Reluctant Jews

Rather than going in search of his Jewish roots, Sandro Gerbi focuses on the reverse process: the gradual secularization of his family during the twentieth century, through the distancing from religious faith and the Jewish Community, up to the recurrent practice of mixed marriages. All without nostalgia, but also without any rejection of his ancestry.

The story begins with 1938, the year in which the author’s father, the historian and economist Antonello Gerbi, was forced to leave Italy for Peru because of racial legislation. The fate of his two brothers — one a sports journalist ,the other a doctor — who found shelter in the United States, was similar. With his fresh writing and rich in anecdotes, the author traces the ‘Jewish’ events that have touched him over time: his birth in Peru in ’43 because of his father’s exile, the return to Italy in ’48, the survival of a specific “family lexicon”, a trip to Israel in December ’67, some decisive meetings: the financial expert Renato Cantoni, the philosopher György Lukács, the journalists Ugo Stille and Indro Montanelli, the literary agent Erich Linder. Finally, the moving first return to Lima in 2010, 62 years after leaving.