MemoGen is a Oral History project aimed at collecting video interviews with people born in Italian families between the 1960s and the 1980s. The topic of the interviews is the legacy of the Second World War in Italian culture and society between 1945 and today.
Between the day we received Olga’s story and today, the gardening company in Odessa mentioned in the text was destroyed during the Russian air strike on May 1, 2024. Thousands of plants and trees were burned, warehouses and offices destroyed. Luckily there were no casualties among the employees. The owners of the company released a video of the aftermath of the attack.
The Olive Grove by Deborah Rohan is a memoir of the Palestinian people told through multiple generations of the Moghrabi family and their friends and neighbors from 1913-1948, from the Ottoman through the British occupations and up through the Zionist invasions and the birth of modern Israel.
World history and great power politics put the Palestinians and the Jews in bloody conflict and collision since the world wars. Both peoples were denied adequate refuge, help or support by powers large and small. Both peoples were largely unwanted in the countries that voiced support for one or the other. Great powers gave little succor, first controlling their territories and governments, then forcing them into collision in the Holy Land so dear to both. This conflict, with only occasional abeyance but never a secure peace, has been raging for many decades. The present war is its latest horrific iteration.
Contemporary conditions make The Olive Grove an imperative read today.
After each assault, the Russian occupiers would take a break from two to three days for pulling up the reserves, delivering more ammunition, and picking up their stiffs and wounded. The stiffs often remained unclaimed. The wounded would be picked up more often than not, but not on the regular basis.
If you caught this break, it was possible to daringly fuck around in the tree lines. The key was not to get too cheeky and keep out of the enemy’s line of sight. Or else.
Sometimes this moment of comfort came from our side as well. Then the silence was even scarier than hearing all those various bangs from both sides. On just such a day, we ventured into tree line number 18 with one aim only – to steal something…
During the Cold War, Italy was not allowed by the international treaties to detain its own nuclear arsenal. However, owing to its strategic geographical position amid the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian peninsula provided an ideal launch platform for NATO’s warheads and aeroplanes. Thus, the indirect involvement of Italy in the Cold War was crucial, albeit underrated and too often passed over in silence by both Italian politicians and intellectuals. Mariani’s fine volume aims to challenge such a grey zone of the Italian memory, by investigating how the discourse on Italian participation in the Cold War was addressed by some Italian authors and intellectuals of the time, namely Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia.
Better you than me. I remembered the first time I heard that aphorism. It sounded callous and cruel, but that wasn’t the point. It reflected the stark reality and limited options imposed by the war and shone an uneasy glow upon our Darwinian nature. I was going to need a wise, experienced, and convincing teacher to help me not just see this darkness but understand it. One day, he simply showed up.
David Klein, Psy.D., is a U.S. Veterans Administration Psychologist.
2010 is when I began to become a veteran. It was more than 40 years after I had returned to the United States from Viet Nam. Forty years of madness, nightmares, drug abuse, suicide attempts. 2010 is when I began to speak about it. And write about it. And cry. 40 years of tears coming out all at once. I am still becoming a vet. My first piece of writing as I started to embrace my identity as a veteran, that I share here, was an open letter to my brothers and sisters of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the numbers given derive from the original writing in 2010, my message and warning are still relevant to any warriors from any country and war struggling to return home after experiencing the horrors of combat and many difficulties of return.
Lawrence Markworth served in the US Navy between 1962 and 1966 and participated in the Vietnam War on the USS Castor. After struggling for decades with his traumatic memories, he eventually reconnected with his younger self, who had gone through the ordeal of war. We publish here a short autobiographical testimony of Lawrence’s journey, which was extracted from his forthcoming memoir Rowing through a Sea of Rubble.
As a genre, personal narratives have evolved over two centuries, passing from being almost exclusively memoirs written by high-ranking officers (mostly noble) to consisting of a much more multifaceted variety of expressive forms including letters, diaries, autobiographical sketches, poems, published or unpublished memoirs, oral histories and autobiographical fiction. After a long-lasting prejudice that banned personal narratives from the history of war and conflict, which was relegated to the disciplinary field of Military History, since the 1960s historians have begun to look at these narrations as valid and valuable sources of historical knowledge, thus giving impulse, after the so-called “cultural” and “narrative” turns after the 1970s, to the birth of sub-disciplines such as Micro-History, History of Mentality, Cultural History, Oral History and more recently the History of the Emotions. Working with personal narratives is a challenging scholarly enterprise due to the flickering and multifaceted nature of this kind of written expression, which is transversal to literary genres while including forms, styles, and registers typical of the spoken language. Personal narratives can hardly provide an overall comprehension and depiction of war, as they can inform about events that occurred on a smaller scale and the perception that human beings have of the war as a direct experience. Therefore, working with personal narratives often requires intellectual flexibility and the ability to blend different disciplinary approaches by borrowing diverse methodological, critical and analytical tools.
Issue n. 7 of the CEIWJ aims to investigate the theme of the close encounters in war in connection with the universe of personal narratives to study how people have accounted for their personal experience of war in ancient, pre-modern, modern and contemporary periods. Guest Editor for Issue n. 7: Fabio Caffarena (University of Genoa).
The editors of the Close Encounters in War Journal invite the submission of abstracts of 250 words in English by 31 March 2024 to ceiwj@nutorevelli.org.
On Saturday 16 October 1943, the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. The Germans arrested 1259 people in the Roman ghetto and deported them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 16 survivors, among which one woman, returned after the war.
Mara Josi investigates how 16 ottobre 1943 by Giacomo Debenedetti, La Storia by Elsa Morante, La parola ebreo by Rosetta Loy, and Portico d’Ottavia 13 by Anna Foa have handed down the legacy of the Roman round-up over eighty years.
Close Encounters in War 