Realized Terror
COTTLE, THOMAS
Realized Terrors The Parnas By Silvano Arieti Basic Books. 165pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Thomas J. Cottle Lecturer on Psychology, Harvard Medical School; author, "Private Lives and Public Accounts,...
...It is a novel based on a real character whom the author knew when he was a young man, and it grippingly reconstructs psychological and historical fact...
...The horror buried in his imagination is replaced by the breathing symbols of hate and evil, the Nazis...
...A man of rare wisdom, he had made a deep impression on the mind of young Arieti...
...For despite all his wisdom, generosity and courage, Sig-nor Pardo suffered from a phobia of animals, especially dogs...
...Eventually a plaque is put up on San Andrea Street to commemorate the death of "Giuseppe Pardo Rogues, Dario Gallichi, Teofilo Gallichi, Ida Gallichi, Cesare Gallichi, Dr...
...In the midst of the quiet conversation, in the midst of the Parnas' need to tell them that it is not a Divine Presence that he safeguards, but an unrelenting illness he cannot exorcise, a young man named Angelo comes to say he is leaving Pisa to join the partisans...
...The soldiers are stunned, terrified...
...That in the midst of genocide individuals were carrying on their separate existences seems almost incomprehensible...
...Yet strangely, miraculously, his end is free of fear...
...As Giuseppe Pardo Rogues, Arieti assures us, would have said, "if awareness of the full potentiality of evil is acquired, mankind will not allow a similar event ever again to darken the earth...
...Mussolini has changed his original political posture and now supports the brutish Tedesci in a scheme to seek a final solution...
...Among other mementos, he took with him a book that belonged to Giuseppe Pardo Rogues, the Parnas of Pisa, the elder secular statesman and main administrator of the Jewish congregation...
...One cries out, "Mother, mother, will you recognize me...
...he has in him the Shekhinah, a Divine Presence, which makes him close to God...
...The Parnas is dead, his own tragedy over, his oppressor no longer inside him.The aftermath, both in terms of the tale of The Parnas and Aricti's psychologically laden epilogue, reveals a few more facts...
...Near death, blind, drawing his last breaths, the Parnas prays in Hebrew to be near God...
...The Parnas himself is blinded by bludgeoning Nazi rifle butts...
...He will die soon in a pool of blood...
...That at the very moment soldiers and secret police were battering down the door of a Jewish household a mother might be reprimanding a young girl for her choice of boyfriends seems bizarre, unreal...
...They arc not without optimism: The unfathomable power of the Nazis has yet to be felt...
...He has, they believe, more than wisdom, more than courage...
...He feared their sudden appearance, their secret prowlings, their vicious attacks...
...A man is tried several years later for revealing the whereabouts of the Parnas to the local Nazi authority, but there is not enough evidence to make a proper case and he is freed...
...A single grenade ends the life of the maids, the friends, the neighbors...
...South of the Arno, the Allied troops are hatching plans for a northern thrust...
...Some neighbors come over to collect water from Signor Pardo, a squabble erupts with another neighbor over the use of Pardo's garden...
...Local ministers arrange for the Jews to be buried apart from the Christians who died with them...
...Ernesto Levi, Ce-sira Levi, Jews...
...In the Pardo home on Saint Andrea Street there are Jew ish guests-Teofilo Gallichi, his wife Ida, and their son Ce-sare, Ernesto Levi and his wife Cesira -And the maids...
...The plaque also contains these words: "The criminal racial hatred and the sanguinary Nazi fury united them in the tragic destiny and in the compassionate memory of men . . as a remembrance, a warning and an auspice of human brotherhood...
...Suddenly, this daily business is shattered by the arrival of Nazi soldiers...
...The Parnas too is a remembrance, and a warning...
...Giovana Olivari, Alice Olivari, Silvia Bonanni, Emilia Del Francia, Dante Ristori, Christians...
...Bearing new witness to the Holocaust in Italy, The Parnas, by the brilliant psychoanalyst Silvano Arieti, is one of the most significant books to appear in a long time...
...Arieti left his native Italy before the War arrived to mar those sensuous greens and tans and ambers of Tuscany and Umbria...
...In each of you I see a snout, fur, four claws and a tail...
...Italians, Jews and Christians alike, await the unraveling of history...
...Angelo meets his death within hours, for the Nazi ring is closing in...
...Then he yells at his murderers: "You are animals...
...concern about the preservation of Italy's sacred edifices and artifacts is paramount in their deliberations...
...Pardo bids him a farewell, probably not unlike the one he bade the author...
...author, "Private Lives and Public Accounts, " "Children in Jail" The actual lives of the Holocaust victims tend to be lost in the bloody sea of the millions who died...
...Young Pisan boys could always scare the elderly Jew merely by sending out howling noises from the dark alleys...
...The phobia that has twisted his existence since his own early years vanishes in the face of real terror...
...Nevertheless, as Elie Wiesel, Andre Schwarz-Bart and others have shown, the Holocaust is essentially a story of human beings-of those who were murdered, those who did the murdering and those who helped the murderers...
...As he intones the words they somehow place him beyond pain and fright...
...As always, they look to the Parnas to tell them what to think, what to do...
...His counsel, his very being touched the young physician, but so too did his psychopathology...
...The Parnas begins in Pisa in early 1940...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 23
