NEW YORK - Like every year, also in this 2023 the Consulate General of Italy in New York will celebrate Remembrance Day, with the now traditional public reading of the names of Italian Jews who were deported to concentration camps. The appointment is from 9.00 to 14.00 on Friday 27 January at 690 Park Avenue, in front of the entrance to the Consulate General and all the public is invited to participate.
This initiative is part of a wider program of events promoted by the Consulate General together with the Primo Levi Center, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò of NYU, the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America of Columbia University, the Calandra Institute of CUNY, the Guglielmo Marconi School of Italy, the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) and the Magazzino d'Arte Italiana, to commemorate the victims of the Shoah and preserve the memory of those tragic events.
The program will already open on 19 January at the Italian Cultural Institute which, starting at 18.00, will host the presentation of the book “A man of letters. Giorgio Bassani in North America”, curated by the director of the IIC Fabio Finotti and Paola Bassani, president of the Giorgio Bassani Foundation. The publisher of the volume Anna Dolfi will present the entire corpus of poems written from 1945 to 1982, from which emerges, unlike the prose works, a more autobiographical and intimate Bassani, who looked with a stern and vigilant eye to post-war Italy .
In the 1970s Bassani came to the United States as a visiting professor at the Universities of Indiana and California and also went to Canada. There he reworked the novel of Ferrara and wrote some new poems for the volume "In great secret", which he called his "American poems". Alain Elkann will recall his meetings with Giorgio Bassani in New York and the writer's impressions of the United States and American literature. Valerio Cappozzo will illustrate the original materials of the correspondence between Bassani and the New York Times and with other magazines published in New York, the city in which Bassani's work has been and continues to be published.
Alongside the presentation there will also be an exhibition of documents made available by the Giorgio Bassani Foundation, curated by Cappozzo with the collaboration of Gaia Litrico and Francesco Franchella. Autographed letters and poems will be exhibited and, for the first time, also Bassani's recently rediscovered translation of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, written in 1943 and considered lost until now: a work that opens up new avenues of investigation into the relationship between the writer from Ferrara and American literature.
On January 21, at 12.00, we will move to Cold Spring in the New York branch of Magazzino Italian Art for the world premiere of "Piombo (The Periodic Table)", a solo work by Luciano Chessa inspired by the work of Primo Levi in a rare performance by legendary cellist Frances-Marie Uitti.
The composer was fascinated by Levi's journey to Nuragic Sardinia and the Bacu Abis mines, an almost divinatory tale of work and knowledge that unfolds as a counterpoint to Levi's reflection on the "camp experiment" and his invitation: "consider If this is a man".
The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of CUNY will host the seminar “Critical thinking in action. The Political Writings of Eugenio Colorni”, which will open at 18.00 on 24 January and will see, among others, as speakers Luca Meldolesi, Nicoletta Stame, Ernest Ialongo (Hostos, CUNY) and Stanislao Pugliese (Hofstra University).
The meeting takes its title from the first volume in English of Eugenio Colorni's writings and correspondence. Born in 1909, he was a political philosopher and teacher who joined the ranks of the anti-fascist movement. His analysis of the convergence of capitalist interests, nationalism and state violence and his federalist ideas led to his imprisonment in Ventotene and, in 1944, to his assassination by Pietro Koch's fascist militia. In addition to the famous Ventotene Manifesto, his writings were mostly published posthumously and translated into English by the Colorni-Hirschman International Institute.
On January 27 at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America of Columbia University there will be a conversation with Katharina von Schnurbein of the European Commission on the fight against anti-Semitism and the promotion of Jewish life.
The European Union and the United Nations commemorate the victims of the Holocaust every winter on the date of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and the Italian Academy celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day every year by exploring issues related to discrimination and crimes against humanity. Over the years, the Italian Academy has broadened its attention to the various groups targeted by the racism and xenophobia of the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
This year, Katharina von Schnurbein will discuss it in a conversation with Barbara Faedda, executive director of the Italian Academy.
On January 31, at 18.30, we return to the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò of NYU for the event "Three memoirs of Fiume". After various attempts to take possession of the city, in 1924 Mussolini annexed Fiume. As a result, thousands of Rijekas identified as Croats, Slovenians, Hungarians, etc. they became victims of legislative, political and physical persecution. Here the first fascist laboratory of ethnic cleansing took shape. From the library and archive of the Primo Levi Center, it will be possible to read excerpts from the memoirs of Jewish women who grew up in Fiume and were victims of fascist persecution: Cathy Lager, Andra and Tatiana Bucci and Nora Tausz. The meeting will be attended as speakers by Dominique Kirchner Reill of the University of Miami, Andra and Tatiana Bucci, Nora Tausz Ronai and Marcia Fink.
The Remembrance Day commemorations will conclude on February 1 at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, which at 5.30pm will host the screening of "When the past was present", a little-known short film from 1948 which appears to be one of the first representations of the deportation of the Jews of Rome, the exile and the birth of the State of Israel. Director Romolo Marcellini and writer Luigi Barzini Jr. had flourishing careers under Fascism and continued to work in the post-war culture industry as well.
The context that originated this film is unknown. Undoubtedly someone guided the director and writer through the recent memories of the Roman Jews. Someone who knew the history and the wounds, the streets, the places, the religious rites. Someone who helped to mediate between the small Italian Jewish world, brutally betrayed by his own country, and a new Republic that had to come to terms with the recent past, despite himself. Scholars Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University), Alexander Stille (Columbia University), Raffaele Bedarida (Cooper Union) and Natalia Indrimi (Centro Primo Levi NY) will present the film and propose some hypotheses about its history and production.
(r.a.\aise)
