Jewish Lives: Rita Levi-Montalcini

In the liberal climate that pervaded Italy after the Risorgimento, Adamo was a secular Jew, his admired uncle-stepfather having failed in his attempt to make a rabbi of him, though the attempt implies a religious education. Moreover, as a university student his classmates and friends were mainly Catholic, and two of them married his sisters. But Adamo never thought of converting to Catholicism, and fought a boy who made insulting remarks about Jews. Still when it came to his children, he decided they should forego a religious education, and thereby denied them the Jewish identification he himself never relinquished. Presumably his son Gino was not circumcised and did not celebrate a Bar Mitzvah. Without being imprinted by these rudders of Judaism, and with his father's emphasis on free thinking, Gino must have found it easy to convert to Catholicism in later life. While the daughters retained their Jewish identity, Gino the architect, with his way to make in the world, may have converted for the same reasons many Italians, Jews and non-Jews, found it expedient to join the Fascist Party.

Religion was a source of disturbance to the Levi children from both Catholic and Jewish perspectives. Yom Kippur was the occasion of a head-on collision with their cousins, the children of Adele's sister. The two families spent this time of the year in the lush wine-producing Asti area, in their uncle's villa, surrounded by a vineyard and an orchard full of ripe fruit, which the Levi children devoured on the Day of Atonement as on other days, despite the scorn and scowls of their cousins.

To please his wife, Adamo consented to attend the Passover Seder held at the home of her uncles and her Aunt Anna, in the company of Adele's sister's family and her three bachelor brothers. The one Rita liked best was Uncle Manno because he, like her mother, was tall, blond, and English-looking. The mayor of a village in the Asti hills, he had brought to it electricity, the telephone, and a school.

Rita liked the exotic food and the beautiful table setting of her great-aunt Anna, but her father's behavior during the reading of the Hagaddah distressed her. One of Adele's uncles read it in Italian, and when he reached the part about the infliction of the ten plagues on the Egyptians, Adamo would murmur "What hatred!" despite Aunt Anna's reproachful look and his wife's whispered plea, "Damino, please!" Turning to his children he would say, "I can't understand why five thousand years afterward, we have to take pleasure not so much in the end of slavery and the exodus from Egypt as in the fact that the Eternal Father punished our enemies with all these plagues." [11 Rita agreed with her father, but his conflict with Aunt Anna, who had adopted and raised Adele, was painful for everyone. In the interests of making his children into good freethinkers Adamo felt compelled to warn them against routine acceptance of the Bible, and the dictates of authority in general. In fact, it seemed as though they were to acc ept no authority but his. In recounting these incidents Rita was at pains to stress that her father fully recognized his "Jewish stock" and was proud of the "indomitable tenacity" [12] and spiritual values of his uncle-stepfather and of other members of the family and friends of his youth. But his children, denied a similar identification, could hardly share his pride.