Little Known Story of Italian-Jewish Resistance in WWII

This amazing novel tells the story of ordinary men and women—farmers, soldiers, priests and nuns, housewives, doctors, stonemasons—who took a stance against the Nazi juggernaut in Italy and waged a near hopeless war of resistance not only in defense of their homeland but in defense of Jews from throughout Europe who had fled across the Alps into an Italy which had broken with Germany, thinking to find a refuge from the genocide, only to discover that the Germans were occupying Italy and prepared to escalate the extermination of the Jews and those who were aiding them, by any and all means.

Russell’s book is based on years of intensive research and interviews, including with survivors of the Italian resistance, and is—she insists—not a glorification of the Italians, but true if relatively unknown history. She focuses her story around the fictional northwestern town of Porto Sant’Andrea, where Renzo Leoni, a Jewish WWI veteran with a powerful intellect, a cynical streak a mile wide, a suicidal drinking problem and a sense of humor that would make the Bard proud, is the unlikely driver of the story. His widowed mother is a firebrand who helps organize the resistance. Renzo morphs into and out of disguise, sometimes playing a priest, other times a dairyman or a postman, and still others a goose-stepping German officer wheedling military intelligence, ration cards, and secrets from the Nazis he bamboozles. He is a joy to watch in action, but when he laments the sorry state of the world and men killing and torturing each other, we weep tears of blood along with him.

Other powerful characters in whose stories we emotionally invest include Claudette Blum, a 14-year-old French Jewess who escapes France with her father, falls in love and marries an Italian soldier, gets pregnant, and transforms from sulky child to steely-eyed partisan fighter over the course of the novel; Werner Schramm, a German doctor who had conducted human experiments in the concentration camps and who is now a broken and consumptive alcoholic in Porto Sant’Andrea seeking forgiveness for his unforgiveable sins; Mirella Soncini, whose husband is Porto Sant’Andrea’s activist rabbi and who together with Leoni, takes on the challenge of Werner’s rehabilitation; and many many more.

A Thread of Grace is the powerfully told story of the intersection of many ordinary and extraordinary lives during a cataclysmic time of sacrifice and heroism, horror and evil; it takes a strong stomach to read it through to the bitter end, but it is a story which will not leave you for a long time after you’ve finished it.