“A story that’s thrilling and upsetting at the same time”. Corriere della Sera
“This individual and unique story is also a collective epic and a portrait of a generation”. Il Sole 24 Ore
A tale of redemption and illusions.
This is the story of the surprising number of children who escaped the Final Solution, some 700 youngsters taken in at Selvino, near Bergamo in northern Italy, to what was then the largest Jewish orphanage in Italy and one of the largest in Europe. It is also the story of Moshe Zeiri, who assumed responsibility for these orphans of the Shoah and made it possible for them to be reborn as citizens of Israel.
Moshe, trained as a carpenter, a man with a gift for the stage, belonged to a small group of young Zionists from Eastern and Central Europe who had emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s and would return to Europe between 1943 and 1945 to fight as volunteers with the British forces driving up the Italian peninsula. After a dramatic meeting with some young survivors, Moshe began to build a sort of republic of orphans at Selvino, creating the conditions for these children to have a second life. It would no longer be the hopeless life of a Jewish victim, “back there” in Poland, Lithuania or Galicia where the Final Solution prevailed, but the free, empowered life of the farmers of “Eretz Israel” working the promised land. The story of Moshe’s children is above all a tale of redemption. Tragically bereft of their homes, their families and their native lands, irreparably deprived of their youths, the children, thanks to their Zionist protectors, were nevertheless offered a future. It was a future to be built in common, working as a great family, in a new “Selvino kibbutz”. The story of Moshe’s children is also a tale of illusions, however. After the war of independence of 1948, the Selvino kibbutz’s utopian ideals would come in conflict with new (and brutal) forces in the nascent state of Israel.
With narrative verve and scholarly acumen, Sergio Luzzatto reconstructs a chapter of the Holocaust as picaresque as it was tragic, a story whose outlines are almost as broad as the master account of the Jews who were drowned and those who were saved.
Sergio Luzzatto
Sergio Luzzatto teaches Modern History at the University of Turin. He is the author of Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age (Metropolitan Books, 2010), which won the prestigious Cundill Prize in History; of The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy (Metropolitan Books, 2005), and of Primo Levi’s Resistance. Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy (Metropolitan Books, 2016), published in France by Gallimard (Partigia, 2016) and in Spain by Debate (Partisanos, 2015).
- Max Fox o le relazioni pericolose (Max Fox or Dangerous Liaisons)
- I bambini di Moshe (Moshe’s Children)
- Partigia (Primo Levi’s Resistance)
“A story that’s thrilling and upsetting at the same time”. Corriere della Sera
“This individual and unique story is also a collective epic and a portrait of a generation”. Il Sole 24 Ore
Foreign publishers of Sergio Luzzatto’s works
France: Gallimard
Spain and Latin America: Debate
US: Metropolitan Books, Picador