Days of Mem­o­ry is a book with two major themes: polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion and per­son­al trans­for­ma­tion. What begins as the author’s two-decade quest to under­stand and record the trag­ic tales of those who lived through Ital­ian fas­cism and the Holo­caust grad­u­al­ly expands into an attempt — as the author writes in her pro­logue — to ​“rec­og­nize what hap­pened and pos­si­bly for some of us, to iden­ti­fy that ter­ri­ble thread of tyran­ny and hate that con­tin­ues to run through the woven con­scious­ness of the world, appear­ing in this coun­try or that coun­try, includ­ing our own country.” 

Judith Monachi­na is not Jew­ish and only part­ly Ital­ian. She con­fess­es that she is ​“com­plete­ly unre­li­gious,” adding, ​“I did not feel I belonged any­where.” To fill that inner empti­ness, she begins a jour­ney as a jour­nal­ist that will utter­ly trans­form her. The details of how this hap­pens and whom she meets along the way are as com­pelling as the sto­ries she uncov­ers, many of them told by men and women who were young when state-spon­sored per­se­cu­tion and assas­si­na­tion of Ital­ian Jews took hold. 

To con­tex­tu­al­ize these sto­ries, Monachi­na pro­vides a suc­cinct — and large­ly over­looked — his­to­ry of the Jew­ish pres­ence in Italy, stretch­ing from pre-Chris­t­ian times to today. She describes long eras of peace­ful coex­is­tence that per­ma­nent­ly end­ed in 1555 with the intro­duc­tion of ​“ghet­tos” by a Papal Bull, and cul­mi­nat­ed with the ascent of Mus­soli­ni, who mor­phed from right-wing dic­ta­tor to fas­cist and antisemite.

The peo­ple she inter­views, from priests to Jew­ish sur­vivors, offer pro­found lessons for today. ​“I would like you to under­stand that dic­ta­tor­ship is like poi­son,” one woman says. ​“A dic­ta­tor­ship takes vic­tims, blood and years to remove.”

It’s up to read­ers to dis­cov­er the hows and whys of Monachina’s path to self-dis­cov­ery. As she dives into the archives and con­ducts inter­views, she grad­u­al­ly moves from observer/​reporter to qua­si-par­tic­i­pant. Days of Mem­o­ry is both a mov­ing per­son­al sto­ry and a moral tale for our times.