Lia Levi’s engrossing novel, Tonight is Already Tomorrow, begins with a nagging sense of impending dread. It is a familiar feeling to Levi, the 90-year-old Italian author who was only seven-years old when Mussolini’s fascist racial laws changed her family’s life forever. Her parents, through luck and daring, managed to survive and the family returned to Rome to start anew after the war. But what precisely did starting anew mean? It seems the author has been grappling with that question throughout her long life. Still, she and her parents were among the lucky ones. 7500 Italian Jews were exterminated by the Nazis having been handed over to them by Italian collaborators. Levi generally culls her childhood memories for inspiration for her novels. As a girl, she lived under a pseudonym and hid in a boarding school run by nuns. Her parents’ anxiety was ever-present as were their fears about the future; Levi resented their reticence to share with her what was going on in fear of frightening her further. Critics often note the author’s simple colloquial style but it is deceptively ensnaring. She intuitively understands the dangers of Jewish oblivion; she endured them as a little girl, and they have permanently marked her as an adult.
The novel centers around the tension of a precocious little Jewish boy named Alessandro who senses the strained currents running through his household. His mother, Emilia, has just taken him to see the rabbi, concerned that her boy has expressed doubts of God’s existence, but the rabbi seems distracted and she returns home perturbed. Emilia does not love his father Marc. Theirs was an arranged marriage, a failed enterprise from the outset. They had already lost a son to illness and their hopes were pinned on Alessandro to bind them as a family. The child sensed his importance in their desperate plan.
In a series of strange incidents that happen almost haphazardly, it is discovered that Alessandro is a prodigy of sorts. His mother is euphoric thinking finally some blessing had been bestowed upon them. Levi writes of her unbridled joy: “It was the boy. Their boy. He had only turned a few pages of the book of life and there he was, just turned four, already able to read and write, invent, and recite with the same versatility as the curly-haired son in some Polish shtetl. It was not Hebrew in this case, but that didn’t matter.” The news had brought his alienated parents together. It was a temporary truce, but a ceasefire nonetheless.
But Jewish sadness is resilient. Shortly after their joyous discovery, Levi explains matter-of-factly, “History had taken a small slight step.” Il Duce had risen to power and horrible things were happening to the Jews. A cousin’s son had been arrested for no reason at all. Jews were targeted as Communists. Alessandro’s school buddies rescinded their embrace of him and now taunted him with questions like “Were you born in Jerusalem?” — to which he knew already not to dare answer. The newspaper declared, “There is such a thing as the Italian race and Jews do not belong to the Italian race.” Alessandro’s parents resumed their non-stop bickering; his father plans escape routes for them as his mother promises she will never budge from their home in Genoa. She is certain the new animus thrust upon them is temporary and feels they must wait it out. As his family and their extended relatives of aunts and uncles and cousins debatd their fate, doors keep shutting. Alessandro’s father loses his job and suffers a heart attack from the stress. Alessandro is thrown out of school. Jews may no longer go to the beach. Or own a radio. Or work anywhere. Park benches are no longer available to them.
Levi is a skilled narrator. We sense her quiet restrained presence on every page. She feels ghost-like, translucent, a wisp of a shadow lingering behind the curtains of a dark, gloomy room watching things play out. She never questions her characters’ acquiescence or mourns for their fate. One detects no grief in her expression. She will not sit shiva for them. She refuses to indulge in any remote fantasies about ways they might escape; it is as if she has already accepted what fate or God or simply man’s evil has put in place for them simply because they are Jews. She deems herself to be only their transmitter describing the shock waves that run through them as “splinters of glass continued to fall incessantly on the shadows of Jews trying to shield themselves by covering their heads with their arms. It was as if each and every Jew had been hiding a secret for years, and had just been found out.” There is a certain resignation in her tone that seems to concede the everlasting plight of the Jews as being just that: interminable.
It bothers Levi that little Alessandro is so distressed. He receives the most affectionate of her taut descriptions. The taunts he receives at school and on the street have made him question his very essence. He thinks to himself “Maybe this is what being Jewish means? You are the one seeking others and then escaping, while they accept you and reject you. He felt different, awkward, not only about his age and school work, but about everything, everywhere, from top to toe in every aspect of his existences …” He had never given much thought to his Judaism; he was a reluctant Jew if he was one at all; except maybe for the Star of David necklace his grandmother gave him which he would grasp tightly in his fist.
Alessandro’s troubles with his mother are bothering him, too. He is older now and finds her machinations intolerable. His father is unable to intervene on his behalf. Levi writes “His mother sewed his buttons back on his shirts, brushed his clothes down, insisted he ate fruit after lunch and dinner, and shouted at random intervals into the other room to study harder. But the truth was something else. Spinning a sticky web around her son and capturing him in silk threads of her contempt was the way Emilia Rimon nee Dello Strologo waged her open war. Her scorn took Alessandro’s fight away and made him insecure ….”
Lia Levi has a good ear for the chaotic disorderliness of Jewish family life with its endless undertow of grievance, bitterness, and uncertainty that wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable. She understands that the Jewish psyche has been maligned for centuries where Jews have, for the most part, been used and abused and discarded. But what is absent from Lia Levi’s finely wrought narrative voice is anger; an emotion she seems to negate by parsing it into bits of small matter. This weakens her characters’ accessibility to us. They often seem entombed inside a second skin that is impassable — lost in a world without transcendence or liberation or even a sliver of light. There is too much numbness present — perhaps a prerequisite for the author’s own survival, and a means of checking our desires for happy endings.
[Published by Europa Editions on February 16, 2021, 224 pages, $18.00 paperback]