By Shelley A. Sackett
Heirlooms hold the keys that can unlock family histories. For many, these stories remain untold, preserved in artifacts that are passed from generation to generation and display case to display case. They sit silently on a shelf, admired and gathering dust.
Award-winning documentarian David Modigliani’s family was different.
When his grandfather, the Italian-born economist and Nobel Prize winner Franco Modigliani, died in 2003, David’s father Sergio inherited 19 boxes of documents. He kept them in a storage unit, where they remained taped up and unopened until COVID, when David decided to check out what was inside them.
He and documentary producer Willa Kaufman had begun dating just before the country went into lockdown during the pandemic. The boxes were a perfect diversion.
What they found inside was a treasure trove of family archives including letters, personal diaries, and fascist spy documents detailing his family’s harrowing times fighting to survive during the rising tide of antisemitism in 1930s Italy. That was the start of “Pack One Bag,” a 10-part podcast that traces his family’s escape to America.
In the boxes, there were scores of love letters between Franco, then a 19-year-old economics student, and Serena Calabi, the daughter of Jewish publishing baron, Giulio Calabi (known as “The King of the Books”) and the love of his life. Although David had grown up hearing the fairytale stories about his grandparents’ epic romance and their escape from fascist Italy for the United States in 1939, these letters did more than just preserve their love; they bore witness to the perils they confronted as Benito Mussolini and his Italian Racial Laws fueled antisemitism.
Most eye-opening was the 25-page letter that Giorgio, Franco’s brother who stayed behind in Rome, wrote and sent to David’s grandfather just after the war. It detailed, in “harrowing, page-turning prose,” his experience of navigating his family and shepherding them through a gauntlet of horror during the Mussolini regime.
“Reading this letter was chilling and opened up a much deeper understanding of the universe my grandfather could have experienced had he not been so fortunate to fall in love with my grandmother and escape fascist Italy with her family before the outbreak of war,” David told the Journal.
The professional storyteller in him knew he had to get to the bottom of his own family’s story. Toting his grandparents’ love letters, he and Kaufman went to Italy to speak to surviving family members, retrace his family’s steps in Rome and Bologna, and discover the answer to a question that haunted him: Why didn’t they all just flee Italy when they could?
The couple spent months piecing together a story that includes narratives of relatives left behind, recorded in their octogenarian voices. They plumbed state archives and even interviewed former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, one of Franco’s students. They returned home knowing they had the raw material for a thrilling and timely story. But how to best tell it?
Film has been David’s medium ever since falling in love with the collaborative process of documentary storytelling while a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. He has won numerous awards for his feature films, which have run on Hulu, Netflix, PBS, and HBO.
But this time was different. There were no great visual assets and most of the main characters are no longer living. His coproducer reminded him that podcasts are at heart a visual medium. “A podcast is more akin to reading a novel than film. The audience must construct and build through their own imagination the world you are trying to create for them,” David said.
Actor/producer/writer Stanley Tucci signed on as executive producer and the featured voice of Giulio Calabi. David voices his Nonno Franco and Nonna Serena.
As a kid, he had done impersonations of his grandparents for his sisters and cousins, and when his collaborators heard them, they agreed that it would be an authentic way for him to bring his grandparents to life. David always meant to record them, and regretted that he didn’t prioritize that before they died. “I felt very close to them when I was recreating them for the podcast,” he said.
Episode 1 of the series David and his team created débuted at the 2023 Tribeca Festival as “Shalom, Amore.” It won the Jury Award for Nonfiction Audio, citing its “unexpectedly moving narrative that blends the personal, political, and comical” as it takes listeners “on a journey across generations and continents.”
Later, he changed the name to “Pack One Bag” to reflect the details of his family’s story. When his great-grandparents began illegally ferrying money across the border into Switzerland in the 1930s, they packed one bag so it would look like they were going on vacation. When the Nazis banged on doors in Rome’s Jewish ghetto in 1943, they instructed them to pack one bag.
“This story is about people who happened to be Jewish in the 1930s in Italy,” David said, “but it is a universal story. It applies to people in any environmental or political crisis who have to leave their homes. What do you take with you?”
David, 44, grew up as a “Reform Jewish kid in Brookline” and was especially connected to Judaism culturally and historically. He vividly understood how being Jewish had impacted the physical locations of his family. “My grandparents were in Belmont largely because of their Jewish identity and because they left Italy just in the nick of time,” he said.
He hopes that listeners can find some answers for the present moment from the way his family confronted their situation. “The question at the heart of ‘Pack One Bag’ is ‘when confronted with fascism, do you stay or flee? What if you can’t?’ ” David said.
Noting the upswing of nationalism, totalitarianism, and antisemitism at home and globally, he is reminded how fascism needs an “other” to survive and thrive, a subset of the population that the majority is motivated to antagonize, scapegoat, and persecute.
He cites his great-grandfather Giulio as advice to those being “othered.” “You resist as best you can for as long as you can, and then you flee,” David said.
“For those that have the privilege to exist inside a fascist society without being persecuted, the onus is on us to preserve democracy and to attempt to return society to a more inclusive and tolerant place.”
To listen to the podcast and for more information, visit packonebagshow.com.
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