“ORToday, even more than before, I realize that I have been miraculous. With my children I could have met the same terrible end as the families massacred in Israel.” To affirm it is Jasmine Mimun, Jewish from Tripoliprotagonist together with her husband Giulio Hassan of the book Libyan night by Raffaele Genah, published by Solferino.
After a silence of over 50 years, they decided to entrust to the pen of Libyan journalist the two-voice story of the violence and persecution they suffered firsthandat the end of the 60s, in the period of Six Day War. “For some time our children had been urging us to put our testimony on paper, in the end we gave in with the conviction that traces of these atrocities must remain” he declares from Jerusalem, the city that welcomed them after a long pilgrimage.
They met as children, got engaged and married in Tripoli and then moved to Milan, where her husband graduated in engineering. It was in Italy that they fled when the hunt for Jews began in Libya with attacks on homes and riots in the squares. In just under 200 pages this long journey to hell undertaken is contained, between glimmers of hope and ruinous falls, straddling the Six Day War and the coup d’état that led to the Gaddafi regime.
Libyan nocturne by Raffaele Genah, Solferino, 192 pages, €16.50
Libyan nightthe fight for life
It has always been the courage dictated by the boundless love that unites them that has kept their lives solid, uprooted and devastated by the ferocity of war. «When my husband, who returned to Tripoli to save his father’s properties, was captured and taken to prison, I found myself facing difficult situations that I would never have imagined. I was a reserved woman, but I discovered that I had great strength to preserve the safety of my familyabove all to fight, to find out where Giulio was, why he was detained, trying to assert our rights” says Mimun who, in desperation, asked ministers, ambassadors and government members of various countries for help.
Despite the violence suffered by her husband behind bars and the harassment meted out to her by the soldiers, they never compromised. Luckily, after four long years of detention, the epilogue was positive: following a brief interlude in Italy – which they define as their second home – Jasmine and Giulio undertook the second act of their life in Israel, reuniting with their roots.
«I have often abused their courtesy, “forcing” them into a tiring – sometimes painful – process of recovering the memory of facts that the mind, to protect itself, tends to push away. They accepted sharing the idea that oblivion cannot, must not, ever descend on this page of history, on the latest, hateful, pogrom in Libya» comments Genah who, with interludes of historical contextualisation, has transformed the couple’s experience into an authentic novel, an ever-present testimony against the hatred that wars unleash.
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