Enrico Lamet, A Gift From the Enemy: A True Story of Escape in War-Time Italy; 2013 revision of 2007 Syracuse University Press , ISBN-12: 9781493646029, 472 pages in proof, including a glossary.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—This book is a love story, written by a man reflecting on his childhood as an Austrian Jewish refugee in Italy, about his three parents: his mother; his first father, who was separated from them by World War II; and his second father, a warm Italian man who was sent into internal exile by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini.
Lotte, the author’s mother, met Pietro, his second father, in the isolated mountain village of Ospedaletto d’Alpinolo, where as refugees Enrico and his mother had been required to live. Located in a high forest, this town where plumbing was all but unknown became the canvas for Erich (later to be called Enrico) to paint a word picture of an international group of intellectuals living among mostly impoverished and illiterate Italian peasants.
While author Lamet’s biography takes place in his mother’s native Austria; his first father’s native Poland; France; Switzerland; his second father’s native Italy; the United States; and Mexico, the village of Ospedaletto was the crucible for Lamet’s tolerant and inquiring life, in which he generally found good in everyone, even a Nazi soldier who told him emotionally, “Not all Germans are alike!”
It is unfortunate that the demonstrative love that spills over these pages for his parents does not extend to the author’s first wife, who divorced him, or, apparently, to his second wife, whose name he leaves unmentioned even though many other far less important personages in his life are fully identified. One has to wonder at the contrast.
Told in episodic fashion, this story’s strengths are the wonderful descriptions of people and places during the Second World War, and the contrast between the pastoral backwardness of Ospedaletto and the raging, industrialized brutality of a war fought, for the most part, far from the mountain village’s confines.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. If you’d like to become a sponsor of San Diego Jewish World, please contact him at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com