by André Aciman
GIORGIO BASSANI
THE NOVEL
OF
FERRARA
TRANSLATED BY
Jamie McKendrick
FOREWORD BY
André Aciman
W. W. Norton & Company
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK / LONDON
For Niccolò Gallo To his memory
Certo, il cuore, chi gli dà retta, ha sempre qualche cosa da dire su quello che sarà. Ma che sa il cuore? Appena un poco di quello che è già accaduto.
Of course, for whoever pays heed to it, the heart always has something to say about what’s to come. But what does the heart know? Just the least bit about what has happened already.
—ALESSANDRO MANZONI, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), CHAPTER VIII
CONTENTS
Foreword by André Aciman
Introduction by Jamie McKendrick
I. WITHIN THE WALLS
Lida Mantovani
The Stroll before Dinner
A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini
The Final Years of Clelia Trotti
A Night in ’43
II. THE GOLD-RIMMED SPECTACLES
III. THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS
IV. BEHIND THE DOOR
V. THE HERON
VI. THE SMELL OF HAY
Two Fables
Further News of Bruno Lattes
Ravenna
Les Neiges d’Antan
Three Apologues
Down There, at the End of the Corridor
About the Author
FOREWORD
André Aciman
I DISCOVERED Giorgio Bassani a year after leaving Rome and settling in New York. I was seventeen that year and totally transfixed by a city the likes of which I’d never seen before. Yet within two or three months, I found myself increasingly, almost desperately, homesick for Italy. The only way to quell the crippling nostalgia for what seemed a world I’d left behind was to lay my hands on every Italian writer whose books I could find at Rizzoli, located in those years on 56th Street, off Fifth Avenue. While living in Rome, I had always been reluctant to read Italian authors—now I devoured them: Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Vasco Pratolini, Carlo Cassola, Elio Vittorini, Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Curzio Malaparte, Ignazio Silone, and, of course, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Lampedusa was already a classic, and in a category all his own. But most all the other writers, with the exception of Pirandello, Svevo, and D’Annunzio, whom I also read that year, had started to publish under Mussolini and established themselves after the fall of Fascism and the end of the Second World War. They were still alive and writing in a contemporary, almost spoken, idiom. In their words I found inflections of the Italy I missed and feared I wouldn’t revisit in a long time.
Of all of these writers, the only one whose sensibility struck an immediate chord in me was Giorgio Bassani. He wrote with an intimate understanding of how devastating it can be for some to witness the end of an era, while the experience almost rolls off the shoulders of others. He understood both the helplessness of those who’ve suffered irreparable horrors and the shrug of others who watched these crimes committed but chose to turn a blind eye. It is hardly surprising to learn that, while Elio Vittorini refused to publish The Leopard, by his fellow-Sicilian Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, it was Bassani, a Jewish northerner who had lived through the virtual end of Ferrara’s Jewry, who upheld its publication. Perhaps the two authors shared a vivid sense of how tragic and ultimately ugly and destructive the end of a way of life can be, whether of Lampedusa’s declining nineteenth-century Sicilian aristocracy or, more violently, of Bassani’s deported Jews of Ferrara. Bassani could never undo the haunting end of Ferrara’s Jewish life, the way I too, as an expelled Jew born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, am still unable to forget—or forgive—the rapid extinction of Jewish and cosmopolitan life in what was once my homeland.
Bassani had lived through Fascism and under Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938. These laws prevented Italian Jews from practicing several professions or from hiring help or attending university. Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler eventually sent many Italian Jews either into voluntary exile or into hiding, or ultimately to death camps. Some, as Bassani himself records, were shot dead by Mussolini’s squadristi; others, however, had been fervent Fascists before the advent of the racial laws and didn’t quite know now how to navigate a world that was changing faster than they could reckon. They never found their bearings again.
Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, and Natalia (herself née Levi) Ginzburg, as well as Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, were also Jewish or partly Jewish, though most were indeed totally secularized; Natalia’s husband was killed by the Fascists, and as for Primo Levi, he survived Auschwitz and left perhaps the most clear-eyed portrait of life in the German camps.
Still, Bassani’s world is different; it is about people who for one reason or another find themselves suddenly pushed to the margins of a world where, until intolerance became the norm in the late 1930s, they had thrived and led secure, highly respected lives in Ferrara. But things don’t last and, for all their stature and position, they don’t fight back, or don’t know how. The dazzling, wealthy heartbreaker Micòl Finzi-Contini becomes an easy victim of the Shoah; the prestigious Dr. Athos Fadigati turns into a hapless homosexual who loses everything from his wealth to his reputation because of a thuggish slap in public; the camp survivor Geo Josz can never undo the memory of what he saw; and the syphilitic, reclusive, frightened Pino Basilari won’t even testify to a crime he witnessed from his very window. Some of Bassani’s characters are what the Portuguese call retornados, people who return after years, sometimes after generations, to their place of origin, to feel no less uprooted in their own homes than in the places left behind. In Bassani, however, they return to live among those who robbed them of everything.
Bassani left Ferrara, moved to Rome, and made Rome his home. But his prose teems with the names of Ferrara’s streets and piazzas, its buildings, movie theaters, restaurants, even brothels. In Bassani, one will always watch a young man riding a bicycle and parking it against a wall somewhere to feel one with a city he still loves but probably foretells won’t ever be home again. Bassani’s world is a cartography of a city that could only be restored with words, restored to what it was before Hitler, before Fascism, before the war shook the ground beneath him and took so many loved ones away, restored to what perhaps it never really was but might have been. In this the imagination of the historian and the memory of the fiction writer are constantly trading places and can no longer be told apart.
INTRODUCTION
Jamie McKendrick
TAKING a break from the 2016 centenary conference on Giorgio Bassani in Ferrara, where scholars, editors, and translators from all over Europe had gathered to celebrate his work, I found myself in Via Vittoria in front of a disused, derelict building. Its sombre facade of ancient brickwork was undistinguished in appearance from the other neighboring houses, except for a white marble plaque next to the arched doorway. Erected by the Jewish Community of Ferrara on 20 November 1992, that, too, was commemorating a centenary: a quincentenary of the same date in 1492, when Duke Ercole I d’Este had welcomed the Jews exiled from Spain to the city. It also recorded how the Sephardic synagogue on this site had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1944. Its twelve lines spanned five hundred years of history, asserted the place of Sephardic culture in Italy, and recorded these acts of welcome and persecution.
Was this then, I wondered, the site of the third synagogue mentioned in Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis as the place of worship for a small section of the Jewish community, the “Fanese,” somewhat shadowy and intriguing to t
he narrator, whose family attended the main temple in nearby Via Mazzini? The inscription immediately recalled the use Bassani makes—throughout his work, but especially in Within the Walls—of the city’s public memorials, its plaques, statues, and funerary inscriptions, and of his impulse to flesh out the history hidden behind the public print with the story of the complex private lives of those who witnessed the recorded events.
In that book of short stories alone, apart from the commemorative plaque of General Diaz’s 1918 victory speech in the school where Clelia Trotti teaches, two other public memorials take center stage in the narrative. “A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini” begins with a peasant boy affixing to the temple facade a tablet listing the names of the 183 Jews deported to the camps and murdered by the Nazis. His work is interrupted by the hesitant protest of a certain Geo Josz, a survivor erroneously listed among the dead. The second is a plaque erected on the wall of the Estense Castle moat that commemorates the eleven citizens rounded up by a Blackshirt squad and shot at dawn on November 15, 1943. These are crucial dates in Ferrara’s history, and Bassani’s stories explore their significance in the most unexpected ways.
Giorgio Bassani and Ferrara are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste. Like Joyce, Bassani spent only a small but crucial portion of his life in the city of his major work. Though he was born—“accidentally,” he claimed—in Bologna, his whole youth was spent in Ferrara, and though he studied at the University of Bologna, under the tuition of the eminent art historian Roberto Longhi, he commuted by train. Those journeys in third class are memorably evoked in several chapters of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles as well as in “Verso Ferrara,” one of the high points of his first collection of poems:
At this hour when through the hot endless grasslands the last trains make their way toward Ferrara, their languid whistles fade as sleep engulfs them along with the lingering red on village towers.
Despite the Racial Laws, he graduated in 1939 and taught in the city’s Jewish school until he was arrested, in May 1943, for the anti-Fascist activities in which he’d been engaged since his student days. He was released in July, the day after Mussolini was removed from power by the Grand Fascist Council and Victor Emmanuel III. Immediately after his release, Bassani married Valeria Sinigallia, whom he had met in Ferrara’s Marfisa tennis club—the model for his Eleanora D’Este Tennis Club, which in the early chapters of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis excluded Ferrara’s Jews. Two months later, as the Allied forces pushed northward through Italy, the Germans reinstalled Mussolini in the puppet Social Republic of Salò, which, with their military assistance, controlled northern and central Italy and, therefore, Ferrara as well. With Mussolini back in power, the couple had to live under assumed names, first in Florence, then in Rome. After the war, Bassani never returned to live in Ferrara but remained in Rome, where among other jobs he worked as the editor of the prominent literary magazine Botteghe Oscure and later in the publishing house Feltrinelli, for whom he had the discernment to accept Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s The Leopard after it had been rejected by all of Italy’s other major publishing houses. Bassani died in 2000 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Ferrara, which he describes so vividly in the first chapter of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.
Situated in the Po Valley in Emilia-Romagna in the northeast of Italy, Ferrara was a potent and flourishing city during the Renaissance. Since that time, it had gradually declined in power and influence, but it remained relatively prosperous. During Bassani’s youth, the city’s population grew from around 110,000 to 120,000. A small though civically prominent community of some seven hundred Jews lived mainly in the triangle formed by the streets Via Vignatagliata, Via Vittoria, and Via Mazzini—the last being the site of the Jewish Temple, which included two active synagogues, one referred to as the “German School,” the other as the “Italian School.” The presence of three distinct places of worship within such a small area already signals how diverse this community was. The diversity is also reflected in Bassani’s warmly inclusive diction, which employs words, phrases, and sentences from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, French, English, and Ferrarese, Veneto and Hispano-Jewish dialects, not to mention the peculiar family idiolect of Micòl and Alberto, referred to as “finzi-continico.” During the 1930s, Ferrara was a stronghold of Fascist adhesion; and notorious squads of Blackshirts controlled the city. In its earlier phase, many Jews, like their Catholic neighbors, were supporters of Fascism; by the latter part of the decade, however, with what became known as “la svolta al razzismo”—the turn toward racism—the well-integrated Jewish community found itself utterly isolated.
The six books that make up The Novel of Ferrara were published separately between 1956 and 1972, and each, with the possible exception of The Smell of Hay, is freestanding and self-sufficient. Yet Bassani chose to extensively and rigorously revise them in order to unite them under the title Il romanzo di Ferrara, published in Italy in 1974 and republished after further revisions in 1980. That complete Novel of Ferrara in its definitive, final revision now appears in English translation for the first time. At some stage in the writing, it became clear to Bassani that the six books shared not only time and place and a cast of characters but also an essential aesthetic unity. The seed of the entire work—its nucleus and donnée—is already present and apparent in Within the Walls, first published as Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara). In the concluding piece of the whole Romanzo, the author steps forward in prima persona to give an account of the composition of that first book, and its title “Down There, at the End of the Corridor” echoes a phrase stressed in the opening of the very first story, “Lida Mantovani.”
The nearest English equivalent for the word romanzo is the generic term “novel,” but in Italian it also carries the echo of an older meaning, one that goes back to the medieval “romance”—originally a poem that celebrated the chivalric adventures of a hero or group of protagonists. It’s likely that for Bassani the term held some of these poetic resonances. After all, as he insisted in an interview, he was as much a poet as a novelist. That may help explain why he designated this gathering of four short novels and two collections of short stories by the singular title of Romanzo. But it’s also important to remember that for Bassani the role of the poet is to “return from the realm of the dead and speak of what he saw there,” as he remarked in the same interview—explicitly referring to the character Geo Josz, who becomes a living record of a history that, during the Liberation, was in the process of erasure; Josz is therefore an increasingly uncomfortable reminder of what his Ferrarese neighbors are busily trying to forget.
Bassani’s Romanzo has unforgettably put his city, and the Jewish community he belonged to, on the map of modern consciousness. While Ferrara is present in all its formidable weight throughout, it still had to be rebuilt in his imagination, and the birth of this imaginary city had a slow gestation. (In his first collection of stories, A City of the Plain, published in 1940—with the Racial Laws prohibiting Jewish publications in full effect—under the nom de plume of Giacomo Marchi, Ferrara is referred to merely as “F.”) Aspects of the city’s history are adumbrated throughout the Romanzo, but the central and recurrent historical focus in most of the works is the Fascist era, and most specifically 1938, the year in which the Racial Laws were enacted. These laws followed the German precedent of the Nuremberg Laws and severely curtailed the lives of Italian Jews with regard to employment, education, and intermarriage, making them, hitherto respected citizens, “strangers in their own home,” in the telling phrase of the Portuguese poet Tatiana Faia. This theme emerges again and again for the characters in Bassani’s fiction. Both The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and, even more centrally, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles observe the process of “eviction” through the eyes of Bassani’s first-person narrator, an unnamed alter ego, the “I” of both these books and also of Behind the Door. Bassani declared that the “I,” which he came to realize was such an essential element in t
he narrative, was a figure who was not exactly himself, although “very like” in numerous respects.
In The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, the fate of marginalization that befalls the Jewish narrator is shared by the homosexual doctor Athos Fadigati, and it’s an act of imaginative generosity that allows Bassani to explore the subtle and devastating parallels between the two figures in this compact masterpiece.
On his return from Buchenwald, Geo Josz finds his house occupied by the partisans and is forced to encamp in the attic, awaiting its delayed repossession. But there are various, less explicit forms of estrangement enacted in these novels. The schoolboy narrator of Behind the Door ends the novel alienated from his family and his own well-being because of the treachery of a school companion—a unique case that, the narrator himself concedes, has for once little to do with his Jewish identity. The fiercely hierarchical and competitive school, however, foreshadows some of the cruelties and divisions that will soon become evident in the political sphere.
Perhaps the most profound treatment of eviction occurs in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, where the narrator first experiences the increasing ostracism of the Jewish community; but then, in a turn that is even more psychologically devastating, he is expelled from the Edenic garden itself, which had offered a haven from this trauma. The loss of the garden is also linked to the loss of his first love, the radiant, precocious and elusive Micòl. Of the four “novels” within the Novel, The Heron is the most atypical, not sharing the same first-person narrator of the other three, and being mainly set outside the city walls, in the nearby countryside. Yet it offers a particularly extreme and harrowing study of the corrosive effects of exclusion. Edgardo Limentani has returned from his Swiss exile and, in the compass of single winter day of 1947, comes to know his full estrangement from his time, his city, his family, and finally his own life.
