Marcella Olschky, pretty 19-year-old junior student at the Dante Junior Academy in Florence, has been sentenced to four months’ internment by a Florence court because, while vacationing on the Island of Elba, she sent her professor a postcard with a picture of the famous prison which once housed Napoleon and marked one cell “for you.” The verdict was jeered by a packed courtroom.
Miss Olschky, daughter of Aldo Olschky, well-known Jewish art dealer, had believed that racial prejudice on the part of her science professor, Persio Falchi, who is also vice-president of the academy, was partly responsible for her having failed her courses last semester.
Prof. Falchi filed charges against the student when he received the postcard, but withdrew them on receipt of an apology from her. However, the court insisted on continuing the case on the ground that her act was a public offense. Miss Olschky said the sending of the postcard was an innocent joke which many of her friends had carried out without the same unfortunate consequences.
When the sentence was handed down, a chorus of jeers went up from what Italian newspapers termed “a courtroom packed as never before with students, male and female.” Miss Olschky was first expelled from the academy in April, 1939, under Italy’s racial laws, but was later reinstated when the regulations were altered so that the fact she has a non-Jewish mother made her an “Aryan.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
