First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy

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First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy Overview

In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up among the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood world of indulgent nannies and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews. Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, revealing the willful ignorance of her own family as one by one their Jewish neighbors disappeared. She indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity, and presents a searing and dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italian Jewry.

Written in crystalline prose, First Words offers an uncommon perspective on the Holocaust -- that of one writer as she struggles to reconcile her memories of a happy childhood with her adult knowledge of one of the world's most horrifying tragedies.

First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy Specifications

In this understated yet scathing memoir, novelist Rosetta Loy intersperses scenes from her affluent childhood with a broader portrait of anti-Semitism in fascist Italy. The otherwise effective translation has softened Loy's original title (in Italian, "The Word Jew") but not her blistering depiction of the Church's complicity in Mussolini's persecution of Jews. Pope Pius XI, an outspoken opponent of state anti-Semitism, died in early 1939. His successor, Eugenio Pacelli, had been a papal nuncio in Germany for 12 years, where he signed the 1933 concordat that urged German Catholics to obey the Nazis (events analyzed at length in John Cornwell's excellent 1999 biography, Hitler's Pope). As Pius XII, Pacelli said little and did nothing to prevent racist genocide. Born in 1931, Loy was just a girl during this dreadful period, but she does not excuse herself or her family for going about their daily lives while their Jewish neighbors were subjected to increasingly restrictive laws and then, in late 1943, transported to the German death camps. The author also relates stirring acts of moral heroism--Catholic priests who denounced anti-Semitism as un-Christian, individuals who sheltered Jews--but her quietly uncompromising book suggests that her parents, good people who found fascism personally distasteful but felt helpless to defy it, were more typical. --Wendy Smith