To this day, the Italian Jewish literary postwar canon is undisputedly ruled by Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Carlo Levi. This study of three major Italian Jewish women writers -Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi -highlights the presence in Italian literature of a subversive Jewish écriture feminine. These writers' formal independence and subversive redeployment of narrative and thematic strategies not only consolidated a strong female voice in Italian literature but also produced a specific Italian brand of Jewish literature. The following analysis shows how, through their literary 'life miniatures', Ginzburg, Sereni and Levi recentre the domestic everydayness of woman's personal and historical experience, while, simultaneously, challenging the traditional representations of women's positions within family and within the public space, as well as interrogating their Jewish identity vis-a-vis their country's Fascist past. In particular, this article focuses on the way in which all three authors portray themselves as women trying to strike a balance between their Jewish identity and history alive only in the domestic space of their family lives, and their gender identity which is repressed by the patriarchal system both in the house and in the public arena. These women respond by moving 'out' of their homes, by exploring the city spacethus turning the 'urban monster' into a positive locus for women's self-determination and political action -and by bonding with other women. Through a demasculinization of the city space, these memoirs re-elaborated notions of family, Judaism, private and historical memory, and they reinvented a poetics for the 'small virtues' (piccole virtù) of woman's everyday existence while also pioneering a new space in literature that radically changed the direction of patriarchal Italian (and Jewish Italian) culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
This article explores Sarah Kofman's last text, her Holocaust memoir Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994). While Kofman's career was famously devoted to deciphering the legacy of the "Great Fathers" of Western culture and to an incessant dialogue with Sigmund Freud, her memoir centers exclusively on the legacy of mothers: it is Kofman's study of herself as a child in the grip of terror, the threat of death, and the s/mothering love of two women—her Jewish mother and the French woman who saved them both. This article examines how the exceptionality of the Holocaust exploded the Familienroman (the psychic family drama) in ways that Freud could have not anticipated. I demonstrate how the same way in which Freud had used Leonardo da Vinci's painting of a double motherhood to prove his point about a son's Oedipal crisis and the origin of his art, Kofman used the same image to interpret her story of double motherhood, victimhood and the origin of her art and creativity.
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