Dan Vittorio Segre - Memoirs of a Failed Diplomat

In 1946, when Rome was still under Allied Occupation, a gypsy read my palm and told me that there was something strange in it. She saw two lives intertwined. Was it due to a split personality or did I have two names? Startled by her accuracy, I smiled but did not give her the satisfaction of learning that in fact my palm should show three, not two, names, each one of which has influenced my fortunes if not my character. Perhaps there is some truth in the Jewish belief that our destiny is linked to the name we carry. Orthodox Jews are so convinced of this that they change the name of a seriously ill relative so that the tormenting spirit will lose track of them.

On the day of my circumcision (not baptism as assumed by most Italians) I was named Vittorio Emilio Giuseppe, the clerk in the registry office confirming that I belonged to the Segre family. The last two names referred respectively to a paternal and a maternal grandfather. Vittorio, on the other hand, was linked to another type of respect. It was not the Italian translation of the Hebrew name Haim, meaning life, as vita is life in Italian, but an act of homage to the various King Vittorios of the House of Savoy, with which my family felt like the majority of Piedmontese Jews a special link. However, I never felt that these three names suited me so when I had the opportunity to discard them I did so with neither heistation nor remorse.

My surname was a completely different matter. Although not a famous name, it has for me acquired resonance: Segre is the name of a Spanish river which, according to family tradition, was the scene of the miraculous rescue of a group of my ancestors who later become known as those of the Segre. Fleeing Spanish persecution in about 1492, they were surrounded by soldiers of the Catholic Queen Isabella, by the river Segre, near the city of Guadalajara, but managed to escape under cover of darkness.

This story, recounted by our elders around the table on Seder night (the Passover meal celebrating the exodus from Egypt), is not supported by any historical evidence. If the event had really taken place, I believe that among the descendants of the saved, there would almost certainly have been some trace of it, perhaps, as is common in religious Jewish families, in the recitation of a prayer of thanks on each anniversary of that happy event, which would then be transmitted from generation to generation. Furthermore, the soldiers of the Catholic Queen preferred to expel the Jews from Spain, not to bring them back into the country unless they were conversos, that is, baptised Jews who secretly retained their original faith. The Inquisition, in fact, was very interested in saving the souls of these people with the help of the stake. But in my family there were no martyrs until Auschwitz. What we do know about the Segre families is that they arrived safe and sound in the Papal Territories of southern France. From here, at the invitation of the Duke of Savoy, Emmanuel Philibert, some of them crossed into Piedmont.

This migration had two consequences: on the one hand, these Jews of Spanish origin justified the Dukes hope, as expressed in his decree of admission, and proved to be an engine of Piedmonts economic recovery and later development; on the other hand, in gratitude for the security which they enjoyed almost continuously in Piedmont, they became devoted subjects of the House of Savoy. A symbiosis of interests was thus created between the Piedmontese Jews and the House of Savoy which lasted in spite of occasional religious friction for about 400 years, until the day on which the racial persecution of Italian Jewry ordered by Mussolini and countersigned by King Emmanuel III in 1938, led to the ruin of both.

To change ones surname in British mandatory Palestine, where I found myself at the end of the 1930s, involved a procedure both bureaucratically simple and ideologically complicated. All that was needed was to apply to the Department of Internal Affairs and pay 25 grush (25p) whereupon one received by mail, within 15 days, the chosen new name, confirmed by an unknown English colonial civil servant who signed himself my Obedient Servant. The only limitation attached to the change of family name was the requirement not to choose one which might consist of false identity or illicit pretension. In other words, it was not permitted for a Jew to call himself Mohammed or for an Arab to call himself Levy or for either of them to call themselves William Shakespeare. But it was also a decision full of significance, representing a psychological break with ones past whilst, at the same time, being a political affirmation of the future.

To switch voluntarily from Grn (Green) to Ben Gurion (lion cub), for example, meant for Israels first prime minister and his descendants cutting ties with the familys diaspora past. In most cases the change of name had no mundane implications. Often it represented the cancellation of an insult suffered in Europe or Russia at a time when Jews were being forced to enter a state population registry. Traditional family names such as Moses son of Jacob, who could equally well be the son of another Moses, were considered by the Gentile authorities a cause of confusion and an obstacle to modernisation and census-taking. Often added to this bureaucratic logic was the oppressive scorn of functionaries who imposed family names which had a disparaging meaning in the local language. To choose a new name in Jewish Palestine was thus almost an obligation. It represented a gesture of liberation from the past, a declaration of intentions in the present, and a profession of faith and hope for the future. It could also occasionally reveal ones intimate ambitions as, for example, when one chose the name Zamir (nightingale), Neeman (faithful), or Oz (courage).

In my case, the reason for the Hebraization of my name was utterly prosaic, dictated by considerations of security and alphabet, with a pinch of juvenile romanticism. It was also the result of that particular artistic mood which afflicted me during my first years in Palestine, and which in Piedmont is called lafamedasuonatore (the hunger of the musician).

I have never played a musical instrument, not even one of those mouth organs which were highly appreciated at Mikve Israel, the agricultural school near Tel Aviv, where I landed in 1939. I have, however, often been in that situation of permanently unassuaged hunger which can develop either into talent or desperation, depending on ones age. Despite, or perhaps because of, my lack of musical ability, I was envious of my schoolmates: they had simply to bring the harmonica to their lips in order to create around them circles of young girls and boys eager to dance even if only to the rhythm of a few nostalgic and syncopated notes, repeated