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Munching on Memories
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12306 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
2,719 Words |
| Author
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Milton Birnbaum
Milton Birnbaum is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and
professor of English at American International College in
Springfield, Massachusetts. |
MEMOIRS OF A FORTUNATE JEW
An Italian Story
Dan Vittorio Segre
Bethesda, Maryland: Adler & Adler Publishers, Inc., 1987
273 pp.
Few memoirs are really memorable, but Dan Vittorio Segre's Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew is a welcome exception. Segre is currently a professor of Zionism and Jewish Political Thought at Haifa University in Israel. Using the diaries he has kept intermittently since 1940, he has reconstructed here the first twenty-two years of his tangled existence. Though the diaries provide the foundation for his book, the descriptions of people and the incidents chronicled are recalled through the haze of memory and the cleansing reflections of the last four decades. It is therefore important to establish the character of the author through whose eyes the reader is going to perceive the tumultuous events of the period between the two world wars.
When Segre was born in 1922 in Piedmont, Italy, the Jews were already well assimilated and established. Because of their active role in the Risorgimento and in the eventual unification of Italy in 1870, they received economic, social, and educational opportunities hitherto unavailable to them. Their continued support of the monarchist government and their vigorous endorsement of Mussolini helped them maintain a position of affluence. Segre's parents belonged to this privileged group.
Originally trained as a lawyer, Segre's father became an affluent landowner and a trusted mayor of Piedmont. As a heavy investor in the electrical industry, he suffered great losses in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. This reversal, however, was only the beginning of many future disappointments. When II Duce joined Hitler's forces, the Jews lost their favored position. Although not suffering as intensely as the rest of European Jewry, Italian Jews clearly endured economic deprivation, social humiliation, and eventually, significant loss of lives. Segre's father was one the victims of the infamous racial laws passed in Italy in 1938. He lost his clout with the Fascist bureaucracy and continued to suffer financial losses. What perhaps pained him most of all, however, was his wife's conversion to Catholicism when World War II broke out in 1939.
Segre's father was not a punctiliously observant Jew. He did not obey the many requirements incumbent upon an Orthodox Jew, and yet, although he did not know Hebrew, he
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