My father’s bookcase was divided by nationalities of the authors. “The French ones,” my mother would say with some solemnity, indicating the most considerable sector, and perhaps the one most congenial to her. Then came the Russians, preferred by my father.
The bookcase, pride of the family, occupied a room in our apartment, on the second floor of the building on via Volta in Erba.
Of the few walks we took together, my father and I, I recall well the one to the Torretta. Having loaded our backpacks with food, which consisted of bread and bresaola, we took off at a good clip.
The Torretta, a medieval tower probably for observation, was tumbledown then, and has now vanished.
By the end of the summer of 1943, a stretch of time that had seemed to me unbelievably long and even more so in my memory, a good-sized colony of strangers had arrived in town.
Then it emerged they were Jewish.
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