First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

La parola ebreo è un libro di Rosetta Loy, pubblicato nel 1997. Insieme al precedente lavoro, Cioccolata da Hanselmann, costituisce un dittico che l'autrice dedica alla realtà dell'Olocausto. Il libro ha vinto il Premio Fregene, edizione 1997 ed è stato tradotto in varie lingue. (fonte: Wikipedia)