The Power of Place and Time

There are stories that might have happened anywhere, anytime, and others that could only have happened at a historical juncture never to be repeated. You, Fascinating You falls into the latter category.

During the years I have spent reconstructing and preserving the story of my heroine, Margit Wolf, I have traveled through Hungary, Italy and Germany retracing her steps. The war she survived changed the face of Europe. And yet, inexplicably, small pockets within cities remained untouched. The city of Spandau, for example, where Margit was interned at a bomb factory, today stands intact exuding character and—dare I say?—charm. The Budapest Opera House where she learned to dance, only slightly damaged by Allied air raids, has regained its former splendor.

But it was Italy that Margit loved, Italy that drew her wide-eyed into a world of possibility. Her son Cesare still spends summers near Lake Como. How many hundreds of miles of autostrada did we drive, combing for stories?

On a recent visit to Florence, opposite the sprawling Palazzo Pitti, I happened to notice two small plaques, the first marking a modest flat where Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot, and, nearby a similar flat where Carlo Levi wrote Christ Stopped in Eboli. The Russian author had fled to Italy to evade his creditors. His writings seem little influenced by his surroundings, though his window opened onto the ultimate treasure trove. In contrast, Levi, an Italian antifascist, returned home from Paris on the brink of the war only to be arrested and sent into exile in a southern backwater. And there divine justice intervened: Levi found beauty and dignity amidst the poverty and wrote what is, perhaps, the most penetrating of his works—a work steeped in place and time and never to be repeated.

I cannot claim to have lived my heroine’s journey, only to have looked out at the same landscapes, awakened to the same church bells, watched the curtain rise in the same theaters… At moments, I thought I caught a glimpse of Margit herself, young and fearless and primed to soar. If only history had been kinder.