Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Pg. 99: Robert Gordon's "The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010 by Robert Gordon.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians—Jews and others—were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.
Read an excerpt from The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Robert S. C. Gordon is Professor of Modern Italian Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is the author of Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues (2001) and 'Outrageous Fortune': Luck and the Holocaust (2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010.

--Marshal Zeringue