Swimming Upstream: A Jewish Refugee from Vienna Book

There are probably half a dozen ways to describe the form of this book. One would be a fictional narrative of twenty four hours in the life of Giuseppe Pardo, a beloved spiritual leader (parnas means lay leader) of the Jewish community in Pisa written by his pupil and friend Silvano Arieti, a distinguished psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Another would be a compelling creatively inspired dissertation on mental illness, in the form of a particular and crippling phobia.

Arieti tells us first about his last meeting with Pardo before he emigrates to the USA in 1939. We learn Pardo has a strange phobia. He is terrified of animals. He walks with a cane which he continually swings around behind his back, as if to ward off any animal creeping up behind him. The entire community knows of this fear of his. Children tease him. They know the sight of a dog fills him with terror and sometimes ambush him with a pet. What this means is he is reluctant to ever leave the relative safety of his home. For a Jew and especially a wealthy renowned Jew this is obviously a dangerous condition, especially when the Nazis arrive.

It's now July 1944 and we're in Pisa. The Allies have reached the south side of the Arno but across the river, home of the Piazza dei Miracoli, the Nazis are not budging. Pardo is sheltering in his house several other Jews and four Christian women who work for him and refuse to leave him. Thus begins a series of dialogues. Fearing for their safety, Pardo tries to persuade his guests to leave his house. He himself cannot leave because of his phobia. One by one they tell him they feel safer by his side. For the first time he openly discusses his illness, tries to understand it rationally. His guests see his illness as part of the Shekhinah (divine presence) that has come to rest on him.

There's also a conversation with a young Jewish boy called Angelo who is about to set forth on a dangerous attempt to reach the Allies. In the next chapter we follow Angelo through the curfew in Pisa's streets and in a stunningly beautiful scene see him make his way through a pine forest. His contact tells him he has never met a Jew before but that it was a Jewish doctor who saved his mother and him when giving birth after the midwife had given mother and son up as lost. The son of this doctor is the author of this book, Silvano Arieti.

The tension is razor sharp. We pray the knock on the door won't arrive. The author's storytelling skill in maintaining this tension is no less impressive than his psychological insight into the nature of good and evil.

Eventually Arieti will show us how Pardo's mental illness is actually a key trigger of the healthy part of his sensibility, that his phobia has always been symbolic and grounded in the prophetic part of his mind.

Does it matter that the conversations in this book are essentially imagined and never took place? No, not at all. This is a beautiful and moving little book that deploys fictional devices to tell the truth about one man's struggle to fight evil.