Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony.

Four Italian Writers and Judaism

By Sergio Parussa, Wellesley College

Syracuse University Press, December 2008

see catalogue

In Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony, Sergio Parussa explores the relationship between Judaism and writing in the works of four twentieth-century Italian writers: Umberto Saba, Natalia Ginzburg, Giorgio Bassani, and Primo Levi. Parussa examines the different ways in which each author ’s work responds to Judaism and the notion of Jewish identity.

With great detail, he shows how their writings reflect a change in attitude toward Judaism that occurred in Italian society between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, from a perception of Jewish identity as a constraint to one ’s freedom to an understanding of it as a tool of intellectual freedom that can contribute to one ’s sense of identity. For these authors, the recovery of Judaism consists not only of telling stories with Jewish subject matter but also of the repeated act of remembering, a process by which, as Parussa puts it, "the past is salvaged from oblivion by means of its reactualization in the present." Through memory, one becomes free to affirm difference and to make Jewish traditions an integral part of Italian culture.

Sergio Parussa is associate professor of Italian studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of Eros onnipotente: erotismo, letteratura e impegno nell ’opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini e Jean Genet. He has also transla0ted L’orsa Maggiore by Ginevra Bompiani.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR SEE:

I Would Have Liked to Flee to Patagonia. Conversation with Anna Jona. in: “Bridges”, Indiana University Press

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Anna Jona, first cousin of Primo Levi was born in Turin.

In 1940, after the promulgation of the Fascist racial laws, managed to leave Italy and come to the United States with her husband Davide and their two daughters Eva and Manuela. Throughout the war years, they lived in Cambridge, MA, where Anna worked for a local broadcasting station as an advocate for antifascism.

After the war, she taught Italian at the New England

Conservatory of Music for several years.

Anna Jona, a writer and poet herself, was responsible for the first attempt to publish Primo Levi ’s If This is a Man in English, which was allegedly rejected by the Boston Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman.