La Storia
Elsa Morante. Excerpts from La Storia, remembering October 16, 1943 Not even from her mother had she ever heard this denomination “Aryans”; in fact, the de-nomination of Jews itself, for…
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Invited to Think
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The Printshop at Bookhouse
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La Storia
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Bruce Slovin (1935-2025)
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QUARTO STATO
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Bookhouse Musings: A Table
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Thruth and the Holocaust
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An Act of Faith
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Notes on Nurith Aviv’s Language Trilogy
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On Bruly Bouabré’s Alphabet (2005)
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Features
Thruth and the Holocaust
“If you no longer want to believe the truth, nobody will want to believe you.” Zelman Lewental, prisoner of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, quoted in Franco Fortini, “I cani del Sinai”. …
Hatching the Cobra
Let no one praise Perillus, who was cruder than the tyrant Phalaris, for whom he constructed a brazen bull, promising that when a man was enclosed therein and a fire…
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The Jesuit
Nicola Chiaromonte, The Partisan Review, February 1948 We had been at school together, at the Collegio Massimo, the time-honored Jesuit college where the sons of the Roman middle class sit…
The Online Thesaurus of Italian Jewish Music
Centro Primo Levi New York partners with Centro Leo Levi in Florence to invite all to listen and sing at www.jewishitalianmusic.org The Online Thesaurus of Italian Jewish Music is a…
Bashing Micól
In a New York Times interview published in 1972, Bassani boldly stated: “I am Micól.” Indeed, he speaks through all of his characters playing across genders and social roles and allowing the space of mystery in which human beings continuously redefine one another through relationships.
The Racial Laws
The Racial Laws, a poem by Giorgio Bassani (translated by Jamie McKendrick) The magnolia right in the middle of our Ferrara house’s garden is the very same that reappears in…
The Novel of Ferrara
Introduction by Jamie McKendrick to his translation of The Novel of Ferrara (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019) In short stories, novels, poems, and essays, Giorgio Bassani has composed perhaps the…
My betrayed garden
my work, in a way that would have been inappropriate even if they were marionettes. Although fine folk, the Finzi-Continis were not Rothschilds, carrying out correspondence with wealthy international relatives by mail! “Isac” and “Rachel,” mentioned on p. 278 onwards of the Pirro revision, distorted the Finzi-Continis, rendering a false and unflattering image of the family.