Rosetta Loy (1931–2022)

I have had this book for ages and have avoided it for ages. It turns out that I did so for no good reason. I enjoyed it and while it is not a great work of art, it was a pleasure to read. I should note immediately that it is almost entirely description; dialogue is minimal at best. I cannot recall reading a book quite like it and yet it works well. The story follows a farming family in the Italian Piedmont, near France, through much of the 19th century. Its strong suit is the author’s show more romantic, often lyrical description of the lives of the family, the countryside, friends, relations, and servants. Wars, disease, weather, poverty…everything comes and goes, bringing good outcomes and bad. And everything takes places against the backdrop of Monferrato and its seasons. I suspect it will be slow and tedious for some, but I found its understatedness its strength and enjoyed it more than I anticipated. show less

3.5 stars (may round up later)

If you avoid holocaust books, you will want to avoid this. In this short memoir, Italian author Rosetta Loy looks at her childhood in 1935-1945 Rome. She was about 5 in 1936, and she did not really see, then, what she can recognize in retrospect. As part of the solid middle class, her family could still travel--and had no issues with hunger--up until about 1940.

There were several Jewish families in her building and neighborhood, and she also looked for what show more became of them. She remembers one neighbor disappearing overnight, and another family was taken away early one morning. She managed to track down what happened to some--and even found testimony. One man, though, she was unable to find anything about. He fled/went into hiding and she can find no records.

This book is also a condemnation of Pope Pius XII. Pius XI was standing for the Jews, but died in 1939 at age 82. Pius XII was German and, as she portrays him, a bit of a coward who cared only for the church itself and Vatican City.

So while I found this book very interesting--an adult re-examining her childhood memories in light of what she knows as an adult, and adding primary source research (much of which only became available decades after the end of WWII). But what I feel is missing is what her parents were thinking--she mentions other families, shops (including a whorehouse!), churches, and convents, that hid Jewish people for one or many nights. Did her parents do nothing? Did she ever discuss the events with her parents and older siblings? She only mentions her teemaged brother running away twice, the second tine to join the partisans--and coming back both times, hungry. Then they teased him. As an older adults she recognized that he was the only one in the family who tried. He did not succeed, but he tried and they teased him. show less

This lovely, poetic, understated little book follows the multigenerational story, spanning the late 1790s until perhaps 1900, of a farming family in Monferrato, Italy, in the Piedmont region, near France. The strength of the book lies in Loy’s lush, almost dreamlike description of the lives and loves of the family and their friends, relations, and servants. Wars come and go, bringing cholera and high taxes; babies are conceived, birthed, and live only a few days or years, or grow into show more healthy young people with lives and loves of their own. Each person has a story, some subtle, some more direct – and against it all is the backdrop of Montferrato itself, and how it changes with the seasons: by turns dusty and dry, or sodden with spring rains and mud, or icy and snowy, or lush and green with wheat and the grapevines for the wines for which the region is known. This is a quiet, satisfying book that provides a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people two hundred years ago. show less

I knew when I was recently reading The Sweet Hills of Florence by Jan Wallace Dickinson that I had something on my shelves about fascism in Italy, but I couldn’t remember the name of the book or where I’d put it. It was when I was completing the meme My Blog’s Name in Books that I came across it: First Words, a Childhood in Fascist Italy is a brief memoir by Italian journalist Rosetta Loy (b.1931), and it traces the Italy of her privileged childhood alongside the oppression of the Jews show more and the reaction of the Vatican.
There’s much more about fascism than a child could have known at the time. Rosetta is five years old when the book begins, and her life is about playing in the park and at home; about listening to stories and singing songs; about beginning school and her brother beginning secondary school; and about her parents and her German nanny Annemarie. Annemarie feeds her anti-Semitic stories, but this is not apparent to Rosetta at the time.
She takes what she is told at face value. Looking back as an adult, she matches up the various decrees and restrictions with events in her own life and in her father’s. Rosetta notes that her father was allergic to Fascism from its inception but that eventually like the vast majority of Italians, he had to register as a member of the National Fascist Party in order to be able to continue working. He wears the party symbol on his lapel, but he abjures the wearing of uniforms and when he does have to wear a black shirt for some ceremony, before he sets out from home he mimics the Fascist gestures in the mirror to amuse his children. Loy notes without further comment, however, that Papa’s friend, Fioravanti, prefers to work abroad rather than sign up with the party.
It causes tension in the family when Mama decks her son out in the Fascist uniform of khaki shorts and a black shirt one day when they go to meet Papa at the station.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/11/first-words-a-childhood-in-fascist-italy-by-... show less