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.
"This book will change the way the relationship between the Holocaust and Italy is understood. Through the use of a wide range of materials, Robert Gordon analyses the tortuous and complicated ways in which the Shoah was narrated, remembered, misunderstood, forgotten, and then rediscovered. This is a fascinating story, told here with great elegance, verve, and passion, but also with scrupulous att
University College London
"[A]n outstanding guide to the last 70 years, full of insight, subtle distinctions, and always readable."
Modern Italy
"Gordon's novel contribution to the field of Italian Holocaust studies is a needed overview of the dynamics underscoring the national struggle between the historical position of the witnesses (epitomized in Gordon's work by Levi) and the pull of those ahistorical perceptions that slowly but surely end up constituting, one decade after another, the edifice of what Maurice Halbwachs famously named '
