Fictional characters, true heroism of Italians in WWII

Toward the end of Mary Doria Russell’s “A Thread of Grace,” a powerfully imagined novel about the Italian resistance in the last years of World War II, two of the surviving characters, Iacopo Soncini, former chief rabbi of the Ligurian coastal town of Sant’Andrea, and Suora Corniglia, a nun who sheltered Jewish children, are stunned by the magnitude of evil revealed in the horrors of the Nazi death camps.

The rabbi then tells the nun of a saying in Hebrew: “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’ ... After the Yom Kippur roundup in ‘43,” he goes on to reflect, “people all over Italy helped us. Over forty thousand Jews were hidden. Italians, foreigners. Nearly all of them survived the occupation. I keep asking myself, Why was it so different here? Why did Italians help, when so many others turned away?”

Confronting deep questions -- ethical, social, religious, philosophical and cosmic -- seems to be second nature to this gifted writer who’s also a paleoanthropologist. In her first novel, “The Sparrow” (1996), and its sequel, “Children of God” (1998), Russell used the speculative medium of science fiction to present urgent moral dilemmas and explore the consequences of her characters’ choices. A planet in another solar system certainly provided a splendid arena for her brilliant powers of invention. But would she fare as well writing about actual history?

It’s clear that a great deal of research has gone into this novel, and the result is a richly detailed portrait of life under the German occupation and of the ongoing struggle to liberate Italy. Russell has invented a convincing cast of fictional characters and portrays their activities and attitudes with insight and compassion. There is Werner Schramm, a conscience-stricken Nazi medical officer who deserts the German army to join the partisans; Claudette Blum, a Belgian Jewish teenager who escapes the encroaching Nazis by fleeing across the Alps into Italy; as well as Osvaldo Tomitz, an Italian priest who comes to wonder if some crimes aren’t too heinous for even God to forgive.

For most writers, perhaps, the best -- or at any rate, the safest -- policy is to heed the oft-repeated injunction of creative writing teachers and write about what they know. But there are realms of imagination and literature beyond the limitations of this approach, and for some truly creative writers, creation begins with imagining what they do not know. Russell is a writer who writes to explore. In this book she explores not only the actual events of recent history but also the reasons people and nations go to war, the ways in which individuals behave under duress, and the difficulty of reconciling cruelty and injustice with belief in a benevolent deity.

A Roman Catholic of Italian descent who converted to Judaism, Russell became interested in the fate of Jews in wartime Italy after reading Alexander Stille’s “Benevolence and Betrayal.” As she continued investigating the subject, she was astonished by the extent to which ordinary Italians put themselves in danger in order to help Italian Jews and Jewish refugees. “Skeptics,” she writes in her author’s note at the end of her novel, “may believe that I have idealized the courage and generosity of ordinary Italians during the 1940s.” But in fact, she claims, she actually toned down the altruism she discovered in her research to make her fictional re-creation of history more credible. And finally, one must say, the nobility displayed by many of this novel’s characters seems no less incredible than the horrors that they have been forced to fight.

This and so much else make reading “A Thread of Grace” an emotionally wrenching experience. Russell has succeeded in vividly and memorably evoking the hardships, dangers, sufferings and sorrows of wartime life in Nazi-occupied Italy in a somber, profoundly moving book that engages the heights and depths of human experience.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.