In 1934, Natalia’s middle brother, Mario — also a GL member — became “notorious” for hurling himself into Lake Lugano when Mussolini’s police tried to arrest him and a companion in the town of Ponte Tresa. “In the water with his overcoat on,” cried his mother, Lidia. As a result, his father and older brother, Gino, were arrested as accomplices and held for a number of days in a Turin prison. These events and others led to a roundup of many GL members in that city. As author Alexander Stille describes, on May 15, 1935, “More than fifty people were arrested in Turin and abut two hundred homes were searched for compromising material.” Stille points out that GL operatives collected information about fascist economic and military policy, about working conditions, unauthorized factory strikes, and peasant uprisings.
Many GL members came from the professional classes, and families like the Levis. “Rumors of mass arrests swept quickly through the Turinese upper-middle-class families of lawyers, businessmen, doctors and professors . . . The waiting room and the police station turned into a kind of social club for wives, mothers and girlfriends of prisoners,” adds Stille. Most GL prisoners were released after a few days but Vittorio Foa, Natalia Ginzburg’s friend, and a well-known GL activist, spent eight traumatic years in prison. She would come to view her father and his friends as “old fashioned Socialists,” as she told Radio Tre. “There’s nothing we can do, we can’t get out of this now,” her father intoned. After the passing of the antisemitic racial laws in 1938, banning Jews from jobs in public institutions, Giuseppe Levi lost his professorship in Italy and luckily was hired to teach in Belgium.
But in 1937, Mussolini’s men brutally murdered Carlo Rosselli along with his brother Nello on a quiet country road in France. The following year, Leone Ginzburg — a native of Odessa, literary critic, and professor of Russian literature — was stripped of his Italian citizenship after an earlier refusal to sign an oath to Mussolini, costing him his teaching job. While Carlo Rosselli famously came from a rich, well-connected Florentine family, this was not the case of Leone Ginzburg, a special target of the fascist secret police, the OVRA.
Leone Ginzburg, who married Natalia in 1938, was perhaps the GL activist best known to the OVRA. In 1936 he was released from Civitavecchia Penitentiary. “His coat was too small and his tattered hat sat slightly askew on top of his black hair,” wrote Natalia in Family Lexicon. “He walked slowly with his hands in his pockets, his lips down, his brow knit, his tortoise shell glasses resting halfway down his large nose with his black, penetrating eyes.”
He met with Giulio Einaudi, who had started a small publishing house back in 1933. Together they decided to revitalize that company, Einaudi editore, and publish those who were fighting against Mussolini. That company would become famous in the postwar period for its talented trove of new Italian voices.
In the Resistance period the largest antifascist party, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was, however, anything but sympathetic to GL and its troubles. It considered the movement founded by Rosselli elitist, non-Marxist, and thoroughly bourgeois. “For Rosselli,” writes Stanislao G. Pugliese, author of Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile, “the task of GL was nothing less than reconciling the political and social potential of the Russian Revolution with the scientific humanistic, liberal legacy of the West . . . Rosselli had had an obsession with renewing socialism, with trying to find some way out of the impotence of international socialism . . . Rosselli was especially impatient with the insipid socialism of [French socialist prime minister] Leon Blum and willing to break the taboo of pacifism . . . nor was he in favor of state socialism.” Instead, Rosselli had called for a “strategy of a permanent, adversarial, and confrontational stance versus the state.”
“The PCI, with good cause,” Pugliese writes, “perceived GL as its most serious competitor for the allegiance of young, active antifascists. The two groups were the most vital, innovative, and well-organized of the exiled, and underground antifascist organizations. . . . For the PCI, GL was ‘an agency of Italian capitalism . . . anticommunist organization . . . that seeks to trick the workers and separate them from the Communist Party.’” And for all the profound sacrifices made by GL members, the movement did not attract a mass following, like the PCI. GL would morph into the Action Party, which only lasted until 1947 after disappointing results in the first postwar elections. Still, Pugliese writes, “their ideals were kept alive by many independent intellectuals of the Left, ideas first broached by Rosselli in the 1930s.”
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