Synopses & Reviews
Review
The years between 1924 and 1974 may indeed have been a silver age for the Italian Jews, but for Italian prose literature the age was golden. This distinguished book, which combines the expert skills of a seasoned historian with the understanding of a literary critic steeped in the language and literature of his subject, offers a challenging interpretation to those who already know these writers, and will serve as a masterly introduction for those whom it will inspire to make their acquaintance. Bernard Knox
Review
Hughes has written a provocative book...A work attentive to nuance and pleasurable to read. New York Review of Books
Review
[An] elegantly written volume which probes the identity of modern Italian Jews through a sensitive reading of the works of six important Italian authors. The first work to address central issues of identity and assimilation in relation to Italian Jews, it evokes their unfamiliar world while suggesting the broader significance of their grappling with Judaism and modernity. Eschewing simplistic dichotomies, Hughes makes a valuable contribution to the study of Italian literature and Jewish history. Adrian Lyttelton - Times Literary Supplement
Review
This book should be read by anyone interested in either modern Italian literature or Italy's Jewish community. Lois C. Dubin - Religious Studies Review
Synopsis
The eminent cultural historian H. Stuart Hughes examines the works of Italo Svevo, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, and Giorgio Bassani--six Italian prose writers of Jewish or part-Jewish origin--and gracefully shows how these writers combine in various measures their ancestral Jewish heritage with recent experiences of antisemitic persecution.
About the Author
H. Stuart Hughes is Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California, San Diego.
Table of Contents
1. The Most Ancient of Minorities 2. Exercises in Futility: Trieste and Rome
The Redeemed and the Eternal City
Italo Svevo's "Discomfort": Premature Aging and Belated Fame
Alberto Moravia's World-Weary Adolescents
3. Two Captives Called Levi
Fascism and Italian Jewry
The Physician. Painter Don Carlo: Exile and Wonder-Worker
The Chemist Primo: "Poet" of the Concentration Camp
"Prisoners of Hope"
4. The Moment of Recollection: Turin
The Testimony of Four Memoirists
Natalia Ginzburg: The Painful Apprenticeship
Natalia Ginzburg: The Arrival and the Departure of the Jews
5. The Moment of Recollection: Ferrara
The Incomparable Walled City
Giorgio Bassani: To the Paradise Garden
Giorgio Bassani: The Splendor of Death
The Cycle Closed
6. The Meanings of "Survival"
Notes
Index