Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg

First published:Lessico famigliare, 1963 (English translation, 1967)

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: The 1920’s to 1950

Locale: Italy

Principal Personages:

• Natalia Levi, the youngest of the five children of Giuseppe and Lydia Levi
• Giuseppe Levi, Natalia’s often ill-tempered Jewish father, a passionate socialist and antifascist who teaches anatomy at the University of Turin
• Lydia Levi, Natalia’s Catholic mother, a housewife
• Gino Levi, the eldest son and the father’s favorite
• Alberto Levi,
• Mario Levi, and
• Paola Levi, the other Levi children

Form and Content

In the preface to this autobiographical/biographical work, the author makes an unusual request of her readers. While the events depicted are true and the individuals are real, Natalia Ginzburg asks that the book be read as a novel. In her reasoning, she cites the treachery of memory and records that come from a single point of view. Yet this personal family portrait, which begins with Ginzburg’s remembrances of her solitary childhood and ends in 1950 after her second marriage, is more an autobiography than a novel. While following a generally linear time line, the author moves back and forth between historical events—the rise of fascism, World War II and the German occupation of Italy, and the privations of the postwar years—and her family memories. Stories about Ginzburg’s parents and details of daily life are woven together with vignettes about relatives, friends, socialist and antifascist activists, and servants. Characters are called by their true names and, as in life, appear and disappear without regard for the conventions of a fictional plot.

The book opens at the family dinner table, as the author’s stormy, impatient father thunders his disapproval of his children’s table manners. The author’s parents, Giu-seppe and Lydia Levi, and their five children, of which Natalia was the youngest, were socialists and, after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini took power, antifascists.

Her family members knew many political leaders in both movements and played their own important parts in this period of Italian history. During Ginzburg’s childhood, the family harbored outlawed socialist leader Filippo Turati during his escape from fascist Italy; the author’s brother Mario escaped to France after nearly being arrested for smuggling antifascist literature from Switzerland; her father and two of her brothers were arrested and temporarily jailed as Mario’s suspected collaborators; and her Jewish father fled to Belgium to avoid anti-Semitic persecution, returning only to go into hiding until Germany’s surrender. Ginzburg also knew many prominent Italian publishers and writers, many who worked against fascism, including poet and novelist Cesare Pavese.

In 1938, the author was married to Leone Ginzburg, a Russian Jew. Though many Jews were fleeing Italy, the couple chose to stay. When her husband was exiled by the fascist government to a small village because of his religion and his antifascist activities, the author and their two children joined him. After Mussolini’s fall, her husband returned to German-occupied Rome and began an underground anti-Nazi newspaper. Arrested by the Germans, he later died in prison.

During this time, the author’s sister, Paola, who liked parties and fashionable clothes, married Adriano Olivetti, heir to one of Italy’s largest manufacturing fortunes (they divorced after the war). Mario, while in hiding in France, married and divorced the artist Amadeo Modigliani’s daughter; he remarried and never returned to Italy. Alberto, after his release from prison, became a doctor.

After the war ended, the elder Levis, Ginzburg, and her children moved back to Turin, where she was hired by a publishing firm to translate novels, and she continued to write her own. In a moving portrait of Pavese, who worked for the same publishing firm, she tells of his suicide. In 1950, Ginzburg married again and moved to Rome. The book ends with her parents arguing as they retell yet another family story.

Context

Though the author clearly separated herself from the women’s movement in Italy, Ginzburg’s fiction has often focused on the skewed power dynamics of the family. Several of her early works condemn traditional families and feature women who are alienated and bored by their passive roles, with familial expectations for achievement reserved only for sons. This portrait of her own family, however, which won Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize, varies in tone from her early fiction.

Like Virginia Woolf in To The Lighthouse (1927), Ginzburg provides an uncensored look at the daily workings of an intellectual, bourgeois family and the perils of a childhood under patriarchy. She offers her father’s raging criticisms of anyone who did not agree with him and his contempt for what he saw as his wife’s frivolous tastes and interests. She also writes that he favored her eldest brother and that, while he worried about his sons’ futures, Levi dismissed concern for the two girls because their path was clear: They would end up married.

Yet, Ginzburg fails to acknowledge the pain of the parental injustices to which she was victim. Her attitude toward traditional family life, even toward her tyrannical father, is subtly affectionate and nostalgic. Her patriarchal family is shown as offering stability and a type of strength in its rigidity and unchanging values, which create a refuge and connection in times of turmoil. Most important, while Ginzburg shows that Giuseppe Levi’s despotism and austerity caused fear and resentment and eventually rebellion in his children, just as the Italians eventually revolted against fascism, she fails to comment on the contradiction between her father’s passionate opposition to Mussolini and his habit of acting the dictator in his own home. Moreover, her mother, despite her nostalgia for her days as a schoolgirl, is content in her domestic role.

Perhaps Ginzburg’s reticence to vilify the traditional family is a reaction to the cultural climate when the book was published. The 1960’s was a period of social protest against traditional values, particularly by the growing women’s movement. Perhaps because of her affection for her family, as seen in hindsight, she could not accept a blanket condemnation of its values. Family Sayings can be seen as her personal attempt to reconcile both the love and the pain in her family memories.

Bibliography

Amoia, Alba della Fazia. Women on the Italian Literary Scene: A Panorama. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1992. A critical survey of the works of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian women writers, including Family Sayings. Includes a chronology marking the years between 1846 and 1991 when various women writers were born and dates of significant publications. Also offers a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a comprehensive index.

Aricó, Santo L., ed. Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. A collection of essays on twelve Italian women writers active after the 1940’s. The chapter on Ginzburg examines her critique of the societal rules that shape family and other human relationships. Contains a bibliography of works in Italian and in English on Italian women authors in general, as well as individual writers.

Books and Bookmen. August, 1984, p. 33.

Bullock, Alan. Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. A book-length study of Ginzburg’s work. Includes a chronology of events in Ginzburg’s life, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources in both English and Italian, and a detailed index.

Christian Science Monitor. LXXVI, December 7, 1984, p. B12.

The Guardian Weekly. CXXXI, July 22, 1984, p. 22.

The Observer. June 17, 1984, p. 23.

O’Healy, Anne-Marie. “Natalia Ginzburg and the Family.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 9, no. 32 (1986): 21-36. Suggests that all the novels before Family Sayings were pessimistic about family life, while those published later express a profound nostalgia for the patriarchal family structure.

Salmagundi, no. 96 (Fall, 1992). This issue contains a special section on Ginzburg, which includes an interview with the author and three essays: one on Ginzburg’s philosophical stance, another discussing her fictional portrayals of gender roles, and the last on the nature of the family in her works. The latter essay places Family Sayings in the context of her other work on the topic of family relations.