Eleanor Foa is a remarkable writer. I am honored and very moved by the beautiful review she wrote for Days of Memory, for the Jewish Book Council.
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/days-of-memory-listening-to-jewish-italians-who-lived-through-fascism-and-the-holocaust
Nonfiction
Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians Who Lived Through Fascism and the Holocaust
Review
By Eleanor Foa
– October 14, 2024
Days of Memory is a book with two major themes: political transformation and personal transformation. What begins as the author’s two-decade quest to understand and record the tragic tales of those who lived through Italian fascism and the Holocaust gradually expands into an attempt — as the author writes in her prologue — to “recognize what happened and possibly for some of us, to identify that terrible thread of tyranny and hate that continues to run through the woven consciousness of the world, appearing in this country or that country, including our own country.”
Judith Monachina is not Jewish and only partly Italian. She confesses that she is “completely unreligious,” adding, “I did not feel I belonged anywhere.” To fill that inner emptiness, she begins a journey as a journalist that will utterly transform her. The details of how this happens and whom she meets along the way are as compelling as the stories she uncovers, many of them told by men and women who were young when state-sponsored persecution and assassination of Italian Jews took hold.
To contextualize these stories, Monachina provides a succinct — and largely overlooked — history of the Jewish presence in Italy, stretching from pre-Christian times to today. She describes long eras of peaceful coexistence that permanently ended in 1555 with the introduction of “ghettos” by a Papal Bull, and culminated with the ascent of Mussolini, who morphed from right-wing dictator to fascist and antisemite.
The people she interviews, from priests to Jewish survivors, offer profound lessons for today. “I would like you to understand that dictatorship is like poison,” one woman says. “A dictatorship takes victims, blood and years to remove.”
It’s up to readers to discover the hows and whys of Monachina’s path to self-discovery. As she dives into the archives and conducts interviews, she gradually moves from observer/reporter to quasi-participant. Days of Memory is both a moving personal story and a moral tale for our times.
Eleanor Foa is an author, journalist, and corporate writer. Her memoir MIXED MESSAGES: Reflections on an Italian Jewish Family and Exile comes out in November 2019. Her work appears in national newspapers, magazines and websites. She is the author of Whither Thou Goest and In Good Company, President of Eleanor Foa Associates (eleanorfoa.com), past president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and received literary residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.