Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Four Italian Writers and Judaism

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.

Author: Sergio Parussa
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 12/23/2008
Pages: 219
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.20w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780815631989

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 01/30/2009 pg. 20
Choice 07/01/2009
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2009 pg. 262

About the Author
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 translated L'orso maggiore by Ginevra Bompiani into English and L. P. Hartley's novella Simonetta Perkins into Italian.