Aldo Zargani's suspended time
Italian writer Aldo Zargani.
Wikimedia commons CC BY-SA 4.0 Geachikoria
Text by: Olivier Favier
5 mins
He had recounted in For violin alone, published in France in 2007, his childhood memories in Italy of racial laws (from 1938) and Nazi-fascist deportations (from 1943 to 1945).
He was perhaps the last great witness to the time of the Shoah in Italy.
Aldo Zargani passed away on October 20, 2020 at the age of 87.
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In
Paolo Sorrentino's
Youth
, an aging character looks at the world from both ends of a telescope.
“
Everything seems very close, it's the future,” he
comments.
Everything seems very far away, it's the past.
"
At the very beginning of
For solo violin
, which marks at the age of sixty-two, Aldo Zargani's full entry into the Pantheon of Italian Letters, somewhere between Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani, the young retiree of Rai who remembers his early years, writes: “
Everyone's childhood is both a spyglass and a microscope, but my instrument explores the night of the Shoah, the Hitlerite extermination, the catastrophes of the past, the times distant places where the existence of so many loved ones was destroyed for no reason.
"
A Jewish child in the Italy of race laws
In this book translated in 2007, twelve years after its publication in Italian, the old divergence of analysis between Platonists and Aristotelians is revitalized in a very concrete way: are we at each age of our life a different person or are we all together his biological age and those who preceded him?
In other words, was Aldo Zargani still the little six-year-old Turinese trotting behind a violist father driven out because he was a Jew from the national radio orchestra after the racial laws of 1938, trying in vain to rebuild his life in Switzerland?
Was it still the ten-year-old kid living under a false identity with the Brothers, without news of his parents who will escape deportation by miracle?
Was there still this preteen who shared the daily life of the partisans that he saw one day execute a couple of lovers for an obscure theft?
Only he could have the definitive answer to this question, but one thing is certain, this time and its inexhaustible retinue of memories always returned in his conversations.
Despite his laughter, his verve and his natural influence, there was an immediately perceptible fragility whose origin could not be ignored.
It was this child who reappeared again, when one day in June 2008, Aldo Zargani reacted to what he considered to be the expression of state racism: “
The fascistoids started the census of the Italian Roma.
One of the first (at 4 a.m. with blinding spotlights and massive law enforcement) is the Resistance Gold Medal.
The few Jews who remember the 1938 census resented it quite badly.
"
The fantasies of memory
He rarely spoke of his post-war life, which was rich in experiences, but which he found mundane.
His second book,
Certe promesse d'amore
, not translated into French, nonetheless shows all its riches, which tells of his distant and disappointed faith in communism and Zionism - he had since nourished a total aversion for ideologies, hence what 'they come.
Other episodes of it were discovered in the stories he published in magazine or online, some of which are collected in volume thanks to the efforts of the writer and critic Marco Belpoliti, who saw him as the heir to the great authors of post-war period, of which he is one of the best specialists.
Aldo Zargani searched his memory like a melancholy and whimsical archivist.
Until recently, there were real moments of grace, such as this scene of a man having a child repeat the opening song of the prayer for the arrival of Shabbat, heard from a window in the Bukharim district, in Jerusalem.
How this atheist could feel and transmit to perfection the feeling of the sacred, even if he was devoid of any religiosity, this is perhaps a key to this intimate and almost magical knowledge of time which made his writing so precious, and which made him a great historian and his perfect opposite, a being convinced that to the tragedy of the world one can only oppose an eternal recommencement.
This is why it will always be a little difficult to believe in the reality of his disappearance.
►For more information:
Aldo Zargani,
For solo violin, memories of childhood in the below
, Editions de luster, 2007.
Aldo Zargani,
The Smell of the Lake
, Alidades, 2008.
Le chemin des livres magazine, n ° 18, special issue dedicated to Aldo Zargani, Alidades.
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