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The Art of Making Do in Naples

book, more than any other, made Italians aware that Jews had not just been afflicted by the Germans in 1943-1945; their plight commenced under Fascism and, to an extent, the persecution was home grown. Primo Levi's career was a barometer of changing attitudes. Gordon, who has previously authored a study of Levi, writes brilliantly about his transition from almost unknown memorialist into a public intellectual during the 1960s and 1970s, and finally his apotheosis as a moral figure addressing a global audience. Yet Levi was careful to cultivate a universalistic appeal suggesting that there was 'nothing specifically Jewish' about the lager. If it is possible to say that by the 1960s 'the Holocaust' had become common knowledge, a subject of general talk, with its own vocabulary, in the 1980s this phenomenon became 'an avalanche'. It was appropriated for so many causes and was the subject of such ritualised obeisance that it became a 'dead metaphor'. 'The Holocaust became a metaphor for power, ideology and violence; for oppression, Fascism, capitalism and the bourgeoisie; and with it emerged a new version of the archetype of the "Jew" as victim and simultaneously as the emblematic figure of modernity' (p. 131). Even so, mention of the war and the fate of the Jews continued to touch a raw nerve. For Romans, the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine was a touchstone for rival versions of resistance history and collaboration. Recurrent, if rather hapless efforts to prosecute German war criminals ensured the periodic inflammation of controversy. The fate of the Jews was also a theme for exploring national identity. The end of the Cold War allowed for greater interpretative fluidity and contestation. New research produced evidence that tarnished the reputation of Italians as a brava gente. The resurgence of the right since the 1990s caused left-wing activists to throw the spotlight on the fate of the Jews at the hands of Fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. Italians bickered over whether the tragedy of the Jews should be remembered on 16 October, the date of the Rome razzia, or 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Right-wingers demand that the victims of Communist tyranny should be recalled, too. These conflicts have made the building of a Holocaust museum an explosive proposition. As my family and I discovered at the Villa Torlonia, in the absence of agreement it was easiest to agree on an absence. Sometime, Robert Gordon may have to update his study. In the meanwhile it will serve as an outstanding guide to the last 70 years, full of insight, subtle distinctions, and always readable.