By Daniela Gross Today, more than ever, we need to remember how rich the weave of languages, cultures, and habits can be. Journalistic help comes to us from the last issue of the New York Times Style Magazine. With its warm title “Welcome to the World”, the newspaper leads us to Italy: first, to Messner’s …
By Daniela Gross “We thought we could get away with a million people walking on Paris’s boulevards, last January, after the manslaughter at Charlie Hebdo, all together, all of us repeating ‘Je suis Charlie’, and later forgetting, removing what happened, apologizing[…]. Then it happened in Copenhagen, where an armed commando attacked a convention regarding the …
By Daniela Gross Would you like a birthday cake with Nazi and fascist symbols? Most people would say no, and most of us would be horrified by the idea. But a senior official in the northern Italian region of Veneto, Massimo Giorgetti, chose to celebrate his day of birth just this way. As Stephanie Kirchgaessner …
By Daniela Gross Primo Levi just became the first Italian author to have his complete work, including unpublished writings, translated in English and put into print by a single publisher. This has never happened before: not even for Dante, Machiavelli, Montale or Calvino, as highlighted by Ernesto Ferrero on La Stampa. On Thursday, he highlighted …
By Daniela Gross The Jewish Brigade, which decidedly contributed to the liberation of Italy during the Second World War, comes back into the spotlight. Last Wednesday, on the Fatto Quotidiano, Furio Colombo expressed his support for a law proposal aimed at honoring with a gold medal the Jewish volunteers from the territory of the British …
By Daniela Gross The Search for the Perfect Citron Strengthens the Ties with Jews. Rabbis and Farmers on the Tirrenian coast: Harvesting is a Rite.” Given that Sukkoth is already over, this headline might sound strange. However, in these days so full of bad news, it’s a relief to find on the Corriere della Sera …
By Daniela Gross “In Milan, the Jewish commitment is made plain in the ongoing work at the Milan Holocaust Memorial where thousands of migrants and refugees have found a safe, free place to spend the night.” On October 2, the humanitarian effort of Italian Jews came again to the international spotlight thanks to the US …
By Daniela Gross This book was the successful literary debut of Alessandro Piperno, who won the Campiello Prize with it in 2005 and came to the national spotlight. “Con le peggiori intenzioni” – which means “with the worst intentions” – is the story of the Sonninos, a rich bourgeois Roman Jewish family. The life of …
By Daniela Gross Moise Levi is 23 years old, when he leaves Fossano for Turin in search of fortune, bringing with him only a chariot full of rags. He will start an incredibly successful clothing trade, will get married, have six sons, and many grandchildren (the title of the book, published in 2008, in English …
By Daniela Gross Family Sayings – as it translates in English – is a semi-biographical, ironic, and delicate chronicle of the daily life of an Italian Jewish family between 1920-1950. Natalia Ginzburg tells us about her father, the renowned histologist Giuseppe Levi, their friends, their habits, and their linguistic uses. In these pages there are …
By Daniela Gross In the first pages of Trieste, Haya Tedeschi, an elderly woman living in Gorizia in northeastern Italy, waits to be reunited with her son, who was born as part of Himmler’s Lebensborn project. Reflecting on her own life, Haya brings us in the middle of the tragedy of the World War II …
By Daniela Gross The Garden of the Finzi Continis by Giorgio Bassani, one of the most important Italian Jewish writers, was published in 1962 and soon became a classic. It tells the story of a prominent and sophisticated family, the Finzi Continis, living in Ferrara, a small city in Northern Italy, just before the Second …
By Daniela Gross “From 1938 until 1943 – before the German occupation and accompanying Holocaust – Fascist Italy drafted and enforced a comprehensive set of anti-Semitic laws”. In his new book “The Fascists and the Jews of Italy. Mussolini’s Racial Laws 1938-1945”, Michael Livingston, professor of Law at Rutgers University, exhaustively reviews Italian legal, administrative, …
By Daniela Gross The last book of Antonio Scurati, which in English translates as “The best time of our life”, tells the story of Leone Ginzburg, who was among the main Italian intellectuals in the fascist era. Mr. Scurati traces Ginzburg’s life from when he was expelled by the university because he was a Jew …
By Daniela Gross The excellent debut of Katja Petrowskaja just won the European Strega prize. The Italian translation of the novel, originally written in German, was the first to be released by the publisher Adelphi at the end of 2014. English readers should still wait for this autobiographical novel telling the history of a Jewish …
By Daniela Gross During the last weeks, international media has reported widely about the impressive wave of refugees reaching Italy’s coasts, from Africa and the Middle East. It’s a real humanitarian emergency for all of Europe, and unluckily it is often confronted with a lack of answers from public institutions. In this scenario, the action …
By Daniela Gross “I am an entrepreneur, but I’d rather call myself a good Jewish mom.” This is the way Ruth Dureghello, chose to introduce herself during a long interview by Paolo Conti on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Last week, Dureghello’s list “Per Israele” (i.e. “For Israel”) won the relative majority of the …
By Daniela Gross It is hard to believe. But when we talk about medical issues, we often conjure some Nazi doctor. Even today, many diseases are in fact named after the Nazi scientist who discovered them, through atrocious experiments on human beings. To amend this situation, an international campaign has just been launched, by a …
By Daniela Gross Sometimes the past comes back and is almost unbearable, as it happened at the beginning of last week. Last Monday, an article on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera recounted how many Jews were traded for money to the Nazis, when Rome was under the Third Reich occupation. “The Jewish Community just …
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 …