The orphans of the Shoah and the birth of Israel.
The book is out in January 2018, Einaudi Storia, pp. XIV – 394, € 32 – eBook € 10,99.
Sergio Luzzatto recounts here the adventure of a surprising number of Jewish children, who have escaped the final solution and refugees in the Italy of Liberation: about seven hundred young Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Romanians, refugees after 1945 in the mountains of Selvino, in the Bergamo area.
It tells the story of the adventure of Moshe Zeiri, the formidable Galician Jew who, placing himself at the helm of the rescued children, will allow them to be reborn as citizens of the new Israel. This is the story of a redemption. Tragically deprived of a family, of a house, of a language, irreparably robbed of their past, the orphans of the Shoah see the prospect of a future in the promised land, thanks to the Zionist emissaries: a future to be built together, male and females, as in a large family gathered in a «Selvino kibbutz».
The Children of Moshe are orphans of the Shoah reborn to life in the Italy of Liberation. They are very young Jews of Central and Eastern Europe who escaped the Nazi extermination, who in 1945 met a man like Moshe Zeiri: the Zionist militant who founded and directed Selvino, in the Bergamo area, the most important orphanage in post-war Europe. “Sciesopoli ” built by Fascism to prepare its young people for war.
A carpenter by training, a theatrical by vocation, Moshe Zeiri was part of a small group of Jews, originally from Central and Eastern Europe. Young immigrants in Palestine in the Thirties, who between 1944 and 1945 went back to Italy as volunteer soldiers in the British Genius, to try to save the salvable. If not their “world of yesterday”, the Yiddish civilization irreparably destroyed, at least the last remnants of the exterminated people. After his dramatic meeting with the surviving children, Moshe Zeiri organizes them in Selvino (Bergamo) in a sort of orphan republic, and through Zionist education he prepares them for a second life. No longer the resigned lives of the victims, “over there”, in the blood lands of the Final Solution, but the free and strong life of the settlers of Eretz Israel, in the Promised Land.
On the other hand, the story of Moshe’s children is also the story of an illusion. Because after the war of independence in 1948, the utopia of the “kibbutz Selvino” would end up in the state of Israel, with the reality of new (and brutal) relations of force.
