- Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books (December 6, 2005)
available from Amazon
- ISBN-10: 0449004139
- ISBN-13: 978-0449004135
Reviewed by Steve Weatherbe
I cannot say enough good things about this book. It traces the fate of several Jewish families through the final years of the Second World War in North Italy. And of the many Italian gentiles who risked—and often lost—their lives protecting them from the German extermination machine.
Whatever is happening with Pope Pius XII in faraway Rome, the author makes clear, in the Piedmontese towns near the French border, many priests and sisters and laity, even police and nominal Fascists, Catholics all, helped to feed, to hide, to nurse and to house both the Italian Jews who were closely integrated with Italian society, and those who fled from Southern France and elsewhere in Europe to Northern Italy, when Italy signed its Armistice with the Allies.
Of course, they were horrified to discover that the Armistice made little difference to the Germans, who continued their bitter withdrawal up the Italian boot, and least of all in Northern Italy, where they installed Mussolini as puppet ruler.
Since everyone was Italian, I suppose, the distinction the characters in this book make is between “the Catholics” and “the Jews” or “the Hebrews.”
This book asks the question: Why did the Italian Catholics help so much when others in Europe did not? And this of course assumes that others in Europe did not, which I am not going to get into. Historians such as Martin Gilbert are more reliable on this and all I can recollect of their assessment is that many did help and many did not. The Poles, for example, demonstrated a far from monolithic response. Exposés have been written about Polish villages who threw themselves with gusto into the execution of their Jewish communities. But many other Poles such as Irena Sendler risked their lives to save Jews.
Anyway, this book asks but does not answer the question. On an anecdotal basis, it does better, as the Jewish characters themselves ask Italians who helped them. The answers are almost always personal, with the exception of a priest who answers with a Scriptural passage. One says, because my son is missing in Russia (Mussolini sent several divisions to the Russian Front); maybe if I give you some clothes someone there will give him some clothes; another says, simply, we are both widows.
The people who help don’t think too hard about it. It’s instinctive.
There is much exciting intrigue, narrow escapes, and well-described Partisan missions (for the Northern Italians mounted a huge armed resistance movement against the Germans—250,000 strong—in 1944 and 1945) . But the most authentic part of these actions is, sadly, how so many end badly. Easy enough to shoot some German soldiers from hiding, in other words. But the classic response of armies to guerrilla attacks is to retaliate against civilians en masse. And so it was in Northern Italy.
The book does not dwell on these ugly outcomes in a narrative sense: the impact is conveyed through those who survive. As one character says to explain why he is leaving for Israel after the war, with his wife, children, brothers and sisters all dead, “My life here has been amputated.”
In one touching scene, a German Catholic doctor who once worked in Auschwitz but has deserted to the Partisans, puts on his old Waffen SS uniform and his old swagger to sneak into the prison where a Catholic priest is being tortured. Oh boy, we think, a daring rescue. No. All he manages is to administer Extreme Unction. It is enough.
Fifty years later, one of the characters to survive the war is remembered on her death by her three children as a distant, emotionally shut-down paradox: unsympathetic and dismissive of their childhood complaints—“save your tears for when you need them”–but always ready to donate to every panhandler and charity. “If you can help, ya godda help,” she always told them in her ill-learned English..
The book succeeds in providing a sense of events on the bigger scale of the world war, and the personal scale of individuals and their families, both Jewish and Christian. There is humor, love, pettiness, triumph and tragedy.
It is one of those books that leaves you thinking, “Truly, it could have ended no other way.”
Thanks for this review. I am a big fan of Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction novel The Sparrow, but she lost me on its sequel, Children of God. I had been waffling about A Thread of Grace, in fact I passed up two chances to buy a used copy fairly cheap. Now I think I will give it a whirl. I just finished reading Captive Daughter, Enemy Wife by Mary Tweedy, which has given me a new appreciation for well-researched historical fiction. In general I stay away from historical fiction because so much of it looks at history through eyes that are either uncomprehending, unsympathetic, or downright hostile to the Catholic understanding of reality. Mary Tweedy (author of Captive Daughter, Enemy Wife) is a Catholic author, and so her treatment of Native American history of the 1600′s in French Canada and Dutch New York is quite beautiful in its sympathy for all the cultural forces going on, from Iroquois-speaking Indians to European traders and settlers to the esuit missionaries. Reading Tweedy’s novel softened me up to read other fair treatments of history. Mary Doria Russell, although not Catholic, was educated by Jesuits and has shown in her earlier SF novels a thorough understanding of and sympathy for the Catholic world view. I think this review comes precisely when I am ready to gobble up some more well-researched AND Catholic-friendly historical fiction.