Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), Within the Walls (Pt 1 of The Novel of Ferrara, W.W. Norton, 2016). First published as Cinque storie ferraresi (1956), rev. as Dentro le mura in 1974 and 1980. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick

These five stories are linked by their setting in the north-eastern Italian city of Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna, famous for its grand renaissance palaces and ancient grass-topped city walls, within which the stories are set. It was a great cultural centre in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, then fell into decline. Its Jewish community, one of the oldest in Italy, became a ghetto in 1627 after the city came under papal control. It remained so until unification in the mid-19^thcentury.

Giorgio Bassani was born in Bologna to a prosperous Ferrarese Jewish family, and spent much of his youth in Ferrara. This troubled history of tension between the Jewish population, which had dwindled to about 700, and the largely Catholic Ferraresi became more heated with the rise of fascism after WWI. In the 1930s, during which period most of the stories in The Novel of Ferrara are set, the city had been a stronghold of fascist fervour and excess.

A central feature of the stories in Within the Walls is the poignant, repeated revelation that many of the Jewish people in the city embraced fascism enthusiastically – as indeed Bassani’s own father did. This attempt to show patriotism and allegiance to Italy ended with the introduction of Mussolini’s notorious Racial Laws of 1938, which excluded Jews from public life and civic/social integration. As a result the Jewish community became isolated and vilified – ‘strangers in their own home’ (a phrase disappointingly echoed recently by the British prime minister). The consequent sense of internal exile, marginalization and estrangement is a strong theme in all of these stories, and the spectre of the death camps in Germany becomes an increasingly sinister presence.

In ‘Lida Mantovani’ a young working-class girl is made pregnant and then abandoned by her well-to-do Jewish lover. She returns with her baby to her mother’s home, and they behave as if nothing untoward had happened.

Lida’s longing for love and completeness is thwarted, and she lives the rest of her life with a much older husband whose devotion she cannot reciprocate. She has to settle for stoic, passionless tranquillity, and opts out of life.

‘A Stroll Before Dinner’ features a contrasting situation. This time the middle-class Jewish lover, Dr Corso, does the decent thing and marries Gemma, the working-class Catholic lover who falls pregnant by him – a marriage that horrifies his family. They and his community feel he’s compromised a promising future as a physician.

Unlike Lida and her dull husband, this couple seem to lead a happy life for several decades. Corso rises to become head of his hospital. Then, as so often happens in this collection, he simply disappears – deported with his young son to Germany ‘in the autumn of 1943’, a phrase chillingly inserted in a parenthesis as Gemma’s sister reflects on her marginal, loveless existence as Corso’s housekeeper after Gemma’s death:

Love was something different [the sister] reflected – no one knew that better than her. / It was something cruel, atrocious, to be spied on from a distance, or to be dreamed of beneath lowered eyelids.

The other three stories focus on the atrocities committed by the fascists and their consequences. The people of the city are aghast when, in ‘A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini’, the sole survivor of the mass deportation of 183 of Ferrara’s Jewish community returns to the city and persists in telling everyone what he witnessed and about the fate of his family and friends. The townsfolk fear ‘they might unexpectedly be called to account’. Their acts of complicity and subsequent denial are compromised by him; ‘Surely he should behave himself, and stop going around annoying people?’ they fume. These are the same people who colluded with and supported the fascists, and helped seize the Jewish people’s possessions and auctioned them off in their own synagogues, or presided in the courts that ordered firing squads.

Their collective shame and guilt are painfully exposed by this sad, broken man’s return. They find his request to live among them again ‘personally threatening’, and when he slaps the face of a former high-up fascist functionary who’d provoked him with his hypocritical words of sympathy, his angry gesture is to them ‘inexplicable and provocative’. They did what they dId because ‘They needed to survive. At any cost.’ His behaviour is to them ‘eccentric and offensive’. He’s gradually ostracised and excluded, and they convince themselves that his stories of the camps are ‘forced and exaggerated, in short…false.’

‘The Final Years of Clelia Trotti’ recounts the grim fate of a prominent anti-fascist woman at the hands of the fascist regime. She’s imprisoned, and after the introduction of the Racial Laws placed under house arrest and hostile surveillance – it’s another example of ‘internal exile’.

The other major outrage of the period was the massacre in 1943 of eleven anti-fascists. ‘A Night in 1943’ has another of Bassani’s trademark characters – the eyewitness who turns a blind eye to the scene he watched, a detached observer who salves his conscience by refusing to acknowledge what he saw: the machine-gunning of these unarmed prisoners, kidnapped from their jail by a blackshirt death squad, against the city walls.

Even decades later the citizens shun that area of the walls, preferring to forget. The plasterer who later cements over the bullet-holes symbolises the attempts of these compromised people to cover up their shameful history, to erase it. After the massacre they’re horrified but treat the killers ‘respectfully’, and make a ‘public show of supporting and submitting to their violence’.

These are powerful, well-crafted stories. The complex syntax accentuates the way these citizens of Ferrara go through all kinds of moral and emotional contortions to try to eradicate their memories of that terrible time and their complicity in what took place. It must have been a nightmare to translate; Jamie McKendrick does pretty well rendering the Italian into fairly natural English.