Never Again What?
On the Hard Questions Primo Levi’s Still Asking One hundred years ago Primo Levi was born in Turin, the first-born son of a middle-class Jewish-Italian family. They were turbulent…
Essays
Nonochka or Nonna
Childhood – growing up in Italy 1925-39 In 1924, when I was born in Moscow, my father was working at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1925, we moved to…
Weightless
… our poor body, so vulnerable to swords, to guns and to viruses, is space-proof. Republished from: Granta Image: Ernesto Neto, The Body that carries me, 2006 What I would…
Defoe as a Possible Model
The structure of History, a Novel, departs substantially from Morante’s previous novels and poses some interesting interpretative questions. While critics have often pointed to similarities with the narrative structure of…
Cinema as Archive
Amos Gitai once told me: “When the credits scroll down at the end of a screening, a new film begins in the mind of the spectator.”With this image in mind,…
Mussolini’s Camps: Civilian Internment in Fascist Italy (1940-1943)
The train that left Ljubljana in the early hours of July 24th, 1942 with somewhere between 300 and 400 people crammed in the cars, without water or food, arrived at…
What exactly is a concentration camp?
L’internata numero 6/Internee n. 6 – The earliest known diary of daily life in a fascist concentration camp. You see, it is as if we were crossing a bridge. Does…
Little Scenes of Rhodes
Conversations between Stella Levi and Isabelle Levy The Department Store of Salomon Alhadeff The Department Store of Salomon Alhadeff was founded in the mid-1800s. It was the biggest department store…
Periodic Words: Stranger
Periodic Words: Stranger In the Preface to If This Is A Man, Levi warns the reader about some possible consequences of organized political systems: “Many people—many nations—, can find themselves…
Current scholarship on Italian Fascist anti-Semitism in honour of Michele Sarfatti
Journal of Modern Italian Studies: On the 80th anniversary of the Racial Laws. Articles reflecting the current scholarship on Italian Fascist anti-Semitism in honour of Michele Sarfatti. Annalisa Capristo and…