Behind High Walls: The Garden of the Finzi-Contini

There are so many great Jewish novels that the choice of one hundred is almost impossible to make. Some novels, however, immediately announce their greatness in many subtle ways. It is not only their story or arguments that matter, but the way in which they convey them, the language and pace in which they are told, the life their characters take on outside the covers of the book, and the length of time they linger in the mind. In my opinion such a novel is Giorgio Bassani's Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini.

In The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (1965) Bassani returns to the period immediately before the war, when Mussolini's racial laws had come into effect. The Finzi-Contini are a wealthy and exclusive Jewish Ferrarese family, so self-sufficient and enclosed in their large house behind its high walls that their children rarely leave it.^* One of the central symbols of the novel is a tennis court around which the young people and their friends congregate, and which gradually decays as time passes. After the racial laws have barred them from the city's tennis club, their own tennis court becomes a substitute for their previous social life in Ferrara. Against this background, a relationship develops between Micol, the Finzi-Contini daughter; the unnamed narrator who is a young man of less exalted birth; Malnate, a non-Jewish Marxist; and Alberto, the ailing Finzi-Contini son. That the affection between the narrator and Micol is doomed is signaled by the slow disintegration of the society around them.

In evocative and leisurely detail, Bassani describes the lives of these people. On the Finzi-Contini estate is a huge mausoleum in which the founder of the family's wealth is buried. An ugly structure, it dominates the estate and looms over the lives of those in the great house, perhaps symbolizing the death-in-life of its inhabitants. The Finzi-Contini parents, the professor of architecture and his wife, continue their privileged, isolated lives, not unaware of the political events taking place outside the high walls, but unwilling to confront or even to acknowledge them. They are civilized, elegant, Èlite, refusing to believe that external events can touch them:

I remember, besides, that almost at once, as soon as we sat down at the table, Alberto started telling the family how I had recently been thrown out of the city library and once again I was surprised at the old people's lack of surprise at such a thing. The comments that followed on the general situationÖwhich kept coming up all through dinner, were not even particularly bitter, but elegantly sarcastic as usual, you might almost say gay.

The high walls that surround their house mimic the walls of the city, indicating not only physical isolation but the family's strange unworldliness. Bassani stresses the blindness of those aristocratic Jews who felt themselves to be so much a part of the larger society that they refused to acknowledge the danger to themselves. The Finzi-Contini move through their lives and their ancient home like ghosts, so that their eventual deportation and death are glossed over, mentioned in a paragraph, as if this tragedy were less potent than the theatricality and artificiality of their lives.

Since the Finzi-Contini are highly cultured, as is the narrator, their story is told through the prism of literature. Even Malnate, portrayed as a rather crude socialist, is fond of quoting poetry. They all discuss the great works of the day and the previous century, literature which, while expressing the responses they seek, still keeps them at a remove from contemporary life. In fact the works which they admire -- by Dickinson, Croce, Baudelaire, Carducci, Panzacchi and many others -- contrast with, rather than exemplify, the brutality of the political situation.

While many of the Jews of northern Italy joined the fascists, Ermanno Finzi-Contini has refused to do so. Later, as a sign of his disapproval of those who have, he restores at his own expense a small, ancient Spanish synagogue which had not been put to religious use for at least three centuries, being used as a storeroom. This was for the private and exclusive use of his family and like-minded others. The racial laws, insidiously, even delicately, in keeping with everything else in the Finzi-Continis' lives, slowly encroach. The Jewish ambience is gracefully maintained through a seamless interweaving of the family's Jewish life with their daily pursuits. Micol wears a schaddai round her neck; the children enjoy the synagogue services; a Pesach seder is celebrated. There are some wonderfully gentle and loving descriptions of the synagogue services, and of a congregation different from those with which most readers would be familiar. Their Jewishness is integrated into the characters' lives with the same elegance, humor and unreality as everything else they experience.

The book's greatness lies in the detailed portrait of the disintegration of Jewish society in Western Europe before the war, the slow, almost undramatic encroachment of disaster which seemed to take the Jews of a certain class entirely by surprise. The air of unreality in the novel, the almost bland acceptance by the Finzi-Contini of events which should have caused alarm, even terror, points to the unbelievability of the political events, the Holocaust itself. With all of this the death of the old world is implied -- the European lifestyle, the cities (the novel begins with a description of an Etruscan necropolis), the social structures that had existed for centuries, and particularly the death of the rarefied lifestyle of the cultured and wealthy aristocracy of whichever faith.

^*There is a real Finzi-Contini family whose surname Bassani used for his fictitious family. Giovanni Finzi-Contini is professor of geophysics at the University of Florence, and a noted poet. His mother was born and grew up in Ferrara where Bassani's novel is set. My thanks to Professor Brian Moloney of the University of Hull, U.K., for this information.