UTW 70

The Sea monsters and Italian Jewish anti-Fascist partisan Franco Cesana, 1931 – 1944.

Art: 2019
Media: Ink, gouache, colored pencil.
Framed, 21 H x 25 W

Franco Cesana, was a Jewish Italian, born Sept. 20, 1931. According to Susan Zuccotti, author of The Italians and the Holocaust – Persecution, Survival, Rescue (Basic Books, N.Y., 1987), when he was seven, due to the new racial laws that barred Jewish students from state schools, he began attending a Jewish school, held in a makeshift classroom in the Bologna synagogue. After his father died in 1939, the family moved to Turin, where Franco entered a rabbinical school.

After the German & Austrian Nazi armed forces occupied northern Italy, the family went into hiding. Franco’s older brother, Lelio, joined the partisans. “Despite his mother’s wishes, Franco ultimately followed. One day in September 1944, Franco ventured out on a scouting mission with his brother. He was caught by German rifle fire. His brother heard his last words, the most famous Hebrew prayer “Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonoy Elohanu, Adonoy Echod.” Hear O’Israel, the Lord God, the Lord is One. His comrades retrieved his body and returned it to his mother on September 20, 1944, his thirteenth birthday.“

That he was religious and a Zionist was unusual for Jewish Italian partisans. The most famous Italian- Jewish anti-Fascists, Primo Levi, Carlo Levi, Leone Ginzburg, and  Eugenio Curiel, were secular, i.e. non-religious.

In my drawing, the building façade at lower right: I drew this from a color photo in the chapter Bologna, seen in the book The Guide to Jewish Italy, by Annie Sacerdoti; photos by Alberto Jona Falco (Rizzoli, N.Y., 2003, 2004). The photo description in the book: “Palazzo Bocchi in Via Goito. The façade of this building has a Hebrew inscription from Psalms and a Latin inscription from Horace. In the 16th century the palazzo housed the Accademia Ermatena, a literary academy.

The façade of the Bologna building with the Hebrew words on the exterior façade reminded me of the Jewish school in Ferrara, which I had seen a black and white photograph of in Marilyn Schneider’s book The Vengeance of the Victim – History and Symbolism in Giorgio Bassani’s Fiction (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). I’d depicted the Ferrara building façade in my 2009 drawing Giorgio Bassani and 3 Scenes of Ferrara (see Other Holocaust Art). See Other Holocaust Art; also see this page in the Univ. of Toronto Press website, of the book The Drama of the Assimilated Jew - Giorgio Bassani’s Romanzo di Ferrara. Book by Lucienne Kroha, pub. 2014.

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A text page about Franco in the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum