Against Saviano

By Daniela Gross

“If you hate Israel and the settlers, read this novel. If you love Israel and defend the settlers, read this novel. But even if you don’t care about the Middle East but love literature, read this novel.” So posted the Italian writer Roberto Saviano on his Facebook page, a couple of days ago. The book he recommended is “The Hilltop”, a novel by the Israeli writer Assaf Gavron, recently translated into Italian and published by La Giuntina.

Praised by critics as a really interesting voice rising from the new generation of Israeli writers, “The Hilltop” chronicles the life and times of the inhabitants of a fictional West Bank settlement. It is a comic saga, which offers a notable view of contemporary Israeli society, but most of Saviano’s followers were not interested in taking into account its literary or social meaning.

As Elena Lowenthal highlighted on La Stampa, on Thursday, they started posting “an avalanche of outraged and delusional comments”, which shared a common virulent Anti-Semitic sentiment. “It looks like there is but a short step from the neutrality of the literature (and in the end from its own meaning) to pure prejudice, at least on the social media,” she wrote, noting how ignorant and indecently Anti-Semitic many of these comments sounded. “It is hard to imagine what could be the right therapy, in this global communication world, where everybody writes, and nobody reads”, she noted. Equally hard to accept is that this hatred speech in fact reflects part of the Italian society, in which still today someone dares to criticize cultural advice by simply commenting “Saviano Jewish”.