By Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91), this was published in 1963. I read it after coming across at least two recommendations on Five Books.

It is a beautiful, tender, evocative book, and I owe it an apology because I spread it out over too many weeks. No good reason -- it's short (shorter than I realized, actually, as my text is supplemented by an extensive critical apparatus); it's interesting; and the Italian is easy to read. It just kept getting elbowed aside by Things That Had To Be Finished First (for various reasons).

It is an account of the lives of the Levi family, of which Natalia is the fifth child. But her little foreword testifies to the complex layers of that account. She tells us that the places, facts, people, and names in the book are real, and nothing is invented. But, she says, she has written only what she remembers, and has not recorded everything she remembers (especially insofar as it concerns herself). So, although it deals with reality, she thinks it is better to approach it as though it were a novel, and to ask of it no more and no less than we would ask of a novel.

Not an autobiography, then, or even a memoir. Not a blow-by-blow family chronicle. And not a novel... Just the record of her family, spread out like a delicate, fragile piece of lace, whose patterns are made up as much by the holes as by the solid bits. She notes that she had long intended to write a book that would tell the story of the people with whom she experienced a key part of her life, and this is -- to some extent -- the book she wanted to write. But only to some extent, "because memory is treacherous, and because books that draw on reality are often no more than faint glimmers and slivers of all that we have seen and heard".

The differences in the way the various translations reflect the title indicate an important theme. In English, we've had Family Sayings; then The Things We Used To Say; and finally, in 2017, Family Lexicon (obviously the most literal rendition of the original title, Lessico famigliare). A French translation, meanwhile, goes for The Words of the Tribe. All these versions point to the fact that this is a very verbal book, constantly foregrounding and repeating the (often nonsensical) things that mean something within a family but little or nothing to outsiders. In later life, as Ginzburg explains, the five siblings are not close. But words are triggers: "Among us, one word is enough. All it takes is one word, one sentence: One of those ancient phrases, heard and repeated countless times during our childhood... One of those phrases or words that would make us siblings recognize each other in the darkness of a cave, in the midst of millions of people."

Every family has them, I guess. Ours certainly did. I don't know any family apart from ours that referred to fairy cakes as dog-pelters, or thick sandwiches as billwiches. I haven't heard anywhere else a child's irruption onto the scene being greeted with the words: "It's like the poor, it's always with us." An untidy room was said to be like "a whore's attic" (but with "whore" pronouned "hooah", so that as a child I always wondered what a hooah was, and probably asked, and was probably answered with just a smile); and anything aesthetically displeasing was labelled with the attributive adjective "hellfire" (as in "a hellfire hat" or "hellfire music"). Our family, like Ginzburg's, and I'm sure like many others, also had its repeated stock phrases or sentences that always designated, like code or shorthand, certain people.


The Jewish Museum, Trieste, 2023. The power of families...

In Ginzburg's account, the key purveyors of this verbal stock-in-trade are her father, biology professor Giuseppe Levi (Beppino to his wife, he's kind, but loud, irascible, stubborn, and judgemental); and her mother, Lidia (inconstant, a little indolent, but resilient and always positive). Giuseppe storms round the house castigating all and sundry as half-wits and donkeys; and he and Lidia hold lively conversations that are replete with stock descriptions, and tried-and-tested ripostes and rebuffs. Giuseppe (from Trieste, as it happens) is Jewish; Lidia (from Milan, though also with some Triestine heritage) is not.

These two have five children (Gino, Alberto, Mario, Paola, and Natalia herself). The whole family verbalizes, loving to quote and create word games or little snippets of poetry, and loving to argue about things, even when they're all on the same side.

Other famous Italians trot quite casually through the pages. There's the Olivetti family, of typewriter fame; Filippo Turati, a socialist leader who hid out with the Levi family for a week before being helped to escape; Carlo Levi, whose memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, was the first Italian novel I ever read, during the subsidiary course I took in my first undergrad year; and, most heart-rendingly, Cesare Pavese, the author who eventually commits suicide ("Pavese killed himself one summer when none of us was in Turin... He had talked for years about killing himself. None of us ever believed him...").

Running along in the background of the family story is the political situation of the time. As a child, Natalia remembers that meeting contingents of blackshirts on his way home always made her father angry. "Clowns!" he would dub them, slamming down his napkin, plate, and glass, and huffing and puffing in contempt. He thinks of himself as one of the few anti-fascists left in Italy, because so many of the people he knows have moved to the right. And he doesn't see anything that can stop fascism in its tracks. Lidia, meanwhile, is always hopeful that someone will kick Mussolini out...

The most overtly political child is Mario. He decides to become a "conspirator", and gets arrested on the Swiss border after anti-fascist pamphlets are found in his car. He escapes into Switzerland, in dramatic fashion, and goes to live in France.

But eventually several other family members get caught up in the political melee, first in the backlash against dissent, and then in the increasing official hostility towards Jews. There always seems to be someone in prison.



Natalia gets to know Leone Ginzburg via one of her brothers. He's a Russian Jew, who came to Italy with his mother and sister when he was a child. He is avowedly political, and often speaks at salons. Then he is jailed for a while, after which he is shunned in Turin "as a dangerous conspirator".

"We got married, Leone and I; and went to live in the house in Via Pallamaglio." (Natalia gives us nothing as to how this came about. In general, she is reticent about her involvement in things. She always hovers on the edge of her account, never in the middle of it.) Giuseppe is unhappy about the marriage. He's always unhappy about the marriages of his children, but this time he might have a point. Leone could be arrested again at any point, and either imprisoned or sent into internal exile ("confino", meaning compulsory residence in a place of the authorities' choosing).

La Ginzburg (as the Italian critics always style her) gradually builds up a picture of what it was to be Jewish in that period. At first you hardly notice. There are just a few references to names common in Jewish families, or the fact that Giuseppe's mother didn't want him to marry a non-Jewish woman, or Giuseppe's horrendously inappropriate prejudices (he thinks Leone is ugly, because he's a Sephardic Jew: "I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, and that's why I'm not so ugly.")

But then the climate changes. Dark touches succeed each other. After her marriage, for example, Natalia frequents three Jewish friends. Two of them, sisters, are friendly with some German Jewish refugees, who "lived from day to day, and didn't know what they were going to do the next month, whether they would be able to leave for Palestine, or whether they would join some unknown cousin in America".

In Italy, too, things are uncertain: "The racial campaign had begun in Italy, but already by mixing with those foreign Jews they had unwittingly prepared themselves for an uncertain future."


"...a proper declaration of belonging to the Jewish race..."

The "racial campaign" makes everyone increasingly fearful. "All the Jews we knew were leaving, or preparing to leave," says Natalia, before adding, almost casually, that she and Leone had thought about leaving, too, but their passports had been confiscated. Leone had lost his Italian citizenship, and was now stateless. He had turned down an earlier opportunity to leave...

Leone is arrested from time to time. We know that. But it's a shock -- a real shock -- when we get to 1945, and we're in the publishing house where he had worked: "On the wall in his office, the publisher had hung a portrait of Leone, with his head a little bowed, his glasses low on his nose, the deep dimple in his cheek, his feminine hand. Leone had died in prison, in the German wing of the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, one icy February during the German occupation."

For a while that's all we get, and Natalia skitters away from the subject. But bit by bit, the painful details are filled in.

Leone and Natalia had been sent into internal exile in the Abruzzi when Italy joined the war. By the summer of 1943, they were hoping the war would end soon: "It was a tranquil period, and those were the last months Leone and I spent together." But then there's a torrent of events. The fall of Mussolini, when Leone leaves his forced residence, and goes to Rome; the exultation of the armistice with the allies; then the German invasion, and the feeling of helplessness and defencelessness it brings. She leaves her Abruzzi village on 1 November, warned by Leone. Everyone has gone into hiding. She is helped by the villagers, and reaches Rome. Three weeks later Leone is arrested, and she never sees him again. She returns to her mother in Florence: "We didn't exchange many words about Leone's death."

Leone, we are later told, was arrested at a clandestine printing press. Family friend and brother-in-law Adriano Olivetti arrives to tell Natalia to leave immediately, as the police might arrive at any moment. She remembers Adriano's kindness as helps her pack. If you read between the lines of the prison records, says Joan Acocella, it seems Leone died under torture. What it must be like to know that has happened to your partner defies imagination, and makes Natalia's reserved, dignified account stand out all the more sharply.

Giuseppe has suffered too, but has been incredibly lucky. Having lost his university position because of his Jewish credentials, he takes up a post in Belgium. He experiences a series of dramatic close calls, but eventually returns to Turin. The family is evacuated to Ivrea, but he is warned to go into hiding because the Germans are searching for Jews. After another series of close calls, he and Lidia are able to go to Florence, where they stay until the north of Italy is liberated.

Alberto's wife's parents are not so lucky: "They had been seized like so many unfortunate Jews who had not taken the persecution seriously." They made the mistake of moving to a smaller town, where everyone can identify them. Someone informs on them, and the Germans take them away. Miranda, Alberto's wife, has warned them they would be safer in a more anonymous big city. "We are peaceful people," they reply, "No-one is going to hurt peaceful people like us..." First they're held in a prison in Milan, and then are transported to an unknown destination...


November 1943: "Those belonging to the Jewish race are foreigners. During this war they have enemy nationality"

When all this is over, Natalia speaks of the euphoria of the post-war period, which rapidly dissipated into discouragement: "There were then two ways of writing. One was a simple enumeration of facts, on the trail of a grey, rainy, miserly reality set against a bare, stark landscape. The other consisted of mixing the facts with violence and the delirium of tears, convulsive sighs, and sobs. But the mistake shared by both approaches was to believe that everything could be turned into poetry and into words. The result was a disgust for poetry and words, so strong that it included even real poetry and real words, so that by the end everyone was silent, petrified by ennui and nausea."

By the end of the book, she has remarried, and is preparing to move to Rome. Family Lexicon closes with another of those masterly duets between Giuseppe and Lidia, rife with reminiscence, insult, and snatches of nonsense rhyme about a character known as the Walrus, and closing with a characteristic harrumph from Giuseppe: "Oh, we're not going to have the Walrus again, are we? ... How many times have I heard that story!" Bravi, Giuseppe and Lidia, the reader wants to say. You survived to bicker on. Bravi!

A very moving book, then, a collection of the jewels that only families can share, pinned against the dark backdrop of a history that belongs to us all.