My Roman History: A Memoir

Although this book is described as a “memoir,” it is really an autobiographical Bildungsroman: the story of a young girl growing into an accomplished writer as she tries—and ultimately fails—to find a career as a professional historian. Holstein had only one female historian as a teacher despite going to a famous women's college that prides itself on valuing teaching and female role models. Her years both in graduate school and on research fellowships in Italy seem to have passed without offering a fully encouraging response to her palpable love of history; almost tactile curiosity about monuments, places, and landscapes; and deep craving to learn languages and read Dante. Some of her stories of dismissive encounters with historians in Rome show that sexism was alive and well in Italy in the late twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries. In one sense, then, there are elements here that indict an academic profession that failed to support a gifted young person's efforts to attain training and find a way in which to share with others her love of the past and of doing research. That Holstein did not thrive as an academic does not seem a result of the shrinking job market in the humanities, about which readers of Common Knowledge hear a good deal and which they know to be true. Rather it is a story of the failure of teachers to fully listen and respond to the love that brings students to study the past, whatever their ultimate careers turn out to be.This exquisitely written account is at its heart, however, not about training and career at all but rather about the growth of love for a place (Rome) and for the languages (Italian and Latin) and literature (Dante and Petrarch) that enable one to glimpse its long ago past. Anyone who has ever traveled to a place and fallen in love with it, thrilled to the sound of a language enough to want to learn it, or walked streets and read books in an effort to somehow experience an “other” of time and place, will be moved by Holstein's fluid and elegant prose and be glad that she became a writer rather than simply another academic historian. Holstein's story ranges from her experience of running away from home at seventeen in the middle of the night, hoping to catch a flight to Rome (only to realize that, alas, she would need a passport), to her return many years later as a successful businesswoman and mother of two sons, when she is gripped not only by a need to explain to assembled American guests at a wedding how Italians really cook artichokes but also by the weight of her loss of Rome, which is as acute as sudden illness. With such stories, she conjures up the experience of falling in love with a place that many of us are lucky enough to have succumbed to at least once in our lives. For those who have ever been enchanted by the otherness of a city, a landscape, or a language, this book will evoke the ineffability of that rarest and dearest of all young loves.