The authorities responsible for children have lost the acuity that distinguishes one act from another and grasps the diversity of human traits and human situations; they have lost the vision that rises from deep within and seeks to comprehend what is good and what is evil. In its place is an abstract idea of perfection. An aseptic, rarefied idea. The authorities proceed with this idea raised aloft before them like a banner. And so they take children away from the poor, or the old, from those who raise them and love them, raising and loving them as best they can, with difficulty and privation, maybe in a disorderly way, not according to the rules in the manuals. The best interests of the child must be protected, they say. But in truth it is not possible to protect the best interests of the child or of anyone else, if the vision that distinguishes good from evil is extinguished, and in its place stands an abstract, aseptic, rarefied idea of perfection, conscious only of itself and its own rigid standards….
What is a family? It is the focal point where a group of people come together, whether in a house or a room or a trailer. They form bonds—strong or weak, fleeting or tenacious. From this point, a child views the rest of the world.
Families may be terrible, repressive, obsessive; or indifferent, or estranged, or inattentive; or poisonous, corrupt, rotten—they very often are. But children need them. You cannot pluck a child out of one family and plant him in another except for extremely serious reasons. Even so, it will devastate his spirit. He may be growing up wretched, be ashamed of his family and hate it; still, this is a wretchedness his memory can feed on, thickening day by day. In future days, he can lead his memory through the thickets of that dense forest. Changing a child’s environment is injurious. He has to view the world from a new point. The old point of view and the new one clash. War breaks out. This kind of war can be worse than wretchedness: later on, memory will look back over that wasteland and search fruitlessly for the remains of the childhood that once was….
When a woman adopts a child, there quickly develops a relationship just like a blood tie. How this happens is hard to explain. And yet it happens. She didn’t carry him in her own body, didn’t give birth to him. But she knows she is the point from which he will come to view the world.
She also knows that he knows he is of supreme value to her. And once this has happened, we must leave them in peace. If problems or complications arise, we must bend over backwards to see that they are left in peace.
There is no great difference between the maternal and paternal instincts. In men, the paternal instinct may arise more slowly and be accompanied by more ideas. In women, the maternal instinct arises and flourishes mute, without ideas. Quite often the roles and instincts become blurred. Within every man is a woman and within every woman, a man. There is only one real difference between men and women, and that one is immense. Women bear children. This is why there arises between a woman and an adopted child, born of another woman, that subterranean, dark, damp and tortuous connection that binds mothers and children and seems to carry with it distant memories no one else can penetrate….
I heard about a couple, some time ago, who couldn’t have children and applied to adopt a baby. Both husband and wife were questioned, subjected to the customary long and grueling investigation. The woman went home in tears. The interrogation was severe, arduous, and exceedingly unpleasant. In the end, they were found unfit to adopt. According to their interrogators, the couple “had no imagination,” and therefore were unable to raise a child in the best possible manner. They had been asked if they liked to travel. They both responded that they had no great interest in traveling. They were two unassuming office workers without much money for unnecessary expenses. For this reason, their “lack of imagination,” they were rejected. A few years later they adopted a Peruvian girl.
I recount this story because I find it illuminating. Whoever examined that couple is ideologically under the sway not only of an abstract concept of perfection, but also of wholly artificial and distorted notions regarding imagination and travel, notions of a profound and abysmal imbecility. If that couple could truly love a child and make her happy—a child who would otherwise face God knows what kind of life simply because they said they don’t like to travel—then obviously that distorted vision of the world is terribly inauspicious. It reveals a worldview that is itself abstract, a view in which the words “imagination” and “travel” have taken on a meaning totally unrelated to their actual meaning. This kind of worldview, patching together a smattering of poorly understood and poorly assimilated notions derived from pseudoscience, is dangerous and ill-omened precisely because it is so self-satisfied and sure of its own power; aggressive and bullying, it is generally validated, indeed enthusiastically applauded, by society at large. Pseudoscience is propagated everywhere and for the most part is greeted with enthusiasm. It takes considerable effort to perceive that behind it is the void.
V
…We have the sense that the Juvenile Court’s power in the field of adoption grows more blind, more deaf, and more isolated every day. No outside voices reach them, not the voices of the highest authorities nor those of the people. The bridges between the Juvenile Court judges and the people have collapsed. And thus the bridges between the Juvenile Court judges and justice itself have also collapsed. For if the people demand what is humane and just and get no response, where then can justice be sought?
We have the sense that the world of adoption is ruled by an abstract idea of perfection conjoined with chaos.
To maintain this abstract idea of perfection, specters must be conjured up. To be sure, specters do exist, and very real ones: children are abused, raped, bought and sold; children are adopted for God knows what reasons; children are used to sell drugs or for other criminal dealings. And yet specters are no proper foundation for legal proceedings, or for managing any aspect of daily reality, or reality as a whole.
The social workers and child welfare agencies have a share in the court’s supreme authority; they support it and take pride in its foresight and perspicacity. And they in turn exert the same power, bringing to it a mentality utterly detached from the real world and from ordinary people: a mentality made up of words glued together by pseudoscience. A lukewarm mentality. The lukewarmness, as I have said, comes from the rejection of the coldness of true science and the rejection of the warmth of emotional identification. From this double rejection, the tribe of the tepid is born. Tepidness and abstraction wheel about together in chaos. What was once commonly called “good will” or “human decency” has fallen into total discredit and is viewed with scorn and disgust by a vast segment of society, and consequently by the world of child welfare. Obviously “good intentions” and “human decency” deserve scorn when they are feigned but not when they are genuine. And among the good intentions that may indeed be genuine are a handful of precious and irreplaceable blessings such as understanding, tolerance and compassion, and the ability to contemplate every human face and every human situation by its own light and in its own singularity. In the world of child welfare, all the lights are out. It moves in darkness.
People in the street gaze wide-eyed, in shock and dismay, at this world immersed in darkness. They raise their voices in anger and protest, but their cries go unheeded.
What the Serena Cruz case has shown us, over and above the issue of how the law is to be enforced, is how very tragic our loss of those precious and irreplaceable blessings has become.
Some people want to see the Juvenile Court abolished and its functions assigned to specific branches of the ordinary courts. That is the system in other countries. I am not sure. I tend to think that questions of child care and protection and all the choices involved therein are so delicate, so tangled with emotion, and so complex that a branch of the judicial system needs to be devoted exclusively and intensely to their consideration. But one thing is certain: social workers, juvenile court judges, everyone presently involved in the world of child welfare should, if not disappear entirely, then be utterly transfo
rmed….
On the other hand, here is Alessandro Galante Garrone’s opinion (La Stampa, May 6, 1989):
“Enforce the existing laws: what else must judges all over the world do? This is a universal principle of the modern era which has prevailed since the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution…. I am reminded of something Salvemini13 liked to quote—a great American Supreme Court Justice’s sharp reprimand to the lawyer who was invoking justice: ‘I am not here to dispense justice but to enforce the law.’”
With all due respect to Galante Garrone, to the memory of Salvemini, and to that great American Supreme Court Justice, I must say that I do not understand these words. They may be legally unexceptionable, but to me they make no sense. To me, justice and the law must be one and the same. I know quite well how often they are not; nevertheless they ought to be. How can we conceive of them as separate? Are laws not made to uphold justice? To uphold the rights of the weaker against the stronger?
If not, why have laws at all? What purpose do they serve?
And if on occasion justice and law clearly diverge, if a law turns out to be flawed or deficient, then shouldn’t the magistrates make superhuman efforts to enforce it as fairly as possible? Especially when the rights and destiny of a child are at stake? Or else resign from office if they cannot succeed?
Can anything be more crucial than justice, in governing nations, in responding to human situations and human needs? No. Nothing in the world can take precedence over justice.
December, 1989
acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to Marco Praderio and Daniele Scalise for their generous and invaluable help with certain mysteries of Italian, to Carl Phillips for elucidating the Latin phrases and references, and to Lisa Ronchi and Vittorio Nuti for information on the Serena Cruz case. Thanks also to the National Endowment for the Arts for their generous support of this project.
source materials
The material in A Place to Live was drawn from:
Le piccole virtú, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1962
Mai devi domandarmi, Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1970
Vita Immaginaria, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1974
Serena Cruz o la vera giustizia, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1990
about the author
NATALIA GINZBURG (1916-1991), one of the most renowned and distinctive voices in postwar Italian literature, has been praised for her inimitable style and her unforgettable novels depicting private lives in a disrupted social landscape. A prolific dramatist as well as essayist and novelist, she is best known in this country for her novels All Our Yesterdays, The City and the House, and Voices in the Evening; her autobiographical work: The Things We Used to Say; and The Manzoni Family, her biography of the great nineteenth-century man of letters Alessandro Manzoni. Ginzburg grew up in Turin and spent most of her adult life in Rome.
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ’s books include the novels Leaving Brooklyn, Disturbances in the Field, and In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy; and the memoir, Ruined by Reading. Her first collection of poetry, In Solitary, will be published this year. She won the 1991 PEN Renato Poggioli Award for her translation from the Italian of Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu.
1 “God has granted us this respite.” Virgil, Eclogues, I, v. 6.
2 Cesare Pavese
3 Fascist Youth Organization
4 “Ah, God! If only I had studied in the days of my mad youth, and learned good habits, now I’d have a house and soft bed, but look! I fled from school like a bad boy…”
5 “Youth, Youth.”
6 Italian novelist and critic
7 Private house with garden, cottage, small cottage
8 Honorific title granted by the President of the Republic for special contributions in various fields.
9 Italian national holiday
10 For a period during the energy crisis of the early 1970’s, automobiles were banned in Rome on Sundays.
11 Unità Sanitaria Locale—a public health clinic, branch of the National Health Service.
12 “The law is harsh, but it is the law.” A principle of classical Roman law.
13 Gaetano Salvemini, early-20th-century writer on politics and political philosophy.
Copyright © 2002 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
First Trade Paperback Edition May 2003.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ginzburg, Natalia.
[Essays. English. Selections]
A place to live : selected essays of Natalia Ginzburg / Natalia Ginzburg ; chosen and translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-609-80030-7
1. Ginzburg, Natalia--Translations into English. I. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon.
II. Title.
PQ4817.I5 A27 2002
854’.912--dc21 2002001559
987654321
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