Description:
Between 1946 and 1948, roughly five thousand ethnic Italians from the northern Adriatic shipbuilding town of Monfalcone relocated to the newly communist Yugoslavia. This rare case of eastward Cold War migration demonstrates how ordinary people conceived of liberation during the transitional years between World War II and the early Cold War--a time when Monfalcone was both the object of competing Italian and Yugoslav territorial claims and the subject of Anglo-American military occupation.
In The Red Italians of Monfalcone, Luke Gramith undertakes a deep and detailed analysis--based on archival sources in Italy, Slovenia, and the United States--of how the Monfalconesi came to understand Fascism and communism through everyday experience and how those emergent ideologies affected and were affected by their migration. In the course of his analysis, Gramith also examines the failure of "defascistization" and how it fueled strong (but ultimately unsuccessful) pro-Yugoslav and communist movements.
Brief description:
Luke Gramith is an independent scholar and a coauthor (with William I. Brustein) of Antisemitism Without Jews in Germany, France, and the US: Phantom Enemies.
Review Quotes: "An original study, methodologically and historiographically, based on extensive and impressive primary research."--John Foot, author of Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism