Author: Giorgio BassaniPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Author: Giorgio BassaniPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
The Novel of Ferrara
Author: Giorgio BassaniPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634299
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 597
Book Description
Giorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be. Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his northern Italian hometown of Ferrara “are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste” (from the Introduction). The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life. Set before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present nuanced and unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is exposed by an exploitative youth; the survivor of the Nazi death camps; the Jewish landowner, returned from exile, to find himself utterly displaced; the schoolteacher whose Communist idealism challenges a postwar generation. Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, The Novel of Ferrara memorializes a city deeply informed by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. This seminal work seals Bassani’s indomitable reputation.
The Gold-rimmed Spectacles
Author: Giorgio BassaniPublisher: London : Faber and Faber
ISBN:
Category : Antisemitism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Book Description
A new doctor arrives into the insular town of 1930s Ferrara. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the townsfolk discover his homosexuality, and the young man he pays to be his lover humiliates him publicly.
Benevolence and Betrayal
Author: Alexander StillePublisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312421533
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Book Description
This history of Italy's Jews under the shadow of the Holocaust examines the lives of five Jewish families: the Ovazzas, who propered under Mussolini and whose patriarch became a prominent fascist; the Foas, whose children included both an antifascist activist and a Fascist Party member, the DiVerolis who struggled for survival in the ghetto; the Teglios, one of whom worked with the Catholic Church to save hundreds of Jews; and the Schonheits, who were sent to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck.
The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature
Author: Adam KirschPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039360831X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
An accessible introduction to the classics of Jewish literature, from the Bible to modern times, by "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal). Jews have long embraced their identity as “the people of the book.” But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known to nonspecialist readers. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts, including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the philosophy of Maimonides, the autobiography of the medieval businesswoman Glückel of Hameln, and the Zionist manifestoes of Theodor Herzl. From the Jews of Roman Egypt to the mystical devotees of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, The People and the Books brings the treasures of Jewish literature to life and offers new ways to think about their enduring power and influence.
Architecture, Death and Nationhood
Author: Hannah MalonePublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317089898
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
In the nineteenth century, new cemeteries were built in many Italian cities that were unique in scale and grandeur, and which became destinations on the Grand Tour. From the Middle Ages, the dead had been buried in churches and urban graveyards but, in the 1740s, a radical reform across Europe prohibited burial inside cities and led to the creation of suburban burial grounds. Italy’s nineteenth-century cemeteries were distinctive as monumental or architectural structures, rather than landscaped gardens. They represented a new building type that emerged in response to momentous changes in Italian politics, tied to the fight for independence and the creation of the nation-state. As the first survey of Italy’s monumental cemeteries, the book explores the relationship between architecture and politics, or how architecture is formed by political forces. As cities of the dead, cemeteries mirrored the spaces of the living. Against the backdrop of Italy’s unification, they conveyed the power of the new nation, efforts to construct an Italian identity, and conflicts between Church and state. Monumental cemeteries helped to foster the narratives and mentalities that shaped Italy as a new nation.
Five Stories of Ferrara
Author: Giorgio BassaniPublisher: New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
The main theme of Giorgio Bassani's novels and short stories, which have earned him wide acclaim outside Italy, has been the advent of anti-Semitism in the provincial Italian city of Ferrara during World War II. Earlier he had a successful career as an editor with a major publishing house, being credited with helping to bring to public notice The Leopard by Tomasi Lampedusa. Bassani edited a literary magazine and was director of the Italian radio-television network. His first collection of short pieces was A City on the Plain, written under the pseudonym Giacomo Marchi. His volumes of poems were finally collected and published in 1963. The stories and novels that were to make him famous abroad began to appear in the 1950s. They include A Prospect of Ferrara (1960), and The Gold Rimmed Spectacles (1960). A film version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962) by Vittorio De Sica has become a public television classic.
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths
Author: Barbara ComynsPublisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178971
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.
The Smell of Hay
Author: Giorgio BassaniPublisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780141192123
Category : Ferrara (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith. Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in these memorable stories set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara. A young man's unrequited love; a strange disappearance; a faded hotel; a lonely funfair; the smell of mown hay at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery - these vivid, impressionistic snapshots build a picture of life's brevity and intensity. Part of the sequence including The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and featuring people and places from these novels, The Smell of Hay is told with a voice that is by turns intimate, ironic, elegiac and rueful. This new translation contains two pieces, added by Bassani to his earlier collection, which have never appeared in English before. 'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith 'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) was an Italian poet, novelist and editor. The Smell of Hay is the last in a series of six works collected together as Il romanzo di Ferrara. Other works in the cycle include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which received the Viareggio Prize and inspired an Academy Award-winning film adaptation by Vittorio de Sica, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Within the Walls (originally published as Five Stories of Ferrara), which won the Strega Prize. Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator. His translations of Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles are already available as Penguin Modern Classics, and he is in the process of translating the rest of the Romanzo di Ferrara cycle anew.
Vittorio De Sica
Author: Stephen SnyderPublisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802083814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted. The essays included here - some newly commissioned, some reprinted, and others in translation - look at De Sica's varied career from many perspecives. Structured chronologically, the volume begins by introducing readers to De Sica's early popularity as an actor and singer during the years of Italian Fascism, and to his initial directorial efforts before the end of World War II. It was not until the postwar era, however, that De Sica made his mark in film history. Special attention is given to this critical phase of his career, which encompasses the neorealist films that made him famous: "Shoeshine", "Bicycle Thieves", "Miracle in Milan", and "Umberto D." When the neorealist movement waned after 1955, De Sica returned to his roots in Neapolitan comedy for a series of commercially successful films starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Memorable works from this period include "Two Women" and "Marriage Italian Style" as well as "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow", which won De Sica an Academy Award in 1965. In one of his final films, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis", he returned to the subject of World War II and to the human tragedy characteristic of his best neorealist productions. This fine anthology offers a comprehensive critical survey that covers the entire scope of De Sica's career, and is an excellent resource for students, critics and film enthusiasts.
