The greatest learning and empathy reveals itself only when walls are brought down.
This article is part of GP-ORF series — From Alpha Century to Viral World: The Raisina Young Fellows Speak.
My mother-in-law, Ave Maria Didic Alberti, was born in June 1942 in Idrija, a town rich in mercury mines in the far eastern reaches of the Alps, in present-day Slovenia, 40 kms from the current Italian border and 60 kms from the historic port city of Trieste. The people of Idrija, who had for centuries coexisted peacefully with their neighbours within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had, after the First World War, come under the rule of Benito Mussolini and his Italian fascist regime. The year that Ave was born, the Second World War was well underway. The US victory against the Japanese at the Battle of Midway was marking the turning point in the Pacific War. In Europe, the second half of 1942 saw a reversal of Nazi German fortunes, with strategic defeats in North Africa and Stalingrad. The news of the mass murders of Jewish people by the Nazis had started to reach the Allies.
Ave’s mother, Tea, was an Italian schoolteacher who spent her childhood in the care of German-speaking nuns, and her father, Stanislao, was an ethnic Slovenian doctor who studied medicine in Bologna and Prague and began his practice in Vienna. In 1943, Ave’s father had only recently returned to his family home in Idrija to continue his career as a doctor when Josip Borz Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans descended on the town. A doctor was in need, and Stanislao was taken by the communists to serve Tito’s troops on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, a bomb ripped off one of his limbs; he spent two months in a field hospital before Europe attained peace. Ave’s parents were then conflicted with the decision of remaining in Idrija, now under Communist Yugoslavian rule, or moving to the recently created Free Territory of Trieste, under Anglo-American administration, where Ave’s maternal grandmother, a staunch supporter of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, ran a successful business. After considering what the repercussions might be for the family in the years to come, they packed up and moved to Trieste.
Trieste’s very particular geographical location, situated at the end of a long strip of rugged karst terrain along the Adriatic coastline, has made for a turbulent yet vibrant history. For centuries, Trieste was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s most important seaport. After the First World War, in the 1920s and ‘30s, fascism reigned over Trieste and the city’s Slavic population was subject to persecution, harassment and forced ‘Italianisation’ of names. In 1943, in response to Mussolini surrendering to the Allies, Hitler’s troops invaded Northern Italy, controlling Trieste for two years. Tito’s Partisans took Trieste by force for 40 days in 1945, killing scores of Italian soldiers, acts of violence that according to some historians amount to genocide. Great Britain and the US then took over administration of the city as a Free Territory for seven years — the southernmost outpost of Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain,’ separating the Communist East from the West — until Trieste finally returned to the now democratic Italian Republic in 1954, where it has sat mostly placidly since. Some of Trieste’s oldest inhabitants joke that they have lived in six countries without ever having left their city. Others dub Trieste the “cold-weather Jerusalem.” Trieste, during the twentieth century, was a microcosm of some of Europe’s gravest problems — ethnic cleansing, forced migrations and identitarian politics.
Ave was the only member of the Slovenian minority in the Italian primary school she attended in Trieste. There was no escaping the burden of her Slavic surname, Didic. She remembers being called “sciava,” a derogatory term used by the majority Italian-speaking Triestini to address the Slovenians. She has recollections of her presence seeming bothersome, a disruption to the ‘Italianness’ that the authorities in Rome wanted to promote nationwide. She never feared for her safety, yet a profound sense of injustice did grip her community. People were classified by their ethnicity, political inclinations or particular family history. A widespread distrust of ‘the other’ prevailed. The repercussions of this tension were felt by Ave’s family in their everyday lives. When asked, she says she can relate to the way today’s immigrants in Europe might feel. Ave does not have fond memories of her childhood in Trieste and recalls dreaming of a future life unscathed by predetermined identities.
Today, Trieste’s diverse past is present on its streets — Spritz cocktails are served with Slovenian cheese, and Austrian sausages and goulash is more of a staple than pizza. Italian, Slovenian and German can all be heard at the outdoor tables of the Caffè degli Specchi, which claims to serve more coffees than any other café in the world. Catholic churches, Orthodox churches and synagogues are all within walking distance of each other. Like her adoptive city, Ave was a product of three distinct cultural and linguistic worlds — the Slavic family to which she belonged ethnically and linguistically; Italy, which gave her a national and cultural identity; and the Germanic influence that her grandmother, who was brought up under the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs, had on her.
Upon finishing high school, Ave moved to Switzerland to study law and learn French in Lausanne. There, she met Günther, a young German diplomat-to-be, whom she married in 1967, moving with him to Bonn, the then German capital, where Günther was completing his entry into the Auswärtiges Amt (German foreign ministry). Ave used her language skills to find a job at the Italian Embassy. Following the law of the time, Ave acquired her husband’s German nationality, which she continues to hold today. She accompanied her husband to postings in Ankara, Turkey and La Paz, Bolivia, where her first daughter, Vania, was born. Her relationship with Günther came to an end, and she moved back to Bonn, to work in the university.
At a party in Bonn, she met Manuel, a young Spanish diplomat on his first assignment abroad. They soon married and had a daughter, Beatriz. With Manuel and her two daughters, she lived in Montevideo (Uruguay), Madrid (Spain), Washington DC (US), Brussels (Belgium) and Panama City (Panama). Apart from the difficult adaptation of her daughters to the constant shifting, her life as a diplomat spouse provided her with the global lifestyle she had longed for as an adolescent. Contrary to her childhood in Trieste, while traveling the world with Manuel, she felt accepted everywhere, though she was aware that she was a privileged immigrant.
Ave is now settled in Madrid, a city she loves. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she was a regular at the Madrid opera and at its many theatres and cinemas, watching arthouse films from every country imaginable. She reads for hours in the six languages she speaks. The rest of the time she travels; Ave relaxes for a few weeks every year in Provence, France, at the country home of a lifelong friend, she travels to Munich, Germany, every summer to spend time with her psychiatrist friend Heidrun and attend the Salzburg Festival, and she visits her two daughters and five grandchildren wherever they may be living in the world, whether it be Trinidad and Tobago, Chile, Bosnia or India. Every Christmas, the entire family gathers in Duino, a small village just outside Trieste, to enjoy the holidays by the fire, watching movies and eating Triestine specialties. Ave finds time to buy and decorate the Christmas tree, cook for an army of guests, entertain visitors from all corners of the globe, and play with every grandchild, never losing her positive nature.
Ave’s story is not only the story of Trieste, but also the story of modern Europe. Born to an ethnic Slovenian father and Italian mother on the fault lines of Europe’s most severe nationalist clashes, her life was shaped both by the bumpy trajectory of one of Europe’s most diverse cities, as well as by the borderless peace and stability which the European Union has brought to the continent she calls home. Her daughter Beatriz often asks her why she does not give up her German passport and become Italian or Spanish, to which Ave consistently responds, “I don’t care about my passport; I’m European.”
As Europe lived through one of its most defining periods in history and Ave came into the world in Italy, on shores far away in India, equally powerful changes were afoot when another life came into being.
Ranjan Banerjee was born in pre-partition India in East Bengal — now Bangladesh — in 1941. It was a time when calls for independence were at a fever pitch. People were ready for change, and change was coming.
He was my mother’s uncle, Ranju to the family and Choto Dadu (junior grandfather, loosely translated) for me.
Although his siblings and he were born in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, his prescient academic father could sense the approaching fault lines for independent India. By 1943, the family had moved to Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, to begin a new life at the Indian Institute for the Cultivation of Science.
As the heady elation of Independence lingered in the air, Choto Dadu’s formative years were reflective of those times. India witnessed its first nationwide election, with the Indian National Congress winning under the leadership of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In the meantime, Choto Dadu savoured the merriment of youth. He was the popular bloke who knew the best digs for food and music, the one with dashing looks, suave clothes and hair, and certainly the neighbourhood ‘Romeo’ with all the young ladies keen for an introduction, and perhaps even a drive in his shiny black Vauxhall.
By 1960, the country was in flux. It was a period of change, often painful for the nation. This was a decade when India saw war, want and loss. In 1962, India witnessed a brief border war with China. In 1965, Indians lived through a second war with Pakistan.
And perhaps in congruence, the young man was struggling to find his own voice as well.
Choto Dadu was now studying at Calcutta University. He was a student of Physics, blessed with academic brilliance. But he was also a young man who did not want to follow the path his father had. This young scholar wanted to see more of what the world had to offer. He was ready for an evolution of his own.
As India elected a new prime minister and a woman (Indira Gandhi) assumed leadership of the nation, Choto Dadu made his journey from the bustling city of Calcutta to the cold climes of Canada.
At the time he made the journey, it was neither commonplace nor widely approved, the idea of moving to another country. After all, what greater joy than the familiarity and uniformity of being around people who spoke, dressed, thought and mostly lived just like you.
But he was looking for something else. The intoxicating and enigmatic promise that vibrant multi-cultural societies whisper in your ear, of showing you places, people, words and ideas that you have never experienced before. Of opening your mind and altering it forever.
Canada was many wonderful things, but it was also not an easy transition. Struggling with a new way of learning, unsupportive guides and professors, he eventually abandoned his hopes of getting a PhD and moved quickly into the folds of the working world.
It would be a long time before his family in India saw him — once briefly in 1967 when he returned as a newly married man, and then in the full kaleidoscopic version in 1984.
The nation was witnessing ordeals of different kinds. In the October of 1984, Prime Minister Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards. In December the same year, a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticides plant in Bhopal left thousands dead and numerous others permanently disabled.
Perhaps these traumatic events placed the country on the brink of vital transformations, even though we were not fully aware of it yet. It was in the context of this time and place that I first met Choto Dadu.
The impact was instant and massive. No one spoke quite like him, and I had never heard these world experiences before — rushing to the Louvre on a six-hour layover at Paris to quickly catch a glimpse of the Monalisa, casually slipping Indonesian phrases and their meanings into a conversation, speaking with equal ease with the cab drivers and the ‘high and mighty’ ones in our family. This man was not just a lesson in himself, it was like seeing a whole other world!
Here was a man who knew and understood so much of the world. Not through the pages of a book, or through hearsay, but through the people he had met, the sights he had seen. Choto Dadu was a life etched with experience.
The 1990s heralded one of India’s most important policy pivots — an economic reform programme begun by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. India was ready to open the borders of its economy and I was ready to open the borders of my mind.
Fortuitously we got to see and experience more of the man and the rich tapestry of his life in the years to come. He and his family were posted to New Delhi, India, for a while. That meant long dinners and lunches at his beautiful home hosted by his wife, a lady with luminous intelligence and humour. Conversations with them were always replete with stories from every imaginable corner of the world, and always created in everyone who listened to a tender yet excruciating urge to see the world and experience cultures this way.
He was the only person I knew who would laugh at angry drawing-room discussions around Pakistan and point out that there were no two communities and nations that were more similar in their ways and thoughts.
As the saying goes, the days they pass slowly, but the years, they seem to fly. My sister and I went on to finish our studies, pursue careers and over time, build families of our own.
Marriage took my sister to the US while I stayed on in India. For me, the changes I was beginning to see my country undergo cemented ideas that Choto Dadu had first planted. The idea that democracies are healthiest and most nourished when they allow for different cultures, communities and ideas to collide yet coexist. The idea that freedom of speech and thought and expression does not build hate, it builds arcs of knowledge, each drawing from the other and reinforced by it. The idea that building bridges is the only way to find any meaningful understanding with another human being. And most importantly, that opening the window of diversity, of acceptance of different cultures and ideas can create ripples of change, not just in an individual but in countless others that individual may touch.
What is more human and real than the sense of wonder, learning and compassion that human connect brings with it? In a world that has been ripped apart by a pandemic, the primal response is to put up walls, both physical and virtual, to protect one’s citizens.
Yet, the greatest learning and empathy reveals itself only when walls are brought down. And for the sake of generations to come, my hope is that our nations continue to build living spaces that nurture many “Choto Dadus” who in turn become windows to new worlds for their children and their children’s children.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Mitali Mukherjee was a Fellow at ORF. Her key areas of interest and expertise are gender finance and media ethics.
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