Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi: Jewish Italian women recapturing cities, families and national memories

Abstract

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.

Children’s Literature and the Holocaust

“…Lia Levi's biography is relevant to understand her work and poetry, as her life experiences illuminate her work. Lia Levi (Clementi 2013) was born in Pisa in 9 November 1931. She therefore lived through the historical period in question as a child, and feels that she has absorbed it deeply.…”