About the Translator
ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ is the leading translator of Croatian into English and a South Slavic scholar who has taught at Harvard. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Gotz and Meyer was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translator’s Association.
Footnotes
* Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), a writer and art historian. Founder and editor of the journals Dedalo (1920–33), Pegaso (1929–33), Pan (1933–5); occasional editor of the paper Corriere della Sera and their art and literary critic of many years. He wrote short stories, novels, humourist commentary, and compiled anthologies. A traditionalist. A member of the Fascist Party since its inception. Fascism attracts a number of Italian intellectuals. Later they say they saw the light and left the Party. Luigi Pirandello joins in 1923, receives the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934; Curzio Malaparte joins in 1921, quits in 1931. Malaparte’s real name is Kurt Erich Suckert. In March 1925 at the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals held in Bologna, their Manifesto is signed by Luigi Barzini, Antonio Beltramelli, Francesco Coppola, Enrico Corradini, Carlo Foà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Curzio Malaparte, Ugo Ojetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Salvatore Di Giacomo, C. E. Opo, Serbio Panunzio, Alberto Panzini, Camillo Pellizi, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Enrico Prampolini, Ardengo Soffici, Ugo Spirito, Gioacchino Volpe and others. The Italian Academy is founded in 1926. The President is Guglielmo Marconi, who from 1930 on, three years before Hitler comes into power and eight years before Mussolini’s racial laws are adopted, systematically prevents Jewish candidates from being accepted into the Italian Academy, marking their names with the capital letter “E” (Ebreo: Jew).
Among the members of the Academy are composers Pietro Mascagni, Ottorino Respighi and Umberto Giordano, scientist Enrico Fermi, writers Giovanni Papini, Antonio Beltramelli, Alfredo Panzini, Luigi Pirandello, Ugo Ojetti and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, painters Achile Funi and Giulio Aristide Sartorio, historian Gioacchino Volpe and religious historian Raffaele Pettazzoni, sculptor Adolfo Wildt, art critic Emilio Cecchi, and musician Ildebrando Pizzetti. All of them enjoy a sizeable monthly stipend. They travel first class on trains for free. People address them as “Your Excellency”.
They appear at public ceremonies in the robes of the Academy, and carry ornamental swords.
A law is passed in 1926 banning Italian women from teaching philosophy, history, Italian language and literature, and Greek and Latin in secondary schools.
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* Elsa Finzi, born in Genoa on 14 May, 1891. Arrested in the spring of 1942 with an anti-fascist group, including Ferruccio Parri. Accused of founding an anti-fascist association and of fomenting anti-fascist propaganda. After the trial, released on 24 November, 1942. Ferruccio Parri, Italian politician born in Pinerolo in 1890. Under fascism, persecuted and arrested. From 1926–33 held in internal exile. With Carlo Rosselli starts an organization which helps victims of fascism flee the country. From 1943 to 1945 a leader of the Italian partisan movement; a founder of the Giustizia e libertà partisan brigades. President of the coalition government in 1945, and until 1948 a deputy, then a senator. President of the League of Veterans of the Italian Resistance Movement. Dies in 1981 in Rome.
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* Born in Naples on 20 January, 1904; dies in Naples on 8 May, 1959.
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* Mathematician, born in Naples on 15 August, 1912; dies on 28 May, 1982.
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* Mathematician, born in Naples on 12 March, 1908; dies in Bologna, 30 May, 1989.
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* Anti-fascist. Born on 29 March, 1873, in Padua; dies on 29 December, 1941, in Rome.
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* Anti-fascist. Born in Ancona on 3 May, 1860; dies in Rome on 11 October, 1940.
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* Born in Venice on 19 January, 1879, leaves Italy in 1938, teaches at Princeton, dies in New York on 6 May, 1943.
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* Born on 16 February, 1903, in Turin. Flees in 1938 to Great Britain, and returns in 1946 to Bologna. Dies on 2 October, 1977, in Frascati.
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* Born in Rome on 20 October, 1901; dies in Chicago on 28 November, 1954.
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* Pasquale Isidoro Simonelli (1878–1960), Commendatore of the Order of the Italian Royal Crown, a Catholic, born in Naples, where he is educated and works as a bank clerk. Goes to the United States in 1897. He first gives Italian language lessons in New York, and in 1898 he gets a job as a librarian in a secondary school. With the help of a certain Joseph Francolini, Simonelli starts his banking career at the Italian Savings Bank of New York City, first as a clerk, then a secretary, and then as a member of the board. He becomes an American citizen in 1902 and joins the Republican Party. Simonelli is Enrico Caruso’s personal banker and handles all his business related to the New York Metropolitan Opera. He spends his whole life bringing Italian opera singers to New York and does much to fuel their popularity. Among these are Riccardo Stracciari, Titta Ruffo and Beniamino Gigli. In 1936 he returns to Naples, to Villa Simonelli, to his palace, where he lives until his death. He is buried there in 1960 in his family mausoleum at the Sant’ Erasmo cemetery.
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* In one moment
The roses have faded
The petals fallen
Because I could not forget the roses
We searched for them together
We found roses
That were her roses, my roses
This journey we called love
Out of our blood and tears we made roses
That shone but a moment in the morning sun
Under the sun among the briars we withered the roses
That were not our roses
Roses that were not ours, not mine, not hers.
P.S. And thus we forgot the roses.
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* Friedrich Rainer, born on 28 July, 1903, in Carinthia (St Veit an der Glan). Attends law school. As of 1930 a member of the German National Socialist Workers Party; from 1936 works in the Party administration in Austria; 1938–41 made Gauleiter, district governor and governor of the Reich in Salzburg; 1941–5 he is in Carinthia and the neighbouring parts of Styria; in 1943 he is appointed defence commissar of the Adriatic Littoral. On 8 May, 1945, hands over his administration to the representatives of the democratic parties, and the British Army extradites him to Yugoslavia. He is tried at Nuremberg. He is put to death as a war criminal on 13 March, 1947, in Ljubljana.
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* Odilo Lotario Globočnik, born in 1904 in Trieste to a Slovenian father (a Habsburg cavalry lieutenant who goes on to work as a postal clerk after the war) and a Hungarian mother. In 1923 his family moves from Trieste to Klagenfurt. In Austria in 1931, Odilo Globočnik becomes a member of the Nazi Party and in 1934 he joins the S.S. He takes an active part in forming Nazi cells throughout Austria before its annexation to Germany in 1938, and in 1936 becomes head of the Party for Carinthia. Before he comes to Trieste, he is one of the key people in an operation of vast proportions in which about two and a half million Polish Jews are murdered (Aktion Reinhard). Globočnik arrives in Trieste with a large team of “professionals”, with a death squad that has already proved itself in exterminating the populations of Russia, Poland and Germany, as well as in the death camps — Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In 1943, ninety-two members of the Einsatzkommando Reinhard are stationed in Trieste, including a large number of Ukrainian S.S.-troops, both men and women. The Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommandos were special squads with the task of “fighting the enemies of the Reich and aiding the troops in combat”, in other words, of occupying the territories that had been conquered, to squelch all rebellion and exterminate the non-Aryan population.