Oliviero Stock: «In spite of H»
Presentation of the book with musical support at the Trentino Ethnographic Museum on the occasion of Memorial Day on Thursday 26 January 2023
Title: In defiance of H
Author: Oliviero Stock
publisher: Bompiani, 2022
Presentation: Thursday 26 January 2023
Pages: 360, Paperback
Cover price: €19
Description
It’s 1938, Adolf Hitler enters Vienna in an open Mercedes, welcomed by the cheering crowd.
From their house overlooking the Ring, Gerty – the author’s mother – and her parents watch the scene, aware that soon they will be forced to abandon everything to save themselves.
In the first phase of the Nazi persecutions there is still some room for action, and so Ferdinand and Isabella, Adolf and Anna, Gerty and Guido, Harry and Georg – the three generations of the Jewish family protagonist of these pages – move with courage and creativity, assisted by a determining factor: luck.
The same luck that will also be needed later to survive in Italy under Nazi-fascism.
It is by intertwining their extraordinary stories, reconstructed through the diaries of Ferdinand and Gerty, and the historical investigation of the context and the facts in their most minute details, that «In beard a H.» witness the strength of life on the edge of the unspeakable abyss.
Presentation on the occasion of the day of remembrance
Thursday 26 January at 6 pm at the METS – San Michele Trentino Ethnographic Museum, in collaboration with the municipal administration, on the occasion of Memorial Day, the book «In barba a H.» by Oliviero Stock the klezmer band will be presented with musical interventions by the TTT (Trentino, Tyrol, Transylvania). Moderating the presentation, as well as performing with the band, will be Renato Morelli. The book testifies to the strength of life on the edge of the unspeakable abyss.
The book starts from a date, 1938, when Adolf Hitler entered Vienna in an open Mercedes, welcomed by the cheering crowd. From there starts a fictionalized historical narrative involving a Central European Jewish family. Between collective events and family events, a historical picture emerges that allows you to “line up” the evolution, often very rapid, of the events that marked the most brutal period in European history. A true and imaginative story with a determining factor: luck.
Oliver Stock
He is a scientist who studies artificial intelligence, especially understanding human language and intelligent person-computer interfaces.
He was director of IRST, one of the main European research institutes in the sector (now Fondazione Bruno Kessler), president of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence and of the Association for Computational Linguistics. In 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa.
He is the author of numerous articles and scientific volumes and, in 2018, he was awarded with the highest honor of Trentino: L’Aquila di San Venceslao.
The TTT klezmer band
The formation of the TTT klezmer band is composed by Renato Morelli on the accordion, by Bice Morelli on the violin, by Belinda Miggitsch on the clarinet, by Andrea Ruocco on the double bass and Matteo Scalchi on the guitar and mandolin.
Klezmer music is the popular music of Ashkenazi Jews. But the TTT Project repertoire includes pieces taken from Trentino documents from the Sonnleithner-Sammlung (Vienna 1819), pieces from the Hungarian, Tyrolean and Trentino musical traditions.
A music “without borders”, curious and open, performed by a “polyglot” band in the sense that it studies and practices different “musical languages”.
The TTT Project was founded by the ethnomusicologist Renato Morelli, the project starts from Trentino, passes through Tyrol and arrives in Transylvania, crossing those communities of Central-Eastern Europe which were once part of the same cultural area, very varied but for certain homogeneous aspects, identifiable roughly in the Austro-Hungarian empire.
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