File:1986 Schneider.jpg

{en} Marilyn Schneider. Vengeance of the victim: history and symbol in Giorgio Bassani's fiction. Minnesota Publications in the Humanities, 5. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Abstract

A textual analysis of Bassani's "Romanzo di Ferrara" (1974), a collection of his works on the Jewish experience in Ferrara. Examines historical, topographical, allegorical, and sexual elements of the book, illustrating the situation of Italian Jews under fascism and Nazism. Emphasizes the importance of the themes of the racial laws of 1938, the ostracism and persecution of Italian Jews, and death in the concentration camps. Bassani also recalls flashes of Jewish history from Renaissance Ferrara and the Risorgimento period. Explores the history of Ferrara and its ghetto, as well as sexual relations among the characters as metaphors for Aryan-Jewish political relations and Jewish self-humiliation. Analyzes Bassani's persona and the influence of his own experience of persecution on his writing.

More profoundly than any documentary record, the collected fiction of Giorgio Bassani—Il Romanzo di Ferrara — captures a very particular and powerful historical reality: Italian Jewish life under Fascism, especially between the passage of the so-called racial laws in 1938 and the end of World War II. Set primarily in the provincial city of Ferrara, Bassani's narratives interweave themes of death, victimization, betrayal, survival, and artistic production. His best-known novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — and other works that concentrate on the crucial years of 1938-1945—stand at the center of the Romanzo.They are preceded by texts that look back on Jewish life in the liberal era of the Risorgimento, and followed by texts set in the liberated, democratic society of the postwar years. These framing narratives provide a space for remembrance and reflection ... Marilyn Schneider's aim, in Vengeance of the Victim, is to uncover the symbolic layers — historical, spatial, topographical, mythopoeic, allegorical, and sexual — that five Bassani's texts their richness and ambiguity, and in so doing to achieve a full understanding of his work and its representation of the Italian Jewish experience. Death and victimization, which pervade these texts, set in motion a process of artistic renewal that is most fully embodied in the vibrant young Micol Finzi-Contini, Bassani's textual icon and a victim of the Holocaust. Schneider also finds that the narratives, especially the late ones, pay self-reflexive attention to the creation of the text, constructing an authorial persona engaged in an existential, moral, and artistic journey from symbolic death to rebirth. It is the writing subject's successful completion of the journey that constitutes the vengeance of the victim.