'When you can resist no more, you flee'
Filmmaker David Modigliani has made a riveting, 10-part podcast about the family of his Nobel Prize-winning grandfather Franco Modigliani, and how they all fared when the Holocaust came to Italy
Early on during work on the podcast “Pack One Bag,” says the series’ writer and host, David Modigliani, a colleague made the observation that “podcasting is a visual medium.” Up to then, Modigliani’s professional experience had been in documentary filmmaking, which made his colleague’s comment seem especially counter-intuitive to him. But then, the latter explained how, in telling a story through audio alone, “you’re really building the world inside the mind of the listener, in their mind’s eye. You’re helping them to see it.”
Certainly, we all can understand how reading a novel can activate every part of our imagination, sometimes more effectively than a film based on the same novel. In a well-made podcast, the impact can be augmented because the words are spoken, and that is only strengthened by sound effects, music, even the accents of the speakers. That is certainly the case with “Pack One Bag,” a 10-part series about the history of Modigliani’s paternal ancestors during the Holocaust in Italy.
One tiny example: Modigliani, who’s just shy of 45, tells large parts of the story through the accounts of his nonni – his grandparents – Franco and Serena, who fled Italy with Serena’s family at the last possible moment. In interviews with their grandson, the couple relate the history of their relationship, correcting one another, teasing each other, revealing details that the other finds embarrassing – and listeners will find endearing. Only -- the grandson acknowledges, up front, in the first episode -- both his grandparents died before he had the chance to interview them for posterity. Rather, the conversations we hear are dramatizations, made all the more amusing because it is David Modigliani who is voicing both Franco and Serena.
Before each audio segment featuring his nonno and nonna, we hear a sound that registers on the semi-conscious level as someone pushing “play” on an old-fashioned cassette recorder. But since the “interviews” are simulated, and certainly weren’t recorded on audio cassettes, that sound is fabricated, inserted as a cue to evoke in us the sense that we are listening to an old recording. Modigliani refers to this as “invented archival” material, and just as he goes to great lengths to make that material sound authentic, he makes no effort to hide the fact that it isn’t.
So much thought and work went into the sound design that, paradoxically, the listener can easily forget that everything he or she hears was the result of a conscious decision by the producers.
The podcast tells not just the story of a family, part of which escaped Italy for eventual refuge in the United States, and part of which was prevented by circumstances from getting out, but also the story of how Italy descended into fascism and eventually to sending more than 7,000 of its 32,000 Jewish citizens to their deaths in German death camps.
“Pack One Bag” is entertaining, gripping, moving and at times very funny, and even if much of what we hear is voiced by actors (together with real interviews conducted by David and his partner Willa Kaufman during several visits to Italy), insists Modigliani, “every factual assertion is based on letters, documents, or on memories of past conversations with my grandparents…. It’s really in the storytelling that we give ourselves some creative license.”
In case you’re wondering if David Modigliani’s family is related to that of the brilliant but tormented 20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani (who was also Italian and also Jewish), the answer is no. David’s grandfather Franco Modigliani (1918-2003) was brilliant and famous too, but in his case it was for being an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1985, in recognition, according to the Nobel committee, of “his pioneering analyses of household saving and of financial markets." By then, Franco had been living in the United States for nearly half a century, and was a professor at MIT.
His grandson, however, is less interested here in his grandfather’s contribution to economic theory than he is in Franco Modigliani’s flight from Europe on August 31, 1939 – one day before the outbreak of World War II – as well as the fate of members of his family who were left behind. Franco’s escape was made possible by the farsightedness and open-heartedness of his future father-in-law, businessman Giulio Calabi.
Franco had had the good luck to fall in love with Giulio and Dina Calabi’s daughter Serena the first time they met, when he was only 15, and she was visiting Rome from her home in Bologna. Franco was nearly two years younger than Serena, and anything but subtle in showing his affection for her. She in turn dubbed him “il tipo ridiculo” – the ridiculous character – and recalls that for her, it was “hate at first sight.”
When the two met again, two years later, he was still smitten with her, but she said she didn’t want to hear from him until he was 18 – which would be in another three months. Each night for the next 91 days, he would write her a letter, and when he turned 18, he delivered her a package of his love letters, which eight decades later would serve as valuable material for David Modigliani in his research for the podcast (along with another 19 cartons of documents that ended up in storage with David’s father, Sergio). It was those letters that finally won her over.
There are many heroes in “Pack One Bag,” but for me it is Giulio Calabi who holds the greatest interest. It helps that he is voiced by Stanley Tucci, who also served as an executive producer of the series, and who injects the role with gravitas and an irresistible Italian accent, complete with tiny language mistakes (he frequently exclaims “thanks God,” for example).
With the help of his wife and her dowry, Giulio had opened a stationery store in Bologna in 1913, which in short time he had turned into Italy’s largest importer and distributor of books and periodicals. One of Calabi’s earliest clients was Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper edited by Benito Mussolini after his expulsion from the Socialist party, in 1914. Mussolini used the paper to advocate, successfully, for Italy’s entry into World War I on the side of the Triple Entente allies, and later to purvey his fascist ideology. Calabi not only delivered Mussolini’s paper, for a time he also served as something of a mentor, and banker, for the future dictator.
Calabi ended his association with Mussolini after Il Duce began displaying the tendencies of a murderous dictator. As early as 1924, after the brutal murder, at Mussolini’s orders, of opposition political figure Giacomo Matteotti, Giulio began developing “his own exit strategy, moving money outside the country, exploring how he and his family might flee,” David Modigliani told me, in an interview. That was 14 years before Calabi actually needed to execute that exit strategy. By the time Mussolini announced the country’s racial laws, in July 1938, Calabi had laid the groundwork to move the family to Paris, and later to New York. And though Serena and Franco were not yet married, their mutual commitment was so clear that Giulio and Dina invited the young economics student to join the family in their flight from Italy.
Several episodes deal with the family members who remained in Italy, in particular Franco’s brother Giorgio and a cousin, Piero, both of whom left behind written accounts of how they and their families managed to stay one or two steps ahead of the Italian police and later German authorities who hunted down Jews in 1943 and 1944. The podcast offers dramatizations of their repeated close calls, as well as interviews with their children who are still alive. We learn too about Franco and Giorgio’s mother, Olga, who was an active and loyal member of the Fascist party, until it expelled her, at which point she had the good fortune to obtain a visa to emigrate to Mandatory Palestine.
I originally heard about “Pack One Bag” from Simonetta Della Seta, a historian and the founding director of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, which opened in 2017 in Ferrara. Simonetta is a cousin of David Modigliani’s, and we hear her on the podcast speaking not only about the fate of Italian Jews in general under Fascism and the German occupation, but also about the experience of her grandparents, Leonello Della Seta and Laura Modigliani, the latter of whom was Franco’s first cousin. Simonetta, who now lives in Jerusalem, has been a close family friend for years, but until I listened to episode 9, I was unaware that her grandfather Leonello and his son Giancarlo were murdered by the Germans.
David Modigliani, who was assisted in creation of the podcast by his then-girlfriend (now-wife) Willa Kaufman, tells us in the opening of each episode that in addition to wanting to tell the suspenseful story of his family, he also wanted to address the following question: “If fascism takes over your country, do you stay, or do you try to flee?” Although he never mentions the president-elect by name, he does refer to frightening anti-democratic trends in the United States, and the series was released several months before the recent presidential election.
There is no single correct answer to that question, but the advice Modigliani offers from his great-grandfather Giulio worked for me: “You resist for as long as you, as best as you can, and when you can resist no more, you flee.” In our conversation (I sent David questions via email, he responded in writing and with a long voice memo), Modigliani felt the need to qualify that answer.
“I think that it depends very much on what group you are in, as relates to the threat of fascism or authoritarianism. In 1938, Giulio Calabi was a Jewish person living in Italy, and the group that was being threatened, persecuted, legislated against, were the Jewish people. So, he was part of the bullied group, part of the ‘othered’ group, part of the group that’s… being scapegoated for all the ills of society.”
In that sense, it made perfect sense for Calabi to flee Italy with his family, and in retrospect it obviously was the correct decision. But, argues Modigliani, if you are not in immediate danger, and are part of “more privileged group in the society that the fascistic group is not necessarily focused upon, then I think instead you have a greater responsibility and a greater opportunity to stay and to resist for longer.”
That is a distinction that makes sense to me as I watch the political reality in Israel become incrementally oppressive with each passing week. If my characterization of the situation sounds alarmist or overly dramatic with regard to Israel, I would argue that it is not. Every institution that has allowed Israel within the Green Line to be, with certain large qualifications, a liberal democracy for most of its history is now under threat. Despite that, the citizenry is not taking to the streets en masse to protest -- for a number of reasons that are understandable. Which makes it all the more urgent for those who recognize the threat, and who still possess the right to express themselves freely here, to exercise that right and continue to resist. Even if political violence -- which is encouraged, and in some cases perpetrated, by the government -- is worsening, those of us who still can are obligated to resist.
For his part, Modigliani says that he and his wife, Willa, “have talked a bit about what might have to happen for us to consider leaving the United States.” A dramatic move like that, he says, would come back to the question of, “did we feel that our personal livelihood, or our personal safety was at stake?” Until that was the case, he says, “I think we would feel the responsibility to continue to stay and to continue to resist, authoritarianism, or the fascism here.”
“There’s no question that [Donald] Trump has authoritarian aspirations, motivations, actions, that are deeply, deeply concerning. Whether [fascism] will fully take over the country, I think, is very much the question of the next four years. Will the institutions in this country, will democracy itself, be able to stand, will we have free and fair elections in 2028? Will we have freedom to protest and to stand up to the Trump administration as it is? I would say that we are watching closely.”