In the Belly of the Monster

...You better watch out," I recall responding...

...By skillfully linking personal testimony with scholarly narrative, the author, who was born in Rochester, New York, also documents disapproval of the racial laws not only among the populace at large but within Fascist officialdom...

...After two years at the kibbutz, the author made what he calls the first free decision of his life...

...As a boy, the author recalls, he was indifferent to politics and ignorant of what was happening around him: He was living "in the belly of the monster unaware of its existence...

...An Israeli scholar and diplomat, Segre was born in 1922 into a wealthy and distinguished Italian family whose members were totally assimilated and unreservedly approving of Fascism...

...Nevertheless, I believe the author exaggerates the harm the racial laws did to Benito Mussolini's standing...

...They could neither teach nor study in public schools...

...Bribery was the primary determinant of its decisions...

...Brutal raids soon spread terror in other major cities, and internment of Jews became government policy in the small part of northeast Italy still controlled by Mussolini...

...Sephardi Jews, who fled to Italy after the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and adopted Italian-sounding names (often derived from the towns where they took up residence), were an oddity to Americans...

...they overestimated Italian autonomy...

...Cutting through these clichés took time as well as patience, and I had plenty of both then...

...It was a fortunate move...

...There was no physical violence as yet—the Holocaust came to northern and central Italy only with the invading German troops in September 1943— but every sphere of activity was affected...

...Moreover, I was struck by the fact that while everybody in the U.S...

...Initially disoriented and lonely, a stranger in a foreign culture, this "Fascist cadet in Sion" gradually began to understand his Jewish heritage—from a secular viewpoint...

...Marriage between Jews and non-Jews was prohibited...

...The final note, though, is a melancholy one: Reunited with his father, Segre realizes that despite their blood ties, they would always be separated by their divergent experiences...

...Later his intelligence work took him to Cairo, then to Southern Italy (as a paratrooper) and finally to Yugoslavia, where he was authorized to move freely in the Partisan-held zones...

...After all, I was a well-educated person, with a college degree and a knowledge of four languages...

...Separate elementary schools were provided by the State, but secondary schooling was left to the individual Jewish communities to organize if they wanted it...

...Jews could not own or manage companies that were worth more than a certain amount or involved in military production, and could not hire non-Jewish personnel...

...16.95...

...To fulfill both his national duty and his own destiny, and to break out of a collective society for which he felt no empathy, he enlisted in the British Army "to train for the war of the Jews for the Jews...

...And what kind of Jewish name was Senigallia...

...On October 19, after one month of "good behavior" aimed at lulling Jews into a life-as-usual tranquillity, the Nazis rounded up 1259 men, women and children in Rome, packed them into sealed freight cars, and sent them to Auschwitz...

...As Susan Zuccotti accurately points out in The Italians and the Holocaust, the "racial" laws of November 17,1938 were extensive in scope, capricious in application and utterly confusing...

...Was I really Italian, let alone Jewish...

...Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story By Dan Vittorio Segre Adler & Adler...

...Many had not heard of an Italian Jew— Italy, they thought, was 100 per cent Catholic...

...and their leaders, fearing panic and disorder, failed to alert the community to the Nazi threat...

...They were forbidden to possess land beyond a fixed value, serve in the Armed Forces, or be employed by banks, insurance companies, or the national or municipal administrations...

...Immersed in a typically unending Jewish debate over the future of the world— voiced loudly in German, Polish, English, and Hebrew—Segre felt, somewhat remorsefully, that he was unable to get involved: He was an observer, not a participant...

...In Dan Vittorio Segre's Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story, antiSemitism is only a marginal issue...

...When, at the age of 16, he decided to go to Palestine, the move was not prompted by religious convictions or moral indignation, but by a spirit of adventure...

...Wartime hardships contributed somewhat toward loosening the enforcement of the racial laws and equalizing the lot of Italian Jews and Gentiles, although the threat of deportation remained a constant nightmare for foreign Jews living in Italy...

...Italians were supposed to be barbers, waiters and laborers who spoke a Neapolitan-Brooklynese lingo, accompanied by frantic gestures to make themselves understood...

...The October 19 deportation, however, was the single most tragic incident suffered by Italian Jews during the War...

...Segre wryly notes that it was with the assistance of Turin's chief of police that his father was able to illegally transfer to a British bank the sum of £1,000 needed to obtain a visa for Palestine...

...273 pp...

...Within a few months Segre was assigned to Intelligence and began broadcasting from the clandestine Italian radio station that operated out of British Middle East Headquarters in Jerusalem...

...The descriptions of his landing in Tel Aviv as a first-class passenger sporting gray flannel trousers, a navy bluejacket and a shirt with cufflinks, and of his early days as a "de luxe emigrant" in kibbutz Givat Brenner, are sad, funny and illuminating...

...The great consensus built by the 1936 conquest of Ethiopia was gradually diminished and ultimately destroyed during a series of Italian military defeats involving heavy losses...

...A radical change occurred when Italy was forced to sue for an armistice in September 1943...

...Hoping to consolidate his empire, the Duce entered the War on the side of Germany in June 1940...

...These provisions were ostensibly aimed at protecting the purity of the "Aryan race"—a concept nobody in Italy had ever heard of before—but exemptions, limitations and ambiguities showed that Fascist Italy's brand of anti-Semitism, albeit nasty, was amateurish and half-baked...

...The law was incredibly elastic in defining who was a Jew...

...I am going, but you are staying...

...In Italian-occupied Croatia and southern France, Jews received the overt protection of Italian military and civilian officials, Zuccotti proudly notes, attributing this to the "Italians' perception of their honor, prestige, and independence in the Axis partnership...

...Since they were of course barred from the Fascist Party, Jews were kept out of many other types of employment too...

...Zuccotti—echoing Hannah Arendt in The Banality of Evil—adds that like most European Jews, those in Rome probably thought: "It could never happen here...

...Furthermore, as Zuccotti notes, the government soon introduced an "Aryanization" program under which a special board could arbitrarily declare that a Jew was not a Jew...

...The German Army occupied northern and central Italy, and the ugly but sloppy Italian antiSemitism gave way to the Final Solution...

...I had just emerged from the most difficult and painful phase of my self-identification, brought on by the violent campaign of official antiSemitism that exploded in Italy in 1938 following the country's military alliance with Nazi Germany...

...seemed to know about Hitler's anti-Semitism, almost no one was aware of the stringent laws designed to put Italian Jews beyond the pale of society...

...When, as a young refugee from Fascist Italy, I described to my new American friends the circumstances that prompted me to leave the country of my birth, they were incredulous...

...My own experience corroborates this: When I went to the police station to get my passport on the eve of emigrating, the officer who handed it to me said he felt a deep sense of shame...

...From first-hand accounts and other sources, Zuccotti tries to determine why "so many people were caught asleep in their own apartments in the sixth week of the German occupation of Rome...

...We have done nothing wrong...

...She comes up with three reasons: The Jews felt safe because of the Pope's presence in the Vatican...

...Reviewed by Silvio F. Senigallia Rome correspondent, "The New Leader" The dramatic plight of Italian Jewry before and during World War II never was much understood in the United States...

...We were always loyal citizens...

...Segre's evocative memoir concludes with his return to his family's old village as a victorious hero and representative of the new authority...

...Jews, everyone knew, came from Central and Eastern Europe with names like Goldberg, Moskowitz and Cohen...