Florence for Outsiders
By Joel Schalit
They were all soldiers. Or at least had been. Some spoke in Hebrew, others in Italian. Some didn't understand each other. My Israeli father served as translator, talking to everyone in English and German. That did the trick.
The air was heavy in the room, and everyone was tense. The host, a grizzled-looking, red-haired sculptor named Ilan, handed me a hot chocolate and told me to sit in the corner in Hebrew. "Yallah Yoel, nazuz" (Get going, Joel, move it).
This was, as my father explained to me afterwards, an important event. The Italians were mostly veterans of the Jewish Brigade, a British Army division consisting of Jews enlisted in Palestine who fought their way up from the south.
These Jews had gone to the Levant to escape Mussolini and the Nazis and decided to remain in Italy after being demobilised. Their families (or what remained of them) were still there. They were communists, my father explained, not Zionists.
That was the last time I spent time in Florence. I was eight years old, and we were living in Genoa. Three decades later, in 2005, we discussed the event in Israel. I was able to confirm what happened. But my father refused to discuss it further.
Burned out and needing a break last month, my partner got me out of the house. Initially thinking I'd go to the sea, I decided to head to Florence. We found a cheap deal at a nice hotel. I wanted to reconnect with that childhood memory.
The following photos parallel that fraught time and its WWII background. They're mostly about minorities from the Global South negotiating Italy. Some are refugees; some are not. The main thing they have in common is Florence.
Photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.