Abstract
Reviewed by: Alexis Herr, Keen State College, USA
In Forging Shoah Memories: Italian Women Writers, Jewish Identity, and the Holocaust, Stefania Lucamente surveys Italian representations of the Shoah and in so doing has discovered that scholars have by and large overlooked Italian women’s Holocaust writings. Lucamente contends that by studying writings by female authors such as Liana Milly, Edith Bruck, Lia Levi, Rosetta Loy, and Giacoma Limentani we earn a better understanding of females’ individual memories of the Holocaust as well as greater insight into Italy’s collective memory (or “mismemory”) of the Shoah.
In “Part I, Survival and Representation of the Shoah in Italy,” Lucamente begins her analysis of female authors by casting them within the greater context of Holocaust memory in Italy. Like many others before her, Lucamente supports the argument that the academic and public memories of the Shoah in Italy do not match. The pervasive myth that depicts Italians as “brava gente” (good folk) instead of willing collaborators and perpetrators has dominated popular memory for decades. Despite central and northern Italy’s considerable participation in genocide—a topic that Palgrave Macmillan, Lucamente’s publisher, has helped to bring to light—popular memory of the Holocaust continues to elide Italy’s role in the atrocity. Lucamente interweaves the historical context of Fascist Italy with the pre-deportation lives of three Italian authors: Lia Levi, Rosetta Loy, and Giaoma Limenati. In so doing, Lucamente lifts the fog of the “brava gente” myth as well as illuminates a tendency of scholars to discount or overlook female writers’ contributions to Holocaust literature.
Lucamente scrutinizes Italians’ obtuse memory of the Holocaust in “Part II, ‘The World Must Be the Writer’s Concern’: La Storia According to Elsa Morante.” Published in 1974, Elsa Morante’s La Storia: Romanzo (History: A Novel) uses fiction as a vehicle to examine Italy’s “brava gente” myth. “In Italian literature,” explains Lucamente, “Morante is the bearer of a collective memory that not many wanted to either awaken or encourage” (p. 161). Lucamente explains that Morante wanted to give a voice to those who felt silenced by the pain of their experiences or barred from sharing them for fear of disrupting a national narrative of heroics. Lucamente’s eloquent and thorough analysis of La Storia elucidates the rupture between the historical reality and popular memory of the Holocaust in Italy. My only point of contention comes early in Chapter 5, “Le Lacrime: Morante and Her Critics,” when Lucamente describes Morante’s “pietas” toward her characters as tied to her gender (p. 154). I would argue that male authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Primo Levi are also capable of writing with “pietas” towards their fictionalized narrators and characters. Her underlying point, however, is that fictional writing affords us greater engagement in the moral and ethical quandaries at the heart of the Judeocide.
Lucamente argues that studying literary representations of the Shoah affords us “alternate readings to reality as otherwise imposed by the writings of history” (p. 241). She makes this idea clear in her analysis of Holocaust memory in “Part III, Helena Janeczek: Understanding Jewish Memory from Lezioni di tenebra to Le rondini di Montecassino.” Here, she hones in on Helena Janeczek’s 1997 novel Lezioni di tenebra (Lessons of Darkness) and Janeczek's second novel Le rondini di Montecassino (The Swallows of Montecassino) published in 2010. Although both are works of fiction, each assesses a historical reality of the past, which reflects the moral rupture that occurred during the Holocaust. Unlike Lucamente, however, I am not convinced that historical writings are incapable of discussing the moral relevancies of the Judeocide. But it is worth noting that I write this as a historian.