Mara Josi

Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina.

From December 1944, literary texts of this event have facilitated a national and international understanding and recollection of 16 October 1943. They have been bearers of historical awareness, channels of memory; not only outcomes of remembrance but also active ingredients in the process of forging cultural memory.

Wartime diaries or post-war memoirs of those Jews who evaded deportation during the German occupation of Italy altogether remain largely unexplored. One of the first of these ego-documents to be published and translated into English is the diary written by Silvia Forti Lombroso (Verona, 1889 – Cambridge, MA, 1979), a middle-aged, Jewish, Italian woman. A version of her diary was published in 1945 by Dalmatia publishing-house with the title of Si può stampare. A few months later, another version of Forti Lombroso’s diary was also published in the United States with the title No Time for Silence by Roy Editors. The diary as a physical object is believed lost. Part of its content, however, is preserved in the two above-mentioned publications.
The Italian and the American publications of Forti Lombroso’s diary are different. The covers, including titles and pictures, are different. The editorial note in the Italian publication was cut from the American, which includes in its place an introduction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an American social activist and educational reformer very well known in the US at the time. Exergues appear only in the Italian publication. Footnotes were added only to the American publication. The content varies, too. Episodes and paragraphs had to be included and discarded differently. This means that No Time for Silence was not published by simply translating Si può stampare.
There are no manuscripts left of Si può stampare nor of No Time for Silence. The archive of Dalmatia has been partially included at the Fondo Morpurgo in the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale in Rome. But no document related to Si può stampare is there. The American publishing-house has no archive left. At present, we can only assume that in 1945 Forti Lombroso prepared two manuscripts, one for Dalmatia, one for Roy Editors and that one of the two crossed the ocean and arrived in New York. We can only imagine that Forti Lombroso worked independently by refining her spontaneous, discontinuous, and unprocessed diary for publication. We can only presume that the Italian and American editors both edited her work, in turn, thus inevitably framing into different shapes Forti Lombroso’s first-hand experience of the past. We can speculate on whether her children, then settled in the US, contributed somehow to the shape of No Time for Silence.
Without expecting to give definitive answers to the implicit questions above, the two publications and all these aspects are considered here in relation to plausible authorial and editorial choices in order to prompt specific reflections on their audience, the Italian one and its American equivalent.

This article looks at La Storia (1974) by Elsa Morante, considering Morante’s
indictment of Fascism and representation of the past. Drawing from cultural memory
studies and theories of emotions, it explores the influence of Morante’s book on individual
and collective memory. It discusses and examines the screen adaptation of La Storia (1986)
by Luigi Comencini and, finally, considers how the works by Morante and Comencini have
represented Fascist Italy and the Second World War. La Storia is here considered as a
bearer of historical knowledge and a channel of memory, both in the literary,
cinematographic and televisual form. It is not only an outcome

Silvia  Forti  Lombroso  (Verona,  1889  –  Cambridge,  MA,  1979)  was  an  Italian  Jewish woman living in  Italy during the  Fascist  regime  and  the  Nazi  occupation.  Between October  1938 and  March  1945,  she  wrote  a  diary,  Si  può  stampare,  published  by  Dalmatia  in  100  copies  in  June 1945.  In  November  of  the  same  year,  the  American  publishing  house  Roy  Editors  translated  and published  it  with  the  title  No  Time  for  Silence,  making  it  one  of  the  first  Italian  documents  of  the Jewish  persecution  to  appear  in  English.  And  yet,  this  text  has  been  forgotten.  Si  può  stampare  is a  diaristic  chronicle  of  discrimination,  persecution,  and  life  in  hiding.  During  the  years  of persecution,  Jews were  deprived  of  most  of  their  belongings.  The  few  objects  that  they  managed to  keep  were,  therefore,  re-semanticised.  Forti  Lombroso  perceived  her  diary  as  the  only  bearer of  her  memories  and  of  her  emotions,  as  the  embodiment  of  her  real  self,  and  as  the  only  means for  its  preservation  when  she  was  forced  into  hiding.  This  text  is  a  testimonial  object  of  and against  the  war.  With  publication,  it  became  a  physical  mark  of  regained  freedom.  This  article analyses  the  diary  as  an  introspective  prism  displaying  Forti  Lombroso’s  psychological,  moral, and  physical  changes  before  and  during  the  war.  At the  same  time,  it rereads  her  words and  her experience  as  representative  of  a  generation  of  women  who  were  silenced,  segregated,  and persecuted  thus  reflecting  on  the  emotional  impact  of  discrimination  and  persecution  on  Jewish women.

The article looks at the literary re-elaboration of the round-up occurred in Rome between 16 and 18 October 1943 in La Storia by Elsa Morante. It considers Morante’s Jewish origins and impegno in writing of World War II and re-reads her description of this event in the light of cultural memories studies. It summarises key events of her life, as they related to World War II and to the German occupation of Rome, and examines her commitment to interrogate the past through literature. Literature is, indeed, a bearer of historical knowledge and a medium of memory; literary texts are not only an outcome of remembrance, but also an active ingredient in the ongoing process of cultural memory. Morante’s literary representation of the events of 16 and 18 October 1943 is also read through the lens of her depiction of the sensory perceptions of the main characters, Ida e Useppe. The analysis shows how and to what extent the author fosters what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory”.

The Roman Round-up: Remembering and Recollecting 16 October 1943.

On Saturday 16 October 1943, 1259 Jews were arrested by the Nazi occupiers of Rome and locked up in the Collegio Militare Italiano for two days. On 17 October, 252 of the 1259 were freed because they had been recognized as what the Germans define as non-Jews. The rest were deported to Auschwitz on 18 October.
My current research explores how the Roman round-up has been transmitted in Italian cultural memory. It examines how certain works of literature, along with historiography and many other cultural forms of expression, have influenced the perception and the memory of this event. It proposes an analysis on the bond literature has with history and memory and it suggests exploring how the Roman round-up has been represented in literary representations.
Literature may store and transmit knowledge, as well as transform it into an element of artistic texts. It creates images which are part of the procedures of recollection and remembering. Thus, it may be considered a bearer of historical knowledge and a medium of memory (Lachmann, 2010). Literature engages in a dialogue with historians and sociologists regarding the interpretation of the past (Erll and Rigney, 2006). It is not only an outcome of remembrance, but also an active ingredient in the ongoing process of cultural memory.
The literary representations analysed are: Giacomo Debenedetti’s 16 ottobre 1943 (1944), Elsa Morante’s La Storia (1974), Rosetta Loy’s La parola ebreo (1998) and Anna Foa’s Portico d’Ottavia 13 (2013). These four authors decode the historical facts of that specific day and re-elaborate them in literary terms. Their narrativization of 16 October increase the level of awareness of the vicissitudes and of the consequences of the Roman round-up.

Una storia morantiana: narrazioni sensoriali della tragedia.



Questo contributo analizza la rielaborazione letteraria della razzia avvenuta a Roma fra il 16 e 18 ottobre 1943 ne La Storia di Elsa Morante. Considera le origini ebraiche di Morante, riassume le sue esperienze durante la guerra e l’occupazione tedesca. Esamina il suo impegno nel narrare la seconda guerra mondiale, e la descrizione della razzia in luce dei Cultural Memory Studies. Analizza la funzione della letteratura quale mediatore di conoscenza storica e medium di memoria: i testi letterari, appunto, non sono solo rappresentativi di ricordi e testimonianze, ma anche elementi attivi nel continuo processo della costruzione della memoria culturale. La rappresentazione letteraria morantiana del 16 e del 18 Ottobre 1943 viene interpretata in questo contesto attraverso le percezioni sensoriali dei personaggi principali, Ida e Useppe. Questo intervento, dunque, mostra come e quanto l’autrice abbia favorito quella che Alison Landsberg chiama ‘memoria prostetica’.

In the Maelstrom of History: A Conversation with Miriam by Rosanna Turcinovich Giuricin records the captivating story of Miriam Grünglas, a Holocaust survivor born in Tyachiv, Slovakia, who grew up in Trieste, Italy. With the promulgation of the racial laws in Italy in 1938, she and her family were forced to leave Trieste. They headed back to Tyachiv, where quite soon they ended up deported to Auschwitz. Miriam is the only survivor of her family. At the end of the war, she went to Prague, where she stayed for three years. In 1948, she emigrated to Canada and started a new life. In the Maelstrom of History provides English readers with an elegant translation of Maddalena ha gli occhi viola, the original Italian publication of Miriam’s story. It was published on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2016.