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 did teach his two children the most important prayers and sent them to Hebrew School to prepare his son for his Bar Mitzvah and his daughter for her Bat Mitzvah. He also commemorated the anniversaries of the death of his parents, celebrated the festival of Passover, and attended the synagogue on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Despite great misfortunes, the father emerges as a man of great courage, integrity, and parental wisdom. Urged on by a relative to join in a hooligan venture to destroy a Jewish, anti-Fascist newspaper in the city of Florence to prove the strength of Jewish support for Mussolini's government, he refused to succumb to the opportunistic pressures of the moment. Although saddened by Segre's decision to leave Italy for Palestine in 1939, moreover, when Jews were threatened with loss of dignity and even physical danger, he gave his blessings to his
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