Frequently Asked Questions

I wrote Daughter of Genoa when I was living in Italy. Much of the actual writing was done at home, in Lucca, at my computer. But I also spent as much time as I could conducting research – and soaking up the atmosphere – in Genoa, as well as a productive stint at the Kolvenbach Library at the Jesuit Curia in Rome.

I speak Italian, and that really helped with researching this story. I studied primary and secondary written sources about DELASEM and the Racial Laws, and I spoke at length with experts from the Jesuit, Jewish and Waldensian communities, as well as those with specific knowledge and experience in other areas: for example, extrapulmonary tuberculosis, anaemia, library work, interrogation techniques, and naval history. You’ll find a full list of those I consulted in the Acknowledgements at the back of the book.

Historical novelists have a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand, we always aim for authenticity – or, at least, we should. On the other, historical fiction is fiction. The facts ought to be right, so far as we can establish, but they also need to support the story. That’s a crude summary, but you get the idea.

This is all much easier to navigate when dealing with purely fictional characters in a historical setting. My heroine Anna’s life story is an imagined one, but it plays out in circumstances that affected many people in Italy from 1938. Father Vittorio is fictional, but he operates within specific constraints, both in terms of his clandestine work and his life as a Jesuit in the time before the Second Vatican Council.

With Massimo Teglio, I had a different sort of challenge. In Daughter of Genoa, his actions and interactions are largely invented. But sometimes he talks about something that affected him in real life, such as the raid on the Genoa synagogue, or the arrest of his sister Margherita and her family. These events were very important, and he spoke about them in interviews. This means that we have his first-person account, often across more than one source.

To understand his motivations and his character, we need to know about the experiences that marked him. For that reason, I’ve touched on the most crucial moments in the story. But rather than dramatise them myself, I’ve had him – or another character – recount them naturally in dialogue. While staying true to Teglio’s version of events, I’ve supplied new words, and I’ve usually streamlined the story to serve his purpose in telling it. Occasionally I’ve echoed his wording, but I’ve kept those echoes brief and impactful. Referring to sources is within the remit of a historical novelist – reproducing them wholesale is not.

Alexander Stille’s Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism is an excellent English-language source that includes interviews with Massimo Teglio and members of his family, encompassing his life until 1945, and including a wealth of detail and context that is not in Daughter of Genoa. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Buy it! Read it!

If you know Italian, then you’ll also find Teglio’s first-person testimony in Carlo Brizzolari’s Gli ebrei nella storia di Genova and Genova nella seconda guerra mondiale, in this audio interview with Michele Sarfatti, and in this partial transcript of a conversation from 1965, reproduced on the CDEC website. There’s a lovely extract from a video interview with him here, and here is an archived interview with Elisa Della Pergola, who was saved by him as a child; years later, he was a witness at her wedding. I used all these sources in my research, and very wonderful it was.

I’m also indebted to Letizia Teglio for talking to me in person about her uncle Massimo, furnishing precious insights that aren’t in any printed source. For the Italian speakers, there’s an interview with her here.

Four of the six main characters in Daughter of Genoa are fictional, so there’s no question of historical accuracy. What I have tried my best to do is to be historically authentic: to fit my invented scenario into the gaps in the record.

This is good practice for historical fiction anyway, but in this case it was a necessity. The very nature of clandestine work is that people don’t always write things down. And DELASEM’s own archives were lost when Villa Emma, where they were stored, was evacuated. Some correspondence has been found and preserved by historians, notably Sandro Antonini, but there are a lot of gaps.

DELASEM’s scope of action was much bigger than anything you’ll see in Daughter of Genoa – this interview with Donato Grosser gives an excellent overview. My aim in this book is to give the reader a taste of how life might look for one small group of people involved in that greater work.

As I’ve noted above, I’ve also avoided substantially retelling or dramatising well-known episodes that appear in Teglio’s own accounts, as told to Stille, Brizzolari and others. We have his words for them: we don’t need mine. It’s my hope that readers who meet him for the first time in Daughter of Genoa will be inspired to read further (Stille’s Benevolence and Betrayal is an excellent place to start).

My fictional characters, and those details I had to invent, fit with the historical background as closely as I could establish.

For example, just twelve professors in all Italy refused to sign the Fascist loyalty oath in 1931; Anna’s father Jacopo is the imaginary thirteenth. Her nemesis, the Commendatore, runs a fictional shipbuilding empire from a real shipbuilding hub, and is awarded a real-life title by Mussolini’s government. His surname, Marinaio, is fictitious: while it’s common for Italian surnames to be based on professions (here, mariner), the standard version is Marinai, which is in the plural. Speaking of mariners, the fictional Antonio Montaldo is sunk by the real Condor Legion.

Father Vittorio, who exists only in my head, regularly interacts with the real Massimo Teglio, don Repetto and Cardinal Boetto, although in entirely imagined ways. His daily routine is shaped by the real rhythm of preconciliar Jesuit life, but his allocated role in the story grants him freedoms – and exposes him to a kind of loneliness – that other Jesuits at that time would not usually experience. His convictions and his resistance work place him at odds with the overall culture of the Society of Jesus in this period, but in the company of real-life Jesuit upstanders such as Cardinal Boetto himself, Alfred Delp SJ, Henri de Lubac SJ, and the future Cardinal Bea. However, he is far less heroic than any of them.

Most refugees housed locally by DELASEM were placed in the convents and monasteries, orphanages and other institutions of the Archdiocese of Genoa, and indeed Cardinal Boetto was prepared to impose sanctions on those who would not take them in. This was both a charitable matter and a practical one, since the terms of the treaty between the Vatican and the Nazi government made church property inviolate; although, in practice, this was not always respected. But some refugees did end up living in private homes or empty housing, and it’s Father Vittorio’s job to minister to the needs of this population.

Silvia and Bernardo are fictional Waldensians who belong to a real and living community, one with a proud history in Genoa. Their imagined workshop is located on a real street, via degli Armeni, which in 1944 did in fact offer a view over the ruined city.

And when it comes to forgery, many of the details are drawn from Teglio’s own accounts: the right paper, the new stamps, the imprimatur and the multiple locations. The matter of the lists was my invention, allowing Anna, Father Vittorio and Massimo Teglio a convenient way to work together.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea.