For Solo Violin: A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy

By Aldo Zargani

Book Overview

For Solo Violin is a gracefully written, elegiac memoir of childhood.--The Los Angeles Times

An eloquent tribute to and] a moving account of those who, despite the cruelty of so many around them, found ways to rejoice and trust in the kindness of a few. One is instantly reminded of Life Is Beautiful.--Andr Aciman, author of Out of Egypt

In an extraordinary literary debut, Aldo Zargani reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938-45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. His haunting memoir acquires a cinematic intensity as he crosscuts from the blood-red stone spires of Basel, where his father failed to find refuge for his family in 1939, to fiery scenes of the Allied bombing of Turin in 1942, to the freezing winter of 1943-44, which Zargani and his brother spent hidden in a Catholic boarding school deep in the countryside.

For Solo Violin is filled with colorful portraits of Italian aristocrats and peasants, priests and soldiers, teachers and students, informers and partisans. At its heart is Zargani's vivid depiction of his father, a concert violinist forced to give up his career when the Fascists came to power. In this time of persecution, the Zargani family survived through their own resourcefulness and through the efforts of the many Italians who came to their aid, from the young doctor who helped them escape from Turin to the shepherd who supplied them with milk during the last year of the war, when they lived among the partisans in a remote Piedmont valley.

Looking back over a distance of fifty years, Zargani rediscovers the enchantment of childhood shining in fable-like constellations even amidst the inferno of war. Lullabies and school games, fairy tales and family jokes are interwoven with the events of terror and oppression. Lyrical, humorous, tender, and wise, For Solo Violin is a testament to resilience and hope during the darkest period in human history.

A broad panorama of Italian-Jewish history in the last] century. Elegant in its style and, however tragic, also rich with understatement, irony, and wit, For Solo Violin counts among the great, enduring works of art.--Focus Magazine, Germany

A tragic, deeply engaging, delicious book--yes delicious, too. (Reading it makes you smile.) It's a miracle...It makes one think of the wit of Kafka --L'Espresso, Italy

Zargani depicts a wealth of sad, despairing, but often also incredibly funny episodes...But vibrating along with the humor is always the sense of threat, and behind it opens the abyss of terror.--Neue Z rcher Zeitung, Switzerland

Aldo Zargani was born in 1933 in Turin, Italy. For many years, he worked for RAI, the Italian broadcasting network. Per Violino Solo was first published in Italy in 1995 and won several literary awards, among them the Premio Acqui Storia and the Premio Ishia. Zargani now lives and writes in Rome.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967967538
• ISBN13: 9780967967530
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Paul Dry Books
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

an astonishing book which should be much better known

I came across this book on a shelf, and could not stop reading it. I could not believe such events could be written with such humor and poetry; it reminded me a little of "Angela's Ashes" but in that book the boy only faces terrible poverty (as if that could be an "only"); in this book the huge forces of war are out to kill young Aldo and his family and hundreds of thousands of others because they are Jews. The book is told in no chronological order, but the seven years between 1938-45 are relayed a month here, a season or perhaps a harried afternoon there, as one might recall them in passionate memory fifty years after, as the author does indeed relate them. The small intimate and ordinary bits of the lives of the author, his brother and their parents ring against the great tragedy of war: in the midst of running for their lives, they stop at a hospital for a minor test for the children, the young boy in boarding school with almost nothing to eat devours another boy's lard sandwiches sent from home. A young woman appeals suddenly in lacy black underwear, her despair overcoming her modesty in a desperate cry for life..why is this book not better known? It is astonishing.

Alexander Stille review from LA Times

Against the OddsFOR SOLO VIOLIN: A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy, By Aldo Zargani Paul, Dry Books: 230 pp., paperBy ALEXANDER STILLEAlexander Stille is the author of several books, including "Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism" and "The Future of the Past."August 25 2002With the gradual passage of those who survived the Holocaust and World War II as adults, we have an increasing number of memoirs of the generation that experienced that time as children. Aldo Zargani was born in 1933 and was 5 when Benito Mussolini passed the racial laws that forced him to leave Italian public schools and cost Zargani's father, a violinist, his job. Zargani was 7 when Italy entered World War II and 10 in 1943, when Italy tried to withdraw from the war and was occupied by Nazi Germany, forcing the Zarganis--father, mother and two sons--to spend a terrifying year and a half in hiding."For Solo Violin" is a gracefully written, elegiac memoir of childhood that effectively renders the pain, psychological dislocation and fear of coming of age under the shadow of fascism's racial laws and Mussolini's disastrous alliance with Hitler's Germany. The book is a useful corrective to the many books and articles that have tended to downplay the havoc that Mussolini's racial policies wreaked because they stopped short of the extermination program of Nazi Germany. As Zargani notes, he did not distinguish as a child between fascism and Nazism because by the German occupation of 1943, Italian fascists and German Nazis were working together to arrest and deport the country's Jews.Zargani paints a number of affecting thumbnail sketches of the many relatives and family friends who were captured and killed. While others have stressed that Italy's Jews had among the highest survival rates of Europe's Jewish population, Zargani notes that between a quarter and a third of those left in the country by 1943 perished, which, given the brevity of the Germany occupation, means that deportation and death were hardly exceptional events.Because these are childhood memories, "For Solo Violin" is more a series of fragmentary scenes and vignettes than a coherent, complete narrative of the family's experience. Following the promptings of memory, Zargani moves back and forth in time, producing a narrative that is, at times, poetical and finely re-imagined but also, at times, choppy and confusing. This impressionistic approach leaves us, however, with some powerful memories that convey the sense of material life at that time: the excitement and luxury of riding in an automobile in Italy in the 1930s; learning to skin moles and cook chestnuts during the terrible hunger and deprivation of the war; a boy whose only word is "goat"; a poor, illiterate family that lives on hunted cats and small-time theft.One vignette perhaps best sums up the weird combination of anti-Semitism and generosity that Zargani experiences. After the war ended, the old peasant woman who had help

A clear autobiographical testament

For Solo Violin: A Jewish Childhood In Fascist Italy is the memoir of Aldo Zargani, a man who survived being a Jewish child in northern Italy during the brutal era of 1938-1945, when the Fascists and Nazis held sway and a deliberate, well orchestrated campaign of genocide was underway. Told from a vantage point of fifty years later, For Solo Violin recalls the wonder of childhood mixed with shocking events of war and murder in this deeply moving, personal account. For Solo Violin is a clear autobiographical testament, recommended for Judaic Studies supplemental reading lists, and a welcome addition to the growing library of Holocaust literature.