Love Story

Last time, I suggested that The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was more a story of unrequited love than one about the Holocaust. Finzi-Continis is famous for being a novel that shows the plight of Italian Jews before and during WWII; could it also be a love story? To put it more finely: is Finzi-Contini a love story set against the backdrop of the Holocaust or is it a novel showing how the Holocaust effects a relationship?

In the introduction (which we will examine more closely later), the narrator begins: “For many years, I wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis—about Micol and Alberto, about Professor Ermanno and Signore Olga…in Ferrara, just before the outbreak of the last war.” The year is 1957, and the narrator is on a Sunday excursion with some friends. Obviously, some years have passed since the time he is remembering, and one wonders why it’s taken the narrator so long to write down his memories. The answer, of course, is that first, this is a novel, and second, the long passage of time gives the reader a sense that the loss of the Finzi-Continis has been so painful that it can only be confronted with the insulation time provides. The introduction continues with a lovely description of seeing some ancient Etruscan tombs, which inevitably remind the narrator of the Finzi-Contini tomb in Ferrara. “And my heart ached as never before at the thought that in that tomb…only one among all the Finzi-Continis I had known and loved, had managed to gain that repose…for Micol…and for her father, Professor Ermanno, and her mother, Signore Olga…all deported to Germany in the autumn of ‘43, who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?”

After this, there are several chapters of history about the Finzi-Contini family, a prominent one in Ferrara, and the Finzi-Contini estate, large and walled. The narrator describes how, as a child, he would see Micol and her brother Alfredo at the local synagogue and school.

Up to this point, everything would point toward the view that the story is about the fate of Jewish Italians in the second world war, shown through the experience of one particular family.

The narrator then writes: “As far as I am personally concerned, there had always been something more intimate, in any case, about my relations with Alberto and Micol. The knowing looks, the confidential nods that brother and sister addressed to me…alluded only to this, I well know; something regarding us and only us.”

According to the narrator, this something is a shared Jewish identity.

It should be mentioned that, first of all, Italy had only been a unified country at the time of the narrator’s recollection (1933) for some sixty years, so that it was fairly new to think of one’s self as Italian, and second, Jewish Italians had historically been treated as being separate, although after the first world war and in the 1920s, they were accepted by the government. Then, in 1938, the Racial Laws were imposed, which took away most of their rights. In the 1940s, Italy and its leader Mussolini, were criticized by their Nazi allies for not being tough enough on Jews who were then interred in concentration camps. Ultimately, Italian Jews were sent to German concentration camps and some 7,000 were murdered.

I believe a shift occurs at chapter five, when the narrator fails part of his school exams and rides his bike aimlessly for hours, fearing his father’s wrath. He winds up at the Finzi-Contini estate and encounters Micol. A coincidence? Remember: this is fiction where coincidence often occurs.

(real life is random) Micol has heard of the narrator’s problems and offers to tutor him if he will enter the estate (this conversation occurs when they are at the estate wall.) The narrator experiences danger here, as well as eroticism. Fearing the theft of his bike, he hides it in a dark chamber within the walls and imagines falling and becoming lost. Micol slips and bruises her leg in climbing. “She pulled up the hem of her dress, baring her thigh, strangely white and strong, already a woman’s, and she bent over to examine the bruise. Two long blond locks, the paler ones, escaping the little ring which held her hair in place, fell down, hiding her forehead and her eyes.” (This occurs in 1929; Micol is thirteen).

Freudian concepts abound about male ambivalence over absorption by the female. Indeed, the narrator has an extended fantasy that he will live secretly in the chamber in the walls, that Micol will bring him food, and that they will kiss. “And every day we would kiss each other, in the darkness: because I was her man, and she, my woman.”

This is a fine example of an adolescent’s experience of the opposite sex, the Other, mysterious and, with the onset of puberty, unknowable, less a real person and more a projection of yearning and fantasy.

The narrator certainly becomes infatuated with Micol, obsessed, really, and the feelings seem to be reciprocated. Micol is not shy—although it must be noted that she is always seen through the narrator’s perspective, and he may not be reliable. (Gasp!)

Because of the increasing antisemitism in Ferrara, the narrator and others are banned from playing tennis at the local private club and are invited by the Finzi-Continis to play at the estate. In the course of these games, the narrator and Micol take long walks together, exploring the estate and each other—although not physically. During one such walk, they end up together in an old carriage in the rain.

Being alone with her, the narrator is anxious and awkward. “How well you keep it,” I said, unable to master a sudden emotion, reflected in a slight quaver in my voice.” He is frozen and does not touch her despite his desire. She speaks about the fate of old objects like the carriage, no longer of use and of an old abandoned canoe. “Look instead at the canoe, I beg you, and look at its honesty, dignity, and moral courage; it’s drawn all the necessary conclusions from its own total loss of function. Objects also die, my friend. And if they also must die, then that’s it, better to let them go. It shows far more style above all. Don’t you agree?”

This statement, spoken in an erotically charged moment, is a great encapsulation of the plight of Micol and her family, who are no longer needed by society and will die.

Then, the narrator (a slow mover) goes over and over this scene in the carriage during the next year. “If…I had at least managed to speak to her—I told myself bitterly—perhaps things between us would have gone differently…Speak to her, kiss her: it was then, when everything was still possible—I never ceased repeating to myself—that I should have done it! And I forgot to ask myself the essential question; whether in that supreme moment, unique, irrevocable—a moment that perhaps decided my life and hers—I had really been capable of attempting an act, a word of any sort. Did I really know then, for example, that I was in love, really? Well no, not at all. I didn’t know. I didn’t know then, and I wasn’t to know for at least another two weeks, when the bad weather, now steady, irreparably scattered our fortuitous company.”

This passage reads like the musings of the narrator looking back from far in the future and trying to make sense of what happened and how he felt. There is a strong sense of loss.

I think we should call a recess here, perhaps thinking of this post as part one of at least two parts on this issue of whether Finzi-Continis is or isn’t primarily a story of love.

Till next time, then.

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