Forging Shoah Memories

Italian Women Writers, Jewish Identity, and the Holocaust

S. Lucamente, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375346
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

Despite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.

Part I

Survival and Representation of the Shoah in Italy

1

The Italian Shoah: Reception and Representation

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, use of the term Shoah is a contentious matter.¹ Shoah or Holocaust is a cultural construction in constant evolving of its concept, both for the individual as for its community. As a testament to the challenges associated with the theoretical elaboration of this epochal event, new critical treatments and revisions and revaluations of discourse are periodically proposed. In recent Italian publications, it is not uncommon for the critic to encounter the word sovrabbondanza (overload) in response to the proliferation of recent pronouncements of the Italian Jewish memory of the Shoah. Despite the fact that in Italian culture, the term Shoah designates un’intera vicenda storica (a whole historical event) in the same way as Rinascimento and Risorgimento recall entire periods (Sarfatti, La Shoah 6), its place in public memory is at pains with its narrative construction. Awareness of the Shoah cannot be found in many of those who attended public schools, at least before the institution of the Giornata della Memoria (Day of Memory), a day of commemoration instituted by the Italian republic on July 20, 2000, with Law 211 to honor the liberation of Italian prisoners from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 (Meghnagi, “Introduzione” xxii). Michele Battini effectively analyzes the possible “reazioni di rigetto” (“rejection reactions”) to the Shoah as the impending “assuefazione” (“inurement”) to the Giornata della Memoria (“La Shoah” 3–13). Among Italian historians, Anna Rossi-Doria shares the same concerns as Enzo Traverso regarding the validity of the Giornata della Memoria for—in her view—events held throughout Italy on this day are often reduced to repetitive oral testimonies by few remaining survivors (“Il conflitto” 59–65). The risks of rhetoric are multitudinous:

We are sorry to say: the Jewish imperative of memory (Zachòr), unbeknownst to unaware Yerushalmi, has recently become in Italy an empty container, the citation of that essay has become, if not a liturgical formula, often a given bothersome act. One feels that the time to start anew has come, starting from the gesture that we make every day going to a public kindergarten, re-examining our daily behaviors from a different angle. (Cavaglion, “Ebraismo” 169)

Criticism of repetitiveness even by historians about presumed overbearing and stale testimonies unearths a concrete concern about a correct mechanism of transmission of public memory in contemporary Italy. Contempt for the necessity to commemorate the Shoah as demonstrated by Italian culture is partly the result of a detrimental process whereby the memorialization of the event has been made banal and didactic in recent years. Paradoxically, in contemporary Italian society the fear of ritualization (following the Giornata della Memoria) intersects with a persistent lack of correct knowledge and need for the elaboration of the facts surrounding the Shoah. Before acquiring any indispensable knowledge, individuals advance a kind of moral fatigue that manifests, in turn, a collective anxiety that prevents contemporaries from looking at their immediate past. It is as if, by turning their attention away from the present and looking at the failure of human values in the twentieth century’s tale of progress, one might lose track of the pursuit of happiness as dictated by a contemporary culture driven by consumerism. As Zygmunt Bauman often notes, our lives are governed by such an ephemeral pursuit: we are not allowed to mourn, for there can be hardly anything to mourn in a society ruled by the right to happiness (material, of course). Or else, the diagnosis can be Pier Paolo Pasolini’s: that we are a people with no memory, and accordingly the past (with the responsibilities that memory invariably carries with it) can never be traced. The problem, then, lies not so much and not only in the necessity of knowing the facts about the Shoah or in its stale ritualization, but perhaps in how to remediate the inability to cultivate a humus apt to raise awareness about the relative ease by which systemic (and tolerated) intolerance spreads and produces historical events like the Shoah. Dehumanization can find a politicized and juridical system of difference (laws allowing for its formalization) at any given time. We need to come to terms with how the unveiling of a pronominal fiction, one that opposes the “us” to the “them,” can reach such outcomes. The “them” indicates the discriminated minority against whose persecution the majority of Italians said little or nothing. Racial intolerance can hardly mark a specific point in history. It can touch tragic peaks, however, and the Giornata della Memoria has institutionalized the need to remember them. Like all institutionalized commemorations, it risks becoming rote, but its role is nevertheless valid, for public action must exact the act of fare memoria (making memory) that every member of society recognizes and understands. But memory comes laden with questions about its very object. For David Bidussa, “[f]or an event to become of national significance for an entire community one needs to build the awareness of a mourning, thus of a void: a thing, that is, to publicly mark a before and an after. In that void, one builds a public memory” (“Che cosa”). The void, the fissure, the caesura, the rupture, the break: how many metaphors have we read/used to define the Shoah? And why should we be constantly turning to the past to fill the void? In Italian popular culture, there is perhaps no better example than the one survivor Davide offers in Ferzan Özpetek’s 2003 film La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows); he advises his young friend Giovanna with the following: “Non si accontenti di sopravvivere, lei deve pretendere di vivere in un mondo migliore!” (“Don’t be just satisfied by surviving, you must demand to live in a better world!”) The hope is that a better world can, and must exist. We must all demand to live in a better world while cognizant of “a current cultural and political isolation of the Jewish Memory, [ . . . ] of a prejudice widely spread among the Gentiles” (Battini, Il socialismo, 204). Symbolically, Giovanna befriends Davide on a bridge connecting historic downtown Rome and Trastevere where Jews first settled. Her character’s development reflects the benefits of Davide’s long memory on a new generation. Similar to the intervention in the life of Antonietta by another discriminated individual, homosexual radio broadcaster Gabriele in Ettore Scola’s 1977 film Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), Davide transmits and shares his suffering of a double discrimination with the member of yet another discriminated group, a married woman of humble conditions and with no education. Giovanna’s lack of knowledge of the deportation of the Roman Jews in 1943 demands that we reflect on two different kinds of history, the one we study (written) and the one previous generations hand down to us (oral). If Giovanna knows the reason for the tattoo she notices on Davide’s left arm while—in an instinctively maternal gesture—she takes care of him in the bathroom, she knows it only because, like many, she has heard stories or seen popular representations of an event that feels remote from her. It’s easy to speculate that the majority of Italians have seen Steven Spielberg’s 1992 Schindler’s List on television (Perra, 183–86). What Giovanna does not master is the history that concerns her own city and the persecutions that occurred in her hometown, Rome. Ignorance of what happened 60 years prior to 2003 in the very ghetto where spectators see her drinking a beer in Piazzetta Mattei with old Davide, persists as our collective problem. Giovanna knows nothing of the Roman roundup and deportation because social and gender discrimination, as well as her lack of educational assets confine her ability to build awareness of the event. Facing Windows—a film replete with powerful however rhetorical images, like that of a hand imprinted on a wall in the ghetto to symbolize the bloodshed by the paths of history—represents an emblematic case of a non-engagé product that aims high nevertheless: attempting to fill the void between the generation who survived the Shoah and the generation that would follow.² Davide’s journey into his own past is more fruitful for his interlocutor, Giovanna, than for himself, because she will listen to his testimony. Although entirely fictional, this relationship between two generations embodies the core of how public memory should be constructed and awareness raised. Without a collective effort (of which the image of a public in a movie theater is emblematic), one cannot begin to fill any void with vitally lacking basic knowledge. Reception through media constructs and arouses interest and curiosity that can lead to awareness. Without at least this, gaining a stable and collective memory becomes an almost impossible task and revisionism lurks menacingly on the horizon. We need to question what we think we know as a constructive method of reflection on the effective and immediate danger of getting used to both others’ grief as well as justice inequality. As Eraldo Affinati states, echoing Primo Levi, giving this topic its due means “discovering information on the species to which we belong” (Campo, 28). In doing so, one must include an empathic understanding of literature and the visual arts as revelatory media to gain further insight. Understanding these aesthetic manifestations requires a transversality of methods that should not ignore philology but should consider it, instead, as a vital element for a correct education on the Shoah.

Testimony and Fiction

There are many difficulties associated with narrating and representing the Shoah, as Theodor Adorno’s initial position of nonrepresentability significantly denied value to fictional (poetic) renditions of events (although we know he later reviewed some of his tenets). Adorno’s is a problematic way of disapproving of an issue that, in actuality, still haunts us. How does one, then, represent human tragedies through artistic works that by their very nature transfigure their elements? Correct awareness of such events by younger generations demands clarity and lucidity from us in explaining facts, but are artists not allowed to project their personal traumas or ideas in unconventional ways? In the beginning of the nineties, a seminal volume edited by Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation, was published. This volume’s cogency, even today, resides in its pointing to the effective issues raised by a literary representation of historical facts.

Friedlander’s claim was that “[t]he question of the limits of representation of Nazism and its crimes has become a recurrent theme in relation to various concrete subjects” (“Introduction” 2). Further, for Friedlander, “the extermination of the European Jews can, and should be, the topic of theoretical debates as the subjects in abstraction are related to the way contemporary culture reshapes the image of the past” (1). Rather than denial per se, Dominick LaCapra warns³ about uneasiness in dealing with extermination, for such a topic in its abstraction must be related to the way contemporary culture shapes a new image of the past. What matters the most, however, is to establish what Friedlander calls a “claim to truth,” an incontestable right to the truth about the Shoah. This suggests that limits do exist: limits to both the revision of historical discourse as well as limits to aesthetic representations of this event. In particular, both Friedlander and LaCapra invite us to divest Nazism of any aesthetic of the sublime that has often mantled this tragedy. Additionally, in eliminating the demoniac facet of Nazism, the historical event is transformed into a human situation that cannot leave Italians’ position aside. This helps us understand that by human we do not only mean the presence of good, but also of evil. It is a human face, and as such it is a banal face that must be confronted. Contrary to Daniel Goldhagen’s tenets about “willing persecutioners,” we see evil-committing individuals far more commonly than we had initially imagined. Violence is not born out of motions of the soul: it is emptied out of hatred and turned into, in Christopher Browning’s functionalist thesis, a “job to do.” This banality—the thoughtlessness of the officer on trial—is what Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann in Jerusalem. By extension, such banality of evil is applicable to all Italians who passively or actively accepted such a state within their own country, hence determining the Shoah’s failure to exist as a negative point in our collective memory. The limits Friedlander discusses are those relative to aesthetic representation both beyond the possibility of identifying realities or sure truths (is a thing true if only few, or one believe in it?) and beyond the constant polysemy and self-referential aspect of linguistic constructs. These are the real limits of the discussion, which, in turn, create the necessity and obligation to establish the realities and the truths about the Shoah as a legacy for generations to come. These truths allow literary writing (but also visual and cinematic representations) to follow a path that is coherent with, and respectful of, the truth of the historical fact. All categories, be they ethical, juridical, or historical must be revisited. In the same way, the behavior of the victims and the persecutors, the consequent analysis of classic binary oppositions and the emergence of gray areas should be also revisited, because, as we are constantly reminded, “what is not confronted critically does not disappear” (LaCapra, “Representing the Holocaust” 125–26). But the practices of social memory, such as writing, speaking, and reforming of society could only elicit what Derrida refers to as “the promise of democracy.”⁴ By representing the Holocaust in fiction we are always reminded that,

The Shoah was a reality that went beyond powers of both imagination and conceptualization, and victims themselves could at times not believe what they went through or beheld . . . [but] the Shoah calls for a response that does not deny its traumatic nature or cover it over through a “fetishistic” or redemptive narrative that makes believe it did not occur or compensate too readily for it. (LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust 220)

Whether or not we consider the Holocaust unique, it leads us to review a “past that is far from inert, in the sense that we rediscover it, having forgotten or repressed too much” (Hartman 101). The consideration of postmodern theoretical discourse in which meaning can differ relates to those critics who believe that even the most precise literary renditions of the Shoah are opaque when confronted with a historiographical discourse that is rooted in what was once identified as an objective rendition of events (considered to be the main difference between fictional and historical writing). It is precisely the “Final Solution” with its unbelievability that puts into question any “totalizing view of history” (Friedlander, “Introduction” 5). David Bidussa speaks of the unbelievability as the “essential component” that initiated the entire destructive machine; it was a scene of “non-sense legitimizing the acceleration of the process” (Quel che resta 8). The categories of the “unbelievable” or “madness” direct collective thinking in the wrong direction for they suggest a lack of solution to the matter. Aesthetic endeavors with Shoah at their center—even when created for mass consumption—do not allow for negate quick oblivion of the problem that lies at their very core.

History and Memory: the Importance of Memory in Italy

A series of rhetorical questions opens LaCapra’s History and Memory after Auschwitz. To investigate the complex relation between the two terms of his book title, he wonders which and how events of such magnitude should be remembered. Is it true that “those more directly involved have special responsibilities to the past and the way it is remembered in the present?”; that “[t]hose who were not directly involved share responsibility for how such events are remembered in the present” (LaCapra, History and Memory 1)? Is it even possible that academic historiography stays in its vacuum, keeping its distance from the ethical implications that such choice has for people and memory? Further, “[d]oes art itself have a special responsibility with respect to traumatic events that remain invested with value and emotion?” (1). Despite recent scholastic efforts engaged in the debate on the Shoah, a specific critical literary discourse in Italy—an attempt to find answers to these questions—has yet to be established. The Freudian repression of which LaCapra speaks seems to have bled outward like a huge stain over our nation and its consciousness. There are two important reasons for this repression: first, the cloud created by the misleading myth of Italians, good people, later deconstructed by Angelo Del Boca in his Italiani, brava gente and then by Bidussa in regards to the Jewish question (Il Mito; cf. Sarfatti, Ebrei 103–230). Second, the “Righteous” among the Italians were not few (Picciotto Fargion, Il Libro). Partly due to this general attitude, Italian public opinion has neither been consistent in describing the attitude of the Italians toward to the Shoah, nor has critically considered the responsibility of art representing the Italian people and the Shoah. Interestingly, some statements made by famous political thinkers like Hannah Arendt also contributed somewhat to this aura of benevolence around a much-praised Jewish assimilation in Italy as well as the behavior of Italians after the Armistice of 1943 (Eichmann in Jerusalem 176–80).⁵ In a case similar to the Italian one, there are many reasons that an extenuated “culture of the victim” about French Jewry determines the inability to actually empathize with them (Dean, Fragility 45). This extenuation can be compared to the Italian phenomenon and comes at a time when the research and study of the Italian Jewish community and identity, as well as their relations with the Gentiles, still requires substantial work. The absence of a commitment to scrutinize the problem as the legacy of a certain state of affairs characterizing postwar Italian society (Schwarz, 5–19) permeates more recent French and Italian historical and sociological studies focused on the path leading to current European anti-Semitism. We still deal with the lack of a correct trajectory defining the literary praxis of memory:

Memory is a crucial source for history and has complicated relations to documentary sources. Even in its falsifications, repressions, displacements, and denials, memory many nonetheless be informative—not in terms of an accurate empirical representation of its objects—but in terms of that object’s often anxiety-ridden reception and assimilation by both participants in events and those born later. (LaCapra, History and Memory 19)

For the literary text whose backdrop is shaped by a historical event, memory needs to constantly interact with artistic imagination for, in order to construct its own images, the latter draws almost by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Survival and Representation of the Shoah in Italy
• Part II   “The World Must Be the Writer’s Concern”: La Storia According to Elsa Morante
• Part III   Helena Janeczek: Understanding Jewish Memory from Lezioni di tenebra to Le rondini di Montecassino
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index