Levi’s personal existence.” A harsh conclusion might be that this book is, above all, about the imaginative license the historian has when confronted with patchy source material.

It is, however, clear that the experience of the execution deeply informed Levi’s writing and thought. Levi forged his voice in opposition to neat moral distinctions like good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, honesty and deceit, strength and weakness, perpetrators and victims, and life and death. For him, these coexist in one and the same person in precarious balance. While he never denied the goodness of human nature, the essential truth of his works—filtered through his experiences of Europe between 1943-1945—is that powerlessness, too, or desperate weakness, manifests itself in the baser part of our natures. What else can the absolutely powerless do when confronted by absolute power?

In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), his final work on Auschwitz written one year before his suicide, he described those who survived, like he did, as driven by despair to all forms of egoism, violence, insensitivity, and collaboration. Only the “drowned”, those who never returned, “did not plumb the depths” of moral compromise: “The best all died”. This was not to condemn the “saved”, only to recognize that powerlessness served to accelerate the violent and calculating potential within men and women. This, if anything, was the true sign of victimhood—being forced to unlock the darker side of human nature.

Like the mythical creature the centaur, a symbol of man’s liminal status, humans, Levi believed, live in a state of tormented oscillation between conflicting moral drives, such as virtue and cruelty, truthfulness and deception, courage and cowardice. (Natural Histories also contains a fable called “Quaestio de Centauris,” in which Levi imagined himself as half man, half horse). In conditions of extremity, like a death camp, that oscillation is of course more radical. But it was also a state of being Levi recognized during his time as a partisan, as he put it in the poem ‘Partigia’ (1981):

What enemy? Every man’s his own foe,
Each one split by his own frontier,
Left hand enemy of the right.
Stand up, old enemies of yourselves,
This war of ours is never done.

Luzzatto examines Levi as someone who, after being part of an execution, was aware of being “split by his own frontier” between wanting to do good on the one hand, and being capable of extreme violence and bloodshed on the other.

Levi’s brief account of life in the Resistance in The Periodic Table was published in 1975, a moment in Italian history when the Resistance was celebrated with unqualified certainty. To portray it as something less than wholly virtuous—and as something that led to his eventual imprisonment in Auschwitz—was an example of his characteristic honesty. Levi knew better than most that the fight against Nazism was an undeniable good mixed with incidents of profound wrong. No human was entirely free of these ambiguities. For him, categories of good and evil aren’t to be found in extremis, only choices and compromises.

Primo Levi’s Resistance provides the most in-depth account of the most formative experience of Levi’s outside of Auschwitz, and reveals a side of Levi we’re not used to seeing—a man implicated in a most pointless killing. The significance of The Collected Works is that it gives us a far more eclectic and interesting writer, one who ranged across a vast intellectual terrain that included astronomy, history, linguistics, classical literature, art, current affairs, memory, and religion. Together, the books not only show the formative effect violence as both a partisan and a prisoner had on his writings, as well as the fundamental relationship between violence and powerlessness.

They also display the basic honesty of Levi’s work: the human condition as one of countless moral shades. Perhaps that is why, away from writing, he loved mountaineering, because of its refreshing certainties. Spared of the complications of human existence, which he celebrated but found so exhausting, rock climbing came down to nothing more than the strength of a piton driven into the mountainside. As he wrote in The Periodic Table: “the rope holds or it doesn’t”.

The Italian Section of the Voice of America during WWII

1. On the evening of January 20, 1944, in Lima, Peru, my father Antonello sat down to write a long letter to his two brothers living in New York – Giuliano, a journalist with the Voice of America, and Claudio, a doctor – giving them a detailed account of the last hours of their father Edmo. Edmo, himself a refugee to Peru, had died of a cerebral aneurism the day before. Antonello had sent his brothers a cable but wasn’t sure if the news had reached them or not.  During the evening he turned on the radio to try and listen to Giuliano’s daily broadcast under the pseudonym Mario Verdi.  But he heard an anonymous speaker say,  “Instead of Mario Verdi’s usual commentary…,” and go on to announce another program. That was how my father knew for sure that Giuliano and Claudio had received his telegram and, as a sign of mourning, had suspended his own broadcast.

Why am I relating this episode? On one hand to explain my own interest in the history of wartime radio broadcasts and, on the other, to underline the effectiveness of the radio medium from the point of view of its listening. Tonight I shall try to illustrate these two complementary aspects by touching on the experiences of two men. Both refugees to America as a result of the 1938 fascist anti-Jewish laws, both held highly responsible positions at the Voice of America during the war: one during the so-called heroic period of 1942-43 and the other after the normalization (which I’ll explain later) of the Office of War Information, of which the Voice of America was a part.

The first of the two is Roberto Lopez (1910-1986), son of the famous playwright Sabatino, who was then a promising scholar and after the war an illustrious professor of Medieval History at Yale.  The second is my uncle Giuliano Gerbi (1905-1976). Renowned as a sportswriter and broadcaster in the Thirties, his career was irreparably damaged by fascism, in spite of his later successes at the Voice of America.

2. Before getting into the story itself, I’d like to recall some of the main points in the history of U.S. radio propaganda after the United States entered the war, on December 8, 1941. President Roosevelt had previously created several different organizations, often in contrast among themselves. It was not until June 13, 1942 that the President decreed the birth of the Office of War Information (OWI), merging four pre-existing government agencies into one sole organism.

Elmer Davis, esteemed CBS commentator, was named head of the new organization, based in Washington. The Overseas Branch, with headquarters in New York, was entrusted instead to the famous playwright Robert E. Sherwood, friend of the President and one of his speechwriters. Subordinate to the Overseas Branch was the Voice of America. Its radio broadcasts (in German, French and Italian) began on February 25, 1942, exactly eighty days after Pearl Harbor.

It must be said right away that OWI was destined to have a troubled existence. This was primarily due to the deep contradictions between the ideals of a ‘just’ war and the crude military necessities, aimed at total victory. It was accused of partisanship as well. The 1942 elections had given control of both Houses of Congress to a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, both of whom “viewed OWI as a propaganda agency not for the United States but for Roosevelt and the New Deal.”  This led to continual attacks in the local press.

Roosevelt was, of course, aware of all these problems but it was not in his character to assume precise positions. So he refrained – as long as he was able – from getting involved in the disputes which broke out almost every day over OWI, especially territorial rivalries with other sectors of the administration.

Making OWI work in such conditions had become, therefore, a herculean task studded with ‘accidents’.  So much so that at war’s end, Elmer Davis, in his Report to the President, wrote that the director of any future propaganda agency would need to possess “the varied abilities of a lobbyist, a traffic policeman, and the impresario of an opera company.”

3. Roberto Lopez applied for a job at the Coordinator of Information, one of OWI’s predecessors, around the end of May, 1942. He was hired by the Italian Section of the newly created Voice of America on August 16^th of the same year.

He had earned his degree in History in Milan and qualified for university teaching in 1936, immediately obtaining a position in  History of Economics at the University of Genoa. Barred from teaching after the approval of the racial laws, he emigrated to America in September of 1939 and, thanks to his friend Professor Robert L. Reynolds, found a job as teaching assistant in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His first boss at the radio, up till the end of 1942, was Carlo Emanuele a Prato, who had had similar duties in one of the agencies incorporated into OWI. At that time there were ten employees in the Italian Section: a Prato himself, Alfredo Segre, J. D. Ravotto, Giorgio Padovano, Sergio Funaro, Aurelio Natoli, Leo Wollemborg, Luigi Giovanola, Primo Raddi and Vincenzo Vacirca. Counting Lopez, about 50 per cent were Jewish.

A Prato was a socialist with a lengthy journalistic career behind him, spent mostly in exile (Switzerland and Paris). He had long been inspired by antifascists Gaetano Salvemini and Carlo Sforza, the latter having been Foreign Minister prior to the advent of fascism. At the beginning of 1942, however, a Prato had begun to cross swords with his former spiritual fathers, in particular with Salvemini who criticized him for serving the Americans and their foreign policies. The same criticism could have been levelled at Lopez, who, however, saw nothing inconsistent with his antifascist principles in working for OWI:  at least as long as he was allowed to attack, not only Mussolini and his gang, but Vittorio Emanuele III as well.

4. Here I shall skip over – as I’ve already written about them elsewhere – all the attacks levelled at the Italian Desk by antifascist Italians in America. There is no evidence that Lopez was touched by them in the slightest. He had to have known about them and yet he never mentioned them during our conversations. He talked to me instead about his particular job. Lopez didn’t talk on the radio himself, he wasn’t a speaker. He wrote news and feature stories which others read in front of the microphone. The amount of work was overwhelming. Newly hired, he drew the night shift for 54 days in a row. The Overseas Branch office of the OWI had recently been transferred, in the middle of summer 1942, to the corner of 57^th Street and Broadway.

By January of 1943, the New York offices of OWI employed around three thousand people, over a fifth of whom were foreigners. Most of the latter worked in the foreign sections of the Voice of America. At the time the VOA turned out approximately a thousand programs a day in twenty-seven different languages. It was a Babel, the dominion of John Houseman (1902-1988), the famous theater director and producer, who left us one of the most vivid descriptions of the ‘heroic’ period of the VOA.

The Italian Desk (or Service) – recalled Houseman in his memoirs – was the third largest, after the French section (although the French “did not distort the news, as the Italians did”) and the German one. At the time of the Allied landing in Sicily (July 10, 1943), it employed about seventy people who were

a constant source of entertainment and exasperation.  From the start they resisted all attempts to bring any semblance of American journalistic efficacy into their broadcasts, The idea of broadcasting items as they received them from the News and Control Desk was utterly repugnant to them.

Houseman continued:

In addition to the deep, chronic disagreements, personal and political, between recent expatriots and Italians long resident in the United States, there was constant friction between those who reluctantly accepted U.S. Government policy and those who followed the divergent lines of various local Italian groups.  In fact, there was more attempted interference with Italian broadcasts than with those of any other nation – except the Poles.

In other words, an animated hotbed of nerves.

5. And so we arrive at a date crucial to Italy’s history: July 25, 1943, with the fall of Mussolini and Field-Marshal Pietro Badoglio named prime minister in his stead.

That Sunday Roosevelt was at his cottage “Shangrila,” about sixty miles north of Washington, with two of his closest advisors, Sam Rosenman and the above-mentioned Bob Sherwood, director of OWI’s Overseas Branch.  They were working together on a speech for the president. The late-afternoon quiet of the sylvan retreat was suddenly shattered by a telephone call from Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, announcing the dramatic Italian news heard, however, on the not-always-reliable “Radio Roma.”

Only that evening was the news definitely confirmed. After returning to Washington, Roosevelt made a call to Churchill (it was the middle of the night in London) who was able to explain exactly what had happened.

Some hours earlier, unaware of the events taking place in Italy, Roberto Lopez, who had by then been promoted to “script editor,” was strolling along 42^nd Street.  On that hot July Sunday he was off-duty. As usual when he arrived at Times Square, he glanced up at the neon billboard to check out the latest headlines. There he saw the electrifying Italian news and ran headlong all the fifteen blocks to his office.

The Voice of America offices were complete bedlam. How to react?  The fact that it happened on a Sunday made communication with the State Department difficult and directives about Italy were unclear.  The latest, approved on February 21, 1943, stated: “‘Fascism’ includes not only Mussolini and his political and military accomplices, but the House of Savoy, which betrayed Italy to Fascism, and the industrialists who support Fascism.” Likewise, the joint message issued by Roosevelt and Churchill on July 17 could be interpreted the same way.

As Sherwood was absent, his second-in-command James Warburg, of the banking family, took on the full responsibility of deciding. In his instructions he gave orders to treat the event “coldly and without any jubilation,” since in any case it made no difference “whether Mussolini or Badoglio or the King hold the leadership.” The intrinsic ambiguity of American foreign policy allowed the liberal approach to prevail, thus forcing OWI into a rather delicate position.

So it was that, on that fateful evening of July 25^th, Lopez considered himself fully authorized to harshly attack Vittorio Emanuele III:  “Badoglio’s proclamation exhorts Italians to gather in support of the emperor-king. The king was made an emperor by Mussolini and by Badoglio. The Italian people were not consulted. The Italian people are not involved”.

6. Yet the Voice of America went even further, with an episode that is rather well-known today. On that same evening, Warburg decided to broadcast several passages from a radio commentary pronounced shortly before by the famous New York Post columnist, Samuel Grafton:

Fascism is still in power in Italy.  Italy has put on a new face, that’s all. Italian Fascism has rouged its cheeks and its lips and is trying to see whether a smile will not do more for it, than the famous frown by which it lived so long.

The moronic little king who has stood behind Mussolini’s shoulder for 21 years has moved forward one pace. This is a political minuet and not the revolution we have been waiting for.

Bitter words indeed, which Warburg meant to be broadcast only once, and only in English. Instead, the text was mistakenly transmitted six times, which probably allowed a news leakage. Consequently, on July 27, Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington correspondent and fierce critic of Roosevelt, levelled a front-page attack on OWI, accusing it of having established its own autonomous course of action with regard to Italy and sabotaging any future negotiations with the king and Badoglio.

OWI was in trouble. On the afternoon of that same July 27, Roosevelt called a press conference and declared that neither he nor Sherwood had authorized the offending broadcast. On top of that, Churchill had just informed the American President that he himself “would deal with any non-fascist Italian Government which can deliver the goods.” In other words, sign an act of surrender.

After some hesitation on Roosevelt’s part, this debatable approach was promoted in another press conference on July 30, in which he manifested his willingness to negotiate with any non-fascist, “be he a King, or a present Prime Minister, or a Mayor of a town, or a village.”

With this, the Voice of America was being called to order: forsaking its ‘strategy of truth’, and submitting the liberal ideology, prevalent among leaders of the time, to the demands of  wartime military and the more moderate spheres.

One can imagine Lopez’ distress in such a situation. During the month of August he still managed to get a few anti-monarchical and anti-Badoglio thrusts past the censors but by now even this tentative approach had become virtually impossible. A drastic choice loomed which came to fruition on September 8, 1943. At news of the the armistice, Maurice English, head ever since spring of 1943 of the Italian Section (after poet Morris Bishop’s brief tenure), chose Lopez to write the  main article. As he gave him the raw material which had arrived from Washington, English ordered: “See that we translate literally: ‘today Italy surrendered.’” To which the adamant Lopez replied: “Fascism has surrendered, not Italy!”

English’s repeated insistences that the orders from Washington  be carried out met with no success. Lopez’ resignation became a foregone conclusion.

Not long afterward, Yale University welcomed the future historian and author of the famous The Birth of Europe with open arms:  he remained there for the rest of his life.

7. By coincidence, Giuliano Gerbi arrived on the scene just as Lopez left it and the turbulence at OWI subsided. His curriculum was quite different from Lopez’. Five years older – he was born in 1905 –Gerbi had graduated from  Bocconi University in Milan with a degree in Economics. He had a lengthy career as a sportswriter behind him:  not only was he a sportswriter and correspondent for the Milanese newspaper L’Ambrosiano, specializing in cycling, tennis and skiing, but since 1931 he had been a sportscaster for EIAR, forerunner of  RAI, as well.  In 1938 he gave the EIAR live commentary of the ‘Tour de France’, won by Gino Bartali. His voice was well known in  Thirties Italy. A brilliant future in radio broadcasting would have been his, had it not been cut short by the passage, in autumn of 1938, of the anti-Jewish laws.

From that moment on, Gerbi’s peregrinations began. Paris, New York, ever-more uncertain jobs, a year at a bank in Colombia. Finally in 1941 he came back to the United States, first in Boston and then in New York, to be near to his brother Claudio, a doctor, himself an emigrant to the US. In the Big Apple, Giuliano had taken up broadcasting once again, first at  WHOM and later, in 1942, at WOV as “Chief of the newsroom and Italian announcer.”  During the same period he also collaborated with NBC.

WOV was a private radio station which broadcast mainly in Italian.  After the USA entered the war it was closed down because of its not-undeserved reputation as a den of fascists and only reopened after a vigorous purge of its most compromised elements. The first change in his circumstances came in the summer of 1942 when OWI gave him his first contract as “Italian staff announcer”, and, in November of the same year, another one as “announcer.”  At the same time he was still working for both WOV and NBC. After September 8, 1943 came the definitive move. In a plan to increase its hours of Italian-language programming, the Voice of America offered him a daily commentary which went on the air for the first time on September 27, 1943. Thus began the broadcasts of “Mario Verdi,” the radio pseudonym assigned (with a striking lack of imagination) to him by OWI. His was the only ‘autographed’ program in the entire Italian Section of the VOA. It went on the air twice a day, every day (except, in its first months, on Thursday).

8. In an autobiographical note from the Sixties, Gerbi himself described his typical working day:

My daily commentary went on the air at 15:45 New York time, corresponding to 21:45 Italian time, but I remember that in spite of that my “piece”  […]  had to be ready, barring any last-minute additions or changes, by 10 o’clock in the morning. If 15:45 was “air time,” there was a rehearsal or run-through at 15:00, during which I had to read the “piece” in front of a “director,” who more often than not understood very little Italian, and, before that the piece had to go to the “ditto room” to be duplicated, and then […]  it had to undergo a “military control” and a “political control;” and before the control it had to be translated into English.

At that time I was living in New York, at 53 East 54^th Street, three blocks from WOV. Thinking back to those days I can’t imagine how I managed to carry on for weeks and months sleeping 55 minutes out of every hour and waking up, systematically, at the stroke of every hour in order to listen to the “news” transmitted by the radio all night long.

Since I continually listened to the “news” for five minutes every hour, I was always on top of the situation. Once I had formed a general picture of the latest developments, I got up at 5:30 and by 6 I was already at WOV, where I found all the stories on the teletype in the newsroom from the three major American agencies, AP, UP and International News Service. I digested them, usually finding confirmation of what I had already heard on the radio during the night, and sat down at the typewriter. In an hour and a half my “piece” was written, and by 8 o’clock in the morning, before I started my normal job at WOV, I handed the manuscript to a VOA messenger who came over regularly to get it. I met up with my “piece” again in the early afternoon when I left WOV on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57^th Street and walked the few blocks to the Voice of America headquarters at the corner of 57^th Street and Broadway.

Once his piece had passed all the political and military censorship, Gerbi could finally go on the air. And, after so much scrutiny, everything went smoothly in comparison to Lopez’ time. Little by little, Giuliano became more proficient and his program more popular.  Evaluations by his bosses were always “excellent.” Duties and salary improved. On January 16, 1944 he went from “announcer” to “script editor,” and on August 1, “radio commentator,” which meant that he was also in charge of inspecting his colleagues’ texts, which were often written in rather poor Italian.

9. Vivian, Giuliano’s daughter, has preserved in the family archive in Milan typewritten copies of all of Mario Verdi’s commentaries, including cuts made by the censors. Perhaps a copy of the texts themselves may be found in the National Archives where twenty or so of Giuliano’s recorded broadcasts have been saved. Before I go into the content of these commentaries and how they evolved over time, I should like to recall a letter my father Antonello, who as I mentioned above was a faithful listener from Peru, wrote to his brothers from Lima on February 7, 1944:

I’ve listened to our Giuliano many times, during vacation and again yesterday, Sunday […].  His diction seemed simply perfect to me (and much better than what I remembered from Milan): clear, well-cadenced yet not singsong, without the slightest uncertainty or slip of the tongue […].  [Speaking of his accent] it is pure, and there is a certain ‘airiness’ about his words as if, instead of reading, he were actually conversing. The tone is just right, serious and confidential. In short, I am not at all surprised that he is so appreciated by his various bosses. As far as the contents are concerned, I realize that he doesn’t have much freedom of choice;  there is a bit too much cheap propaganda, which I doubt is really good propaganda, precisely because it is cheap. I hope his listeners recognize that the fight is neither easy nor already won. And perhaps – the average Italian listener should be considered fairly intelligent – a touch of humor, or self-irony, or even a serene bitterness would not be out of place. But here I see that I am criticizing, not Giuliano, but his spiritual directors.

10. Now we come to the contents themselves of Giuliano’s broadcasts which, as his brother had pointed out, were largely dictated by the directives he received. Little by little, however, his comments became more refined, his journalistic experience had the better of political restrictions and his popularity grew, even though it would never reach that of his colleagues at Radio London. Technically his programs were transmitted to London via shortwave and then re-transmitted to Italy by medium wave which gave far better reception.  This was borne out by the ever-increasing number of letters which Gerbi received, from Italian prisoners of war as well as from his fellow countrymen, especially after the Allied landing in Sicily, in July of 1944. By the last year of the war, Gerbi was receiving hundreds of letters a month, some of which he answered on the air.

His broadcasts were all structured the same way. An announcer signaled that Mario Verdi’s program was about to go on air.  Then the same announcer or Giuliano himself, from time to time, read a summary of the main news stories from the various war fronts (this was repeated at the end). Then came fifteen minutes of commentary by Mario Verdi which, although at the beginning more oriented towards bare facts, became over time more and more elaborate and full of opinions which naturally reflected the official policy of the American government. It was all  well put together, with a good sense of rhythm and a growing show of familiarity with Italian affairs.

11. From the end of September 1943 to the liberation of Europe in May of 1945 (and afterward as well, although it doesn’t interest us here), Mario Verdi followed the main events of the war and  international politics step by step, strictly adhering to the directives regarding Italy. On the other hand, he had free rein when it came to constantly denouncing Hitler and the atrocities that his German soldiers were committing, even against civilians. It is important to remember that this was the period of time after El Alamein and after Stalingrad, a period of increasingly heavy losses for the nazis.

Verdi underlined the age-old hatred of Italians for the Germans.  He showed gratitude for those Italians who helped Allied prisoners to escape. He evoked important anniversaries, like October 19, 1812, when Napoleon began his retreat from Russia. On October 29, 1943 he announced the end of the New York blackout, as threats of a German invasion had ceased. He said repeatedly that fascists and nazis would have to undergo a severe purge at war’s end and that Italy would be allowed to choose its future government on a democratic basis. He never tried to hide the losses and difficulties of the Allies as they battled their way up the Peninsula. He criticized the errors of American isolationist policy prior to Roosevelt. He supported both Italian and Yugoslavian partisans (he would always refer to  them as “patriots”). He was enthusiastic about the decision to let Italian soldiers fight side by side with the Allies (“co-belligerency”).

On Christmas day, 1943, he recalled the festivities in warm tones:

The feeling of nostalgia for days gone by is alive today more than ever. Nostalgia for fireplaces with crackling logs. For the joyous pealing of the church bells. Nostalgia for chestnuts, for ricotta cakes, for panettoni, for good wine from our own vineyards. For traditional dishes, for the sounds of bagpipes and fifed. For dances in costume. For serene and smiling faces. Nostalgia above all for Peace (December 19, 1943).

It would have been hard for people to imagine that they were listening to a Jew forced into exile by the fascist regime.

Just as unlikely for us today was the celebration of Stalin’s birthday:

Today Marshal Stalin is 64. It is perhaps the happiest birthday of the Soviet       Statesmans’s entire political and military life. The most sumptuous gift has come from his soldiers. The most gratifying reward for him is the consciousness that he has done everything in his power for the good of his Country. His talents had already manifested themselves through his policies in times of peace. Through an intense campaign to raise the spirit of the Russian people, to give this people, enslaved by the Tsars, the awareness of their own national strength (December 21, 1943).

12. There are far too many such examples to mention all of them here. The documents are available to scholars wanting to consult them. I should like to mention at least one broadcast, dated July 17, 1944, in which Gerbi narrates the liberation of the city where he spent his childhood, Livorno. In the early Eighties, one of his schoolmates, the “livornese” Jew Laura Castelfranchi recalled:

I’ll never forget how moved I was on July 19 [recte 17], 1944 when, in hiding in the Versilian mountains, I heard Giuliano Gerbi, who […] announced the liberation of Livorno evoking the Quattro Stagioni school where he had studied.

She had actually recognized, in the voice of Mario Verdi, her old schoolmate, Giuliano. Yet it probably wasn’t so very hard to recognize him if we listen to Mario Verdi’s own words:

Italian listeners, good evening. […] Many memories link me to Livorno.  Several tombs, in a cemetery outside the walls, on which I hope one day to be able to place a flower once more; the classrooms of the elementary school “Quattro Stagioni” and those of the “Guerrazzi” gymnasium where I spent several years of my early youth, the  “Fides” club where Beppe Nadi, father of the Olympic champions, taught me fencing, the “Baracchina” in Ardenza where I had the best ice cream of my life and hundreds and hundreds of others.

14. Now it is time to draw some conclusions about what we’ve said up to now. In order to describe the two phases of the Voice of America there is no better way than to delve into the above-mentioned Report to the President, written in 1945 by OWI director, Elmer Davis. Davis writes:

an information agency [OWI], in a war which was in some of its aspects ideological, naturally attracted many free-lance writers and others who had been used to working by themselves and had always jealously cherished their personal integrity and freedom of expression. Such a man is very apt to insist that he must proclaim the truth as he sees it; if you tell him that so long as he works for the government he must proclaim the truth as the President and the Secretary of State sees it, he may feel that this is an intolerable limitation on his freedom of thought and speech.  In that case, he must go.

As happened in the case of Roberto Lopez and many others.

Yet their initiative, their imagination, their passionate conviction (if only it could have been channeled) were all qualities that OWI needed, and was poorer without.

All these concepts fit the Lopez “case” perfectly.  But Elmer Davis concludes – and we with him – by expressing an opinion which match the Gerbi case even better:

The more credit is due to the many other men and women of that type who were able to subordinate their personal feeling, when occasion required, to the national interest, and who gave us outstanding service as members of the team.

Archaeologists reveal secrets of Roman prison that held both Christian saints and Jewish rebels

The Tullianum dungeon, older than Rome itself, was where Romans locked up their worst enemies: from the Great Jewish Revolt leader to (supposedly) St. Peter and St. Paul.

One of the world’s oldest and most terrifying prisons, reserved for ancient Rome’s fiercest enemies, has reopened to the public after years of excavation that have revealed new clues about the very birth of the Eternal City itself.

The Carcer Tullianum (Tullianum Prison in Latin) is notoriously known as the squalid underground dungeon where the Romans would lock up enemy leaders, including Simon Bar Giora, one of the architects of the Great Revolt of 66-70 C.E. Other honored inhabitants, according to medieval Christian tradition, were the apostles Peter and Paul.

But the three-year excavation has shown that the structure, located between the bottom of the Capitoline hill and the entrance of the Forum, was much more than just a prison, and may in fact predate the founding of Rome itself.

Before Romulus killed Remus

Archaeologists were surprised when they turned up walls made of tufa stone blocks and other finds dated to the late ninth or early eighth century B.C.E.

Ancient Roman historians believed their city was founded around 753 B.C.E. on the nearby Palatine hill, and modern archaeologists have found some evidence supporting this.

But by the time Romulus supposedly founded Rome and killed his twin brother Remus, structures like the Tullianum were already standing. In fact, the building was apparently part of a wall that surrounded the Capitoline, defending a village on top of that hill.

The discovery of such important structures predating the city’s legendary birthdate supports the theory that Rome did not rise from a single foundational act, but from the union of several communities that may have inhabited its famous seven hills from the late Bronze Age, says Patrizia Fortini, the archaeologist who led the dig.

Puzzling finds

Researchers also discovered that the round building, with walls up to three meters thick, did not start out as a prison, but as a cultic center built around a small, artificially-dug spring that gushes into the lowest cell of the dungeon to this day.

This may also have given the place its name, as tullius means “water spring” in Latin. Other scholars link it to the name of two of Rome’s legendary kings, Tullus Hostilius or Servius Tullius.

It was next to the spring that Fortini and her colleagues discovered a grouping of votive offerings: ceramic vessels, remains of sacrificial animals and plants, dating back as far as the sixth century B.C.E.

Alongside fairly mundane offerings such as grapes and olives, they also found the seeds and rind of a lemon. This is the first appearance of the fruit in Europe and is somewhat of a head-scratcher for archaeobotanists, who had thought the citrus reached the continent from the Far East at a much later date, Fortini said.

While it is unclear which deity was being worshipped in the Tullianum, the cult was probably not just about offering up animals and exotic fruits. The site also yielded the grisly burial of three individuals: a man, a woman and a female child, all dated to the earliest stage of the monument. The man was found with his hands bound behind his back and signs of blunt force trauma to the skull.

Were the burials connected? Was it a human sacrifice? Or an execution? We don’t know, Fortini admits.

The gates of Hell

The archaeologist says that all these activities were probably connected to the spring, which the ancient population may have been seen as a conduit between the world of the living and the underground world of the dead.

This religious connection to the underworld may have inspired the later use of the site as a prison, she told Haaretz during a tour of the site, which reopened late last month.

“The prisoners held here were all leaders of enemy populations or traitors, all people who were believed to have endangered the survival of Rome,” Fortini said. “The idea was that they had to disappear, they had no right to be a part of human society, so they were symbolically removed from the world and confined to the underworld.”

The use of the Tullianum as a prison became common sometime during the Roman Republic, around the fourth century B.C.E. The once large, airy sanctuary was divided into two vaulted, claustrophobic levels, the lowest of which encased the spring and was accessible only through a tight opening, still visible today, used to lower prisoners into what must have seemed like a dark and foul-smelling antechamber to Hell.

“It was not a prison in the way we think of it today,” Fortini said, noting that long-term incarceration was rare in the Roman world. Monetary fines, enslavement, and various cruel and inventive forms of execution were a more common fate for criminals or captured enemies.

The Tullianum usually served as a holding cell for high-value captives waiting to be paraded in the triumphal procession led by the general who had vanquished them. They would then be returned to jail, to be starved to death or quietly executed, usually by strangulation, Fortini said.

A deadly bath

Besides Simon Bar Giora, other enemies of Rome who spent their last days in the Tullianum include the Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, who united the Gauls in revolt against Julius Caesar. He languished in the dungeon for six years awaiting Julius Caesar’s triumph, and was executed in the prison after the procession.

The historian Plutarch tells us that Jugurtha, the defeated king of the north African reign of Numidia, mocked his jailers as he was lowered naked into the dark, damp dungeon, exclaiming: “By Hercules, o Romans, this bath of yours is cold!” He succumbed to hunger and exposure a few days later.

One of the few who made it out alive was Aristobulus II, the Hasmonean king of Judea who had been imprisoned there by Pompey.

The Jewish historian Josephus relates that when Caesar took control of Rome he freed Aristobulus, hoping to use him to foment rebellion in the Levant against his rival, but the Judean king was soon poisoned by Pompey’s followers.

Holy again

As the Roman Empire became Christian, use of the Tullianum as a jail declined. By the 7th century it was back to being a holy site, revered as the place where Peter and Paul were held before their martyrdoms.

The ancient water source was repurposed by Christian tradition, and was said to have been miraculously sprung by the apostles to baptize their jailers. Now called the Mamertine (possibly because of a temple of Mars that had stood nearby), by the early Middle Ages the dungeon was transformed into a church, and a second church was built on top of the prison during the Renaissance.

Archaeologists have found a trove of medieval artifacts, including rare glass and ceramic vessels, connected to the cult of the saints, all displayed in a new museum at the site, which is managed by the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi, a Vatican office that organizes pilgrimages and protects holy sites..

Actually, there is little evidence to support the legend that Peter and Paul were held there. But Fortini says this tradition made sure the building was protected from looting during the Middle Ages – preserving this monument from the archaic Roman period to this very day.

In the chapter Phosphorus in the Periodic Table Levi tells us of a love story that took place in 1942, when he was employed in futile research after an oral cure for diabetes. Beatrice and Virgil in one, Giulia Vineis was responsible for the job offer and becomes his guide, in the factory as well as in life and love. They knew each other from school she was strong, passionate, and catholic and above all engaged. Phosphorus, the luminous burning noxious element is all about life under Fascism and the racial rules, about the way a regime insinuates itself in human intimacy and its language.

Brave and honest Giulia thinks that “Racial laws are a bunch of stories, what importance could they have anyway?”[1] And one night during a storm, life for Levi almost became wholly other:

There was a fierce storm; Giulia endured two thunderclaps and at the third sought refuge with me. I felt the heat of her body against mine, Dizzying and new, known in dreams, but I did not return her embrace; if I had, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone crashing off the rails, toward a common, completely unpredictable future.[2]

The sum of these thoughts is about, fortuna, an Italian term Levi employs frequently and seriously to consider ethically his own luck.[3] We know they discussed the matter in their meetings after the war as Levi discreetly informs us. Inevitably Phosphors it is about a light that had not been lighted and above all about how a Christian love would have most likely avoided Auschwitz, though one can never know. It is also just as much about the intervention of law on the proper body, the insecure Jew frozen by law into the impossibility of masculinity. One day Giulia asks him to drive her on his bicycle to do battle with the parents of her fiancé that did not approve of her:

Giulia was arguing with me like I was her Don Rodrigo, I was overcome by an absurd hatred for my unknown rival. A gòi and she a gòia, according to the atavistic terminology: and they would be able to marry. I felt, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness growing inside of me: this, then, meant being other; this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on the crossbar of your bicycle the girl you desire, and to be so distant from her that you can’t even fall in love: to carry her on the crossbar to Viale Gorizia to help her become another’s, and disappear from my life.”[4]

The weight of such considerations is largely attenuated in this story by a the form of the telenovela, the allusion that catches our eye is to Alessandro Mazoni’s novel, I Promessi Sposi – The Bethrothed as translated into English. The allusion is comically inverted, Levi cast in the role of Don Rodrigo, the maleficent nobleman that separates Renzo from Lucia. Marco Belpoliti and Giovanni Tesio have already shown that the The Betrothed is of great importance to Levi, one of those books that he didn’t include in his personal anthology “La ricerca delle radici”, because their presence is so obvious “it would have been like describing under ‘particular signs” a person as having two eyes”.[5]

According to Belpoliti, Manzoni is central to Levi regarding physical gestures and the theme of the oppressed.[6] This might be true, though what is certainly missing is the role of The Betrothed in figuring love, especially in its particular Italian Catholic sense. As Levi has stated, The Betrothed is the bedrock of Italian identity as such. In the novel, Renzo and Lucia are separated by the will of Don Rodrigo, forcing them apart and abducting Lucia, in a land of perverted justice.[7] Only in the end, through the destruction brought on by the plague, is Renzo miraculously reunited with his love.

The irony of Levi cast in the role of Don Rodrigo, the perpetrator, should not occlude how the allusion here highlights the importance of the Betrothed in allowing Levi to meaningfully engage a Christian concept of love, one that brings together, survivor perpetrator and carnal love. Renzo, the survivor of the plague, arrives in death stricken Milano, where he heads to the Lazzaretto, a space much like the infirmary of Buna where the sick and dying are confined. The images are eerily reminiscent of the last part of If This is a Man, as the Germans leave Levi and the other inmates to die of their maladies. In the Lazaretto Renzo meets Fra Cristoforo, who in the first part of the tale, tried to help the couple, and when Renzo vows to avenge himself on Don Rodrigo, if he cannot find Lucia, Fra Cristoforo responds with a vehement reproach:

You have dared to meditate revenge; but He (God) has power and mercy enough to prevent you…You know, and… He can arrest the hand of the oppressor: but, remember. He can also arrest that of the revengeful… You may hate and be lost forever; you may…rest assured that all will be punishment until you have forgiven—forgiven in such a way, that you may never again be able to say, I forgive him.”

“Yes, yes,” said Renzo, with deep shame and emotion: ” I see now that I have never before really forgiven him I see that I have spoken like a beast, and not like a Christian : and now, by the grace of God, I will forgive him; yes, I’ll forgive him from my very heart.”

” And supposing you were to see him ?”

” I would pray the Lord to give me patience, and to touch his heart.”

“Would you remember that the Lord has not only commanded us to forgive our enemies, but also to love them ?

” Yes, by His help, I would.”[8]

The importance of this episode cannot be underestimated, as this demand returns to haunt Levi in later years in the form of a demand, cultural and not even tacit, by the perpetrators, Germans and Fascists for forgiveness, indeed for love. Levi, who was separated from his love at Auschwitz, indeed from his life, by the Don Rodrigo of Salò and Auschwitz, found the demand for love perverse, radically rejecting the very form of Christian love with force, finding the meagre form of revenge allowed by the victors, through testimony, unsatisfactory to say the least.

Love as Wittgenstein observed is “Less an irrecoverable, private inner state than it is a response deeply implicated in the social world… in the weave of life”.[9] And here in the question of Levi’s love we are made acutely aware of the implications. Levi’s account in Phosphorus is loaded with bitter dark irony. The thought of what might have been avoided through the love of Giulia is further poisoned by the abject position of the non-rejected, non-attempting Jewish male. In Levi’s words one can immediately individuate the thick layers of the anti-Semitic discourses that systematically emasculated the Jews as Italian men. What kind of men they could be as Jews is left unsaid, but the weight of fascist virilities to quote Barbara Spackman, is crushing.[10]

Of Levi’s love what is known has been uncovered by his biographers and recently exhaustively discussed by Sergio Luzzato in Partigia, a book that minutely examines Levis brief experience as a Partisan.[11] Her name was, Vanda Maestro, Mesto Xanda in the Fascist police files, a Jewish girl from Torino about the same age. Levi had been friends with her brother, Aldo, and together they were part of a group of Torino Jews forced together by the race laws of 1938. With Lucianna Nissim they went into the mountains to fight as partisans, and soon were captured by Fascist militias. They arrived at the Fossoli camp in January 1944 before being sent to Auschwitz.[12]

Luciana Nissim having survived Auschwitz confirms that Levi loved Vanda and there are also good reasons to believe that Levi wrote the loving and tender portrait of Vanda in “Donne piemontesi nella lotta di liberazione.[13]:

No one who saw her in those days, climbing up the snow-covered paths, can ever forget the tiny, gentle face, marked by the physical effort, and also by a deeper tension: because for her, as for the best of that time, and in that position the choice had not been easy, or joyous, or free from doubt…. [14]

The use of no one – nessuno – is central in Levi and the figure of Ulysses famously telling Polyphemos that he is nobody – is present but it is also the reality of the group’s brief days of being partisans in which literally no one who saw her had survived besides Levi himself and Luciana Nissim.[15] Luciana may talk about love but Levi has a very difficult time doing so.

The first place in Levi’s writing where Vanda is mentioned is implicit mode when Levi describes their last night before deportation:

Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain.[16]

Vanda is one of those among whom these things were said and done and for a work of testimony this is an enigmatic proclamation. How is it better that no memory rests of the things said and done, and isn’t he leaving a trace of memory just by saying so? There is no simple answer to this query and since Levi describes the night, we are forced to believe that he is talking here of some part of the experience that cannot be touched. A sliver of life that escapes discourse and has no place in the tale of the survivor – a piece of life that has been forced upon the survivor by the perpetrator but in which he has no part and cannot be contained within the narrative of “that which had happened”. It is almost the case of the purloined letter – it is there and yet cannot and should not be seen. The impossibility persists in the account of the transport to Auschwitz:

Next to me, crushed, like me, body against body for the whole journey, there had been a woman. We had been acquainted for many years, and the misfortune had struck us together, but we knew little of one another. Now, in the decisive hour, we said to each other things that are never said among the living. We said farewell and it was short; everybody said farewell to life through his neighbor. We had no more fear.

There is a curious mistranslation here, and the translation errs precisely where Levi would like us not to read. The minor mistranslation is that misfortune “struck” where the Italian uses “la sventura ci aveva colti insieme” colti – means that it collected us, took us, it is a soft enveloping verb – indicating a shared intimacy and pointing precisely to their capture in the mountains, thus naming Vanda. The crucial misinterpretation is in the translation of “ciascuno salutò nell’altro la vita” – in the English ciascuno becomes everyone instead of each other – turning the heart breaking intimacy into a collective ceremony. The short wrenching sentence “Ci Salutammo, e fu breve” is lost and with it the memory of the moment of love shared between the two – “crushed against each other” completely misses the original “serrata” accanto a me – literally “locked” next to me. Not only does the original create a movement of intimacy, it also harkens to the historical “Serrata Venziana” of 1296 and canto X of the inferno where “seculars” will be sealed in their tombs forever after the last judgment. Excluded from the polity they reach into each other – the brevity of this salutation of life seems to speak of physical contact, and perhaps this is what is described.[17] One hesitates when confronted with the depth of this closing, in Italian the literal and figurative closing of the heart and of the throat are indicated aligning the infinite forms of being locked out of society, love and in the end life itself; Levi locks us out of that which is most intimate and the most public in Christian discourse, out of love. The discourse of survival is closed to the redemptive power of love, refusing it consistently, erecting an impenetrable wall between his inferno and Dante’s. It is the one place in Levi’s work that consistently behaves as a black hole, not the camp, not death, but in love, the moment of transfer being the moment of love locking him forever inside. [18]

Further evidence of the particularity of this bond can be found at the end of the second chapter of “The Truce” when Levi, in the Big Camp meets Olga, a Croatian Jew that befriended Vanda:

They had all died. All the children and the old people, immediately. Of the Five hundred and fifty people I had lost track of when I entered the Lager, only twenty-nine women were admitted to Birkenau: of these, only five had survived. Vanda had been gassed, fully conscious, in the month of October; she herself, Olga, had obtained two sleeping pills for her, but they were not enough.[19]

The utterly amazing part of this quote from Levi’s second book is that the reader cannot have any idea who Vanda is and why her story told in such detail. It is a kind of slip that is uncommon in Levi’s work. We understand that Vanda is someone he cares about, one that has a continuous presence that her name appears so naturally next to the nameless; some may have noted that she is mentioned in passing in If This is A Man but it is impossible to see that she is a significant figure. It requires extra-textual knowledge and a reconstruction across various texts to know that she is a figure of love, the woman that was present in the camp, next to him in the, mountains, jail and transport. It is a sign of love, a point in which the real buried story, the story that can never be told is revealed, allowing us a glimpse at the otherwise very serrated heart of the survivor.
Levi tacitly returns to tell of Vanda in the chapter Chromium of The Periodic Table. Chromium the substance that covers metals with a fake precious shine, tells the story of a chemical investigation conducted by Levi, the returned survivor working in a factory on the shore of a lake reminiscent of the only recently fallen Republic of Salò. The recently employed Levi, is presented with a coagulated batch of varnish leftover from that war and is charged with finding a way to melt it, indeed to resurrect it.[20]

But I had been back from prison for three months, and I found life hard. The things I had seen and suffered burned inside me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and guilty for being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had swallowed up millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to me (che me stava a cuore). It seemed to me that I would be purified by telling the story, and I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who grabs the wedding guest on the way to the wedding, to inflict on him his story of evil.[21]

So Levi is this man who feels guilty for what man has done to man. Returning from the Lager, he is man once again, and as such he is already betraying the woman that drowned, a last solitary moment of love, in a sealed wagon forever.[22] Levi’s writing cannot and does not try to resurrect though; writing can only return, just ruining the party for the guest bound to a wedding. In the same chapter there is a turn in love that corresponds perfectly to the chemical story, one of the moments when The Periodic Table reaches perfect resonance between the language of chemistry and the language of the heart:

Now it happened that the following day destiny had reserved for me a different and unique gift: a meeting with a young woman, of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our coats…Within a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for a meeting but for a lifetime, as in fact it had been…likewise, the world around me was cured, and the name and face of the woman who had descended to hell with me and had not returned were exorcised. My writing itself became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a beggar seeking compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid construction and no longer solitary: the work of a chemist.[23]

The passage gives us a very candid account of the composition of If This is A Man. It is a book that does not ask for compassion, unlike Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Irony is clearly at play, since the quote from the Ancient Mariner will eventually be the motto of The Drowned and the Saved. Love is not mentioned, it is not a love story nor a simple story of a world restored to health; desperate writing turned to pleasure. Vanda is replaced with a real woman and writing becomes an adventure – the work of a chemist, one who measures and weighs.

Next, Levi proceeds to solve the mystery of the livered paint discovering the solution to the mystery in the “poison exuded by companies”: paperwork. The solution he finds, adding ammonium, seems to be part of finding a way to write. Levi here embraces literary growth with an image of the plant, so untypically banal, that it can only be explained by the figure of Cato in the first canto of Purgatorio, a canto that ends with Virgil wiping the Infernal soot of Dante’s face girding him with a plant he plucks and then immediately regrows:

“Amonium Chloride” the twin of a happy love and liberating book” (159) Makes perfect sense here, where for a moment all three seem to have melted that which was coagulated. But this is not the end of the story, the story can be liberating but it is also poisonous especially when it is the only form of revenge allowed the survivor. The perpetrators demand that is be so, that the victim content and confine himself to telling the story, reliving hell, as they go on with their lives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the chapter Vanadium, named, clearly after Vanda Maestro his first love and in a sense, the only one, at least as the man he was before he was undone.

Vanadium is the penultimate chapter in the Periodic Table. It tells of a defective resin that arrived at Levi’s factory from an ex I.G. Farben subsidiary in Germany. The varnish just wouldn’t dry. In the course of a terse and courteous correspondence with his German counterpart, he discovers that it is Dr. Muller, one of the men in charge of the laboratory in Buna where Levi was employed as a slave. A private communication between the two accompanies the commercial one. Muller, it turns out, had read Levi’s book in German – Is das Eine Mench? As the commercial issue is resolved, a private letter arrives at Levi’s home. In the letter Muller “attributed the facts of Auschwitz to Man, without differentiating”.[24] In his opinion he had friendly relations with the prisoners and I.G. Farben employed these prisoners only in order to protect them.

He perceived in my book an overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony to faith in Man, and he concluded by insisting on the necessity of our meeting, in Germany or Italy, where he was ready to come when and where I pleased: preferably the Riviera –[25]

“In Sinne der Bewältigung der so fruchtbaren Vergangenheit” —

to overcome the past, to rape it if you will.

As Carol Angier noticed this episode has a counterpart in Levi’s correspondence with one Ferdinand Meyer who was introduced to him by Hety Schmitt-Maass. Marco Belpoliti has reconstructed the affair in detail, all the while believing that the biographical story is the truth behind the fiction that is nothing more than a “rounding” of the truth as Levi usually does.[26] There is little need to argue that truth in a poet lies in poetry not in biography, the events as they happened are never the truth of fiction, only its circumstance. Meyer’s incomprehension is of little consequence, Muller’s incomprehension is fatal since it is also a demand for love, a demand for Christian love from the Jew. This proximity between loves is the reason why Muller’s story appears in reference to Vanda in the form of Vanadium, a resonance that stands in spite of Christian love.[27] The letter would be comic if it did not express a truth about the world. Muller, a perpetrator, a collaborator, like many others demands of the Jews to overcome their Jewish system of revenge and embrace Christian love of the enemy. This is what the theologically unified world of Dante’s love has come to, and Levi refuses, consistently, because that possibility of love is sealed in a tomb, in the sealed wagon:

He gave me undeserved credit in attributing to me the virtue of loving my enemies: no, despite the distant privileges he had secured for me, and although he wasn’t an enemy in the strict sense of the term, I did not feel like loving him. I didn’t love him, and didn’t want to see him, and yet I felt a certain measure of respect for him: it is not easy to be one-eyed.[28]

The reference to Cyclops, the one eyed monster underlines the acidic irony of the words. Muller is a Cyclops and the Cyclops are Nazis of sorts, Ulysses is rendered nobody by the encounter with Polyphemos. Like poyphemos, he grants the survivor the sordid favor of being eaten last. Struggling to respond Levi drafts a letter in which he claims that perhaps one could love, but the enemy must cease to be such which means accepting responsibility for Auschwitz by people like Muller. Levi does not send the letter and eventually he receives another from Muller’s wife informing of his death at the age of sixty.

This is one ending of the The Periodic Table – in the acidic refusal of Christian love, in the wish for revenge or at least a longing for justice that is not equal to love, a justice that does not weigh on the victim like the crime. Love for Levi, does not survive Aushcwitz and the connection between Dante and Levi rests in literature’s place and means for love and revenge. Dante gets his revenge quite clearly, his love is there, as are his old enemies, all punished in grueling ways. Levi does not have the privilege of a unified system. His love, for Vanda, or indeed for Western culture is lost, burnt, and irretrievable. Yet there is no other world for him, as there might be for those who have faith. The secular Jew, that product of European enlightenment is a survivor of a world that has gone up in smoke, and the love it fostered is sealed and buried, lurking under the ground of what is being written, there, waiting, like revenge, like Renzo for Lucia, like love.

Endnotes

[1] The Periodic Table, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 2 pp. 516. Primo Levi, Opere, Vol. 1, pp. 533 translation modified

[2] The periodic table, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 2 pp. 518;Il sistema periodico, opere vol 1. Pp. 538

[3] Robert Gordon, Sfacciata fortuna, La Shoa e il caso, Torino: Enaudi, 2010.

[4] Opere I, pp. 544., Works vol. 2, pp. 520-521

[5] Primo Levi, Levi, Primo. Conversazioni E Interviste : 1963-1987. Torino: Einaudi, 1997, pp. 154.

[6] Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi. Milano: B. Mondadori, 1998, pp. 111-114.

[7] See: “Renzo’s Fist” in Other People’s Trades, Works, Vol. 3, pp. 1266-1268.

[8] Alessandro Maznzoni, I promessi sposi, Torino: Enaudi, 1971, pp. 535-536

[9] This idea of love has been mostly explored in theatre studies and is historicized especially in Shakespeare, see: David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service, Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2008; Theodore Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 1999.

[10] Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities : Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[11] Luzzatto, Sergio. Partigia : Una Storia Della Resistenza. Milano: Mondadori, 2013, pp. 127.

[12]The story of Vanda Maestro and the resistance episode had been told by all three biographers, Mansardi and Luzzatto and others, I have nothing to add beside interpretation. See: Mesnard, Philippe. Primo Levi : Una Vita per Immagini. Venezia: Marsilio, 2008.

[13] Carol Angier’s reasons for that identification seem correct and the style certainly is very different from the other entries, see: Angier, Carole. The Double Bond : Primo Levi, a Biography. New York: Viking, 2002, pp. 64; Chiappano, Alessandra. Luciana Nissim Momigliano: una vita. Casa Editrice Giuntina, 2010, pp. 144.

[14] The Double Bond, pp. 248

[15] Cohen, Uri S. “Consider If This Is a Man: Primo Levi and the Figure of Ulysses.” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 40–69.

[16] Primo Levi, If This is A Man, Works Vol. 1, p. 33

[17] Elie Wiesel describes a similar scene in an early version of Night, that was removed from the final version, see: Ofer Aderet, “Newly Unearthed Evidence”, Haaretz, 5/1/2016; See also Naomi Seidman’s illuminating discussion of the Yiddish and French versions: “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage.” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–19.

[18] Just like Dan Pagis in describes in Gilgul, see: Ezrahi, Sidra Dekoven. “Dan Pagis—Out of Line: A Poetics of Decomposition.” Prooftexts 10, no. 2 (1990): 335–363.

[19] Primo Levi, The Truce, Works, Vol. 1. P. 159.

[20] It is well known that Levi was employed at the time by Duca-Montecatini in Avigliana, the vagueness of the description makes it very clear that literary construct is not intended as a representation of current employment but rather of something of general significance.

[21] Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Works vol. 2, p. 535

[22] This is not very different from the love Auerbach is trying to resurrect in Mimesis, “to reunite those who have not lost it, a love for the west as a literary vision of humanity is shared by the two.” See: Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 518

[23] Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Works vol. 2, p. 535

[24] Ibid. p. 570

[25] Ibid. p. 571

[26] Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo, Milano: Ugo Guanda, 2016, pp. 261-273

[27]Levi has written another story about the lab and a Doctor Mertens this time. It is indeed a different story with a different meaning even though it stems from the same exchange. Levi, perhaps foreshadowing the futility of future research includes the following observation about the: “essential inadequacy of the documentary page: it hardly ever has the power to restore the essence of a human being. The playwright or the poet is more suited to this purpose that the historian or the psychologist”, Primo Levi, “The Quiet Town of Auschwitz”, Works, Vol. 3, p. 1386.

[28] Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Works vol. 2, p.572

In this conversation Judge Guido Calabresi, a long time friend of Centro Primo Levi, shares stories of his family’s flight from Fascist Italy —from Milan to Yale— and the ways his childhood experiences have shaped his personal and professional life in the USA.

This spring, Calabresi has appeared as a panelist in our presentation of Giana Pontecorboli’s  Americordo.The Italian Jewish Exiles  in America, and of Patrizia Guarnieri’s Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism.

Guido Calabresi is a legal scholar and senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A former Dean of Yale Laws School where he has been teaching since 1959, he is now Sterling Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer in Law. He has been awarded some fifty honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, and has published widely on the Law and related subjects.

AC Unlike most Italian Jews who came to the US, fleeing the Italian racial laws, your father was an anti-Fascist and realized long before the discriminatory measures where Italy was going.  You family’s decision was not so much a consequence of the laws but rather a political decision.

GC We are unusual because we were antifascist. Most of the people who came as refugees were not particularly active antifascists, perhaps they thought fascism was wrong, but it was not a reason for taking political action. And then there were some who had been actively fascist, because some Italian Jews as every other group had embraced fascism. What was unusual about us was that both my father and my grandfather were fiercely antifascist from the beginning. My father was beaten and jailed in 1924, when he was a student, from then on he and his sisters became very active in Giustizia e Libertà the movement led by the Rosselli brothers. The second time he was beaten and jailed was when he and others put a wreath by a statue of Garibaldi on the first anniversary of Mateotti’s murder.

My father had wanted to leave Italy in the late twenties early thirties, when it became clear that Mussolini was not going to fall. My grandfather who was a patriot of the old school, said: “No, one does not leave one’s country”. Despite patriotism, his fierce anti-Fascism, made some call him a traitor. One of Ferrara’s most prominent fascists, his name escapes me now, would correct them:” You can call Ettore Calabresi anything: he is wrong, his is terrible, but don’t call him a traitor, because in the First World War he behaved heroically even after Caporetto”. Because of his antifascism and his prestige in the city, my grandfather was barred from returning to Ferrara. Once he returned to his city to attend a funeral they put him in jail.  In such a small city they could not tolerate a powerful industrialist married to a woman from a great land owning family, who was outspokenly against the Regime.

AC Was there a catalyst for your parent’s decision to leave?

GC After my grandfather died in the fall of 1937, and at the same time his friends Carlo and Nello Rosselli were murdered, my father decided it was time to leave. He tried to get out then, but as it happened, the Fascists did not want people to come to the US and speak out against them, so they denied us the necessary exit visas. My father was repeatedly denied permission to leave until the racial laws were passed. So we came to the US because we were anti-Fascists, but we left at a time when most Jews were in fact fleeing the racial laws.

AC For centuries Italian Jews had lived in tightly knit communities. Increasingly in the times of Fascist persecution, mobility between cities was dangerous. During the difficult times that it took your parents to arrange for the family’s departure for the US, you moved all over Italy: from Bologna, Milan, Genoa and Cortina D’Ampezzo, making it literally an escape out of Italy, rather than one out of Milan. What do you recall of the actual departure?

GC What had happened is that with the help of Giuseppe Levi, a professor of Physiology in Turin —the father of Natalia Ginzburg— a fellowship had been arranged at Yale, through the Damian

Foundation, and that is what allowed us to come. But my mother’s parents thought one should not leave, so the compromise was that my father was going to come see what it was like and we would join a bit later. When our father was scheduled to leave, my brother and I were in Cortina with our maternal grandparents. My father was supposed to leave on the Conte Di Savoia, in late August 1939, and my mother was there seeing him off. But the ship did not sail: they said it had engine trouble and that it might leave the next day. Some body we knew in Rome told us that the delay was because war was about to break-out.

I had gone to bed thinking my father had sailed, when we were phoned in the night: it was my mother saying that the ship had not sailed, it might sail tomorrow. If it is war we don’t want to be separated, bring the children to Genoa, and we will leave the next day. She went back to Milan and told the maids to put everything that was in the wardrobe rooms, into trunks.

AC one of the difficulties is that you were not allowed to bring money abroad…

GC Exactly. My father had had enough shirts made so that he did not need shirts for fifteen years!  What the maids took from the wardrobes and put into the trunks was not necessarily what we needed in the US. For instance upon opening them we found diapers from when we were small. Those were eventually sewn together and made into sheets for my father’s examining room here…

AC How did you get to Genoa?

GC My brother and I, our maternal grandparents, and our nanny — a wonderful woman from Friuli, very religious, very Catholic and fiercely anti-Fascist— she had been with us since the time my brother was born, took a train. I remember that ride very well because we could not get a sleeper, it was too late, and so we all were in a first class carriage, which was unusual.  In families of our sort parents would typically go first class, the children and the nanny would go in second class, not to disturb the people in first. I thought those red plush cushions in first class were lovely, and was very excited that we were going to America. My brother and I were shouting “We are going to America!” without knowing at all what that meant, while our grandparents, looked like death, because their daughter was leaving, their other daughter having already left for Brazil. We arrived in Genoa, and the ship did not sail.

So we thought, war is really coming. Obviously, we did not want to go back to Cortina, near the German border, and we also did not want to go back to Milan because it might be bombed.

AC You had to separate again?

GC Yes. My father went back to Milan to see if there was some other way to leave the country, while we went to our maternal grandparents’ villa, L’Uccelletto, on the Via Emilia, just outside Bologna. —L’Uccelletto, has become over the years a collective dream for our family, everyone has been trying to rebuild l’Uccelletto—

While we were there, my father was frantically searching for other ways to have us leave. The President Monroe, of the American President Lines, was despatched to bring American nationals back home because of the war crisis. The ship was so full that they needed an extra ship doctor and offered the spot to my father. His reply was that he would only go if his family could travel with him. So again we thought we would be leaving… Our trunks were somewhere between Genoa and Bologna.

But eventually they found another doctor who wanted to leave and did not have a family with him, so our departure was postponed again

The evening that the trunks arrived at L’Uccelletto —I had a little earphone radio—I heard that the Rex — the flagship of the Italian lines (which appears in Fellini’s Amarcord)—  was leaving on the 8^th of September. What had happened was that war had broken out, but Italy had not joined. So the ship was sailing. I turned to tell my mother that I heard this, I was six but I knew what was going on. The phone rang: it was my father from Milan saying he had tickets for us on the Rex. We immediately went back to Genoa with the still unopened trunks. We got on board on the 8^th of September, and arrived in New York on the 16^th.

AC How was the beginning of your American life?

GC Not easy. The problem was that, because of the uncertainties of our departure my father’s fellowship at Yale had been arranged for the second term. So when we arrived my father did not have a job, and things were not easy. We went to a dismal hotel on the West Side that a distant cousin of ours, the only person we knew in the US, had indicated. This cousin, Paolo Contini, because he was tall and handsome, had been sent by the Fascists to study law in Berkley, California.

My parents had sent Paolo a telegram from the ship asking him to find us a really cheap hotel in New York where we could stay a few months. The hotel was cheap indeed: it cost $10 a month for four people with food — if you can call what they gave us, food—

I know this because my father kept the receipts for the first two months, obviously one for my brother and one for me, so we would always know how it all started in the US.

AC Your memories are so vivid and precise. Did you commemorate your beginning in the family over the years?

GC Yes, we always celebrated the anniversary of our arrival. The night before the 16^th, we often would go to an excellent Italian restaurant, as a reminder of our life in Italy and on the ship; and then the day after, we would go and eat hamburgers…

We had been very, very wealthy, but arrived with nothing and had to rebuild from scratch.

AC Since your father was going to start his fellowship in New Heaven in just a few months, why did you remain in New York City?

GC We stayed in New York because my father thought that the New York License Exams had more reciprocity. If we were going to starve, he thought, we might as well starve here, as there. He took his exams in New York and luckily he passed them. We did not know that we would end up staying in New Haven. His fellowship was only for a year…

A Dean at Yale recently found the letter from back then giving the fellowship, and sent it to me. It is the most offensive letter you can imagine. My parents never said a word about it to us, but it said: “Yes we will let you come, somebody has given the money, try to get them to give more, but you cannot do this and you cannot do that … and don’t think it will last…” They really did not want us: I’m not sure if in their eyes it was worst that we were Italian, or Jewish, but they made it clear they did not want us. The Medical School like the Law School was more open, than the rest of the University, which was certainly not open to Jewish or to Italian faculty members at that time, but it wasn’t very open!

AC What was it like for two young children such as you and your brother, to find yourselves in New York under these new circumstances, as refugees?

GC We landed on a Saturday and on Monday we were in school. I was six, almost seven and my brother was nine years old. That’s what you did with kids. My brother was lucky because in this little public school somewhere in the West Side, they had a class for people his age and older, who were non English speakers. We spoke German and French, we had had a German governess and a French one, but we did not speak English. My brother immediately fit in with his classmates who were German, French and Spanish refugees, and learned English perfectly in a short time and with no accent at all.

I instead, was too young to go in that class, and was put back in kindergarten, while I should have been beginning second grade. I could already do math at a 5^th grade level and instead was in a class were all we did was make necklaces and tie knots … I did not understand what was going on, and naturally did not like it.

Further I was teased pretty badly and did not have enough English to respond.

AC As children did you sense or absorbe the anxieties your parents must have felt about employment, the war, and the future?

GC Our parents were very good at keeping from us their underlying anxieties. I did not think about the future much, but the present was sometimes puzzling. There were things I didn’t like: I did not like the food! Until we found an automat where they had chicken potpie, I really had trouble eating. I loved the automat, it was very flashy and something children could play with: you put in money and things spun around…

Remarkably our parents kept us from feeling really anxious about things, so that our anxieties were more our own, the smaller anxieties of all children trying to adjust to a new environment.

I have long been full of admiration for the strength of my parents.

AC Did you realize that the family was suddenly out of money?

GC Our parents did not talk about it in front of us but there were plenty of indications. For example my father was a well known cardiologist but without a license he could not practice. Someone at the Italian Consulate, a Count of some sort, heard about him and asked to be treated.  My father took care of him but explained he could not accept money. So instead the Count kept sending elaborate flower arrangements for us at the cheap hotel. My mother would only comment that he could have send fruit…In truth I am sure the Count had no idea how poor we really were.

AC In that period, the fall of 1939, there were a number of other Jewish families, who had escaped from Italy and were living in New York. Did your parents socialize with some of them?

GC There was a significant Italian Jewish community in New York, and there were also some non-Jewish anti-Fascists: the two groups pretty much became one. My father, of course, fitted in both camps because of his early anti-Fascism. We did see a fair amount of them. There was the whole family of Paolo Calabi. One of the daughters, Serena Calabi Modigliani, who later married the famous economist Franco Modigliani, was a distant relative on my mother’s side.

My parents almost never went out in the evenings, because it cost money to do anything. One evening they did go out, I think to a movie, and our baby sitter for that evening was Tullia Calabi, who later married Bruno Zevi. She must have been 17 or so and I remember liking her very much. After that, we did not see her again for years and years.

AC When you moved to New Haven, that kinship with other Italian Jews must have ended abruptly.

GC Certainly in a certain sense by moving to New Haven we distanced ourselves from the Italian Jewish community in New York. We did socialize with the very few Italian Jews who had come to New Haven. There were the Orefice, an insurance family, Giorgio Cavalieri’s sister had married one of them and they were in New Haven. For a time, Cesare and Piera Tedeschi (John Tedeschi’s father and mother) were there and we would see them. But in New Haven we had to be part of a broader community.

The Italian Jews who remained in New York in fact remained very much part of that community of exiles, and while my parents stayed in contact with them, we progressively became separate from them.

AC In a sense you were becoming “Americans”?

GC Well, what did we become? We were outsiders in every possible way; we were Jews but not like most American Jews. We were Italian, but not like most American-Italians. We did things for them and with them. My mother after the war was made Cavaliere for all she had done for the Italian Americans in New Haven.  And my father was met immediately by those —very few— Italian Americans who were or had been anti-Fascist, and had been ostracized, because the Italian American community, mislead  by propaganda, had become quite pro Fascist. Several of them made my father (a doctor, not a lawyer) the executor of their wills, because they trusted and shared his political views.

AC Were did you live in New Haven?

GC That is interesting! When we first arrived, a real estate agent took us to the Wooster Square area, which is where all the Italians lived —New Haven was very segregated— and to Westville, were most of the Jews tended to live. But the people from the Medical School, my father’s colleagues to be, immediately swept in and said: “No, no, no that is not were you are going to live. You must live in a certain area between Whitney Avenue and Orange Street, between the Park and Edwards Street, (which is where all the Yale fellows, assistant professors, graduate students still live.) What they meant to say was: you are “ethnically Yale”.

AC Yale in turn was less than welcoming to Jews…

GC Yes, we were at Yale, and we were part of Yale, but we were completely different from most of the Yale people. With the exception of a few people in the Law School, and fewer people in the Medical School, there were no Jews on Yale faculty and no Italians either. So we were part of something of which we were not part, and not part of those things one would have thought we would be part of. My brother and I recognized this immediately, and not as a negative thing; that rather than being part of any group, we were ourselves. And that we did. We spoke Italian at home, and we spoke English outside. Italian remained our language: to my brother’s dying day, when I spoke to him I would speak in Italian. This has much to do with what all of us became.

AC Can you talk about your family’s relationship with Italy. In three generations of Calabresi men, we find Ettore, your grandfather, who having fought for a unified Italy, could not imagine leaving. Your father, Massimo, whose anti-Fascism made him want to leave in the early 1930s, and yourself who despite having grown up largely in the States continue to see Italy as a point of reference.

GC I think, that in an interesting way, all of us have always thought of ourselves as being Italian. Though they decided ultimately to stay in America, in part for my brother and me, my parents never thought of themselves as being really American. They became American citizens but they were Italians in a very deep sense. To their dying day, they were Italians who were living here.

My brother and I were, in some fundamental sense, both. We went back to Italy after the war, and both of us had the same experience. This was right after the war when Italy was very poor and just beginning to reconstruct. Both of us had the sensation that while it would be extremely difficult to live in Italy if one were poor, it would be intolerable for people like us who had grown up in America with egalitarian principles, to be rich there, as we would have been. So we said to our parents that we wanted to remain in the US.

There is a time related irony: our trip and our impressions were of Italy in the late 1940’s, before the Italian economic boom of the 50’s and 60’s, when Italy became immensely egalitarian, while in America African Americans were virtually not seen; desegregation had not yet happened. In a sense we made a decision, based on egalitarianism, which was a good thing, but we may have decided wrong because now America is less equal in many ways than Italy.

My wife, who is as American as they come, and has fallen in love with Italy (her work is there), says that I am never fully at home until I am in Italy.

AC How does one deal with in effect being, both Italian and American?

GC One summer I had a group of students from all over the world. A youngster who was born in Pakistan, and grew up in Denmark, said: “Look, I think I know what it means to be two things, but what are you really, are you Italian or are you American?” And I said, “ I am both, I really am both”. “OK” he said, “but whom do you root for in the World Cup?” “Of course, in the World Cup I root for Italy” I answered “but if there were a World Cup in baseball I would root for the USA”.

In other words, in those things that I associate with Italy, I am very Italian and in the things I associate with the US I am very American.

Now that is a difference from my parents, who though they were here felt so deeply Italian, and with my grandfather, born in 1870, who no matter how bad things got, could not conceive of leaving Italy.

AC Much of the Calabresi’s American experience is intertwined with Yale. It was Yale that offered your father an initial fellowship, and Yale is the place were first you studied, and later became Dean of the Law School and eventually Professor Emeritus.

GC We grew up in New Haven, where we first were at the fringes of Yale —my father was hanging on by his fingernails to a tenuous affiliation while my mother flat out could not teach at Yale, as women were not on the faculty back then— Nonetheless both my brother and I attended Yale and did very well there. Yale recognized this very early, so that when I got a prize as one of the top students in my freshman year, in the motivation they wrote “Guido Calabresi first generation American, second generation Yale.” Both my parents had gotten Yale degrees and that, in an odd way, became part of our identity. In a strange way I think that Yale changed more than we did and it became more like us, than we became like it.

AC How much do you think that your family history, you emigration story has informed your professional life as a United States Court of Appeals Judge?

GC The way we came to this country certainly influenced me as a lawyer and as a judge.

I became a lawyer because I loved the study of law so much… that I practically fell in to it. At the time I did not realize how much this was the ancient tradition of my family.  Especially on my maternal side, the Del Vecchio’s, who originally were Rabbis, had later had a long tradition in the Law. In my immediate family (grandfather, father and brother) they were all doctors and I thinking I was doing something different, fell into an even longer family tradition. I was reverting…

What became of me as a lawyer and a Judge is this: the most important part of my legal education, of my formation as a lawyer, and as a Judge is that I am a refugee. That I am an outsider.

People don’t believe that I am an outsider, because now I seem to be so much of an insider. But I am not.

My wife Anne recognizes that and loves that in me. It is that sense of not being part of the system, that has made me, I think, the kind of scholar, the kind of Judge, that I am. In the same way that my student, colleague, and now boss Sonia Sotomayor, has always seen things as an outsider, so do I.

I could not be the judge that I am if I had come up entirely in an American system. In a strange way I have Mussolini to thank for that; the difficulties he presented us with made us the people that we have become.

The Italian Section of the Voice of America during WWII

1. On the evening of January 20, 1944, in Lima, Peru, my father Antonello sat down to write a long letter to his two brothers living in New York – Giuliano, a journalist with the Voice of America, and Claudio, a doctor – giving them a detailed account of the last hours of their father Edmo. Edmo, himself a refugee to Peru, had died of a cerebral aneurism the day before. Antonello had sent his brothers a cable but wasn’t sure if the news had reached them or not.  During the evening he turned on the radio to try and listen to Giuliano’s daily broadcast under the pseudonym Mario Verdi.  But he heard an anonymous speaker say,  “Instead of Mario Verdi’s usual commentary…,” and go on to announce another program. That was how my father knew for sure that Giuliano and Claudio had received his telegram and, as a sign of mourning, had suspended his own broadcast.

Why am I relating this episode? On one hand to explain my own interest in the history of wartime radio broadcasts and, on the other, to underline the effectiveness of the radio medium from the point of view of its listening. Tonight I shall try to illustrate these two complementary aspects by touching on the experiences of two men. Both refugees to America as a result of the 1938 fascist anti-Jewish laws, both held highly responsible positions at the Voice of America during the war: one during the so-called heroic period of 1942-43 and the other after the normalization (which I’ll explain later) of the Office of War Information, of which the Voice of America was a part.

The first of the two is Roberto Lopez (1910-1986), son of the famous playwright Sabatino, who was then a promising scholar and after the war an illustrious professor of Medieval History at Yale.  The second is my uncle Giuliano Gerbi (1905-1976). Renowned as a sportswriter and broadcaster in the Thirties, his career was irreparably damaged by fascism, in spite of his later successes at the Voice of America.

2. Before getting into the story itself, I’d like to recall some of the main points in the history of U.S. radio propaganda after the United States entered the war, on December 8, 1941. President Roosevelt had previously created several different organizations, often in contrast among themselves. It was not until June 13, 1942 that the President decreed the birth of the Office of War Information (OWI), merging four pre-existing government agencies into one sole organism.

Elmer Davis, esteemed CBS commentator, was named head of the new organization, based in Washington. The Overseas Branch, with headquarters in New York, was entrusted instead to the famous playwright Robert E. Sherwood, friend of the President and one of his speechwriters. Subordinate to the Overseas Branch was the Voice of America. Its radio broadcasts (in German, French and Italian) began on February 25, 1942, exactly eighty days after Pearl Harbor.

It must be said right away that OWI was destined to have a troubled existence. This was primarily due to the deep contradictions between the ideals of a ‘just’ war and the crude military necessities, aimed at total victory. It was accused of partisanship as well. The 1942 elections had given control of both Houses of Congress to a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, both of whom “viewed OWI as a propaganda agency not for the United States but for Roosevelt and the New Deal.”  This led to continual attacks in the local press.

Roosevelt was, of course, aware of all these problems but it was not in his character to assume precise positions. So he refrained – as long as he was able – from getting involved in the disputes which broke out almost every day over OWI, especially territorial rivalries with other sectors of the administration.

Making OWI work in such conditions had become, therefore, a herculean task studded with ‘accidents’.  So much so that at war’s end, Elmer Davis, in his Report to the President, wrote that the director of any future propaganda agency would need to possess “the varied abilities of a lobbyist, a traffic policeman, and the impresario of an opera company.”

3. Roberto Lopez applied for a job at the Coordinator of Information, one of OWI’s predecessors, around the end of May, 1942. He was hired by the Italian Section of the newly created Voice of America on August 16^th of the same year.

He had earned his degree in History in Milan and qualified for university teaching in 1936, immediately obtaining a position in  History of Economics at the University of Genoa. Barred from teaching after the approval of the racial laws, he emigrated to America in September of 1939 and, thanks to his friend Professor Robert L. Reynolds, found a job as teaching assistant in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His first boss at the radio, up till the end of 1942, was Carlo Emanuele a Prato, who had had similar duties in one of the agencies incorporated into OWI. At that time there were ten employees in the Italian Section: a Prato himself, Alfredo Segre, J. D. Ravotto, Giorgio Padovano, Sergio Funaro, Aurelio Natoli, Leo Wollemborg, Luigi Giovanola, Primo Raddi and Vincenzo Vacirca. Counting Lopez, about 50 per cent were Jewish.

A Prato was a socialist with a lengthy journalistic career behind him, spent mostly in exile (Switzerland and Paris). He had long been inspired by antifascists Gaetano Salvemini and Carlo Sforza, the latter having been Foreign Minister prior to the advent of fascism. At the beginning of 1942, however, a Prato had begun to cross swords with his former spiritual fathers, in particular with Salvemini who criticized him for serving the Americans and their foreign policies. The same criticism could have been levelled at Lopez, who, however, saw nothing inconsistent with his antifascist principles in working for OWI:  at least as long as he was allowed to attack, not only Mussolini and his gang, but Vittorio Emanuele III as well.

4. Here I shall skip over – as I’ve already written about them elsewhere – all the attacks levelled at the Italian Desk by antifascist Italians in America. There is no evidence that Lopez was touched by them in the slightest. He had to have known about them and yet he never mentioned them during our conversations. He talked to me instead about his particular job. Lopez didn’t talk on the radio himself, he wasn’t a speaker. He wrote news and feature stories which others read in front of the microphone. The amount of work was overwhelming. Newly hired, he drew the night shift for 54 days in a row. The Overseas Branch office of the OWI had recently been transferred, in the middle of summer 1942, to the corner of 57^th Street and Broadway.

By January of 1943, the New York offices of OWI employed around three thousand people, over a fifth of whom were foreigners. Most of the latter worked in the foreign sections of the Voice of America. At the time the VOA turned out approximately a thousand programs a day in twenty-seven different languages. It was a Babel, the dominion of John Houseman (1902-1988), the famous theater director and producer, who left us one of the most vivid descriptions of the ‘heroic’ period of the VOA.

The Italian Desk (or Service) – recalled Houseman in his memoirs – was the third largest, after the French section (although the French “did not distort the news, as the Italians did”) and the German one. At the time of the Allied landing in Sicily (July 10, 1943), it employed about seventy people who were

a constant source of entertainment and exasperation.  From the start they resisted all attempts to bring any semblance of American journalistic efficacy into their broadcasts, The idea of broadcasting items as they received them from the News and Control Desk was utterly repugnant to them.

Houseman continued:

In addition to the deep, chronic disagreements, personal and political, between recent expatriots and Italians long resident in the United States, there was constant friction between those who reluctantly accepted U.S. Government policy and those who followed the divergent lines of various local Italian groups.  In fact, there was more attempted interference with Italian broadcasts than with those of any other nation – except the Poles.

In other words, an animated hotbed of nerves.

5. And so we arrive at a date crucial to Italy’s history: July 25, 1943, with the fall of Mussolini and Field-Marshal Pietro Badoglio named prime minister in his stead.

That Sunday Roosevelt was at his cottage “Shangrila,” about sixty miles north of Washington, with two of his closest advisors, Sam Rosenman and the above-mentioned Bob Sherwood, director of OWI’s Overseas Branch.  They were working together on a speech for the president. The late-afternoon quiet of the sylvan retreat was suddenly shattered by a telephone call from Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, announcing the dramatic Italian news heard, however, on the not-always-reliable “Radio Roma.”

Only that evening was the news definitely confirmed. After returning to Washington, Roosevelt made a call to Churchill (it was the middle of the night in London) who was able to explain exactly what had happened.

Some hours earlier, unaware of the events taking place in Italy, Roberto Lopez, who had by then been promoted to “script editor,” was strolling along 42^nd Street.  On that hot July Sunday he was off-duty. As usual when he arrived at Times Square, he glanced up at the neon billboard to check out the latest headlines. There he saw the electrifying Italian news and ran headlong all the fifteen blocks to his office.

The Voice of America offices were complete bedlam. How to react?  The fact that it happened on a Sunday made communication with the State Department difficult and directives about Italy were unclear.  The latest, approved on February 21, 1943, stated: “‘Fascism’ includes not only Mussolini and his political and military accomplices, but the House of Savoy, which betrayed Italy to Fascism, and the industrialists who support Fascism.” Likewise, the joint message issued by Roosevelt and Churchill on July 17 could be interpreted the same way.

As Sherwood was absent, his second-in-command James Warburg, of the banking family, took on the full responsibility of deciding. In his instructions he gave orders to treat the event “coldly and without any jubilation,” since in any case it made no difference “whether Mussolini or Badoglio or the King hold the leadership.” The intrinsic ambiguity of American foreign policy allowed the liberal approach to prevail, thus forcing OWI into a rather delicate position.

So it was that, on that fateful evening of July 25^th, Lopez considered himself fully authorized to harshly attack Vittorio Emanuele III:  “Badoglio’s proclamation exhorts Italians to gather in support of the emperor-king. The king was made an emperor by Mussolini and by Badoglio. The Italian people were not consulted. The Italian people are not involved”.

6. Yet the Voice of America went even further, with an episode that is rather well-known today. On that same evening, Warburg decided to broadcast several passages from a radio commentary pronounced shortly before by the famous New York Post columnist, Samuel Grafton:

Fascism is still in power in Italy.  Italy has put on a new face, that’s all. Italian Fascism has rouged its cheeks and its lips and is trying to see whether a smile will not do more for it, than the famous frown by which it lived so long.

The moronic little king who has stood behind Mussolini’s shoulder for 21 years has moved forward one pace. This is a political minuet and not the revolution we have been waiting for.

Bitter words indeed, which Warburg meant to be broadcast only once, and only in English. Instead, the text was mistakenly transmitted six times, which probably allowed a news leakage. Consequently, on July 27, Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington correspondent and fierce critic of Roosevelt, levelled a front-page attack on OWI, accusing it of having established its own autonomous course of action with regard to Italy and sabotaging any future negotiations with the king and Badoglio.

OWI was in trouble. On the afternoon of that same July 27, Roosevelt called a press conference and declared that neither he nor Sherwood had authorized the offending broadcast. On top of that, Churchill had just informed the American President that he himself “would deal with any non-fascist Italian Government which can deliver the goods.” In other words, sign an act of surrender.

After some hesitation on Roosevelt’s part, this debatable approach was promoted in another press conference on July 30, in which he manifested his willingness to negotiate with any non-fascist, “be he a King, or a present Prime Minister, or a Mayor of a town, or a village.”

With this, the Voice of America was being called to order: forsaking its ‘strategy of truth’, and submitting the liberal ideology, prevalent among leaders of the time, to the demands of  wartime military and the more moderate spheres.

One can imagine Lopez’ distress in such a situation. During the month of August he still managed to get a few anti-monarchical and anti-Badoglio thrusts past the censors but by now even this tentative approach had become virtually impossible. A drastic choice loomed which came to fruition on September 8, 1943. At news of the the armistice, Maurice English, head ever since spring of 1943 of the Italian Section (after poet Morris Bishop’s brief tenure), chose Lopez to write the  main article. As he gave him the raw material which had arrived from Washington, English ordered: “See that we translate literally: ‘today Italy surrendered.’” To which the adamant Lopez replied: “Fascism has surrendered, not Italy!”

English’s repeated insistences that the orders from Washington  be carried out met with no success. Lopez’ resignation became a foregone conclusion.

Not long afterward, Yale University welcomed the future historian and author of the famous The Birth of Europe with open arms:  he remained there for the rest of his life.

7. By coincidence, Giuliano Gerbi arrived on the scene just as Lopez left it and the turbulence at OWI subsided. His curriculum was quite different from Lopez’. Five years older – he was born in 1905 –Gerbi had graduated from  Bocconi University in Milan with a degree in Economics. He had a lengthy career as a sportswriter behind him:  not only was he a sportswriter and correspondent for the Milanese newspaper L’Ambrosiano, specializing in cycling, tennis and skiing, but since 1931 he had been a sportscaster for EIAR, forerunner of  RAI, as well.  In 1938 he gave the EIAR live commentary of the ‘Tour de France’, won by Gino Bartali. His voice was well known in  Thirties Italy. A brilliant future in radio broadcasting would have been his, had it not been cut short by the passage, in autumn of 1938, of the anti-Jewish laws.

From that moment on, Gerbi’s peregrinations began. Paris, New York, ever-more uncertain jobs, a year at a bank in Colombia. Finally in 1941 he came back to the United States, first in Boston and then in New York, to be near to his brother Claudio, a doctor, himself an emigrant to the US. In the Big Apple, Giuliano had taken up broadcasting once again, first at  WHOM and later, in 1942, at WOV as “Chief of the newsroom and Italian announcer.”  During the same period he also collaborated with NBC.

WOV was a private radio station which broadcast mainly in Italian.  After the USA entered the war it was closed down because of its not-undeserved reputation as a den of fascists and only reopened after a vigorous purge of its most compromised elements. The first change in his circumstances came in the summer of 1942 when OWI gave him his first contract as “Italian staff announcer”, and, in November of the same year, another one as “announcer.”  At the same time he was still working for both WOV and NBC. After September 8, 1943 came the definitive move. In a plan to increase its hours of Italian-language programming, the Voice of America offered him a daily commentary which went on the air for the first time on September 27, 1943. Thus began the broadcasts of “Mario Verdi,” the radio pseudonym assigned (with a striking lack of imagination) to him by OWI. His was the only ‘autographed’ program in the entire Italian Section of the VOA. It went on the air twice a day, every day (except, in its first months, on Thursday).

8. In an autobiographical note from the Sixties, Gerbi himself described his typical working day:

My daily commentary went on the air at 15:45 New York time, corresponding to 21:45 Italian time, but I remember that in spite of that my “piece”  […]  had to be ready, barring any last-minute additions or changes, by 10 o’clock in the morning. If 15:45 was “air time,” there was a rehearsal or run-through at 15:00, during which I had to read the “piece” in front of a “director,” who more often than not understood very little Italian, and, before that the piece had to go to the “ditto room” to be duplicated, and then […]  it had to undergo a “military control” and a “political control;” and before the control it had to be translated into English.

At that time I was living in New York, at 53 East 54^th Street, three blocks from WOV. Thinking back to those days I can’t imagine how I managed to carry on for weeks and months sleeping 55 minutes out of every hour and waking up, systematically, at the stroke of every hour in order to listen to the “news” transmitted by the radio all night long.

Since I continually listened to the “news” for five minutes every hour, I was always on top of the situation. Once I had formed a general picture of the latest developments, I got up at 5:30 and by 6 I was already at WOV, where I found all the stories on the teletype in the newsroom from the three major American agencies, AP, UP and International News Service. I digested them, usually finding confirmation of what I had already heard on the radio during the night, and sat down at the typewriter. In an hour and a half my “piece” was written, and by 8 o’clock in the morning, before I started my normal job at WOV, I handed the manuscript to a VOA messenger who came over regularly to get it. I met up with my “piece” again in the early afternoon when I left WOV on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57^th Street and walked the few blocks to the Voice of America headquarters at the corner of 57^th Street and Broadway.

Once his piece had passed all the political and military censorship, Gerbi could finally go on the air. And, after so much scrutiny, everything went smoothly in comparison to Lopez’ time. Little by little, Giuliano became more proficient and his program more popular.  Evaluations by his bosses were always “excellent.” Duties and salary improved. On January 16, 1944 he went from “announcer” to “script editor,” and on August 1, “radio commentator,” which meant that he was also in charge of inspecting his colleagues’ texts, which were often written in rather poor Italian.

9. Vivian, Giuliano’s daughter, has preserved in the family archive in Milan typewritten copies of all of Mario Verdi’s commentaries, including cuts made by the censors. Perhaps a copy of the texts themselves may be found in the National Archives where twenty or so of Giuliano’s recorded broadcasts have been saved. Before I go into the content of these commentaries and how they evolved over time, I should like to recall a letter my father Antonello, who as I mentioned above was a faithful listener from Peru, wrote to his brothers from Lima on February 7, 1944:

I’ve listened to our Giuliano many times, during vacation and again yesterday, Sunday […].  His diction seemed simply perfect to me (and much better than what I remembered from Milan): clear, well-cadenced yet not singsong, without the slightest uncertainty or slip of the tongue […].  [Speaking of his accent] it is pure, and there is a certain ‘airiness’ about his words as if, instead of reading, he were actually conversing. The tone is just right, serious and confidential. In short, I am not at all surprised that he is so appreciated by his various bosses. As far as the contents are concerned, I realize that he doesn’t have much freedom of choice;  there is a bit too much cheap propaganda, which I doubt is really good propaganda, precisely because it is cheap. I hope his listeners recognize that the fight is neither easy nor already won. And perhaps – the average Italian listener should be considered fairly intelligent – a touch of humor, or self-irony, or even a serene bitterness would not be out of place. But here I see that I am criticizing, not Giuliano, but his spiritual directors.

10. Now we come to the contents themselves of Giuliano’s broadcasts which, as his brother had pointed out, were largely dictated by the directives he received. Little by little, however, his comments became more refined, his journalistic experience had the better of political restrictions and his popularity grew, even though it would never reach that of his colleagues at Radio London. Technically his programs were transmitted to London via shortwave and then re-transmitted to Italy by medium wave which gave far better reception.  This was borne out by the ever-increasing number of letters which Gerbi received, from Italian prisoners of war as well as from his fellow countrymen, especially after the Allied landing in Sicily, in July of 1944. By the last year of the war, Gerbi was receiving hundreds of letters a month, some of which he answered on the air.

His broadcasts were all structured the same way. An announcer signaled that Mario Verdi’s program was about to go on air.  Then the same announcer or Giuliano himself, from time to time, read a summary of the main news stories from the various war fronts (this was repeated at the end). Then came fifteen minutes of commentary by Mario Verdi which, although at the beginning more oriented towards bare facts, became over time more and more elaborate and full of opinions which naturally reflected the official policy of the American government. It was all  well put together, with a good sense of rhythm and a growing show of familiarity with Italian affairs.

11. From the end of September 1943 to the liberation of Europe in May of 1945 (and afterward as well, although it doesn’t interest us here), Mario Verdi followed the main events of the war and  international politics step by step, strictly adhering to the directives regarding Italy. On the other hand, he had free rein when it came to constantly denouncing Hitler and the atrocities that his German soldiers were committing, even against civilians. It is important to remember that this was the period of time after El Alamein and after Stalingrad, a period of increasingly heavy losses for the nazis.

Verdi underlined the age-old hatred of Italians for the Germans.  He showed gratitude for those Italians who helped Allied prisoners to escape. He evoked important anniversaries, like October 19, 1812, when Napoleon began his retreat from Russia. On October 29, 1943 he announced the end of the New York blackout, as threats of a German invasion had ceased. He said repeatedly that fascists and nazis would have to undergo a severe purge at war’s end and that Italy would be allowed to choose its future government on a democratic basis. He never tried to hide the losses and difficulties of the Allies as they battled their way up the Peninsula. He criticized the errors of American isolationist policy prior to Roosevelt. He supported both Italian and Yugoslavian partisans (he would always refer to  them as “patriots”). He was enthusiastic about the decision to let Italian soldiers fight side by side with the Allies (“co-belligerency”).

On Christmas day, 1943, he recalled the festivities in warm tones:

The feeling of nostalgia for days gone by is alive today more than ever. Nostalgia for fireplaces with crackling logs. For the joyous pealing of the church bells. Nostalgia for chestnuts, for ricotta cakes, for panettoni, for good wine from our own vineyards. For traditional dishes, for the sounds of bagpipes and fifed. For dances in costume. For serene and smiling faces. Nostalgia above all for Peace (December 19, 1943).

It would have been hard for people to imagine that they were listening to a Jew forced into exile by the fascist regime.

Just as unlikely for us today was the celebration of Stalin’s birthday:

Today Marshal Stalin is 64. It is perhaps the happiest birthday of the Soviet       Statesmans’s entire political and military life. The most sumptuous gift has come from his soldiers. The most gratifying reward for him is the consciousness that he has done everything in his power for the good of his Country. His talents had already manifested themselves through his policies in times of peace. Through an intense campaign to raise the spirit of the Russian people, to give this people, enslaved by the Tsars, the awareness of their own national strength (December 21, 1943).

12. There are far too many such examples to mention all of them here. The documents are available to scholars wanting to consult them. I should like to mention at least one broadcast, dated July 17, 1944, in which Gerbi narrates the liberation of the city where he spent his childhood, Livorno. In the early Eighties, one of his schoolmates, the “livornese” Jew Laura Castelfranchi recalled:

I’ll never forget how moved I was on July 19 [recte 17], 1944 when, in hiding in the Versilian mountains, I heard Giuliano Gerbi, who […] announced the liberation of Livorno evoking the Quattro Stagioni school where he had studied.

She had actually recognized, in the voice of Mario Verdi, her old schoolmate, Giuliano. Yet it probably wasn’t so very hard to recognize him if we listen to Mario Verdi’s own words:

Italian listeners, good evening. […] Many memories link me to Livorno.  Several tombs, in a cemetery outside the walls, on which I hope one day to be able to place a flower once more; the classrooms of the elementary school “Quattro Stagioni” and those of the “Guerrazzi” gymnasium where I spent several years of my early youth, the  “Fides” club where Beppe Nadi, father of the Olympic champions, taught me fencing, the “Baracchina” in Ardenza where I had the best ice cream of my life and hundreds and hundreds of others.

14. Now it is time to draw some conclusions about what we’ve said up to now. In order to describe the two phases of the Voice of America there is no better way than to delve into the above-mentioned Report to the President, written in 1945 by OWI director, Elmer Davis. Davis writes:

an information agency [OWI], in a war which was in some of its aspects ideological, naturally attracted many free-lance writers and others who had been used to working by themselves and had always jealously cherished their personal integrity and freedom of expression. Such a man is very apt to insist that he must proclaim the truth as he sees it; if you tell him that so long as he works for the government he must proclaim the truth as the President and the Secretary of State sees it, he may feel that this is an intolerable limitation on his freedom of thought and speech.  In that case, he must go.

As happened in the case of Roberto Lopez and many others.

Yet their initiative, their imagination, their passionate conviction (if only it could have been channeled) were all qualities that OWI needed, and was poorer without.

All these concepts fit the Lopez “case” perfectly.  But Elmer Davis concludes – and we with him – by expressing an opinion which match the Gerbi case even better:

The more credit is due to the many other men and women of that type who were able to subordinate their personal feeling, when occasion required, to the national interest, and who gave us outstanding service as members of the team.