Dear Readers,
An April Assortment of Italian connections: Abruzzi aid to Jews during WWII has not been forgotten. According to an Associated Press story, soon after the Monday morning April 6th earthquake struck L’Aquila, Italy the epicenter of the quake and its environs, a delegation of two dozens elderly Jews, their younger descendants and Jewish community leaders made their way to the makeshift camps in the area around the mountain city of L’Aquila, peering into tents, in a bid to find their wartime saviors or members of their families and offer aid.
More than 65 years after villagers of Fossa, Casentino and nearby hamlets provided shelter to Italian Jews fleeing from the Nazis, a group of those who evaded capture rushed to repay that sacrifice in rural communities hard-hit by the April 6th earthquake. They offered everything from shoes to summer camps for children and apartments in Rome.
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these people,” said one Jew whose parents were sheltered in the small hamlets of Fossa and Casentino during the war. “We have to help them.” More than 100 tent cities have been built around L’Aquila and the 26 towns and villages affected by the 6.3 magnitude quake, which struck central Italy on April 6.
The temblor killed 300 people and displaced approximately 55,000, damaging or destroying up to 15,000 buildings. Most of the homeless could spend weeks or months in tents as authorities have so far examined only 1,000 buildings, and declared 30 percent of those uninhabitable. In mid-1943, at least five Jewish families, around 30 people, took shelter in the small mountainside villages of Fossa and Casentino when German forces began to take direct control of central and northern Italy.
They remained there until the arrival of the Allies a year later. In October 1943, a few weeks after the families left their native Rome, Nazi troops swept in on the capital’s Old Ghetto neighborhood deporting more than 2,000 Jews. Only a handful survived the death camps. The runaways initially hid in Fossa, about 10 miles from L’Aquila, but were forced to flee to the nearby village of Casentino when warned the Germans had learned of their presence.
An elderly Jewish lady now living in Rome who came to the tent camp set up outside Casentino recalled “We left at night, it was winter and the snow was up to my waist. We stayed in a ruined house until a woman took us in. “Though they had fake documents and posed as refugees fleeing Allied bombings, their hosts knew who they were and were aware they could be executed if caught sheltering Jews.
In a blue tent, one of the Jewish visitors managed to find the 74 year old son of the couple who sheltered his father and eight other relatives during the war. “It’s so painful that such righteous people should suffer like this.” He reminisced how his aunt was born in the couple’s barn and was baptized in the church to avoid suspicion from authorities. As the old timers used to say “Fa bene e scordati” (Do good and forget about it). “Grazie a Dio” some of the beneficiaries remembered!
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Andrea Camilleri’s books are always near the top of Italy’s book sale charts. I heard about his popular fictional detective Commissario Salvo Montalbano years ago, but since all of his whodunits have not been translated into English, I did not experience via the printed page the magnetic attraction of Commissario Montalbano until earlier this year, when I contacted Rizzoli Books (31 West 57th St., New York, 212/759-2424) and ordered a trio of Camilleri’s titles translated into English: Terracotta Dog, Smell of the Night and Voice of the Violin, to see what all the fuss was all about.
And I’m glad I did. Those of you with special satellite dishes that receive a half-dozen or so television “canali italiani” may have already “met” Commissario Montalbano. Sales of Camilleri’s books have skyrocketed since actor Luca Zingaretti began playing Salvo Montalbano on television in episodes of “Il Commissario.”
A big hit in Italy, “Il Commissario” has been exported to Latin America, Australia and across Europe. And earlier this year, Terracotta Dog, the 10th tale in the Montalbano series, was translated into English. Author Andrea Camilleri, who recently celebrated his 83rd birthday often laces his books with words that even many Italians, especially the younger ones, don’t know.
He affectionately borrows from the dialect of his Sicilian youth, which he says gives itself to expressing emotions. The potential of dialect dawned on him as a teenager one night when his mother gave him a tongue lashing for coming home late.
“The first part of my mother’s lecture, which was all about her not being able to sleep for the worry, was prevalently in dialect, while the second part, about how she would cut off my allowance, the cold, law and order part, was in Italian,” Camilleri once reminisced. While his prolific output ranges from a fictionalized biography of Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello to a dark novel about an abused Sicilian boy’s childhood under Fascism, his claim to fame is Montalbano, a moody, thinking man’s cop. Camilleri and Montalbano rocketed to stardom in the late 1990s, after a decidedly slow launch to his literary career.
He author’s first novel, about a kind of Montalbano prototype, languished for 10 years, largely because use of dialect discouraged potential publishers, according to Camilleri. By the time the book made it into print, in 1978, Camilleri was well into middle age. What propelled Camilleri to popularity were the televised versions of his Montalbano stories, starting in 1999.
The shows, broadcast on RAI Italian state television, captivated millions of viewers with picture-postcard views of baroque Sicilian towns. Camilleri’s books also travel well, dialect and all. French and German translations sometimes keep the Sicilian words, while at least one English translation opted for slang and a Brooklyn accent to assure the flavor of dialect wasn’t lost.
The Montalbano stories are set in the fictional town of Vigata, based on Porto Empedocle, where Camilleri grew up. Montalbano intuitively understands human weaknesses, maybe because he has so many of his own. In one early work, “The Shape of Water,” Montalbano tosses away some non-crucial evidence because it might embarrass a bond, buxom and leggy Swedish woman who is the daughter-in-law of a politician involved in the case. He is also unable to resist his housekeeper’s pasta, devouring it on the seaside terrace of his bachelor pad while chewing over who might be the culprits in Vigata’s latest murder.
Camilleri employs a brilliant ear for dialogue, drawing on long experience as a theater and TV director and script writer. The sprinkling of Sicilian words can disorient a first-time reader, but persevere and you can crack the code. Camilleri tosses out enough clues and context, and occasionally provides the translation.
A sampling: “cambiare” (to change) becomes “cangiare;” “uomo” (man) becomes “omo.” Other, radically different words, soon become familiar, like the playful “picciliddru” for “bambino” (male child). The Italian publisher of the Montalbano series, Palermo-based Sellerio, says it has sold more than 11 million copies in Italy. That doesn’t count Camilleri’s books published by other editorial houses.
Modest about his success, Camilleri says he scours the crime pages of newspapers for ideas. He has resisted giving the Mafia a big role so that it does not “become idealized in some way.” But he did write about convicted Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, who was captured in 2006 at a Sicilian farmhouse. Palermo prosecutors gave the author all the typewritten notes Provenzano used to communicate with his henchmen during his 40 years on the lam.
Proceeds from the book, “You Don’t Know,” go to a foundation he set up for children of police slain by the Mafia. Camilleri doesn’t aim for Italy’s highbrow literary world. He just wants to give the biggest number of readers possible a relaxing read through the twists and turns of his master plots.
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Advice: Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe. In the World of Individuals there is no such thing as “Best.” God gave us two ears and one tongue, so we could listen twice as much as we talk.
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