Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism [Paperback]

Alexander Stille (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1993

A profoundly moving history of Italy’s Jews under the shadow of the Holocaust, told through the lives of five Jewish Italian families: the Ovazzas of Turin, who prospered under Mussolini and whose patriarch became a prominent fascist; the Foas of Turin, whose children included both an antifascist activist and a Fascist Party member; the Di Verolis of Rome, who struggled for survival in the ghetto; the Teglios of Genoa, one of whom worked with the Catholic church to save hundreds of Jews; and the Schonheits of Ferrara, who were sent to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. An extraordinary montage that resurrects a forgotten and tragic era.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The complex experience of Italy's Jews under fascism is personified in the experiences of five families whose socioeconomic and geographic background and response to fascism varied, but who all were overtaken by the tragedy of the Italian holocaust. From fervent belief in fascism, through courageous resistance to the horrors of Buchenwald and back, the story is told in the words of the families themselves, interwoven with the author's clear and dispassionate historical narrative. This book is thoroughly researched and documented, but it is the distinctive and surprisingly calm voices of the families that provide a harrowing and deeply moving oral history. A worthy companion to such classics of the Italian holocaust as Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (HBJ, 1983) and Primo Levi's The Periodic Table ( LJ 1/85), this should be in all libraries with collections in European history or Jewish studies. For another book about Italian fascism, see Victoria de Grazia's How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945, reviewed in this issue, p. 93.--Ed.
- Barbara Walden, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“An achievement that deserves to stand next to the most insightful fiction about life and death under fascism.” —The New York Times

“Alexander Stille’s stunning achievement in Benevolence and Betrayal—the result of meticulous research and comprehensive understanding—is to give faces and personalities to people who might otherwise have been consigned to anonymity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A beautifully written and moving book which I am sure will in time come to rank with the works of Primo Levi.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Benevolence and Betrayal, like all first-rate journalism, reshapes dusty history in the form of life—messy, tentative, poignant, and unforgettable.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“These stories are filled with courage and tragedy, spies and counterspies, escape and destruction. They are true, spellbinding, and sometimes almost unbelievable.” —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 1st Printing edition (August 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140177159
• ISBN-13: 978-0140177152
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,424,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, moving and informative, October 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Paperback)

This is a very moving book, but also a very informative one. The author, an American journalist, shows how varied the Jewish response to and experience of fascism was in Italy. At one extreme there were Jews who joined the fascist party (and were welcomed into it) at the other extreme there were Jews fighting with the partisans. By describing what happened to five different families, this beautifully written book grips you like a novel and leaves you gasping at man's inhumanity and humanity to his fellow man.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living History, July 8, 2003

By 

Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Paperback)

Several readers have suggested that the prose in this book reminds them of Primo Levi, the great humanist scientist who has written poignantly of his own war time experiences. Like his other works, Stille makes the non-fiction read like a novel. He knows just what to stress and what to downplay - in other words, he emphasizes the most important aspects of the "story".

What is so compelling is his "umbrella" approach wherein all components and shades of Italian fascism and Judaism are reviewed. There was a huge difference between the fascism of Italy and Germany despite their apparent political solidarity. The outstanding difference was that German fascism, unlike that of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy and Croatia was based on not only adoration of the race but specificially subjugation of the Jews. It is difficult to understand some of the decisions made but most of us have never had to face the start life and death choices these families encountered.

Stille is also an eminently fair man, one who does not condemn fascism while excusing or praising dictatorships of the Left. He views all forms of state collectivism as inherently evil and this message only increases the force of the narrative. This is yet another work that should be required reading for high school students.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History which is much stranger than fiction, November 17, 2006

By 

Scott C. Locklin "Selectos nisi das mihi libe... (Berkeley CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Paperback)

Here's an historical curiosity; apparently Jewish Fascism was a common phenomenon in Italy. Before Nazi influence caused racial laws to be passed in 1938, 1/3 of the ~50,000 Jewish folk in Italy were members of the fascist party. Jewish families often had as much as a 2000 year history in Italy (there was mention of the Jews wanting permission to cry over the tomb of Julius Caesar after his death), and the Italian Jewish experience (at least in the North, in the areas of progressive city-states, rather than Papal states) was one more or less of recent integration with the rest of the Italian people. So they tended to have political views pretty closely following the rest of the populace; or even perhaps more conservative views, such as latin-americans in the U.S. The book follows the lives of five jewish families under fascism. Some were fascist, some antifascist. Some in shades of grey. The stories were quite powerful when they strayed from the nonstandard; most of the Italian Jewish experience of WW-2 was much different from that of other European jews.

Americans have a fairly unsophisticated view of WW-2; we mostly think of German and Japanese enemies, and Russian and English allies, and the terrible things which happened to the Jews in Germany, Poland and the Ukraine. There were entire theaters of war which never enter into our consciousness. Most of what happened in Italy and the Balkans is poorly understood. The stories in this book fill in some of the blank spots in this American's understanding of that period.