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Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism

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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.

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.

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.

The book is five books in one.The stories of five Jewish Italian families during the WWII years.A common fate,common people and so different personalities and destinies.
The author achieved to describe a psychological portrait of each character and their vicissitudes.I loved the book.

One of the best books in its category of historicaldocumentation. The author has deeply research the topic, has beenfaithfull to historical facts with an unbiased approach.

To write about a subject as controversial as the Holocaust in Italy without becoming a "partisan" is a rare achievement, but Stille has succeeded in this absorbing book. Ignoring the unsettle-able issue of what Pope Pius XII did or didn't do to help Italian Jews, he instead concentrates on the experiences and fates of five very different Jewish families in various parts of Italy during the 20 years of Fascism, including the last, terrible period of the German occupation.

Stille chose his title with care; instances of benevolence and betrayal are woven throughout the stories. There are Christians who risk their lives to save Jewish friends and neighbors; priests and nuns, bishops and cardinals who offer support and sanctuary; stories of Jewish ingenuity and bravery. There are also stories of betrayals on both sides: Christians who betrayed Jews out of greed or anti-Semitism, or in pathetic efforts to save their own or their families' lives. Stille doesn't hesitate to expose Jews who betrayed their own people--a touchy subject many writers would avoid. The result is a book that reveals the complexity of an issue too often over-simplified into Jewish heroes and Italian villains, or heroic Italians and helpless Jews.

What makes Stille's book so memorable, however, isn't the author's unusual objectivity; it's the fascinating stories his subjects tell. Stille interviewed many of them, as well as using diaries, letters, published writings and personal papers provided by the families of those no longer living. The book is divided into five sections, one for each family.

This is a moving, at times horrifying, but enlightening and engrossing book, full of vivid details of Italian life during a tragic but deeply significant period of Italy's history.