All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

First published:Tutti i nostri ieri, 1952 (English translation, Dead Yesterdays, 1956; better known as All Our Yesterdays)

Type of work: Domestic realism

Time of work: From the late 1930’s through the end of World War II

Locale: An unnamed town in northern Italy and the village of San Costanzo in southern Italy

Principal Characters:

• Anna, a teenage girl as the narrative begins
• Ippolito, and
• Giustino, her brothers
• Concettina, her sister
• Giuma, the boy across the street and Anna’s lover
• Cenzo Rena, Anna’s husband

The Novel

All Our Yesterdays is divided chronologically and geographically. Part 1 describes the last school years and earliest adult experiences of the children of a middle-class provincial family in the late 1930’s. Part 2 takes Anna and her husband away to the southern village of San Costanzo. From their perspective the reader observes the impact of World War II on the family and on Italian society as a whole.

There is no single protagonist in the novel, which details the lives of the children of two neighboring families. Anna’s father, a widower, is an anti-Fascist who spends the last years of his life writing his memoirs, which will never be published. Anna’s sister, Concettina, is preoccupied with her boyfriends and eventually marries Emilio, arousing the political disapproval of several male members of the family. Anna meets Giuma, the youngest son of the family across the street, on the day of her father’s funeral. Giuma’s household consists of the old father who owns a local soap factory, his much younger wife, Mammina, Giuma’s elder brother, Emanuele, a rebellious sister, Amalia, and a mysterious German refugee, Franz, who is Mammina’s lover.

As Nazi Germany stands poised for the invasion of France, young Anna’s brother Ippolito, Emanuele, and their friend Danilo form a loose anti-Fascist group, whose program consists largely of reading clandestine newspapers behind closed doors. Ippolito becomes the first casualty of the war. Unable to accept the collapse of France and Italy’s collaboration with the Nazis, he shoots himself one morning on a park bench in the center of the town. His suicide coincides with Anna’s realization that she has been made pregnant by Giuma. She is sixteen years old. At this point an old family friend, Cenzo Rena, reappears. Learning of Anna’s crisis, he offers to marry her and takes her back to his home in the South.

The second half of the novel is much more than the chronicle of Anna’s marriage. It is a careful portrait of a time and place. Cenzo Rena is the self-appointed savior of the wretched village of San Costanzo, continuously campaigning for the basic standards of civilized life, such as regular health care for the women and children, and denouncing the doctor and schoolmistress for their ignorance, prejudice, and apathy. At first Anna, an outsider and still little more than a schoolgirl, feels completely alienated from this foreign and largely male-dominated society. Gradually, however, her eyes are opened to a new world which, while it offers her a spectacle of poverty and misery, also bestows on her the warmth and generosity of its people. She grows particularly close to La Maschiona, Cenzo Rena’s faithful housekeeper.

The war comes to San Costanzo with the arrival of a handful of Jewish refugees, a reminder of the special racial laws of 1938. Franz suddenly reappears, separated from his wife, Amalia, and rigid with the fear of captivity. Local sons and fathers are shipped overseas to fight for what is an increasingly losing cause. The village is finally occupied by retreating German troops in the summer of 1944. The occupation leads to inevitable tragedy when a “friendly” German soldier discovers Franz and other fugitives in Cenzo Rena’s cellar. There are reprisals, and Rena sacrifices himself to save the lives of innocent villagers.

Woven through these events is news of Anna’s family, conveyed by letter or visits. Her old governess, Signora Maria, is killed in an air raid on Turin. Her younger brother, Giustino, and his friend Danilo join the resistance. Emanuele edits a clandestine newspaper in Rome. Giuma turns up again, married to an American student of psychology. The war over, Anna returns with her daughter to the North to rejoin Giustino, Emanuele, and her family to face the future together, uncertain of what lies ahead and how to deal with the problems they will have to confront.

The Characters

This is a choral novel in which the collective experience of families and social groups is more important than that of separate individuals. One can clearly distinguish the individual voices, but all are linked to the thematic and historical chorus. Consequently, no one character stands out as the focus of the book. By the end of Part 1, however, it is clear that the remainder of the action will revolve around Anna and her middle-aged husband, Cenzo Rena. Anna emerges only gradually from the shadows. As a schoolgirl, she thinks of herself as unattractive and not very intelligent and is ashamed to have to wear dresses made out of curtains. She accepts the courtship of Giuma out of gratitude that someone is paying attention to her and in the full knowledge that he does not love her. Anna is completely passive in the acceptance of her pregnancy, Giuma’s indifference, and her marriage. The reader must see this as a consequence of being born female in a patriarchal society and remember that Anna is still a child. In the circumstances, she is fortunate to find in Rena a protector who is wise and generous in spirit.

Natalia Ginzburg’s characterization of Cenzo Rena is remarkable. Rena marries Anna out of loyalty and love for her father. He breaks in on the family’s torpor at the most unexpected moments and attempts to breathe some vitality into their ennui and passivity. In sweeping Anna off to the South, he offers her a protection which reflects his social commitment to all the inhabitants of San Costanzo. He is sincerely committed to the future of his adopted daughter, to that of the villagers, and indeed to the whole of southern Italy. Cenzo Rena has plans for his village beyond the end of the war and the inevitable collapse of Fascism. He has even marked out a new mayor, the peasant Giovanni, whose function will be to put into practice all Rena can teach him about social welfare. Ultimately, Rena is a tragic figure obliged to offer his life to save others. The village, the South, and his young wife and child lose a man of action and moral energy.

The book’s remaining characters are drawn with bold brush strokes, fully rounded in speech and gesture. The old governess, Signora Maria, is initially the glue that keeps the family together, with her punctilious observance of social convention. Concettina is busy with her boyfriends. Her vision grows even narrower after her marriage. Ippolito is silent; his mysterious smile cannot hide a growing, ungovernable despair. The generous Emanuele eventually learns the courage to break away from his family, and Anna’s younger brother, Giustino, grows to political maturity through the war. Giuma, the spoiled boy, reverts to middle-class conformity at the end. Finally, there is the refugee Franz, who is numb with fear when he turns up at San Costanzo, carrying his tennis rackets to a mountain village in the midst of war.

Critical Context

Natalia Ginzburg had already established an authorial voice in her earliest stories: “Un’assenza” (an absence), “Casa al mare” (house by the sea), and “La madre” (the mother). In All Our Yesterdays her style is even more firmly defined, as she outdistances her previous work in breadth and ambition.

The relationship of Ginzburg’s voice to the post-nineteenth century tradition of the Italian novel is made clear in two respects in the novel. First, Ginzburg’s polished control of indirect speech (which she prefers over direct dialogue) as the single means of narration places her in a direct line from the Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga. Verga’s cultivation of this device allowed the characters to speak for themselves, the author to absent himself from the novel, and for an appearance of objectivity. Ginzburg grants her characters autonomy by the same means, while staying closer to them in their sufferings and struggles. Second, she is more Manzonian than she might admit. Indeed, she has written a comprehensive biography of Alessandro Manzoni, chronicling the domestic life of the Milanese novelist. Since the publication of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827, revised 1840-1842; The Betrothed, 1828, revised 1951), Italian novelists have regularly explored the impact of history on individuals. Ginzburg’s instinct is to limit herself to the vicissitudes of private life, but here, in what might be called her contribution to the resistance novel, she explicitly deals with the effects of Fascism and the war on those who find themselves unable to avoid the flood of history. In All Our Yesterdays, as in the works of Ignazio Silone and Alberto Moravia, history is a constant reminder of the individual’s responsibility to his community—a challenge to which some are equal, while others are not. Seen in this light, history is the crucible of character, and thus the ally of the novelist.

Bibliography

Bergin, T.G. Review in The Saturday Review. XL (January 5, 1957), p. 4.

Clementelli, Elena. Invito alla lettura di Natalia Ginzburg, 1972.

Piclardi, Rosetta D. “Forms and Figures in the Novels of Natalia Ginzburg,” in World Literature Today. LIII (1979), pp. 585-589.

Quigley, Isabel. Review in The Spectator. August 24, 1956, p. 269.

Slonim, Marc. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXII (January 5, 1957), p. 5.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. September 14, 1956, p. 537.