I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words

BY RUBY R O H R L I C H1I OW COULD YOU RETURN TO LIVE INa country that persecuted you, that took away your citizenship,your profession, and forced you to live undergroundto survive?" Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of the 1986Nobel Prize in Science, never answered my question. Instead,smiling a little, she set down her watering can amidthe dozens of coral and crimson plants and went to thebook shelves in the apartment she shares with her twin sister,Paola. When she returned to the room, Levi-Montalcinigave me an armful of family papers, books, and descriptionsof her- Nobel-winning discovery of Nerve GrowthFactor, a natural chemical that helps nerve cells to navigateand survive and may someday be used to regenerate damagedor severed nerves.Born in 1909, Rita Levi-Montalcini will soon be 88 yearsold. Her slim carriage is erect, her hands don't tremble, shedoesn't wear glasses. Her thick, gray hair is smartly and simplystyled, and so are her clothes. Her hyphenated name, andthe elegant gold jewelry she wore, once led an American psychologistwho encountered Rita at scientific meetings to assumeshe was supported by a wealthy Italian husband.Nothing could be further from the facts of her life.An anxious child, Rita Levi-Montalcini grew up utterlylacking in self-confidence, afraid of her father, Adamo Levi.A businessman with an exuberant love of opera, Adamowas also a controlling patriarch; his wife, Adele Montalcini,nine years his junior, accepted his authority and toleratedhis explosive temper. Paola was not intimidated by theseverity and piercing quality of Adamo's gaze, the silentflaring of the nostrils preceding his brief but violent outburstsof anger, the imperious voice. Rita trembled withfear when she saw such behavior and, extending this fearto all adults, fled from them. Her father's stories about theprecarious situation of Jews under the Italian Inquisitionand during the pogroms in Eastern Europe gave her nightmaresinto adulthood.Undoubtedly it was also Adamo's temperament that impelledhim to make all the decisions in the household, rightdown to the kinds of hats worn by the twin girls. When itcame time for higher education, it took two years for Ritato persuade her father to allow her to enter medical school.According to Adamo, two of his six sisters, both of whomhad doctoral degrees, had found it very difficult to reconciletheir studies with their conjugal and maternal roles.Adamo objected that medicine "was a long and difficultcourse of study, unsuitable for a woman." The young Ritahad already decided to forego marriage, however, and shehad no interest at all in babies. In her autobiography, InPraise of Imperfection, she wrote that "the subordinate roleplayed by the female in a society run entirely by men madethe status of a wife less than attractive."Finally her father yielded. Rita and her cousin, Eugenia,Anthropologist RUBY ROHRLICH PH.D. has authored numerouspapers on women. She is currently working on a book,Scientists as Survivors: From Ashes into the Light.S p r i n g 1 9 9 7 • O N T H E I S S U E Sspent a year preparing for entrance exams: with the help oftutors, they learned Latin, Greek and mathematics. The twoyoung women studied philosophy, literature and historyon their own. Their concentration was rewarded when Ritascored highest on the list of candidates on the entranceexams. In 1930, both she and Eugenia enrolled in Turin UniversityMedical School on the banks of the River Po.Rita was one of seven women in a class of 300 students;she made few friends at the university. A classmate oncedescribed her "as a kind of squid, ready to squirt ink atanybody who came near." She did, however, attract a mentor,Giuseppe Levi (no relation). Later, she would describehim as "celebrated in Turin University as a scientist, for theanti-fascism he professed with supreme disdain for themost elementary rules of caution, and for his terrible butshort-lived fits of rage."Rita graduated at the head of her class in 1936, and wasrewarded with a trip to a scientific conference in Sweden.She decided to specialize in neurology and psychiatry, andwas given a job as assistant lecturer in the anatomy department.But history intervened.Underground ResearchIn 1936 Mussolini's ties with Hitler became closer andthe Italian Fascists began to vilify the Jews. When theanti-Jewish laws were passed in 1938, Rita was compelledto leave the university and was barred from doinglaboratory research and practicing medicine. Rita hadnever firmly identified herself as Jewish; her father had notifiedhis four children, before they could even read andwrite, that they were freethinkers and could choose orrefuse a religion when they reached the age of 21. As theItalian newspapers continued their vicious attacks on theJews, Rita at first experienced a kind of shock. That shockeventually gave way to a sense of liberation from "thenightmare of an anti-Semitism, all the more menacing forbeing invisible and yet ever present," that had tormentedher since early childhood."For the first time I felt pride in being Jewish and not Israelite,as we had been called in the liberal climate of myearly years," she wrote, "and though still profoundly secular,I felt a bond with those who were, like me, the victimsof the lurid campaign unleashed by the Fascist press."In 1940, one of her classmates, Rodolfo Amprimo, proddedher into continuing her research. With the help of herbrother Gino, Rita built a laboratory in her bedroom. Shecontinued her early research on the nervous system of chickembryos. The first experiments turned out well, allowingRita to observe the development of the nervous system.Her mentor, Giuseppe Levi, who had been dismissedfrom the University along with all the other Jewish professors,became Rita's first assistant, and his students crowdedinto her bedroom to work and examine her experiment.In this setting, Rita replicated an experiment by ViktorHamburger of Washington University, which she had readof in a scientific journal. In the winter of 1942, Rita wrote41