About Aldo Zargani: Italian Writer (1933-)
Aldo Zagani (born 7 August 1933) is an Italian Jewish writer and public intellectual living in Rome. He started writing in his early sixties: his first and most famous book, violin solo (violin solo), which appeared in 1995. In addition to his autobiographical writing, Zagani has contributed to discussions on Italian Jewish politics and culture through essays, lectures and school visits.
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Aldo Zagani was born in Turin in 1933. In late 1938, when he was 5 years old, the Fascist regime passed a series of anti-Semitic laws that affected the lives of every one of the approximately 46,000 Jews living in Italy at the time. Jews were barred from studying or teaching in public and private schools, prohibited from marrying non-Jews, expelled from the Fascist Party, excluded from public administration, phone books and obituary boards. Zagani’s father Mario, a viola player in the National Radio Orchestra, was fired, and Aldo and his brother began attending a special school set up by Turin’s Jewish community.
After the armistice between Italy and the Allies on September 8, 1943, after northern and central Italy were occupied by German troops, the SS and Gestapo began rounding up Jews in every community. Zargani’s parents were arrested but were able to avoid deportation, unlike some of their other family members. Aldo and his brother went into hiding at a Catholic boarding school for a year.
After World War II, Zagani continued to live in Turin and worked as an actor in two theater companies. It was around this time that he met his wife Elena Magoja, a theatre and film actress. His main employer was RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, first in Turin and then in Rome. He retired in 1994. He has a daughter, Lena, and a grandson, Mario, for whom he composed each violin solo.
Zagani’s political allegiance is the Italian left. A longtime member of the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party, he is now an active member of Gruppo Martin Buber – Ebrei per la pace (Jews for Peace), an organization that recognizes the rights of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples to an independent and sovereign nation-state. Much of his writing focuses on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Italy or the political and historical uses of Holocaust memory. 1
work
- violin solo. La mia infanzia nell’Aldiqua. 1938–1945Bologna, Il Mulino, 1995 (reprinted in 2003 with a new foreword by the author).
- Certe promesse d’amore. Bologna, Ilmulino, 1997.
- L’Odeur du lac [The Scent of the Lake] (Three stories not yet published in Italian; French translation and foreword by Olivier Favier, Alidades, Évian, 2008).
- in bilico (noi gli ebrei e anche gli altri). Venice, Masilio, 2017.
- Numerous articles and papers published in various journals: Il Mulino, Lettera internazionale, Doppiozero and in Hakirathe journal of the Turin Jewish community.
violin solo Translated into German (violin solo. Meine Kindheit im Diesseits 1938–1945, 1998), English (violin solo. Jewish childhood in Fascist Italy, 2002), Spanish (spanish skylight2002) and French (Inverted Cello Sur. Souvenirs d’enfance dans l’En-deca 1938–1945, 2007). It has won three Italian awards (Ischia International Press Award, Premio Acqui Storia, Premio Sant’Anna di Stazzema) and was shortlisted for four prestigious literary awards (Premio Viareggio, Premio Pisa, Premio Lucca and Pen Club Award ).
violin solo and Certe promesse d’amore (Some Promises of Love) is an autobiographical text. The former traces the narrator’s childhood between 1938 and 1945 in the context of war, civil war, and holocaust. In the latter, the narrated self, a teenager, fascinated by Marxism and left-wing Zionism, discovers love and gradually sheds some personal and political fantasies. In both texts, the narratives are arranged in loose chronological order, but within each chapter there are numerous flashbacks and “flashbacks” triggered by associations. The memory of the narrative self of the elderly intersects with the perspective of the narrative self of children and adolescents, which is corrected and evaluated with the help of Zhuge Liang in hindsight.
in Billico is a collection of 20 autobiographical narratives and vignettes that take place at various times in Zargani’s life, where he touches upon the contradictory and multiple nature of Jewish history and identity.
Humor and irony play a central role in all of Zargani’s narratives. Their function is both intellectual and moral. They emphasize the tension between Jews as “insiders” and Jews as “outsiders,” stressing personal, cultural, and political contradictions, and problematizing a single concept of “identity.” “Over time,” he says in the final pages of the book violin solo“It seems that only humor and religion exist, and memories fade with the lives of those who carry them.”
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