(from our correspondent Mauretta Capuano)

ERALDO AFFINATI, NELLA PALUDE DEL PADRE (GRAMMA FELTRINELLI, PP 260, EURO 19). From childhood, Eraldo Affinati felt the weight of his parents' history, both orphans, who had met in postwar Italy in 1946. His father Fortunato had lost his mother at the age of 15 and had not been acknowledged by his other parent. To get by, he did odd jobs — newspaper boy, travelling clothes salesman. His mother, from Romagna, had had her father, a partisan of the Garibaldi Brigades, killed by the Nazi-fascists in 1944.

"I used to ask my mother what had happened during the war. I used to ask my father what he did in Rome without any points of reference, how he had managed to get by, and he gave me answers in bits and pieces, unsatisfying ones. Both he and my mother had only completed fifth grade. They didn't have the cultural tools to recount properly what had happened to them, even to themselves," Affinati tells ANSA, on 17 September at Pordenolegge, presenting the book 'Nella palude del padre' (Gramma Feltrinelli).

"Perhaps I became a writer and teacher to find those words I had felt the need for as a child — I understood that over time. Literature and school saved me," says the writer who, together with his wife Anna Luce Lenzi, founded 18 years ago the Penny Wirton School, now present in 70 locations across Italy, for teaching Italian to migrants. It features in this book too, which contains all of Affinati's recurring themes: denied identity, the value of education, human suffering and evil.

"There were no books at home, but I read a great deal — I got hold of them myself. I fell in love with Natasha reading Tolstoy's War and Peace, I identified with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, I read Fenoglio, I understood the Resistance through Johnny the Partisan. I read Verga, Manzoni. In short, I found what I have called on many occasions an ideal aesthetic family, a family of beauty, which in some way substituted for the real one I had. Then school, education. I taught for 40 years until I founded, together with my wife, also an Italian teacher, the Penny Wirton school, taking its name from a novel by Silvio D'Arzo whose protagonist is an abandoned child."

In 'La palude del padre', "I address it because there is a very close connection between the situation of the young people I teach Italian to — Africans without families, unaccompanied minors — and my father, who at 15 or 16 had lost everything."

Autobiography, family history, the book is also a kind of reparation, a way of "healing a wound within me, of speaking ideally with my parents," but it is also "a small story of Italy in which everyone can recognise themselves." The writer speaks of the abandoned children of today whom he has met, Italian and immigrant alike. "I speak of Russian prisoners I encountered who faced the problem of not being able to see their children before being shot. I speak of a Ukrainian girl, of many things I call paternal resonances. Today there are many Fortunatos like my father."

The spark from which the story began is a photograph depicting Affinati's father as a child, seated with his little sister at the feet of three women — his mother, his grandmother and an unidentified great-aunt of the writer. The young Fortunato is a sad child and "you can feel," Affinati explains, "the absence of the father figure. I had never seen my father so young. In the photos that

he kept was a little older. He had also kept some photographs that he had cut, and I believe the image that had been removed was that of his grandfather, his father who had not acknowledged him. Secrets, things left unsaid, misunderstandings, are very present in Italian families. We all have skeletons in the closet tied to pain, to unresolved situations. Literature helps us to emerge from this darkness." A book about motherhood and fatherhood that must always be earned, 'Nella palude del padre' also has an anthropological dimension," says the author. Why a swamp? "Because I had to flounder through this past, sink into it at the risk of drowning. If I hadn't had literature, this swamp would have swallowed me up. The great question that remains is: 'What is it that binds us: biology, blood, or culture?' 'Both,' says the writer, 'matter.'"

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