First Words

"In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up in the heart of the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood world of velvet and lace, airy apartments, indulgent nannies, and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's Fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews.". "In First Words, Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, shifting with powerful effect from a lyrical evocation of the many comforts of her class to the accumulation of laws stipulating where Jews were forbidden to travel and what they were not allowed to buy, eat, wear, and read. She reveals the willful ignorance of her own family as one by one their neighbors disappeared, and she indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity. And with hard-won clarity, she presents a dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and the Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italy's Jews."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: IF I GO BACK IN TIME and think of when I first heard the word Jew, I see myself sitting on a little blue chair in the nursery, a room with flowery peach-colored wallpaper showing the marks of children's scribbles.

Year

2000

Language

English

Publisher

Metropolitan Books

Editions

1

Pages

224

ISBN

9780805062588

Data source: Wikidata