First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy - Hardcover

Loy, Rosetta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805062580 ISBN 13: 9780805062588

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2000

Synopsis

An internationally acclaimed novelist and journalist movingly chronicles her childhood in Rome during World War II, providing a rare account by a Catholic of Jewish persecution and Papal responsibility

In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up in the heart of the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood world of velvet and lace, airy apartments, indulgent nannies, and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews. Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, shifting with powerful effect from a lyrical evocation of the many comforts of her class to the accumulation of laws stipulating where Jews were forbidden to travel and what they were not allowed to buy, eat, wear, and read. She reveals the willful ignorance of her own family as one by one their neighbors disappeared, and indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity. And with hard-won clarity, she presents a dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and the Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italy's Jews.

Written in crystalline prose, First Words offers an uncommon perspective on the Holocaust. In the process, Loy reveals one writer's struggle to reconcile her memories of a happy childhood with her adult knowledge that, hidden from her young eyes, one of the world's most horrifying tragedies was unfolding.

About this title

Review:

In this understated yet scathing memoir, novelist Rosetta Loy intersperses scenes from her affluent childhood with a broader portrait of anti-Semitism in fascist Italy. The otherwise effective translation has softened Loy's original title (in Italian, "The Word Jew") but not her blistering depiction of the Church's complicity in Mussolini's persecution of Jews. Pope Pius XI, an outspoken opponent of state anti-Semitism, died in early 1939. His successor, Eugenio Pacelli, had been a papal nuncio in Germany for 12 years, where he signed the 1933 concordat that urged German Catholics to obey the Nazis (events analyzed at length in John Cornwell's excellent 1999 biography, Hitler's Pope). As Pius XII, Pacelli said little and did nothing to prevent racist genocide. Born in 1931, Loy was just a girl during this dreadful period, but she does not excuse herself or her family for going about their daily lives while their Jewish neighbors were subjected to increasingly restrictive laws and then, in late 1943, transported to the German death camps. The author also relates stirring acts of moral heroism--Catholic priests who denounced anti-Semitism as un-Christian, individuals who sheltered Jews--but her quietly uncompromising book suggests that her parents, good people who found fascism personally distasteful but felt helpless to defy it, were more typical. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Born in Rome in 1931, Rosetta Loy is one of Italy's leading novelists and journalists. She has written seven novels and been honored with every major Italian literary award. In 1996 she received the prestigious European Prize for literature. Her work has been translated into eleven languages.

About this edition

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0805062580
• ISBN 13: 9780805062588
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224