While references to world events and the unfolding of World War II are confined to the nine prefaces, the novel focuses on daily life in Rome between 1941 and 1947. Yet, as with everything in this novel, the question of chronology is a complicated one.<\/p>\n
In my reading, Morante\u2019s central concerns are centered on the Race Laws of 1938 and their effects specifically on the children of mixed marriages, thus the novel includes events dating well before the starting point of 1941.<\/p>\n
The entire narrative construction consists of Morante\u2019s creation of fictional antecedents to a scene reported by local newspapers in Rome in June 1947: the discovery of a dead six-year-old child with his mother gone insane, in an apartment guarded by a ferocious she-dog.\u00a0From this scant report, Morante\u2019s imagination created a whole novel around what may have preceded and caused this grim scene.<\/p>\n
For this reason, the apparently random beginning of the narration in 1941, allows the child to die at six, in 1947.\u00a0The technique chosen by Morante is that of repeated, often very long, flashbacks. The opening scene in Chapter 1, finds Ida in January 1941, teaching elementary school while hiding her status as a half-Jew under the Racial Law. The entire second chapter takes us back to Ida\u2019s childhood and her family of origin, where we learn she is the product of a mixed marriage. Her mother is Jewish and her father Catholic.\u00a0We also learn that her mother, and Ida after her, suffered from misdiagnosed epilepsy. Chapter 3 begins with the texts of crucial articles from the Race Laws. Only in Chapter 4, does the narration return to 1941, where it had begun.<\/p>\n\n[aesop_image img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Disegno-Morante-1.jpg” align=”right” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]\n
Ida Ramundo\u2019s tale is intertwined with major events in wartime Rome:<\/p>\n
\u2014The Allies\u2019 bombing of San Lorenzo, on June 19th, 1943.<\/p>\n
\u2014An example of partisan activities in the countryside around the Castelli Romani.<\/p>\n
\u2014The nine months of German Occupation from September 8, 1943, to June 4th, 1944.<\/p>\n
\u2014The roundup of the Jews on October 16th, 1943.<\/p>\n
\u2014The deportation by train of the Roman Jews from Stazione Tiburtina on October 19, 1943, headed for Auschwitz.<\/p>\n
Morante diverges in many ways from a merely historical account of Rome during those years. For example, she limits the dramatic nine months of the German occupation occupy a few terse pages. According to estimates by the historian Cesare De Simone, during that period 400,000 people were living in hiding in Rome: Jews, draft dodgers, deserters, anti-fascists, and partisans. Yet in the passages about life under Nazi rule, Morante describes a ghost town in which Ida, in the hallucinatory grips of hunger, and her son Useppe, seem utterly alone in a city with a undetermined mass of suffering people.<\/p>\n[aesop_image img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/ROMACITTAAPERTA.jpg” align=”left” lightbox=”on” caption=”Roma citt\u00e0 aperta, Roberto Rossellini” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]\n\n
There is no doubt that for La Storia<\/i>, written between 1971-74, Elsa Morante conducted very accurate and detailed research. Regarding the roundup and deportation of the Jews, Giacomo Debenedetti is a key a reference particularly in light of Morante\u2019s long friendship with the Italian literary critic. In an author\u2019s note to the American edition, she writes:<\/p>\n
As far as the bibliography of the Second World War is concerned, since it is obviously vast, I can only refer readers to some of the many accounts everywhere available on the subject.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Here I must limit myself to mentioning \u2014 also by way of thanks \u2014 the following authors who,\u00a0with their documentation and testimony, have given me some (real)\u00a0suggestions for some (invented) individual episodes in the novel: Giacomo Debenedetti (16 ottobre 1943<\/i>, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1959); Robert Katz (Black Sabbath<\/i>, Macmillan, Toronto, 1969); Pino Levi Cavaglion (Guerriglia nei Castelli Romani<\/i>, Einaudi, Rome, 1945); Bruno Piazza (Perch\u00e8 gli altri dimenticano<\/i>, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1956); Nuto Revelli (La strada del Davai<\/i>, Einaudi, Turin, 1966, and L\u2019Ultimo fronte<\/i>, Einaudi, Turin, 1971).<\/p>\n\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/plume.png” caption=”Image: Elsa Morante’s manuscript L’Isola di Arturo [aesop_content color=”#000000″ background=”#FFFFFF” columns=”1″ position=”none” imgrepeat=”no-repeat” disable_bgshading=”off” floaterposition=”left” floaterdirection=”up” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] While references to world events and the unfolding of World War II are confined to the nine prefaces, the novel focuses on daily life in Rome between 1941 and 1947. Yet, as with everything in this novel, the question of chronology is a complicated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2755,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2350"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2350"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3361,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2350\/revisions\/3361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMusic: W.A. Mozart, Concert for horn n. 3, Romanza” align=”right” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"