History of The Jews in Trieste - Famous People

Famous People

• Italo Svevo, born Ettore Schmitz, the author of The Confessions of Zeno, studied English with James Joyce, the great Irish writer who made Trieste his home for a number of years. His background reflected the cosmopolitan, shifting identity so typical of Trieste. He was born into a Jewish family in 1861 and worked most of his life as a clerk. His mother was Italian and his father Austrian, and he himself converted to Catholicism. His works, too, reflect a deep interest in emerging fields of psychoanalysis and self-examination.
• Angelo Vivante was a historian, publicist and socialist politician. He was one of the foremost advocates of Austromarxism. He rejected both Italian irredentism and Pan-Slavic nationalism, and called for a peaceful co-existence of different nationalities within a federalized Austro-Hungarian Empire.
• Ernesto Nathan Rogers was a famous architect.
• Umberto Saba (original surname Poli), was an Italian poet noted for his simple, lyrical autobiographical poems. Saba was raised by his Jewish mother in the ghetto of Trieste after his Christian father deserted them when Saba was an infant. The racial laws, the second world war and the Nazi occupation in Trieste forced him to leave the "ancient and modern Bookstore" that he had opened in Trieste; it was sheltered first to Paris, then in Rome, where it was hidden in the Ungaretti house, to Florence and Milan.

After the war he returned in his city and it got numerous recognitions, what the Viareggio Prize (1946), and the Prize of the academy of the Linceis (1953).

• Fabio Cusin was a historian and left-wing intellectual. He opposed Italian nationalism and centralism and was one of the main supporters of the Free Territory of Trieste among Triestine intellectuals.
• Giorgio Voghera was an Italian writer and essayist who emigrated to Palestine in 1939, but returned to TRieste after the end of World War II in 1948. He is famous for his travelogues and description of the Middle East, as well as for his essays and autobiographic novels on the intellectual life in early 20th century Trieste.