Eternal

Bestselling author Lisa Scottoline says that "Eternal is the culmination of a lifetime of my work." It is a story she has wanted to write for some forty years since she was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania and one of her professors was none other than acclaimed author Philip Roth. It was during that first semester of study with "Mr. Roth," as he liked to be called, focused on "The Literature of the Holocaust," that Scottoline learned of Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist who survived being imprisoned at Auschwitz and wrote Survival in Auschwitz, his memoir. For the first time, she also learned details about the Italian Holocaust and a 1943 event called the "Gold of Rome." Finally, after writing more than thirty novels, and immersing herself in research, she felt ready to pen the story that had been inside her for so many years.

The result is Eternal, the engrossing, emotional saga of three friends who grow up in Rome. Elisabetta D'Orfeo is the story's heart -- a young girl from a troubled family who dreams of being a novelist someday. Her father is an alcoholic, but once he was a painter of beautiful landscapes. After suffering a catastrophic injury that left him unable to paint, Elisabetta has watched his condition worsen and her parents' marriage disintegrate. In order to make ends meet, she works as a waitress at a family-owned restaurant, Casa Servano, where the endearing matriarch, Nonna, serves up homemade pasta and unsparing advice about Elisabetta's love life.

Marco Terrizzi, is the youngest son of Beppe and Maria. Beppe was a champion cyclist and wants his two youngest sons, Marco and his brother Aldo, to train to follow in his footsteps. But neither of them feel called to cycling. Marco, like his father, believes in fascism, and secures a job working for Commendatore Buonacorso, a powerful Fascist officer. Eldest son Emedio is a Catholic priest assigned to work at the Vatican. Aldo is harboring a secret that, if discovered, will endanger him and the family.

Sandro Simone is a kind, introspective mathematician who looks forward to his internship at the university under the guidance of Professor Tullio Levi-Civita. His father, Massimo, is a successful lawyer and prominent leader in the Jewish community, and Gemma, his mother, is a physician. His older sister, Rosa, has entered into a romantic relationship with David Jacobs, a gentile, much to her parents' consternation. After all, faith, family, and history are the most important things to them, and they live immersed in all three in the Ghetto. The oldest Jewish community in Western Civilization, established nearly two thousand years ago, their house has been in Massimo's family for generations. Many Roman Jews with the means to do so moved away, but Sandro's family remains, even though they are financially better off than most of their neighbors and employ Cornelia, their beloved nanny and housekeeper.

Scottoline begins the story in May 1957, as Elisabetta gathers her strength to reveal a secret to her young son with the hope that he will understand her motives for keeping the truth from him. The action then moves back twenty years to May 1937, revealing the story that Elisabetta must relate to her son so that he will understand the things she survived and why she has not previously told him everything.

Eternal is an emotionally enthralling, towering story about the ways in which the three friends' world gradually begins to change. At first, Marco is a true believer in fascism, anxious to do anything to support Italy's government and its agenda. He believes Mussolini to be a great, brave leader and is anxious to rise up the ranks of the Fascist Party. Sandro craves intellectual pursuits -- and Elisabetta's heart. As does Marco, but the competition between them is not malicious or mean-spirited. They are friends first and foremost, and no matter which of them ends up earning Elisabetta's devotion, they vow to remain friends.

With Elisabetta, Scottoline has crafted a strong female protagonist. Elisabetta lovingly cares for her father, understanding how losing the ability to express himself as an artist broke his spirit, just as she is devoted to her two friends and resists being rushed into deciding to which of them she will commit her future. Around them, the world begins to be a dark place as Mussolini and the Fascists begin enacting a series of Race Laws that discriminate against and increasingly dehumanize Jews. Little by little, their rights are stripped away, along with their occupations and professions, financial holdings, possessions, and ability to live anything resembling a normal life. Elisabetta and Marco watch, horrified, as Sandro and all other Jewish students and faculty are expelled from every school and university in Italy, and his parents are prohibited from practicing their professions. Despite the fact that anti-Semitism had never been part of the Fascist belief system, the three and their families are left reeling when Mussolini decides to align with Hitler, adopting the Nazi agenda in a failed power-grab. Things only get worse when the Nazis invade Rome and subject the Jews to unspeakable atrocities that Scottoline depicts through the experiences and reactions of her characters, including the "Gold of Rome" and eventual rastrellamento (rounding up) of the Ghetto inhabitants. As in other parts of Europe, the Nazis' goal was to eradicate the Roman Jews.

Scottoline's decades of research make Eternal emotionally rich and deeply resonant. Real historical figures appear as supporting characters in the story, including Professor Levi-Civita, the "Einstein of Italy," and Dr. Giovanni Borromeo, a physician who devised an ingenious ruse to trick the Nazis and save his Jewish patients, as depicted in the book, as well as Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican" who disguised himself and hid Jews from the Nazis. The character of Nonna is lovingly based on Scottoline's own mother, Mary, who was, like Nonna, a pasta professoressa with strong opinions. The story unfolds in the locations where the actual events occurred, all of which Scottoline visited, and they practically become, along with the food that is so much a part of the story, characters in their own right. Scottoline deftly uses the locales and food to dramatically illustrate the profound ways in which the characters' lives change. Sandro and his family go from sitting down to delicious, plentiful dinners prepared by Cornelia, shared at the family table where conversations are had and decisions made, to practically starving but for the generous and risky assistance rendered them by true friends who dare to defy the Nazis and their evil machinations. Likewise, she depicts the difficulty Nonna and other business owners encounter getting supplies to keep their restaurants and cafes operating so that they can provide for their families as Italy inches closer to war.

Scottoline is not a plotter, admitting that when she sits down to write, she does not always know what direction her story will go. That is not evident in Eternal, which is a cohesive tale that proceeds in a linear manner with increasingly difficult to absorb plot twists based on the true history of Rome. Her characters are fully developed, credible, and compelling, especially Elisabetta, strong and determined, and Marco, who undergoes a transformation as the story proceeds that undoubtedly reflects the evolution of many citizens of Rome who were caught off-guard as Mussolini betrayed them and the Nazis gained a foothold in the city.

Fans of historical fiction must read Eternal, not just because it is a unique tale about aspects of World War II that have not been fictionalized before, but because it is, at its core, a well-told, deeply moving story about the resilience of the human spirit. Scottoline's characters love their home, are bound to and committed to it and each other, and determined that injustice and evil will not prevail. There are villains, of course, and there are also heroes in Eternal -- normal, unremarkable people who do exceptional things at great peril in order to help their neighbors and friends. Still, some of Scottoline's plot developments will infuriate and break the hearts of readers but, like any writer, she can be forgiven because she realistically depicts the devastatingly unfair nature of war.

What is evident on every page is the degree to which writing Eternal was a labor of love for Scottoline, an Italian-American who worked tirelessly to get the details exactly right and do justice to her subject matter. She has succeeded spectacularly because Eternal is a monumentally memorable story populated with characters -- real and imagined -- who will remain in the hearts and minds of readers long after they finish reading the book. Indeed, Scottoline bestows her "ultimate acknowledgment" upon the memories of the Italian Jewish victims of the Holocaust and their families, noting, "I hope I have honored them and their story, because that matters the most to me." She most definitely has.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.

I like history, especially WWII so learning about Italy during WWII Mussolini was a plus since much of this novel has a basis in real events during that time, but the characters and plot felt like a romance novel and felt very formulaic and often farfetched.