For Solo Violin: A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy

Rating:
Summary: Alexander Stille review from LA Times
Review: Against the Odds

FOR SOLO VIOLIN: A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy, By Aldo Zargani Paul, Dry Books: 230 pp., paper
By ALEXANDER STILLE
Alexander Stille is the author of several books, including "Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism" and "The Future of the Past."

August 25 2002
With the gradual passage of those who survived the Holocaust and World War II as adults, we have an increasing number of memoirs of the generation that experienced that time as children. Aldo Zargani was born in 1933 and was 5 when Benito Mussolini passed the racial laws that forced him to leave Italian public schools and cost Zargani's father, a violinist, his job. Zargani was 7 when Italy entered World War II and 10 in 1943, when Italy tried to withdraw from the war and was occupied by Nazi Germany, forcing the Zarganis--father, mother and two sons--to spend a terrifying year and a half in hiding.
"For Solo Violin" is a gracefully written, elegiac memoir of childhood that effectively renders the pain, psychological dislocation and fear of coming of age under the shadow of fascism's racial laws and Mussolini's disastrous alliance with Hitler's Germany. The book is a useful corrective to the many books and articles that have tended to downplay the havoc that Mussolini's racial policies wreaked because they stopped short of the extermination program of Nazi Germany. As Zargani notes, he did not distinguish as a child between fascism and Nazism because by the German occupation of 1943, Italian fascists and German Nazis were working together to arrest and deport the country's Jews.
Zargani paints a number of affecting thumbnail sketches of the many relatives and family friends who were captured and killed. While others have stressed that Italy's Jews had among the highest survival rates of Europe's Jewish population, Zargani notes that between a quarter and a third of those left in the country by 1943 perished, which, given the brevity of the Germany occupation, means that deportation and death were hardly exceptional events.
Because these are childhood memories, "For Solo Violin" is more a series of fragmentary scenes and vignettes than a coherent, complete narrative of the family's experience. Following the promptings of memory, Zargani moves back and forth in time, producing a narrative that is, at times, poetical and finely re-imagined but also, at times, choppy and confusing. This impressionistic approach leaves us, however, with some powerful memories that convey the sense of material life at that time: the excitement and luxury of riding in an automobile in Italy in the 1930s; learning to skin moles and cook chestnuts during the terrible hunger and deprivation of the war; a boy whose only word is "goat"; a poor, illiterate family that lives on hunted cats and small-time theft.
One vignette perhaps best sums up the weird combination of anti-Semitism and generosity that Zargani experiences. After the war ended, the old peasant woman who had helped hide his family asked Zargani's mother: "Please explain to me, Madam, if you don't mind, how nice people like you can eat babies every year at Easter?" The woman had evidently absorbed the centuries of Catholic preaching about Jewish ritual murder and yet it did not prevent her from risking her life to save a Jewish family.

Rating:
Summary: A clear autobiographical testament
Review: For Solo Violin: A Jewish Childhood In Fascist Italy is the memoir of Aldo Zargani, a man who survived being a Jewish child in northern Italy during the brutal era of 1938-1945, when the Fascists and Nazis held sway and a deliberate, well orchestrated campaign of genocide was underway. Told from a vantage point of fifty years later, For Solo Violin recalls the wonder of childhood mixed with shocking events of war and murder in this deeply moving, personal account. For Solo Violin is a clear autobiographical testament, recommended for Judaic Studies supplemental reading lists, and a welcome addition to the growing library of Holocaust literature.

Rating:
Summary: an astonishing book which should be much better known
Review: I came across this book on a shelf, and could not stop reading it. I could not believe such events could be written with such humor and poetry; it reminded me a little of "Angela's Ashes" but in that book the boy only faces terrible poverty (as if that could be an "only"); in this book the huge forces of war are out to kill young Aldo and his family and hundreds of thousands of others because they are Jews. The book is told in no chronological order, but the seven years between 1938-45 are relayed a month here, a season or perhaps a harried afternoon there, as one might recall them in passionate memory fifty years after, as the author does indeed relate them. The small intimate and ordinary bits of the lives of the author, his brother and their parents ring against the great tragedy of war: in the midst of running for their lives, they stop at a hospital for a minor test for the children, the young boy in boarding school with almost nothing to eat devours another boy's lard sandwiches sent from home. A young woman appeals suddenly in lacy black underwear, her despair overcoming her modesty in a desperate cry for life..why is this book not better known? It is astonishing.