Marion did not stay with them long. She roamed, unable to settle. ‘She sought vengeance,’ Mirtillino wrote later. ‘She hated.’ For a while, she went back to Paris, took classes in biology at the Sorbonne, but she felt too agitated to study. ‘There is no good reason for me to be in one place rather than another,’ she wrote sadly. She made herself more ill, and her tormented undecidedness maddened Amelia and Maria. She tried Cambridge, then decided that there was something about England she could no longer adjust to, so returned to France, this time to Nantes, to stay with her friends Françoise and Louis Joxe. It was while she was here that she had a stroke. It left her briefly paralysed and though her movement and speech came back, her hand shook and her words sounded blurred; she never spoke to the children in Italian again. Marion and the children were still in Nantes when the Germans invaded France in the early summer of 1940. The Joxes drove them to Saint-Malo, where they caught the last ferry to Southampton. They docked on the day that Italy entered the war.
Maria and Amelia fretted that the Germans, having occupied France, would invade England. Being Jewish and anti-fascists, they would not be safe. The news from Italy was not good, and though their friends the Cividallis had managed to emigrate to Palestine, Maria’s parents and many relations were still in Italy. Mussolini’s race laws – barring Jews from professions and their children from school – had been passed in November 1938. That same year, the pseudo-scientific Manifesto of Racial Scientists had asserted that ‘Jews do not belong to the Italian race.’ The goose-step had been formally adopted, and Mussolini was talking about setting up ‘concentration camps’ for dissident Masons and Jews, or resettling them in Somalia, where, with luck, they might be eaten by sharks.
Amelia, Maria wrote to the Cividallis, was as ever extremely strong and determined but she was, ‘alas, much aged’; her face was thinner, more deeply lined and she seemed worn out. Max Ascoli and Salvemini had been pressing the family to join them in the States. Maria was eager; Marion, ill, agreed. Visas were slow in coming, but Max Ascoli’s second wife, Marion Rosenwald, had well-placed connections and Eleanor Roosevelt intervened to speed up the permissions. In August 1940 they set sail for Montreal on a ship guarded by a convoy, in the last two cabins, just beside the engines, constantly mindful of the possibility of German submarines. The sea was very rough; Maria had bought leashes for the two smallest boys in case the boat was hit and they got lost. Amelia was now seventy. The eldest of the seven children, Mirtillino, was thirteen; the youngest, Alberto, three. ‘Everything unknown before us,’ Amelia wrote to Ascoli before embarking. ‘It’s like playing lotto.’
As Italian enemy-aliens, Amelia, Maria and her children were detained for a short while by the Canadian customs officers, while the English Marion, Mirtillino, Melina and Aldo wandered around Montreal waiting for them to be freed. Then they caught a night train to New York. Max Ascoli and his wife boarded their train as it passed through Croton, on the Hudson. They took them to have breakfast in the dining car, where they were given bacon, cornflakes and grapefruit, which none of the children had ever seen before.
Early in May 1921, eighteen months before the March on Rome, Mussolini had received a telegram from a group of Italians in New York, most of them members of a shooting club. ‘The first Italian fascio in the United States’, it said, ‘today salutes the fasci of Italy!’ The 1920s and early 1930s saw a flowering of pro-Mussolini associations and newspapers among the four and a half million Italians living in the US, eager to celebrate their italianità and to praise the man they held responsible for saving from the Bolsheviks a homeland they remembered with sentimental nostalgia. Many were ultra-Catholic, hostile to newcomers, ignorant about what Italy had turned into since they emigrated, and delighted to abandon, as instructed, ‘barbaric dialects, worthy of Harlem negroes or the slum dwellers of London’. Italian consulates across the country acted as cover for Bocchini’s men, while Italo-American businessmen and bankers, who had done well in their adopted country, willingly put money into training their young to march, sing ‘Giovinezza’ and raise their arms in the fascist salute. In New York, ‘well born’ Italian ladies joined a women’s fascio. The Duce himself was described by a reporter sent by McCall’s magazine to Italy, as a ‘despot with a dimple’.
Arrival in the United States
When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, squadristi formed a guard of honour round his bier, on which had been placed a garland with the name of Mussolini on it. Not all this adoration was peaceful. The 1920s and 1930s also saw brawls between Blackshirts wielding manganelli and their opponents in the streets of Boston and New York.
By the time Amelia and her two grieving families reached America, however, much of this noisy confrontation had quietened down. The anti-fascists were now a considerably larger group, their numbers increased by successive waves of people driven into exile. New York, rather than Paris, had become the capital of the Italian fuoriusciti. Max Ascoli had turned the New School for Social Research in New York into a haven for many of the professors among the refugees, saying that they were a ‘small group of survivors of what was European civilisation’ and represented the many others who had been murdered or silenced.
Waiting for them in New York, the Rossellis found Lussu, Cianca, Tarchiani, Parri and Don Sturzo. And, of course, Salvemini, a little older, a little balder, with his round black-framed glasses and his neat beard and moustache, his look knowing and benign. Salvemini had spent his years of exile in a fever of work, putting out book after book on fascism, full of scholarly research and statistics, writing fast and well, lecturing all over the country in his erratic English about the ‘suffocation and paralysis’ inflicted by Mussolini and his men. Time had done nothing to temper his passion or his strong, impatient views, and he was much attacked as a ‘drifting shipwreck’, filled with ‘mad, bitter hatred . . . and a macabre obsession’. Salvemini liked the language of the American liberals and their commitment to justice but grumbled that they were too obsessed by Nazis and communists to pay proper heed to the dangers of Italian fascism.
Amelia and Maria still had an income from shares in Italy and, for $80 a month, they took a small mock-Victorian house in Larchmont, Westchester, a forty-minute train ride from Grand Central Station. It was not elegant but it was comfortable and the local schools were good. Ruth Draper and Max Ascoli, who said that Carlo and Nello had been his closest friends and that their children would want for nothing, helped with the fees. Amelia, who had once had cooks, maids and menservants, presided over the running of the house with the help of a single part-time maid; Maria cooked and organised the children’s lives. Marion, ever restless and uneasy, rented a second house nearby. Soon after moving in, they received a visit from a neighbour who assured them that one of Larchmont’s attractions was that it was ‘free of negros and Jews’. But we, said Amelia coldly, ‘are Jews’. Next day, a large bunch of flowers was delivered.
If Amelia worried that Silvia and Paola would lose their ‘beautiful simplicity’ among the American schoolgirls she considered ‘painted, permed, playing at being women’, she was also deeply grateful for the security in which they now found themselves. Every morning after breakfast she retired to her bed and did her correspondence, writing and receiving dozens of letters, in French, Italian and English, from all over the world, and making arrangements for the publication of her sons’ works. More than either of her daughters-in-law, she approached the New World with curiosity and openness and, determined to make the most of what it had to offer, regularly took the children into New York to visit museums and go to concerts. They went to Niagara Falls and to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. For Alberto’s sixth birthday, she gave him a violin.
For the children, Amelia had rapidly become their main figure of authority, imparting a certain old-fashioned code of behaviour which revolved around truthfulness and justice, and she would brook no dissent. She regarded her own role as one of providing stability in a country in which they were Jews among Protestan
ts, Italians at a time of war with Italy, and a household of women without men. Stability and love: none of the children would ever forget the solidity of the love she surrounded them with. Mirtillino, Silvia and Paola were excellent students, but Melina remained volatile and awkward. Maria clung to Alberto, the baby born so soon before Nello’s death, and Aldo showed signs of depression. It took Amelia a long time to coax Maria out of her black mourning clothes, persuading her to wear a little white collar. There was always a sense of waiting – waiting to go home, waiting to resume real life. Amelia would tell friends that she felt herself to be profoundly an exile, too old to put down new roots.
When visitors came to call, they found Amelia sitting very upright in a high-necked blouse, her white hair parted in the middle and piled high on her head; they addressed her as Signora Amelia and used the formal ‘Lei’. One recent Italian arrival came to pay his respects on a particularly hot summer day, and asked whether he might take off his jacket. ‘No,’ she replied. Amelia never complained; complaining was not in her nature, though her letters to Italian friends were sometimes despairing. ‘How can one explain’, she wrote to Gina Lombroso, ‘all this terrible suffering and bloodshed, the collapse of all those spiritual values which were once our reason for living?’ Whenever he could get away, Salvemini came to see them. The two old friends approached each other with a sort of tenderness and clasped hands, murmuring ‘Che piacere, che piacere’, ‘What a pleasure’. ‘La vecchia Signora Amelia’, he wrote to Ernesto Rossi, ‘è meravigliosa.’
Amelia, Marion and Maria were endlessly busy. Maria had emerged as a strong and capable woman, and started a charity shop in Larchmont to raise money for Italian refugees. All three women were involved in the Mazzini Society, set up by Salvemini and Ascoli in September 1939 to inform the American public about Italian fascism, to counter fascist propaganda and to help the newly arrived refugees settle. It was not an altogether easy enterprise, its members split between those who saw themselves as Americans of Italian origin and those who, like Lussu, Cianca and Parri, were simply waiting for the moment they could go home. Over time, schisms developed and acrimonious exchanges led to resignations. There were moves to expel the ‘intransigent and quarrelsome’ Salvemini. Amelia was among those who stepped down, saying that she refused to take sides. She seemed to age and to grow frailer, telling friends that it required ever more courage to go on living, but she was never, at any point, as Silvia remembered much later, ‘what you might call an ordinary grandmother’.
In the summer of 1943, after most of the Grand Council voted against him, Mussolini was ousted from power and Pietro Badoglio made head of state. When Italy joined the Allies in September and the Germans moved to occupy the whole country, Lussu, Tarchiani and Cianca hurried home to meet up with Carlo Levi, Rossi, Bauer and Ginzburg – all now freed from the confino – to see if they could serve with the partisans, and to start drawing up plans for the governance of post-war Italy.
Having been imprisoned in the Gran Sasso, Mussolini was rescued by German forces and installed in the town of Salò to preside over a corrupt and incompetent puppet state known as the Italian Social Republic. In the mountains in the north, groups of partisans, taking the name Partito d’Azione and some under the banner of the Rosselli Brigades – Primo Levi among them – were fighting bitter battles against the retreating Germans. As a ‘gypsy people gone to rot’, declared the Germans, the Italians would have to pay heavily for their treachery.
For months on end in Larchmont, there was no news of the fate of Amelia’s friends or of Maria’s family, as Jews in grave danger now of arrest and deportation by the Germans. Maria’s five-year-old niece Gianna had been given a different name, Pallina, and put for safety into an orphanage; her parents Max and Luisa were being hidden in clinics in different parts of the city. The house in Via Giusti and L’Apparita, to protect them from being seized as Jewish property, had been nominally sold to Maria’s Catholic sister-in-law. They heard that Zia Gì was safe, but had taken refuge in the house of the parish priest after the Germans looted Il Frassine at gunpoint.
Finally came word that the 3rd, 4th and what remained of the 2nd Rosselli Brigades – for there had been many casualties – were among the first men to liberate Florence. ‘Does this not seem to you a dream?’ Amelia wrote.
In September 1944, after the liberation of Rome, an investigation was launched into the murders of Carlo and Nello. Ciano was by now dead, shot on his father-in-law’s orders in January for having voted against him the night that he was removed from power; in his diaries – from which various pages had vanished – he had said nothing on the subject of Carlo or Nello. Santo Emanuele implicated Anfuso, currently still Mussolini’s ambassador to Berlin. A former head of military intelligence, General Giacomo Carboni, testified that Ciano had once said to him that Emanuele’s great merit lay in ‘having been the author of the elimination of the Rossellis’, but that Ciano later regretted their murders, for Carlo ‘could have done good for Italy’. Anfuso admitted to having been in touch with the Cagoulards, but said that it had been Emanuele’s idea to get rid of the two brothers.
A first trial opened on 29 January 1945, with witness statements by Lussu, Garosci and Calamandrei. By the time the conspirators had finished changing their statements and accusing each other, Anfuso, on the run, had been sentenced to death for collaboration and life for the Rosselli killings, and Emanuele to life imprisonment. In 1946, Anfuso’s sentence was lifted, and even Emanuele was granted amnesty in 1947. In 1949, the Court of Appeal opened a new hearing, which either absolved the accused, or dropped the charges on the grounds of lack of evidence.
Had Mussolini ordered the killings? As with Matteotti, it was impossible to be certain. By the end of April 1945, he was dead, stopped by partisans near Lake Como as he fled to Switzerland, then shot with his mistress, Clara Petacci, and their bodies hanged from meat hooks in a square in Milan. Salvemini was only one of many who believed that, even if he had not given a direct order, Mussolini certainly knew what was happening. As for Ciano, he was beyond doubt complicit.
In France, there was also a further inquiry into the killings. But Charles Tenaille, the Cagoule leader, was dead, fighting for the Nazis on the Russian front, and Deloncle had been killed by the Gestapo. Filliol, Bouvyer, Huguet and Fauran were all condemned to death – in absentia. Alone of the principal murderers, Jakubiez was sentenced to life with hard labour. In the court, he admitted that he had taken a hand in the murders, and said that while Carlo was ‘killed in an instant’, Nello had fought back, been stabbed again and then finished off with a pistol.
Amelia never believed that she would live to go home. But in June 1946, having delayed their return to wait for Marion, who had suffered a second stroke, the family boarded the Vulcania, bound for Naples and Genoa. Marion had not set foot in Italy for fifteen years; the others had been away for seven. Alberto, who had no memory of Italy, was now ten. All the children spoke better English than Italian.
In their absence, their fathers had become heroes.
When they docked in Naples, friends boarded the ship to tell them that the royal train had been sent to meet them. As they travelled north they looked out of the windows at the devastation of the Italian landscape. At every stop, people were waiting with flowers. At Rome, they were taken to spend the night in a suite in the Grand Hotel, and next morning, while the three women met the new political leaders of Italy, many of them old friends, the children were given a tour of the city in a horse and carriage. Florence was dark and silent; in the enclosed carriage sent to meet them at the station, they listened to the clip-clop of the horse’s feet. In the house in Via Giusti, Maria’s parents were waiting; her father Max was wearing a white suit and a panama hat. There were so many flowers that it looked like a garden. They ate figs, melons and prosciutto.
None of them found arriving home easy. They learnt that Carlo Pincherle, Amelia’s brother, had died, as had her dear friends Guglielmo and Gina Ferrero. It shocked t
hem to realise how many of their friends and acquaintances had willingly cooperated with Mussolini and the fascists. Perhaps saddest of all, for Amelia, was her nephew Alberto Moravia’s behaviour. Early in 1945, he had written to say that, since he had been so closely watched by spies, he had thought it prudent to wait until then before telling her how much he had minded the deaths of his cousins, Carlo and Nello. ‘But I was close to you in your grief.’ Amelia did not reply. Moravia had acted, she said, ‘out of opportunism, or, at its most charitable, out of weakness’.
But then Moravia chose to write a novel, Il conformista, closely based on Carlo’s story, in which his murder is described in gruesome detail; instead of Nello it is Marion who is murdered, sensual and shapely in death. Carlo – Quadro – is portrayed as cynical, imprudent, didactic and pompous, and Marion – Lina – as a woman who is sexually aroused by other women. Prepared to sacrifice young friends with a ‘cruel indifference to human life’, Quadro, urged his converts to ‘bold and dangerous undertakings which were almost always disastrous’. Though the novel received almost uniformly bad reviews, and the rest of the family refused to have anything more to do with Moravia, Amelia was surprisingly forgiving. Moravia himself never expressed the slightest hint of remorse, nor explained why he had chosen to write as he had. If asked about the Rosselli brothers in interviews, he would produce a few vague anecdotes about their childhood. It was as if the past held little interest for him.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 42
