TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 : On “Benevolence and Betrayal”

People remember. That is why feuds are chronic (see Eastern Europe). People forget. That is why historians are indispensable (see “Benevolence and Betrayal”).

Alexander Stille is the son of Jewish refugees who spent many years in Italy. Although he was raised in the United States and trained as a journalist, he obviously has strong attachments to the old country, where he now reports for the Boston Globe and U.S. News and World Report. Just as obviously, he holds with the Emersonian dictum that “there is properly no history, only biography.” His profoundly researched and beautifully written book concerns the plight of Italian Jewry, as revealed in the lives of five families during the time of Mussolini. Vittorio De Sica’s 1971 film “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” told the story of one such family, but it was fiction wanting to be taken as real. “Benevolence and Betrayal” is real. One wishes it were fiction.

The tragedy of the Holocaust has been told so often that we know--or think we know--the process by heart: antisemitism as an unwritten national creed, racial laws, Kristallnacht, roundups, sealed railed cars, death camps: Holocaust. But as Stille points out, Italy and its Jews were different in style and, for a long period, in substance. Unlike their co-religionists in Eastern Europe, for example, Italian Jews had become sanguine about prejudice. They had accommodated it for hundreds of years-- ghetto is an Italian word, in use since 1516 when the Jews of Venice were banished to a walled district.

By quietly going along and getting along they had seen the walls come down. By the early 1900s, conditions had improved so markedly that King Victor Emmanuel III could pronounce the end of bias: “Jews may occupy any position, and they do. . . . Jews for us are full-blown Italians.” When Benito Mussolini first entered the scene, nothing seemed to change. The nation’s new leader even joked without malice about the genealogy of the Italy’s Jews: They “supplied the clothes,” he said, “after the rape of the Sabine women.”

Indeed, the patriarch of one of Stille’s five families, the Ovazzas of Turin, actually became a prominent fascist. And Ovazza was not the only Jew to endorse Italy’s New Right. The rabbi of Turin praised the “noble figure of Il Duce, powerful, gifted with amazing, I might almost say, divine qualities.”

As the ‘30s wore on, other Jewish families grew less sanguine about what was happening around them. They looked beyond the strutting marionette figure of Mussolini and saw the backdrop of Auschwitz and the figure of Adolf Hitler pulling the strings. In Turin, the Foas supplied the resistance with one of its most vigorous fighters. Massimo Teglio of Genoa worked with a priest to hide Jews from German invaders. Despite the silence of the Vatican, Stille notes, thousands of Italian Jews would not have been rescued without the efforts of individual bishops, priests and nuns.

They were not always successful, but even their defeats show a decency the Germans could not extinguish. Sister Esther Busnelli recalled the day SS troopers invaded her convent, where some Jewish women and children had been given sanctuary. “We tried to save two young brides with their babies. Vittoria, with two little ones, we put in bed, making believe she was ill. Anna, with her baby of thirteen months, we brought up into a room in the dormitory, hoping that in the confusion, among the crying and screaming, their absence might go unnoticed. . . .

“The roll call began and they were loaded onto the truck like beasts to slaughter.

“Just and merciful God, have pity on your chosen people. Dear Madonna, protect our unfortunate friends in life and for eternity.”

Franco Schonheit of Ferrara saw even worse crimes. He was only a half-Jew; that was enough to send him to the killing ground of Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived, and during the 35 years of their marriage, his wife recalls, they have spoken of his wartime experiences for “perhaps a total of an hour.” Yet in the presence of Stille, Schonheit manages to find words for his long-suppressed feelings. “Stalin’s purges, what happened in Vietnam, Argentina, Chile, Cambodia, are all terrible, tragic experiences. But this was different. This science of organized extermination was unique. . . . Carrying a ninety-year-old woman on a train in order to kill her six hundred kilometers away, even though she is going to die on the trip anyway--this belongs to a dimension of the absurd.”

Stille spends many indelible chapters in that dimension. He has a gift for the revealing incident and the apposite quote; he seems to have talked to everyone and overlooked nothing. Personal memoirs, private papers, half-forgotten meetings, all become part of this remarkable reconstruction. It was, the author reflects, “this world of subjective personal experience--how people loved and thought, what they did and why they did it--that I wanted to explore. Strangely enough, the existing books made little use of a great untapped historical resource, the thousands of Italian Jews who had lived through the period and whose numbers dwindle significantly with every year.”

One day they will be gone. But “Benevolence and Betrayal” will remain, an essential document of this inhuman century, a monument to its victims and a warning to its heirs.

HISTORY

BENEVOLENCE AND BETRAYAL: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, By Alexander Stille (Summit Books)

Finalists

THE CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY: Upton Sinclair’s Race for the Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, By Greg Mitchell (Random House)

FRONTIERS: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People, By Noel Mostert (Alfred A. Knopf)

TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDY: A History of the Mexican People, By Ramon Eduardo Ruiz (W.W. Norton)

OWEN LATTIMORE AND THE ‘LOSS’ OF CHINA, By Robert L. Newman (University of California Press)