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In her 1997 book, \"La parola ebreo,\" Rosetta Loy gives a narrative articulation to the ceaseless return of personal and collective history. Minghelli examines the heart of the tensions between history and childhood and between remembering and forgetting that give rise to the multilayered narrative structure of Rosetta Loy's novel.

Nell'articolo si presenta uno studio de La parola ebreo alla luce di una poetica in cui la rappresentazione dell'infanzia è il cardine fondamentale dell'introspezione autobiografica. Si analizza quindi la dialettica di discorso e silenzio, dalla quale emerge la verità autobiografica e storica di un passato su cui grava un senso di colpa inteso come destino (Benjamin). Con l'articolo sostengo che la soggettività rappresentata è l'articolazione storica di una intersoggettività ontologica (Heidegger), espressa nel confronto/opposizione fra un \"noi\" e un \"loro\", che solo retrospettivamente si fissa e produce come coscienza e discorso.

An excerpt from The Water Door by Rosetta Loy and translated by Gregory Conti is presented.

An excerpt from the novella Ahi, Paloma by Rosetta Loy and translated by Gregory Conti is presented.

Take Shlomo Breznitz's analysis of courage that [Rosetta Loy] quotes. In Memory Fields, where he was taken in by an orphanage run by nuns because his parents had perished in Auschwitz, he pays homage to the mother superior who yelled at German soldiers who had returned with bloodhounds to sniff him out. Breznitz writes: \"The fascination of hiding doesn't amount to much compared to the mystery of courage, especially courage on behalf of others. It is when fear tells you to run away and your mind tells you to stay, when your body tells you to save yourself and your soul to save others, that courage goes to battle with fear, its eternal companion.\"

When the plot of Les Miserables required two characters to meet at Waterloo the night after the battle, Victor Hugo backed off and wrote 60 blood-and-thunder pages on the entire campaign. In The Dust Roads of Monferrato, one character fights in Napoleon's army at Marengo in 1800, and his grandson takes part in a naval engagement against Austria in 1866. Rosetta Loy dispenses with each battle in about a half-paragraph. A memorable, poetic half-paragraph, however.

The 5-year-old narrator of [Rosetta Loy]'s brief, death-haunted novel \"The Water Door\" is, to borrow Henry James's graceful phrase, a girl upon whom nothing is lost. To read this book is to become immersed in the intensity of childhood as it is experienced, rather than nostalgically remembered. And yet the great success of the book is that it is remembered. An adult looks back with 5-year-old eyes and sees, missing nothing. \"With my elbows resting on the tabletop I lean my face up next to hers; Ann Marie chews slowly, with attention, and from her mouth comes a kind of sweet, wild smell.\" Thus, the novel may be read as a kind of act of contrition through memory. Many of the narrator's recollections are preoccupied with thoughts about the fate of Jews. In fact, it is the narrator's curiosity about a chance meeting with a Jewish girl named Regina in the park that causes an almost imperceptible, yet deep rift between her and her beloved governess. She asks Ann Marie if, since newborns are found in baskets outside the apartments of their parents, what might have happened if she too had been left outside the door of a Jewish house? \"Ann Marie smiled, explaining to me that Jewish children were much different from me, more curls, darker skin. 'So lockig, so braun,' she said, and in German it was almost the sound of bells.\" Still, the narrator's doubts remain. But Regina is blond, she retorts.

Joan K. Peters reviews \"The Dust Roads of Monferrato,\" a novel by Rosetta Loy, translated from the Italian by William Weaver.

\"Madame della Seta aussi est juive\" by Rosetta Loy and translated by Francoise Brun is reviewed.

The crackdown on Italy's Jews began as a gesture from Mussolini to Hitler, toward whom Il Duce was craven in all respects. To curry favor with the Nazis and their powerful armed forces, Mussolini became \"the pupil who outdoes the teacher,\" and by 1938 he had orchestrated an antisemitic campaign \"all over the national press, not only the openly anti-Semitic papers . . . but the large- circulation moderate papers as well.\" Jews were attacked repeatedly and virulently, and \"although the majority of Italians don't respond to the new racist line with the level of enthusiasm that Mussolini might expect, the intellectuals fail to demonstrate even a shadow of the staunch opposition that more than a few people are hoping they will mount,\" a complacency no doubt connected with Mussolini's decision \"to increase--up to three times their previous level-- government subsidies to intellectuals.\" [Rosetta Loy]'s personal memories of the large subject with which she wrestles in this book are understandably limited. In 1937, when the \"neglected issue of 'race' \" burst into the Italian press, she was only 5 years old. The Jewish population of Italy was small--some 48,000 in a total population of 44 million--and for the most part thoroughly assimilated. A Jewish woman was kind to young Rosetta and a Jewish boy played nearby, but they were merely neighbors, somewhat distinguished from others by their religious observances but otherwise just normal, regular people.