Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony By Sergio Parussa (Jewish Studies)

In Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony, Sergio Parussa explores the relationship between Judaism and writing in the works of four twentieth-century Italian writers: Umberto Saba, Natlia Ginzburg, Giorgio Bassani, and Primo Levi. Parussa examines the different ways in which each authors' work responds to Judaism and the notion of Jewish identity. _x000D_

With great detail, he shows how their writings reflect the change in attitude towards Judaism that occurs in Italian society between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth centuries: from a perception of Jewish identity as a constraint to one's freedom, to an understanding of it as a tool of intellectual freedom that can contribute to one's sense of identity. For these authors, the recovery of Judaism doesn't consist of only telling stories with Jewish subject matter. It also exists in the very gesture of memory, in the repetition of an act of remembering in which the past is salvaged by means of its return to the present. Through memory, one becomes