A Thread of Grace
Page 48
Since her final illness, her children searched their childhood home, hoping for some hidden memoir: a stash of old letters or a box of remembrances that could reveal their mother’s soul. An emotional Rosetta Stone to decipher. They’ve found only a cheap spiral-bound notebook with a few cryptic lines in their mother’s small, cramped handwriting. “The bells rang day and night,” she wrote. “The others danced and sang. As for me, I thought of ice.”
“Ice is the right word,” David said bitterly. “A coldhearted bitch, that’s what she was.” He blames himself for being unable to elicit her affection.
“An emotional deaf-mute,” his sister Paula concluded. She prefers to believe in some disability that rendered their mother incapable of giving what her children craved.
“She never really dealt with her losses,” Jacqui said, intellectualizing. “All that aggressive cheeriness was a front. She used to tap her fingers on her lips— as though she was reminding herself not to talk.”
The rabbi has his own ideas. Claudia Kaplan is yet another casualty of a war that began long before it started, and has not ended yet. Immense, intractable, incomprehensible, that conflict remains the pivot point of two centuries, the event that defines before and after. Hundreds of millions killed, wounded, maimed, displaced. The last survivors are dying now. Their children and grandchildren are fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that the dry bones shall live again, but the poison still seeps down, contaminating generations. So much evil. So much destruction, and at its heart—
Struck by a thought, the rabbi straightens. Years of study. Books, documentaries, interviews. It seems impossible, but he searches his memory, and nothing comes to mind… The Austrian corporal was a courier in the First World War, running through tunnels and trenches, delivering messages from one officer to another. There were rumors about his cousin Gelli’s death, and yet, in the end, did Klara Hitler’s sickly son ever fire a gun?
One hollow, hateful little man. One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others.
Author’s Note
A Thread of Grace takes place in an imaginary landscape peopled by fictional characters, but my intent was to present an accurate portrayal of the 1943–45 German occupation of northwestern Italy. Hundreds of histories, memoirs, and published interviews contributed background, but I must single out the two books that provided impetus for this novel. The Sant’Andrea story line formed around the section called “The Priest, the Rabbi and the Aviator” in Alexander Stille’s historical study Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Summit Books, 1991). The mountain story line took its shape from Alfred Feldman’s memoir One Step Ahead: A Jewish Fugitive in Hitler’s Europe (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). My Web site, www.MaryDoriaRussell.info, includes an annotated bibliography of additional important sources.
I cannot overstate my debt to Alfred Feldman. Together, we retraced his steps from the Maritime Alps to the hamlets, towns, and cities of Piemonte and Liguria, where he and his father spent the final twenty months of the war. With Mr. Feldman’s help, I was able to conduct personal interviews with survivors and rescuers he knew during the war. Enzo Cavaglion, Pia Cavaglion, and Miriam Kraus shared firsthand memories of resistance and rescue, while Catarina Goletto, Margharita Brondello, Anna Occelli, and Battista Cesana demonstrated to me the openhearted welcome that strangers still receive in the village of Rittana, where Alfred and his father were hidden in 1944–45.
Rochelle Losman of Traces 2000 facilitated interviews with veterans of the armed anti-Fascist Resistance, including Carla Capponi, Rinaldo Bausi, Mario Livi, Max Boris, Gino Servi, Orazio Barbieri, Ugo Sacerdoti, Mario Treves, Giorgio Dieno, Eugenio Gentile Tedeschi, and Giovanni Pecse.
Many others in Italy and the United States told me stories of childhood and daily Italian life during the Second World War. In particular, I thank Emmanuele Pacifici, Carmello Furnari, Marietta Gettenberg, Dani Marino, Rosetta Delbiondo Marino, Renato Marino and Anna Agresta Marino, Lydia Schmalz Geiss and Anita Deibert Arndt, Father Roy Marien, Louisette Gianesini Gallegos, Ines Gianesini Zamboni, Tullio Bertini, Lucina Ronutti Cutler, Daniel B. Cutler, and Eva Angelo.
It will be eerie, I suspect, for these people to recognize elements of their own experiences mixed with the memories of others, filtered through a novelist’s imagination, and assigned to a character of a different age or gender. What I have written is not real, but I hope they will find it true.
My thanks also go to Alberto, Davide, and Mirella Cavaglion, to Dr. Giovanni Varnier, Enrico Fubini, and Rabbino Giuseppi Momigliano, who aided my research in Italy, as did Dr. Susanne Bach in Germany and Rita Zitiello in the United States. A thousand e-kisses go to Massimo Weilbacher, who answered a thousand questions about Italian history and dialects with unfailing good humor.
The following provided professional insight: José Alfredo González Celdrán (Middle Eastern philology); Father Ray Bucko and Father Ross Fewing (Catholic practice); Frank Olynyk, Ferdinando D’Amico, Richard P. Doria, Charles O’Toole, and Dr. Sven Kuttner (militariana); Sister Anna Margaret Gilbride and Sister Christine Devinne, both of the Order of Saint Ursula (convent life).
To my agents, Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich, and to the peerless Leona Nevler: thank you for your faith, judgment, and friendship. My editor Susanna Porter’s enthusiasm, guidance, and support have matched publisher Gina Centrello’s belief that this book would be worth the wait. Evelyn O’Hara and Dennis Ambrose have my gratitude for their patience with manuscript changes. The sales force at Random House adopted me before The Sparrow came out and have championed me ever since. My publicist, Brian McLendon, and I are approaching our tenth anniversary; he is a joy to work with— funny, wry, and relentless in his efforts to make a literary career out of what might have been an accidental detour off the academic highway. Bonnie Thompson’s meticulous copyediting keeps me coming back to her for more, and since books are indeed judged by their covers, I thank Robin Locke Monda for creating the arrestingly beautiful jackets of The Sparrow, Children of God, and A Thread of Grace. As always, I would like to express my appreciation to the wonderful people who sell books, read books, discuss books, and recommend them to others. You’re the ones who keep my stuff in print.
As good as my professional team is, we all owe a great debt to my amateur editors. Jennifer Tucker, Mary Dewing, Kate Sweeney, Louise Doria, Vivian Singer, Ellie D’Addio Baehr, Maureen McHugh, Maria Rybak, Tomasz Rybak, and Susanna Bach provided insight, suggestions, and encouragement that made it possible for me to keep working on this manuscript until it was worthy of all the time they gave early, awful drafts. My son, Daniel, became a partner as I discussed the story with him chapter by chapter. (You were right, Dan: it would have been a mistake to cut Claudette.) And for over thirty-five years, my husband, Don, has been the steady heartbeat of my life: partner and soul mate. Not to mention in-house tech support.
Skeptics may believe that I have idealized the courage and generosity of ordinary Italians during the 1940s. So I will close with the inscription chiseled on the marble memorial stela erected in Borgo San Dalmazzo in 1998 by the Jews of Saint-Martin-Vesubie in honor of the people of Valle Stura and Valle Gesso.
WHEN RACIAL HATRED RAGED IN EUROPE,
JEWISH REFUGEES, UNCERTAIN OF THEIR FATE,
COMING FROM DISTANT COUNTRIES
— AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, GERMANY, POLAND—
FOUND HOSPITALITY AND SAFETY IN THESE VALLEYS.
HIDDEN IN ISOLATED COTTAGES,
PROTECTED BY THE POPULATION,
THEY WAITED WITH TRUST AND HOPE,
THROUGH TWO INTERMINABLE WINTERS,
FOR THE RETURN OF LIBERTY.
IN HOMAGE TO AND IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO HELPED THEM,
THOSE REFUGEES AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
EMBRACE THE NOBLE INHABITANTS OF THESE VALLEYS
IN BROTHERHOOD.
About the Author
A paleoanthropologist known for work on cannibalism and
craniofacial biomechanics, MARY DORIA RUSSELL is the author of two previous novels. The Sparrow and Children of God earned her a number of awards and have been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband and their son. Her Web site is www.MaryDoriaRussell.info.
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