He shook the head with the air of a man who could understand if he wished, but didn’t want to:
subtleties, complications, infinitesimal distinctions, might be all be very interesting, but only up to a point, they too have to end.
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
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Hand diagram in Josef ben Shem Ṭov ben Yeshuʿah Ḥai’s Sheʾerit Yosef, Algeria, 1804 (British Library Or 9782, ff. 13v-14r)
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January 27
9 am to 2 pm
Consulate General of Italy
Park Avenue 690
Since 2004, the Consulate General of Italy in New York organizes a public reading of the names of 9,800 Jews deported from Italy and the territories under Italian control.
The names of the deportees are published in the database "Nomi della Shoah in Italia, " maintained by the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan. The initial collection of documents was led by one man, Massimo Adolfo Vitale, a retired Jewish colonel of the Italian army who had been dismissed in 1938 and whose immediate family had been deported. After the liberation of Rome, Vitale strenuously began to collect information about the Italian victims whom, their families hoped, could still be helped. They learned soon that most Italian Jews had not survived the first day, week or month at the concentration camps.
Vitale produced a report of over twenty pages entitled Les persecutions contre les juifs en Italie 1938–1945. As early as 1946, he provided the first account of the persecution of the Jews in Italy, asserting the complicity of the Italian authorities and of ordinary people as well as the silence and ambiguous position of the Vatican. Without failing to recognize episodes of support, Vitale concluded that “after the armistice, the courageous people who ignored the dangers to save some Jews existed, but there were few of them. However the Police together with the Carabinieri, in almost all cases, carried out their activity of denunciation, house searches, arrests and transfers to internment and death camps.” Read
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January 31
12 noon
Virtual event
Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA).
Robert S.C. Gordon (Cambridge University, UK) and Raffaele Bedarida (Cooper Union, New York), will discuss their recent research on the memorialization of the Holocaust in the context of Italian public monuments and memorials. Prof. Gordon will examine the tensions and creativity that underpinned the creation of the Museo Monumento del Deportato in Carpi and the Memoriale italiano di Auschwitz, while Prof. Bedarida will focus on the Holocaust drawings by Corrado Cagli, a Jewish Italian artist who enlisted with the American army and took part in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Read
Image: Museo del Deportato, Carpi
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The Garden of the Finzi Contini: from Novel to Film, to Opera |
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February 1
5 pm
Live/Virtual event
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, CUNY Calandra Institute.
A conversation: Stefano Albertini (Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, NYU), Anthony Tamburri (Calandra Institute, CUNY), Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi (Columbia University), Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi), Michael Korie (Librettist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opera).
Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Contini was first published in English in 1965 enticing a small number of high profile literary critics. However his lasting success began with the 1972 film version by Vittorio De Sica which was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Only in the following decades with two more translations by William Weaver and Jamie McKendrick, the novel became one of the main literary references for American critics, scholars and the public at large, making increasingly clear the distance that separate the two works.
This year, the National Yiddish Theater and New York City Opera present a new operatic version of Bassani’s masterpiece. The debut of a new chapter in the American fortune of the Bassani’s novel, through a much richer knowledge than what the American public had in 1972, will tell us more about how the understanding of the book may or may not have changed in 50 years. Read
Image: Baccio Maria Bacci, Pomeriggio a Fiesole, 1929, Gli Uffizi, Firenze
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My Betrayed Garden
Giorgio Bassani, L'Espresso, 1970
But what most displeased me, personally, was that my characters were used so freely, with so little reference to my work, in a way that would have been inappropriate even if they were marionettes. Although fine folk, the Finzi-Continis were not Rothschilds, carrying out correspondence with wealthy international relatives by mail! “Isac” and “Rachel,” distorted the Finzi-Continis, rendering a false and unflattering image of the family. Read
Image: Giorgio Bassani, courtesy RAI.
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La iente de Zion
Laura Minervini, from: Jews, an Italian Story. The First Thousand Years, MEIS, Ferrara. This article is published on the occasion of Giorno della Memoria 2022 in connection to the reading of La iente de Zion produced by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.
La iente de Zion is a Jewish liturgical poem composed for the observance of the fast of the 9th day of the month of Av (Tisha B’Av). It appears in two prayer books of the Roman rite compiled in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was probably written in the first half of the 13th century in vernacular typical of the central and southern areas of the Italian peninsula. Composed in Hebrew characters, it is considered one of the earliest examples of Judeo-Italian as well as vernacular literary compositions. Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of both Temples of Jerusalem. During different historical periods and especially in the Middle Ages, poets have composed lamentations (qinot) that were recited or sung as part of local liturgies throughout the world. It has also become customary to recite these quinot to commemorate other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, including the Holocaust. Read
Image: Prayer book according to the Roman rite, Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Ms. 273 6
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Lia Tagliacozzo, from: La generazione del deserto, Manni editore, 2021
In my family the wartime stories have always been kept quiet. Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, reconstructing them entailed years of occasional discoveries, of haphazard clues, of diving clandestinely into family papers. It was long, solitary work, conducted without the comfort of exchange with my sister and brother: each one of us has embarked in this excavation according to personal inclination and different degrees of urgency of questions and answers. Read
Image: Mario Mafai, Landscape on the Tiber, 1929
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Umpublished: An Archive of Memoirs and Letters by Centro Primo Levi NY
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Centro Primo Levi is the recipient of the endowment fund established by the Viterbi Family in memory of Achille and Maria Viterbi. CPL's activities are supported by Lily Safra, Jeffrey Keil & Danielle Pinet, Sarah Wolf Hallac and Toby Wolf, Robert S. and Ellen Kapito, Peter S. and Mary Kalikow, Claude Ghez, Joseph and Diane Steinberg, Alan and Caryn Viterbi, Ezra K. Zilkha z'l, Andrew and Joan Milano, Scully-Peretsmsn Foundation and Leonard Groopman, Lice Ghilardi, Bruce Slovin and Francesca Slovin z'l, Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky, Ira and Andrea Jolles, Alan Berro, Isabelle Levy and Nugi Jakobishvili.
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DONATE TODAY Centro Primo Levi is a 501 (C)(3) non-profit organization
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