Biography of Giorgio Voghera
Giorgio Voghera was a writer, essay writer and intellectual.
Son of Guido, a famous mathematician, and Paola Fano, both important members of the Jewish community of Trieste, Giorgio Voghera was born in Trieste in 1908. He attended the classic secondary school and then moved to Rome to enrol on a degree in natural sciences, although he was later to abandon this idea as the course failed to match with his interests. Upon his return to Trieste, not yet twenty years old, he was employed by the insurance company RAS Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà, one of the most important businesses operating in the city.
Following the issue of the racial laws in 1938 and the start of the persecution of Jewish communities, Voghera was dismissed. The whole family left Trieste in 1939, emigrating to Palestine, where, together with other Italian Jews, he was forced to stay in a surveillance camp in Jaffa, before then moving to a kibbutz, a sort of collective farm, where he was assigned to hard farming work.
The last part of his stay in Palestine was spent in Tel Aviv, working in transport.
He returned to Trieste in 1948 and was hired back to the insurance company RAS. He continued working there until 1962.
A refined intellectual and prolific writer of various types of works, Giorgio Voghera became friends with Umberto Saba, whom he had met in his youth, Virgilio Giotti, Roberto Bazlen, Biagio Marin and many other representative of the literary and cultural cenacles of his times, as described by Voghera in “Gli anni della psicanalisi”, published in 1980.
The author of narrative writings and essays, his works include in particular the novel “Il segreto”, although here he writes under the pseudonym of “Anonimo Triestino”. Published for Einaudi by Linuccia Saba in 1961, for a long time the work was attributed to Guido Voghera, but family witnesses and archived documents have effectively proven that it was indeed Giorgio Voghera who wrote it.
A translator from English and Hebrew, he collaborated at length with “Il Piccolo” newspaper of Trieste and numerous other newspapers, weekly publications and magazines, including “Il Giornale”, “Il Mondo”, “Israel”, “Il Ponte” and the “Osservatore Politico Letterario".
Although elderly, he was an active, authoritative presence in the cultural context of both his region and the rest of Italy.
Giorgio Voghera died in his beloved Trieste in 1999.
Selected works
Il segreto, con lo pseudonimo di Anonimo Triestino, Torino, 1961
Quaderno di Israele, Milano, 1967
Il Direttore Generale, Trieste, 1974
Gli anni della psicanalisi, Pordenone, 1980
Nostra Signora Morte, Pordenone, 1983
Carcere a Giaffa, Pordenone, 1985
Anni di Trieste, Gorizia 1989
Selected bibliography
Cigoi R., Quattrocento domande a un vecchio ebreo triestino, Roma 1996
Conedera M. P., Gli anni di Voghera. Bibliografia degli scritti, 1945 – 1996, Trieste 1997
AA.VV., Io sono un dinosauro. Giorgio Voghera (1908 – 1999): Mostra documentaria 15 dicembre 2008 -15 gennaio 2009, Trieste 2008
External link
Publications