A Comma in the Blood

The Italian author Natalia Ginzburg examined a wide range of topics, but it was not until the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that she chose to write about her Jewishness. Her piece, bluntly titled “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei”), appeared in the daily La Stampa on Sept. 14, 1972, nine days after the killings, and has recently been translated into English for the first time. Its perspective on the tensions surrounding the relationship between Jews and the state of Israel is acutely relevant in the wake of Oct. 7. We also now have the immediate responses to her provocative essay from fellow Italian intellectuals and authors, including the likes of Alberto Moravia and Primo Levi. These can be found, translated into English and with commentary by the literary critic Domenico Scarpa, in the collection Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies.

Ginzburg, the youngest of five children, was born Natalia Levi in Palermo in 1916 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. The family attended neither synagogue nor church, nor was there any commitment to a political ideology other than a professed anti-fascism during the Mussolini years.

When Natalia was three, the family moved to Turin, where her father, Giuseppe, a noted histologist, took a position teaching at the university there. In Ginzburg’s much-praised memoir Family Lexicon, Beppe, as he is affectionately called, comes off as boisterous and humorous yet domineering. The long hours he spent examining organisms under a microscope led him to worry over germs, and Natalia was kept from school until she was 11 for fear that she would contract a disease. The isolation from other children left its mark, as did her position in the family. She was born seven years after her next oldest sibling and always felt she’d been ignored. While this, she believed, accounted for her anguish, she also knew that her alienation generated an independence of mind that distinguished her writing. As the poet Peg Boyers puts it, “Ginzburg often appears … to be considering her subjects for the first time, with almost childlike freshness.” In the essay “Childhood,” Ginzburg describes her family as “nothing”—that is, lacking any comprehensive approach to the world. Yet this incomprehension led Ginzburg to work at clarifying each issue she took on. To achieve this, she developed a seemingly simple prose style to reveal her often unexpected insights.

While her childhood household might have lacked coherence, it was by no means culturally impoverished. Ginzburg describes it as rambunctious and intellectually stimulating, with visits from poets, journalists, and businessmen. Among the illustrious: Cesare Pavese, a good friend of her brothers, and the engineer Adriano Olivetti, of the typewriter family, who married her sister.

Prior to the Second World War, Turin was a center for left-wing activities, and the Ginzburg family was appropriately anti-fascist in its worldview. All three of Natalia’s brothers and her father spent brief times in jail for what the author Tim Parks calls “their political sympathies.” As he explains, “Anti-fascism had become an indication of worthiness in the world they moved in.” One may recall that one of Turin’s most famous sons, Primo Levi (no relation to Natalia), was arrested by the Italian fascists in the fall of 1943, not for being a Jew, but because he was on his way into the mountains to join an anti-fascist partisan group.

Though half-Jewish and nonpracticing, Ginzburg chose to identify as a Jew. Her wartime experience likely determined this. In 1938 she married a Jewish professor of Russian literature, Leone Ginzburg. He was one of those visitors to her home and, in addition to his professorial duties, was a journalist and left-wing activist, as well as a publisher, cofounding Einaudi, the famous Italian publishing house. In the year they married, Leone, who’d been born in Odessa, had his Italian citizenship revoked under Italy’s new antisemitic racial laws. In 1940, he, Natalia, and their three children were sentenced to confine (internal exile) and spent the next three years in Pizzoli, an impoverished village in the Abruzzi, where, as Natalia relates in her evocative memoir Winter in the Abruzzi, her children “run to eat the rotten oranges” that a shopkeeper throws away.

In 1943, upon hearing that the Allies had landed in Sicily, Leone—in a spirit of optimism—hurried to Rome, where he was arrested by the Italian police in the printshop of a partisan newspaper. He was taken to the German section of the Regina Coeli prison and tortured to death. He was 34. Fearing arrest herself by the approaching German army, Natalia gathered her children and made a daring escape to Rome, where they survived the remainder of the war.

Throughout her writing career, Ginzburg consistently sided with the powerless, the victimized. Late in that career, she took up the cause of Serena Cruz, a Filipino girl whose adoption by an Italian couple was nullified by an Italian court. Her essay on the subject was subtitled “The Meaning of True Justice.” Though she claimed she was among those “who understand nothing of politics,” she increasingly involved herself in Italy’s political affairs and was even elected to the Italian parliament on an independent left-wing ticket in 1985, at the age of 69. But to her credit, Ginzburg never turned herself into a monolithically minded leftist, dishing out the pabulum of received opinion. She was always a writer first, a political sympathizer second. In the same year that she published “The Jews,” she wrote “An Invisible Government,” in which she makes the following crucial distinction:

Thinking and expressing oneself politically means thinking and expressing oneself with a specific purpose in mind … Those who understand nothing of politics, on the other hand, think and express themselves without any goal whatsoever. It may be that their only goal is to explore and express their genuine thoughts.

Even when her writing turns political, Ginzburg holds to those “genuine thoughts.”

During the years following the Second World War, as details of the Shoah surfaced, Ginzburg’s identification with the survivors and with what she called “my Jewish side” deepened; but that affinity was thrown into question with Israel’s Six-Day War. The thought of emaciated Jewish victims transformed into sun-tanned Sabras adept at driving tanks and flying fighter jets generated a moral dilemma for her. As she would write a few years after Israel’s victory, “Those whom we loved and sympathized with as victims can change overnight, taking on the odious guises of cruelty. … And yet we can’t help regarding them as the victims they once were.”

This is from her 1970 essay, “Universal Compassion.” Inspired by the 1967 war, the essay eschews specifics—the words Israel and Palestine are not to be found—achieving what the title promises: a universalizing of moral inclinations in a perplexing world where it is difficult, as she says, “distinguishing the victims from the oppressors.”

The muddled, indistinct world she describes—the world we have unfortunately inherited—is one overloaded with information, opinions: a plethora of perspectives. It is a universe where ethical distinctions are blurred, where definitive judgements become increasingly impossible:

No matter what transpires … our intellectual response is to avidly pursue the root causes and seek out the probable guilty parties. But before long we stop short in bewilderment: the causes appear numberless, the reality too tortuous and complex for human judgment … the more deeply we probe, the more we find infinitely ramifying events that preceded it, all the way back to its source. In such a subterranean labyrinth, tracking down the guilty and the innocent seems a hopeless task. The truth darts from place to place, slipping and sliding in the dark like a fish or a mouse.

The condition that Ginzburg diagnoses has progressed in intensity over the past five decades. Never before in human history have we been so inundated with news, with an unceasing barrage of stories, videos, photographs, and provocative commentary, each day’s headlines burying the previous day’s concerns. Our instinctive reaction to whatever is happening is anger or approval. We have become, in Ginzburg’s assessment, creatures weighed down with “love and hate … forever seeking a place to unload them. But we cannot find the right place or the right person.” One thinks of John Steinbeck’s tenant farmer, Muley Graves, frustrated and helpless in the face of an impersonal and unjust system, asking, after his land has been taken away, “Then who do we shoot?”

In such a maddening world, where judgments are impossible, we resort, Ginzburg explains, “to a vast compassion for ourselves and the world at large. With universal compassion,” she argues, “we can’t go wrong. It is the one feeling we can give ourselves up to without fear of error.”

One may be appalled at what appears to be her moral capitulation, arising, it seems, out of a withering spiritual exhaustion. Yet what she has described is certainly the resort of a great many people today. “Even if we don’t know which side to support,” Ginzburg asserts, “we feel drawn to the side of the losers. … We cannot even imagine a happy world where the winners would not be hateful.”

Apply this dichotomous model to our current state of affairs, and Israel—despite the atrocities committed against it on Oct. 7—becomes the land of hateful winners, and Gaza, the land of losers: the safe moral bet.

This was Ginzburg’s mindset when she sat down to write “The Jews,” and it helps explain why she refers to the members of Black September, who carried out the massacre, as “guerrillas” rather than terrorists. (In this, she foretells the practice of news agencies such as the BBC and CBC to label Hamas terrorists, “militants.”)

Ginzburg begins her piece with a truism: When a tragedy happens in the world, we find ourselves considering how we would have acted if we had the power to do so. “If I were Golda Meir, I would have acquiesced to the guerrillas’ demands. … If I were the head of the German police, I would have let the guerrillas escape.” As for the guerrillas, Ginzburg describes their state of mind as “inhuman desperation.” They exist in a “stone desert,” where the “usual sentiments disappear” and where “the guilty and the innocent no longer exist.” These desperate ones, devoid of “hatred, scorn, or pity,” are “imbued with a power impossible to reach with our voices.”

The second part of her essay is far more interesting and revealing. She begins with the affirmation “I am Jewish” and continues, “When I heard about the Munich massacre, I thought: Once again they’ve killed people of my blood … but when I thought it, I felt contempt for myself. … I don’t believe in the least that Jews have blood different from that of others. I don’t believe there are blood divisions.”

Realignment of thought becomes her overwhelming project: “As a child, I inhaled the idea that the Jews were superior to others.” Such thoughts, she states, “are flaws of our education,” and so she asks us, as adults, “to remove these tattoos from our souls.” As for the Jews of Israel: “I thought they were superior to the Arabs. … Then, at a certain point, I found this idea monstrous. I tried to rip it from my mind and stamp it out.”

Ginzburg’s reeducation leads to the following: “After the war, we loved and pitied the Jews who went to Israel. … They’d survived an extermination and had nowhere to go. … We loved them for their fragility, their weary gait, and their shoulders weighed down by fear. … We had hoped that they would be a small, cozy, powerless country.”

This is shockingly naive and only to be matched by her romanticizing of Arabs as “poor peasants and shepherds.” Her conclusion is to be expected if one has followed her train of thought from “Universal Compassion”: “The only choice available to us is to be on the side of those who die or suffer unjustly. … I don’t want to be on the side of those who use weapons, money, and culture to oppress peasants and shepherds.”

“The Jews,” as one can imagine, received a wide range of immediate responses, both public and private. The first appeared in the same newspaper the following day from Arrigo Levi, a well-known Italian journalist who had fought in the Negev Brigade during Israel’s War of Independence. He derided Ginzburg’s characterization of Israelis and Arabs, her use of the word guerrillas, and her attempt to excuse them by calling them “desperate.” On the other end of the spectrum, a private letter from the left-wing activist Ursula Hirschmann praising Ginzburg and telling her “much of what you say is what I think and feel as well.” A Jew herself, Hirschmann complains of “the Jewish people who has been for a long time a fundamentally closed community,” and hopes that one day they will work to “give birth to a new utopia.”

To my mind, the most significant response came in a letter from Primo Levi. Levi always claimed that Auschwitz had provided him with a laboratory to understand human nature, and it is the basic elements of human nature he employs in challenging Ginzburg’s perspective. He begins by telling her, “I feel and think like you about certain points, regarding others—I don’t.” The points he agrees with are superficial (Levi, too, thinks Golda Meir should have released the hostages) and are dealt with in a short paragraph. His disagreements comprise the bulk of the letter.

Levi rejects Ginzburg’s use of guerrillas; he calls members of Black September “terrorists” and characterizes them as “clever and strong … infected with violence that is not the result of genuine indignation or desperation.” He believes Israel has a right to use force against them but takes the opportunity to state his disapproval of the IDF’s use of napalm in its attacks on Lebanon. Overall, he views Israel’s military as “a necessary evil” to ensure survival and admires Israelis “for their prompt and practical manner of confronting problems.”

His main critique, however, concerns Ginzburg’s feelings toward Jews. Levi believes that a Jew has the right to renounce her heritage, but if she does choose to identify as Jewish, would she not, he wonders, feel close to other Jews? As he explains, “We all have children, relatives, friends to whom we feel tied emotionally … assigning them a privileged position; we are partial to them and we are not embarrassed by it.” He knows that such partiality is not fair, but he does not wish to go against “human nature.” As an Italian and a Jew, Levi claims a closeness when he is in the company of Italians and Jews. As for Jewish solidarity, he tells Ginzburg, “In Auschwitz I had Jewish friends of the most diverse origins” whom “I liked wholeheartedly.”

Levi has pinpointed the critical issue separating a thinker like Ginzburg from himself. Though he does not use the phrase, it is apparent that what Ginzburg lacks—what Hannah Arendt likewise lacked, accounting for why Isaiah Berlin discontinued his correspondence with her—is love of the Jewish people: ahavat ha’am ha-yehudi. “I don’t believe there are blood divisions,” Ginzburg publicly proclaimed, only days after her fellow Jews were murdered in cold blood. And blood was still on her mind 14 years later, in 1986, when she told an interviewer, “I think that being Jewish is like having a comma in your blood, a comma you are not aware of. … I don’t believe it right to attribute a vital and essential importance to this comma in the blood. I think it should be cherished like a distant memory.”

A distant memory. Or a curiosity, perhaps, locked in a glass museum case with an explanatory label. And now we can go back and reexamine her abrupt title, “The Jews,” and contemplate the coldness of that definite article. And we can wonder at the insignificance of her comma—“a comma you are not aware of”—compared to the powerful aroma Osip Mandelstam noted in his memoir, The Noise of Time: “As a little bit of musk fills an entire house, so the least influence of Judaism overflows all of one’s life. O, what a strong smell that is!”

I have long been struck by the serendipitous coincidences that follow the writing of an essay. You come upon something in your reading that confirms what you have been thinking about, or you stumble upon a quotation that illustrates a point you wish to make.

Yesterday, my friend, Ken Hundert, emailed me a tribute for his older brother, Gershon. It was written by Ruth Wisse. The late Gershon Hundert had once served as the chair of the Jewish Studies program at McGill University and was the editor in chief of the monumental The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Wisse recounts attending a symposium with other academics, attempting to address “the relation of Jews to the nations.” What was it, they were struggling to explain, that had kept Jews together as a people? According to Wisse, “Suddenly Gershon burst out: ‘It was blood.’ How uncharacteristic this was you can only appreciate if you knew how gently he usually spoke and what a liberal, rational man he was.” She concludes, “The murderers had pursued us as a family, and Gershon cut through our intellectualization …”

Family. Can it be, that beneath all the arguments between Jews who support Israel and Jews who deny Israel, beneath all the intense “intellectualization”—the magazine articles, the forums, the podcasts—there lies the simple question of kinship? Those who feel it and those who do not?

Natalia Ginzburg confessed to feeling that kinship. Then she condemned the feeling and worked hard to root it out and send it into exile. Into her global family, founded upon a universal compassion for victims, she would accept only those Jews who were downtrodden: work slaves, barely breathing skeletons emerging from the lice-ridden barracks of Dachau. Once they took on flesh, once they acquired vigor and self-determination—along with the usual strengths and foibles—she could not abide them.