Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Giulio Einaudi and Pavese: Giulio Einaudi (1912–1999) founded one of Italy’s most prestigious publishing houses in Turin in 1933. Natalia Ginzburg worked as an editor for the publishing house and her books were later published by Einaudi. Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) was a poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and antifascist. He worked as an editor and translator for Einaudi’s publishing house.

  a journal called La Cultura: La Cultura was a literary magazine founded in Rome in 1881. Pavese was the editor in the 1930s, publishing many antifascist articles. The magazine was closed down in 1936.

  Pascoli or Carducci: Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) was a tragic poet and classical scholar. His teacher and mentor while studying at the University of Bologna was Giosuè Carducci. Carducci (1835–1907) was a poet, essayist, and translator. He was the first Italian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1906).

  Leopardi, yes, he was a great poet: Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) was a lyric poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist. One of the nineteenth century’s greatest poets, his prose reveals him as one of the era’s most radical thinkers.

  Renzo Giua: Renzo Giua (1914–1938) was an antifascist activist, an exile, and for a time a member of Justice and Liberty. He fought to defend the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and died in battle at Zalamea de la Serena in Estremadura.

  The other friend was Chiaromonte: Nicola Chiaromonte (1905–1972) was an antifascist activist and writer. He also fought in the Spanish Civil War against General Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, flying in the French novelist André Malraux’s squadron. The character Scali in Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope is based on him. He moved to New York in 1941 and wrote anti-Stalinist pieces for The Nation, The New Republic, and Partisan Review. He was a good friend of Mary McCarthy.

  Vittorio’s name was in fact Foa: Vittorio Foa (1910–2008) was a politician, trade unionist, journalist, and writer, as well as an antifascist and a leader of the Resistance movement in Italy. For an in-depth profile of him and his family see Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Picador, 1991).

  Ilda, who normally lived with her husband and children in Palestine: Palestine at the time was a British protectorate where Jews were beginning to emigrate in significant numbers in hopes of forming the new State of Israel.

  Her son now worked in Rome with Fermi and was a famous physicist: Franco Dino Rasetti (1901–2001), along with Enrico Fermi (1901–1954, the recipient of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics), discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. He refused, on moral grounds, to participate in the Manhattan Project.

  Barriera di Milano: An industrial and working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Turin.

  loaned her books by Croce: Benedetto Croce (1866–1951) was a philosopher, a philosopher of history, and politician. He initially supported Mussolini and his fascist government that came to power in 1922, but in 1925 Croce composed the “Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.” When the fascist government’s anti-Semitic policies were adopted in 1938, Croce was the only non-Jewish intellectual who refused to state any information regarding his “racial background” on an obligatory government questionnaire.

  This was how I first heard of Balbo: Felice Balbo (1914–1964) was a writer and philosopher. He was a militant Catholic and communist intellectual and one of the most influential thinkers on Italian culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Lisetta read Salgari’s novels: Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) was an enormously popular novelist who wrote more than two hundred adventure stories and novels that were set in exotic locations. His heroes were mostly pirates, outlaws, and barbarians who fought against greed, corruption, and the abuse of power. His work was admired by Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Isabelle Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Che Guevara.

  La letteratura della nuova Italia: The Literature of the New Italy was a six-volume book of critical essays on Italian literature written during the period from unification (1861) to the First World War. It was published in 1914 by Laterza.

  “Nigra sum, sed formosa”: Song of Solomon 1:5: “Dark am I, yet lovely.”

  the racial campaign had begun: On November 17, 1938, Mussolini’s government introduced the Laws for the Defense of the Race, legislation that excluded Jews from the civil service, the armed forces, and the National Fascist Party, and restricted Jewish ownership of certain companies and property; intermarriage was also prohibited.

  the rari nantes swimming club: “Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto” (“A few men appear swimming in the immense whirlpool”), from Virgil, Aeneid 1.118.

  And then there was Garosci, Lussu: Aldo Garosci (1907–2000) was a politician, historian, antifascist, and co-founder of Justice and Liberty. He fought against Franco’s government in the Spanish Civil War and was a member of the Action Party. In government, he was a representative of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party. Emilio Lussu (1890–1975) was an Italian soldier, politician, writer, radical antifascist, and co-founder of Justice and Liberty. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and later worked in the government for various left-wing parties. He was married to Joyce Lussu (1912–1998), a writer, poet, translator, and antifascist.

  I felt as if I were Nancy in The Devourers: I Divoratori was a novel by Annie Vivanti (1866–1942) first published in England as The Devourers in 1910. Published a year later in Italy, it became a huge best seller. Vivanti was a highly regarded poet, playwright, and novelist who was internationally renowned. Croce included two essays on her work in volumes I and VI of La letteratura della nuova Italia.

  it was, perhaps, still possible to go to Madagascar: The Madagascar Plan was a Nazi government proposal to relocate European Jews to Madagascar.

  the painter Amedeo Modigliani: Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884–1920) was a renowned painter and sculptor. He was born in Livorno and trained in art schools in Rome, Florence, and Venice. He moved to Paris in 1906 where he lived and worked among the avant-garde until his death.

  he joined the Maquis: The Maquis were French Resistance fighters during the German occupation of France in World War II.

  the Purge Commission: Following the liberation of France, the Provisional Government of the French Republic led by Charles de Gaulle established a Purge Commission that resulted in a wave of official trials of traitors and collaborators.

  When the armistice was announced: Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in early July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism met on July 24 and 25 and passed a vote of no confidence against Mussolini. This led to the change of Italian government and the appointment of Marshal Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. An armistice, agreed to by Marshal Badoglio and General Eisenhower, was announced on September 8.

  until the north was liberated: Following the Badoglio-Eisenhower armistice, the Germans almost immediately occupied Rome and the north of Italy. Mussolini became the puppet leader of the Nazi-controlled Italian Social Republic, informally known as the Republic of Salò for the town on Lake Garda where it was based, until April 1945 when Mussolini was shot by partisans.

  Nenni’s socialism: Pietro Sandro Nenni (1891–1980) joined the Socialist Party in 1921, when Mussolini left to become a fascist and the wing that would become the Communist Party split off. He was arrested for antifascist activity in 1925 and went into exile in France in 1926 where he became the secretary of the Socialist Party. He was a central figure of the Italian left for the greater part of the twentieth century.

  She preferred Saragat’s followers: Guiseppe Saragat (1898–1988) was a reformist socialist who split from the Socialist Party in 1947 because he disapproved of the close alliance with the Communist Party. That year, he founded the Socialist Party of Italian Workers, which would become the Italian Democratic Socialist Party. He was elected the fifth president of the Italian Republic and served from 1964 to 1971.

  Elle pleure, il faut lui
donner sa tétée!: She’s crying, we must give her the breast!

  “He treated me as if I were a Christian Democrat!”: The Christian Democratic Party, founded in 1943, was a Roman Catholic centrist party that played a dominant role in Italian politics.

  “He always thinks Togliatti is right”: Palmiro Togliatti (1896–1964) was a founding member and leader of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 with Antonio Gramsci.

  He was a member of the Action Party: The Partito d’Azione was a liberal, socialist, anti-Marxist political party founded in 1942 by former members of Justice and Liberty. In January 1943, it began publishing a clandestine newspaper, Free Italy, edited by Leone Ginzburg. The Action Party folded in 1946.

  She’d been interrogated by Ferida: Luisa Ferida (1914–1945) was an actress and a prominent fascist. She belonged to Pietro Koch’s band of fascists, renowned for its extreme cruelty and gratuitous violence. Its headquarters was a villa in Milan that came to be known as the Villa Triste (sad house) because of the terrible and tragic practices that went on there. In 1945 in Milan, the Partisans arrested and executed Ferida and her lover, the actor Osvaldo Valenti.

  my mother said, “Many clothes, much honor!”: A parody of the fascist slogan “Many Foes, Much Honor.”

  had a striking resemblance to Gramsci: Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a highly influential leader of the Italian Communist Party, which he founded in 1921. He was a writer, philosopher, sociologist, and linguist. He was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1926 and released for health reasons in 1934.

  Nobody’s Boy: Sans Famille, a children’s book written in 1879, by the French author Hector Malo (1830–1907), about an orphan abandoned at birth.

  The Marchesa Colombi’s books: Maria Antoinetta Torriani (1840–1920) was a popular novelist, children’s writer, and journalist who published under the pen name Marchesa Colombi.

  I had given the children Misunderstood: A children’s book written in 1869 by the English writer Florence Montgomery (1843–1923).

  Gabriele, my husband: Gabriele Baldini (1919–1969) was a professor of English literature at the University of Rome. He and Natalia Ginzburg were married in 1950.

  AFTERWORD

  LEXICON: a dictionary, or, more precisely, an assemblage of words meaningful only to initiates, or a collection of phrases, any one of which, when uttered, no matter when or where, will at once identify the speaker as a member of a particular tribe. “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people,” writes Natalia Ginzburg in Family Lexicon, “just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of waters, the corrosion of time.” Most of us have such phrases or their equivalents in our repertoire and understand the virtues and satisfactions of membership codes and passwords that confirm belonging, summon the flavor of a shared world.

  Ginzburg was born in 1916 in Palermo, but her childhood and early adulthood were spent in the northern industrial city of Turin where her father was a medical researcher and university professor. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, was Jewish; her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic; but neither parent was religious and the household was fiercely nonsectarian. If there was a religion practiced it was antifascism. There was no deity worshipped and the only form of prayer practiced was laughter; indeed, the rich and reliably laughter- inducing compendium of stories and sayings that make up Family Lexicon can be said to comprise a kind of prayer missile or psalter for practical, spirit-renewing use.

  •

  Ginzburg began work on Family Lexicon while living in London with her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, in the early 1960s. The book was published in 1963 and awarded the coveted Strega Prize for fiction, though it reads like a memoir and is entirely based on facts. At the time Ginzburg was in her mid-forties and already well-known as the author of five novels, in addition to stories, essays, and plays. It was not until she was living in England, in a city she disliked, among people she regarded as cold and lacking in joie de vivre, that she was moved to write intimately about Italy and her family.

  In London, where Baldini was busy with his diplomatic post, Ginzburg spent most of her time at home taking care of her three children from an earlier marriage. She felt isolated and unhappy, and she missed Italy. In an interview in 1990 she told me that she had felt somewhat at sea living among Brits and that when she began writing Family Lexicon she was “greatly relieved to be writing as a Torinese.” And so it was during this moment of intense longing that Ginzburg set out to write the story of her Torinese childhood and of the years leading into and through World War II, finding in the remembered anecdotes and phrases that constituted her family lexicon the Italian companionship she craved. Though the avowed motive informing the work is by no means therapeutic, its very composition helped Ginzburg get through a difficult period. And in the stories themselves, the alternation of light and dark, terror and relief that characterizes them, there is a discernible will to confront everything, past and present, no matter how horrific or disheartening, and to make from each encounter some modest affirmation of life.

  “Si tira avanti” is the ready answer Italians often give when greeted by the standard “Come stai?” (How are you?) Not “Very well, thank you,” but rather “One pulls oneself forward.” “We will not lie and say, Bene, benissimo, grazie,” they seem to say with a steady, bemused irony, “We pull ourselves forward, but—si capisce—with difficulty.” To pull herself forward in monochromatic London, Ginzburg conjured for herself the colorful details of her family history, rich in pleasure as well as in pain. Not for her the programmatic hopelessness that often characterizes narratives set in fascist Italy, in well-known films like Rome, Open City; The Conformist; or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Ginzburg’s project is not to whitewash the varieties of tragic loss suffered by Italians and others of her generation. Her focus, rather, is the mundane interior landscape of a household, the daily experience of living in the haven of family life even as death prevails outside and catastrophes follow catastrophes on every front.

  •

  In the mid-1930s, we learn, Natalia’s older brother, Mario, escapes arrest for distributing antifascist propaganda and flees to Switzerland. As a consequence, her father, known as “Beppino,” is deemed guilty by association with a subversive and jailed. Somehow, though everyone in the Levi household is preoccupied and fearful, comedy prevails: Natalina, the maid, continues to get her pronouns mixed up, referring to all feminine objects and persons as “he,” while Lidia, the mother, continues to break involuntarily into song “at the top of her lungs,” with lyrics like these, which she composed in high school:

  I am Don Carlos Tadrid

  And I’m a student in Madrid!

  Each week the same Lidia, undaunted, carries fresh clothes to Beppino in prison and worries about having enough money to pay the bills. These people have reason to be afraid of what will soon befall them, and yet they remain open to mischief and absurdity, even to unexpected good fortune. Improbably, Beppino is released from prison, and though brother Mario has had to flee, he is alive, and the family can return for a time to what Beppino is always declaring to be their “boring” lives. While it is hard, in the era of Italian fascism, quite to believe in the good simplicity of normal life, Ginzburg’s family can feel that things are, well, not so bad. Beppino openly mocks the fascists at his university and seems not to imagine what dangers his habitual antiestablishment demeanor might bring upon his family. The Levi family, for all its political savvy and sophistication, cannot conceive of what will come by war’s end. Fascism, they are certain, cannot and will not last. Nor can the war. Or so they are assured by their informants and by those who speak in the name of reason and the reasonable. They want to believe these assurances, and Ginzburg’s comic imagination len
ds itself to keeping the narrative close to that shared determination to believe that all will turn out well. The gift for a kind of cheerful stoicism, shared by all the Levis, endows the family members with what appears to be an almost genetically determined ability to withstand—or at least to avoid dwelling on—the worst.

  •

  Beppino, monumental in his superbia and buffoonery, is the most important figure in the book. He cannot suffer fools easily and yet it is his lot, he is convinced, to be surrounded by fools. But his unrelenting intolerance and irascibility are useful traits, it turns out, for surviving the challenges of his moment. Of course Mussolini and his fellow fascists are fools in a sense that has little to do with the mundane idiocies and delusions of family members and friends who are the objects of Beppino’s practiced disdain. And yet there is in his readiness to pounce upon and hold up to ridicule every species of stupidity, including the most harmless and casual, a model for resistance to high-stakes injustice as well as small-scale incompetence and foolishness.

  It takes a while to realize that Beppino is the strongest character in Family Lexicon, perhaps because from the start—literally, the book’s opening—Ginzburg exposes him as something much less than an idealized paterfamilias. We meet him on page one as a routinely explosive—bordering on abusive—father who screams at his children and insults everyone at the dinner table, including his wife. Arrogant, overbearing, effusively opinionated, he habitually characterizes his family members as nitwits and “negroes.” “Don’t be negroes!” he admonishes them. “Stop your negroisms!”—by which he intends to exhort them all to use the language they speak in a way that seems to them (or rather to him) correct and reasonable. All behaviors of which he disapproves are negrigure, a term once commonly used in Italy, though bound by now, in the perfectly literal translation offered by Jenny McPhee, to seem outrageous.