In my Italian senior thesis, I will analyze the ostracization of the Jewish community of Ferrara, Italy, in the decades leading up to World War Two. The bulk of my research centers upon two literary works: Giorgio... [ view full abstract ]
In my Italian senior thesis, I will analyze the ostracization of the Jewish community of Ferrara, Italy, in the decades leading up to World War Two. The bulk of my research centers upon two literary works: Giorgio Bassani’s Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, and Silvio Magrini’s Storia degli ebrei di Ferrara.
Giorgio Bassani, a celebrated Ferrarese author who published an acclaimed series of novels based upon his childhood and adolescence in Ferrara during the Second World War, was himself of Jewish heritage. He wrote about the increasing isolation, commendable resilience, and tragic deportation of Ferrara’s thriving Jewish population at the outbreak of the war. Similarly, Silvio Magrini was an active member of Ferrara's Jewish community before and during WW2, who wrote a comprehensive, non-fiction volume detailing the history of Ferrara’s Jewish community from its twelfth-century origins until 1943 (the year in which Ferrara’s Jewish population, Magrini included, was deported). His work has been rediscovered and published only a few years ago.
After having lived and studied in Ferrara for an extended period of time, I find that the “Jewish” aspect of Ferrarese history is frequently overlooked, or, worse, explicitly ignored. By comparing Bassani’s most celebrated work, Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, with Magrini’s nonfictional account of the Jewish experience in Ferrara, I hope to shed light on the gradual (if not insidious) process by which Ferrara’s Jewish population was ostracized from the larger community during the Fascist reign and war period.
