Born in Turin in 1915 to a prominent Jewish family, Emanuel Artom joined the anti-Mussolini partisans in 1943; a year later he was captured by the Nazis and tortured to death. He had been a promising scholar before the war, and had, among other things, authored a children’s book outlining Jewish history from biblical times to the present. While he is well known in Italy, he remains nearly unheard of elsewhere, perhaps because his remarkable diaries have remained untranslated. Siân Gibby writes:
Emanuele was the elder child of the mathematicians Emilio and Amalia Artom. Together with his brother, Ennio, he founded a Jewish culture group, which included Primo Levi and his sister Anna Maria. . . . He had learned Hebrew to read and discuss Talmud and Torah with his father. Levi’s biographer, Carole Angier, says that the Artoms were a devout family but that Emanuele didn’t develop his personal religious feeling until adulthood. . . .
[Artom possessed] a keen awareness and expressive ability that, had he survived, would surely have placed him squarely in Primo Levi’s company as one of the greatest Jewish chroniclers of the wartime experience. [His diaries] include his literary musings—on Dostoyevsky, 19th-century Italian poetry, and a French edition of A Thousand and One Nights. He records dreams, worries about his parents, meditates on Zionism, and references his engagement to a woman he shyly refers to as “M.” . . .
Eventually, along with all these ordinary experiences of being an extraordinary young man in wartime Italy, he begins to write about the darkening political scene and the Jews’ place in it.
More about: Fascism, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Italian Jewry, Primo Levi
