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Books, Essays October 16, 2025

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…

Essays, Interviews June 9, 2025

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”. …

Essays September 2, 2024

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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News January 15, 2016

Who Owns the Holocaust?

History, Memory, and the Question of “Who Owns the Holocaust?”: Thoughts on Manuela Consonni’s L’eclisse dell’antifascismo The following are some not-quite-random thoughts inspired by Manuela Consonni’s new book, L’eclisse dell’antifasicsmo: Resistenza,…

Essays January 15, 2016

Lagersprache: Primo Levi and the Language of Survival

In a story from 1976 entitled “Decoding” (Decodificazione), Primo Levi investigates the appearance of swastikas and Fascist graffiti in a small Italian town.[1] Discovering they were made by a disaffected teenager,…

Academia, Books, News January 15, 2016

Science Fiction?

Francesco Cassata delivers the 2015 Primo Levi Lecture   Storie naturali, the first collection of Primo Levi’s science fiction stories, was published in September 1966, under the pen name Damiano Malabaila,…

Academia, News November 11, 2015

Primo Levi: Tradition, Translation, Transmission

Universität Innsbruck (Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft) with the The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Department of Romance and Latin American Studies) November 17-19, 2015 – Claudiasaal – Herzog-Friedrich-Str. 3/2, Innsbruck, Contacts: aiani@uibk.ac.at, italienzentrum@uibk.ac.at This conference…