Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Nietzsche’s definition of nihilism was different from that proposed by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) or in Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchism. Modern nihilism was a form of solipsism in which one identified the good, the just, and the true with one’s own interests. “Nihilism,” Silone wrote in 1954, “is the deep conviction that there is no objective reality behind faiths and doctrines and that the only thing that counts is success.” Postwar existentialist literature and philosophy had clearly portrayed the predicament: “Every tie between man’s existence and his essence has been broken. Existence is bereft of any meaning which transcends it.” The antidote to this “lonely sense of the absurd” could be found not in politics or religion but in friendship and compassion. Silone’s response to this contemporary disease was in his last work, Severina, left unfinished at his death.

  Even though Silone managed to overcome the despair leading others to suicide, he could still recognize the profound pain that was not uncommon in his part of the world that often led people to the local insane asylum. “I still have painful memories of departures,” he wrote late in life, “of people leaving our native village for that sad refuge . . . The journey was considered a one-way passage.” Family members would attend the departure as if at a funeral, while the townspeople, in order to spare the afflicted family more shame, would discreetly witness the drama from behind doors and shuttered windows. Once, while attempting to visit one of the inmates, Silone and a colleague came across an elderly fellow whom they took as the portiere (doorkeeper). He claimed to be a schoolmate of the writer. While Silone went off to find a doctor who told him his friend was going through a “critical phase” and advised against a visit, the elderly “doorkeeper” had whispered to the other visitor that he had been expecting Silone to be confined in the asylum “for some time” and that the “delay was incomprehensible.” The old man was no doorkeeper but an inmate himself who had been anticipating Silone’s arrival for years.

  The consolations of religion were not forthcoming. A “return” to the church was impossible, even after the “aggiornamento” inspired by Pope John XXIII in calling for the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). At the time, Silone and Darina had opened their apartment in Rome to a flood of priests, nuns, monks, and theologians, many of whom confirmed a fierce internal struggle over the direction of the church. Silone was deeply moved by the peasant pope (Angelo Roncalli had been born on a farm near Bergamo in northern Italy) who, in his first act as Christ’s Vicar, went to Rome’s most notorious prison, Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven). During the Fascist regime and Nazi occupation of Rome, Regina Coeli had “hosted” many of Silone’s anti-Fascist colleagues. Now it was home to common criminals. Pope John XXIII, with his beatific smile, said simply—and not without a touch of irony that Silone must have found delightful—“Brothers, since you could not come to me, I have come to you,” and shocked the prisoners and the conservative hierarchy by declaring, “Here we are in our Father’s house.”

  In the slight opening of the church to modernity, Silone could see some common ground. If the church embraced doubt, “it would find me, the old Communist, the dissident, the preacher of autonomy and freedom, of social humanity, entangled with ancient doubts.” And yet he confessed to “an irrational, almost magical certainty: that life is not absurd, that life signifies, must signify, something.”

  After a last trip to Corfu in 1976, Darina and Silone did not travel far. In the 1970s, they began to vacation in a former villa converted to a hotel in Fiuggi, not far from Rome and Silone’s doctors. Silone was so enamored of the place that he often extended his vacations while Darina returned to Rome to attend to household matters and mounting medical bills. In 1977, she took advantage of one of Silone’s extended stays in Fiuggi to repaint, recarpet, and redecorate the entire apartment, something that was not possible when her husband was home as he detested any fuss, disturbance, or change. He either failed to notice the apartment’s transformation on his return or, more likely, refused to compliment Darina on a job well done. In his defense, one might note that his mind was consumed with Severina.

  Simone Weil and Severina

  Found among Silone’s notes for his last work is an ambiguous line from Spinoza’s Ethics: “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” It was not the first time Silone had turned to the heretical Jewish philosopher from Holland. At the time of the Hungarian uprising in November 1956, Silone quoted Spinoza in his editorial for Tempo Presente, adopting the philosopher’s motto: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to mourn, not to scorn human actions, but to understand.”

  Silone had experimented with at least a half dozen different titles for this last work: Vita d’una suora, Destino di una suora, Vita di una donna, Destino d’una donna, Vita d’una cristiana, finally settling on La speranza di suor Severina (The Hope of Sister Severina), which was shortened by Darina to Severina. Could it be that in naming his protagonist, Silone might have been musing on his own name and fate? On Silone’s presentation at the town hall to have his birth registered, the mayor had suggested his own name, Severino, when Silone’s father’s first choices were rejected as “un-Christian.” Instead of taking the mayor’s name, the town clerk’s was used.

  Severina is the contemporary story of a young nun who refuses an order from her mother superior to give false testimony in court after a worker is killed by police in a political demonstration. In his insistence that moral conscience is far superior to mere obedience, Silone was consciously echoing the Hebrew prophets. If the prophets had first articulated this new moral imperative, Silone discerned it as well in Spinoza and, most powerfully, in Simone Weil. This motif was to be most fully developed in Severina, completed after his death by Darina. But the idea ran like a thread throughout his entire oeuvre.

  For Silone, assiduous reader of the Old Testament, the Hebrews represented an unprecedented moral example: absolute fidelity to human conscience through time and historical experiences such as exile, slavery, oppression, the Crusades, the Inquisition, totalitarianism, and attempts at extermination. Yet curiously, there are only two Jewish characters in Silone’s fiction, both found in A Handful of Blackberries: the Austrian Jew Stern, “a timid, courteous, bearded little man, garbed in black,” and his precocious daughter. When the inhabitants of the roadside inn are told that the word “stern” means “star,” they name the daughter Stella (Italian for “star”). Stern and his daughter had arrived in Italy from Vienna after the anschluss. Scheduled to be deported to an extermination camp, they were instead sent to the road-house inn by a humane Fascist police officer.

  Silone, a political exile himself, sensed a fraternity with the Jews (he often liked to recount the story of the Holy Family’s flight from Herod), and Stern is a sympathetic character. For the peasants of Abruzzo, the two Jews are the personification of a persecuted race, one that had become the scapegoat of humanity. Their presence creates two theological problems, touchingly human and absurd. When the elderly Stern is close to death, Zaccaria, the ornery old bandit in charge of the roadside inn, sends for the local priest, Don Nicola. Upon arriving in the middle of a snowstorm, after having been threatened with an attack by the ferocious mountain wolves, Don Nicola discovers that the deathbed scene belongs to old Stern. When Zaccaria, citing the ancient laws of hospitality, insists that the priest administer the last rites, Don Nicola refuses because of the old man’s Jewish faith. The argument threatens to escalate into violence until an agreement is finally reached: Zaccaria’s wife, Giuditta, is dispatched to the deathbed to inquire if old man Stern wishes to receive the last rites. She returns with his answer: He would prefer to die “in the religion of his ancestors,” but remembering a talk with Don Nicola about the brotherhood of all men, would like to speak one last time with the priest about the subject.

  Entering the room, Don Nicola finds Stella reading to her father from the Torah: “Our fathers trusted in Thee; they trusted and Thou didst deliver them. They cried unto Thee
and were delivered; they trusted in Thee and were not confounded.” When Stella falls asleep, Don Nicola takes her place reading from the Book of Job. Don Nicola is then charged with a solemn task:

  “Forgive me,” said the dying man. “I leave my daughter in your charge.”

  “Have no fears for her,” said Giuditta.

  “She’s not of your religion,” added the dying man. “Will you respect her?”

  “Do you doubt it?” answered Zaccaria.

  Signor Stern repeated his question, turning his eyes to the priest: “Will you respect her?”

  “We shall love her,” answered Don Nicola.

  “I’m sure of that,” murmured Signor Stern. “I know you. You’re good people, warmhearted people. But will you also respect her?” . . .

  Toward midnight old Stern revived, but Don Nicola was not fooled; he knew it was the rally that often precedes death.

  “Do you really believe,” Signor Stern asked Don Nicola, “that there is some meaning in it all? Are you sure?”

  Then he said: “Now tell me about our being all children of the same Father.”

  This deathbed request comes to haunt Don Nicola when he is confronted by his parochial, bigoted spinster sister, Adele, to address the growing dual scandals of having an unbaptized person (Stella) in his parish, and the even more scandalous relationship between Stella and Rocco De Donatis, Silone’s alter ego. The growing tension between brother and sister finally explodes one night as they sit down for the evening meal.

  “I’ll appeal to the Bishop,” she said vehemently and furiously. “The scandal can’t go on.”

  “What scandal are you talking about?”

  “Your laziness about the Jewess.”

  “In what way? You mean there’s a scandal that there are other religions in the world besides the Catholic religion? But that’s an old scandal . . .”

  “What are you doing to enlighten her and guide her?” pursued his sister in a nagging voice. “What have you done up to now?”

  “Very little, alas,” confessed Don Nicola . . . “Love is the best catechism. For the rest, faith is a matter of Grace.”

  Brother and sister continue their verbal parrying, with Adele accusing her brother of blasphemy and Nicola increasingly vigorous in his defense of his position and Stella’s right to her own conscience. In one of Silone’s few direct references to the Holocaust, Don Nicola challenges his sister:

  “Stella was driven by violence from her home and her country,” Don Nicola went on, taking courage. “I can’t be silent any longer, you must listen to me. She was hunted out of that Catholic country. By violence. Now she is here with us, an orphan. But hundreds of thousands belonging to her faith are at this very moment being persecuted, robbed, massacred, burned alive. According to my humble but irremovable way of thinking, a man with any sense of charity and decency, in the presence of that forlorn little being, can only feel ashamed and be silent.”

  (When a friend and colleague asked me about Silone’s writings on the Holocaust, I was forced to concede that, surprisingly, he had written little or nothing on the subject. Perhaps he thought that in the face of such horror, he, as a writer and a Christian, could only remain “ashamed and silent.”)

  As Adele admonishes him not to forget that he is a Catholic priest, Don Nicola shoots back that he cannot forget that Stella is also a human being and that a “war of extermination” is being fought against her and her people. Their epic confrontation reaches a climax when Adele insists that the Lord abandoned the Temple and that their religion is false, to which Don Nicola responds, “And what if it is?” The spinster flares up “like a match” and asks if her brother has gone mad. In truth, Don Nicola finds himself standing on the very brink of two sins, heresy and indiscipline, the first as a Catholic, the second in his capacity as priest.

  A Handful of Blackberries, then, is the story not only of Silone’s estrangement from the PCI through the figure of Rocco De Donatis, but also of Silone’s estrangement from the church through the figure of Don Nicola. De Donatis and Don Nicola, who had been inseparable as boyhood friends, took different paths yet ended up in the same place, together at novel’s end, the former expelled from the party, the latter leaving his shrew of a sister and following De Donatis in his wanderings.

  While the Jews did not figure prominently in his fiction, Silone was sensitive to the contemporary plight of Jewish intellectuals, especially in the Soviet bloc. He thundered with rage in a January 1957 letter to the Russian writer Ivan Anissimov about the fate of Isaac Babel. The Jewish writer had given a speech at the first Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934 in which he declared that he was fast becoming a master of a new literary genre, “the genre of silence,” and a year later he addressed the writers and artists of the West at the International Congress of Writers in Paris. During Stalin’s purge, his mentor Gorky died under mysterious circumstances. (Was he really, Silone asked Anissimov, poisoned by the political police?) Babel was arrested in the spring of 1939 and executed in January 1940, although the official Soviet version, passed on by the Russian Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, was that he perished in a labor camp. Of the long line of Jewish writers condemned and killed under the grotesque charge of “cosmopolitanism,” “I have only these names: D. Bergelson, Perez Markisc [sic], Itzik Feffer, Der Nistar, Moshe Kulbak; but what of the others?” Silone even cites an essay by Bernard Turner in the Tel Aviv journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), “With Jewish Writers in Siberia,” in which he mentions, among other things, the rumor that Ehrenburg was an informer for the Soviet police.

  Accepting the Jerusalem Prize for literature in 1969, Silone recalled, “During my exile in Zurich, I came to know and befriend many Jews, of every social condition, and with some of them I have remained tied all the rest of my life. I will never forget their accounts of suffering and sorrow.” Through these Jewish refugees, he came to know a few words of Yiddish. His favorite, which he used in response to those who questioned his traveling to Israel to accept the award in the wake of the 1967 war, was “nebbish.” “I could not have found an Italian word that was more precise. Nebbish is a marvelous word, untranslatable, mutable according to the voice and the attitude of the speaker; it is an authentic philological jewel.”

  Silone’s encounter with the life and work of Simone Weil presented another fundamental turning point in his life, so important that two biographers refer to her as “a second life companion” (una seconda compagna di vita). But even here, Silone could not bring himself to admit that it was Darina who had introduced him to the tragic figure of Weil.

  “It was not easy,” Darina recalled in an interview shortly before her death, “to give gifts to Silone.” On its publication in 1950, she gave her husband a copy of Simone Weil’s Attente de Dieu. Judging by his copy marked by different pencils revealing many readings, “I think it was one of the most successful gifts.” Silone went on to devour all of Weil’s work, keeping her books on his nightstand, along with a Bible and a German translation of the Old Testament completed by his old friend from Switzerland, Martin Buber.

  Not all contemporary writers shared Silone’s enthusiasm for Weil. Susan Sontag criticized Weil’s “anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church,” her “Gnostic theology of divine absence,” her “ideals of body denial,” and her “violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews.” But to André Gide, Weil was the “most spiritual writer of this century”; for Camus she was “the only great spirit of our times.” T. S. Eliot called her “a woman of genius, akin to that of a saint.” The critic Leslie Fiedler described her as “the Outsider as Saint in an age of alienation.”

  Weil (1909–43), like Silone, suffered from tuberculosis, succumbing to the disease (and self-imposed starvation) at the age of thirty-four in England, where she had fled the Nazi occupation of the Continent. Weil had been born in Paris to an assimilated Jewish family and studied with the French philosopher Alain. Her experience as a factory work
er radically transformed her into a follower of Marxism and pacifism. One suspects that her popularity with some European thinkers was based—at least in part—on her critique of Judaism. T. S. Eliot wrote in his preface to a volume of her essays that “she was intensely Jewish, suffering the torments in the affliction of the Jews in Germany; yet she castigated Israel with all the severity of a Hebrew prophet. Prophets, we are told, were stoned in Jerusalem: but Simone Weil is exposed to lapidation from several quarters.” Jewish writers, for their part, detected in her a classic case of Theodor Lessing’s “Jewish self-hatred.”

  Silone, I believe, interpreted Weil’s work as a creative and radical Jewish rejection of idolatry in all its forms, a position that constitutes the very heart of prophetic monotheism. In this sense, Silone and Weil both find themselves reinforcing Carlo Levi’s meditation on man’s inability to liberate himself from a primal dread, resulting in accepting sacrifice in place of the sacred and embracing fear in exchange for freedom. In “The Choice of Companions,” Silone quotes Weil’s Shadow and Grace: “One must always be ready to change sides in the name of justice, the great refugee from the camp of the conquerors.”