Lia Levi’s journey through the youth squares of the early twentieth century

It’s a Bildungsroman that revolves around three classmates grappling with the complicated search for themselves and their role in the world ‘And if I didn’t leave too’ (edizioni e/o) just landed in bookshops. But Lia Levi, precious literary guardian of Jewish memory, who with this book shifts her gaze further back than the historical setting of Nazi-fascist persecution in which her books traditionally move, took a lot longer. Entrusting Ida, the Jewish girl of the trio, with the task of navigating between modernity and tradition feminist conquests and married life, between the desire to open up to the world and the push, even for a lay person like her, to avoid a mixed marriage.

And provoking in readers a reflection on the climate that could be felt in the squares that agitated Italy on the eve of the First World War and what we see today, after the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023. ‘What if I didn’t leave too’ ( the title refers to the slogan that animated the interventionist student squares, taken from ‘Farewell of the volunteer’ by Carlo Alberto Bosi) is a sort of ‘spin off’ of ‘Everyone next to their night’, written in 2021, born from an explicit request from readers.

“Ida was the aunt of the character who rebelled against her parents in that book – explains Levi to Agi – and who, while supporting him, warned him about the side effects of the rebellion, clarifying that she had experienced them first hand”. Since many people during the presentations asked to know more about Ida’s story, Levi began to meditate on this feminist story, on the freedom of women to choose their working and sentimental future, which was intertwined with a great internal Jewish maceration, the desire to be like others on the one hand and the attractive force of traditions on the other. All entrusted to the story of Ida which, the writer announces, will have a sequel.

We are in Rome in the early years of the 20th century, in a historical moment dominated by war and the tumultuous debate between socialist pacifism and patriotic interventionism that animated clubs and squares. Ida is the eldest daughter of the antiques dealer Benedetto Sabatello, whose father lived in the ghetto at the time of the outrageous gates that deprived the Jews of their freedom.

Unlike his wife Rosina, anchored to traditions, against the idea of ​​opening up the women’s vote and scandalized by her daughter’s choice to attend a mixed school, with boys and girls even mixed in the same classes, he is the open minded of the family, convinced that the dawn of a new world had just dawned and that his daughter Ida, a brilliant teenager with a strong vocation for drawing, would be one of the protagonists.

He will become one, also thanks to the meeting and discussion with his schoolmates Vanessa, a pacifist and committed feminist art gallery owner mother and an artist father who lives in Spain, and the cultured activist Andrea, also from an intellectual family: a trio aware of the need to open up to a changing societyto other points of view, starting from what he had begun to consider women were equal to men. Around the three move characters who animate the choral novel and contribute to the lightness with which Lia Levi has always tackled crucial historical themes and periods: from Vanessa’s English governess, Miss Kilman, who fights for the rights of the poor and women, to nurse Olimpia, passing through the “parnassessa” of the old ghetto and the commoner Angelina, with her husband at war, sure that “love from afar, after a long time, expires”.