Forging Shoah Memories. Italian Women Writers, Jewish Identity, and the Holocaust

Italian ghetto stories: Toward a transnational literary history

“…Beginning with the Shoah (Primo Levi, Giacomo Debenedetti) and then moving to anti-Black racism (Caryl Phillips, Igiaba Scego), this section analyzes how Italian ghetto fictions incorporate 20th-century histories, while also building on the elements discussed in the previous section: more recent representations of Italian ghettos can again be distinguished because of movements in and out, confusions of time, and tourism. While this section is not exhaustive and does not include authors such as Giacoma Limentani, analyzed in detail by Stefania Lucamante (2014), or Amitav Ghosh (Gun Island, 2019), it indicates one way later Italian ghetto works could be considered collectively in a transnational literary history. From Bassani and Morante to contemporary stories, many works written after 1945 focus on ghettos through the lens of the Second World War and the persecution of Jews.…”