Introduction by Pankaj Mishra

In 1967, as Western journalists rapturously chronicled Israel’s crushing victory in the Six-Day War, the Italian poet and critic Franco Fortini published a curious text titled The Dogs of the Sinai. In 27 short chapters, he meditated on his affiliation to Judaism, which had grown during the darkest years of murderous antisemitism, and was now being rendered fraught by Zionist and Western triumphalism. He described how he had provoked condemnation from friends and relatives, many of them on the left, who expected him to stand with ‘socialist’ Israel; but “great world events forced me to interpret myself differently”.

Two fratricidal European wars, followed by humiliating defeats in Java, Algeria and Vietnam, had sapped the old spirit of progress through spectacular violence and conquest. In Europe and the US, at least some of the crimes committed during the age of extremes, if not the age of empire, had become undeniable; they now induced unwelcome feelings of shame and remorse. Israel’s unapologetic and awesomely successful warrior culture, however, was redeeming a hyper-masculine ethos that had fallen into disrepute.

The celebrations in the US (which were what began to radicalise an Ivy League professor of literature named Edward Said) were best summed up by a cable from a fired-up American to Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion requesting that he ‘lend’ Moshe Dayan for the flailing US assault on Vietnam. In Germany, headlines hailed “Der Blitzkrieg Israels” and Die Welt took back German ‘infamies’ about Jews: they had turned out to be a “small, brave, heroic, genius people”.

There was a similarly sinister eruption of philo-Israeli sentiment in Italy. Observing the “new or recent Italian petty bourgeois”, Fortini concluded that the Six-Day War had unleashed in this class a desire to dispense with whatever little fascist guilt it was willing to recognise – to “unload on the Arab the hatred accumulated against the generation of the fathers, against misery, the peasant mother, redundancy, rags, military braggadocio, illiteracy”. Fortini noted that “things written and said about Arabs” repeated arguments that the fascist and Nazi press made against Jews. This time, however, the bigotry was covered in “a pedagogical, democratic veneer”: the “ragged gesticulating illiterate Arab” was deemed worthy of “‘progress’ if instructed in Western values”. 

In a remarkable irony of history, the new nation state formed by Europe’s despised and decimated Jewish minority had come to represent suave modernity to the fervent Western haters of Arabs and Muslims: Israel had emerged as an avatar of the West at its best, the winner of modern history, ready to resume its mission civilisatrice against the losers. Aiding this transformation, Fortini noted, was the Western media, which softened the nineteenth century’s crude ideology of racial pre-eminence with the genteel language of impartiality. The juxtaposition of civilisation against barbarism was, long before Trump, the ‘objective’ common sense shared by Western institutions and made hegemonic through their long unchallenged power and prestige. Violence was always deemed virtuous when unleashed against racial and civilisational inferiors.

Having identified early such an insidious machinery of spiritual corruption, Fortini naturally took an austere view of both postwar Western democracies and the role in them of morally serious writers and intellectuals, not to mention the IDF-veterans-turned-journalists posing as ‘objective’. He was tough even on artists who tried to disown their success by embracing political activism. “It is not enough, dear Pierpaolo,” he wrote to Pasolini in 1964, “to despise adulation; one must not deserve it.” It is not hard to imagine how he would have regarded the soft fantasy of a Rushdie or an Adichie – that storytelling and literature will encourage mutual understanding and save the world. Fortini concluded that the noble mandate conferred by nineteenth-century bourgeois society upon the writer after the decline of traditional religion – to play the role of “the voice of national conscience, or the historian of private life” – had expired. Even the writer willing to speak truth to power had been appropriated by a system of cultural production and publicity that “renders his spiritual powers derisory or extremely limited”.

What can writers do after they lose their status as unacknowledged legislators and are reduced to being content-providers for a culturally ambitious, and often politically crooked, bourgeoisie? Is an ethical code still available to them when the exalted realms of art and literature, too, are infected by the mentality of ‘winners’? Natalia Ginzburg’s two essays, freshly translated by Gini Alhadeff for Equator, eloquently address this predicament. Like Fortini, her former colleague at Einaudi, Ginzburg refused a facile consensus about the political efficacy of literature and journalism. Too many people in her own generation, she writes in her 1966 autobiographical novel Family Lexicon, believed themselves to be a poet and a politician. They had succumbed to a delusion common among writers: to “believe that everything could be transformed into poetry and words”. This resulted in failure and discontent and “in the end everyone kept quiet, paralysed by boredom and nausea. It was necessary for writers to go back and choose their words, scrutinise them to see if they were false or real, if they had actual origins in our experience.” She undertakes such a frank scrutiny without literary or intellectual conceits in these two essays.

Received belatedly into the Anglo-American canon, and promptly de-politicised, Ginzburg was a socialist who wrote for L’Unità, the Italian Communist Party’s newspaper, and in 1983, late in her career, was elected to the Italian parliament on an independent left-wing ticket; her last major work was about Serena Cruz, a Filipino girl whose adoption by an Italian couple had been nullified by an Italian court. Like many Italian Jews, she was first made aware of her ancestry by Mussolini’s Racial Laws. She and her family fled to a remote Italian village; her husband Leone Ginzburg, captured in Rome by the Nazis in 1944, ostensibly for editing an anti-fascist newspaper, died in prison.

Ginzburg first wrote about Israel without mentioning it in 1970. The essay titled “Universal Pity”, her son Carlo Ginzburg has clarified, was a belated response to the Six-Day War, which “overturned the image of the Jew as a downtrodden victim”. She begins by fastidiously recoiling from the notion that the Holocaust, selectively interpreted, licensed, in perpetuity, the violence of the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state with expanding borders. There was no such thing as an eternal victim. “Those we had loved and pitied as victims can all of a sudden change, all of a sudden appearing to us in the hateful guise of cruelty and persecution.”

She admits that the moral clarity she knew during the long years of anti-fascist struggles, when the distinction between wrong and right was relatively easily identified, is gone. A proliferation of historical narratives has made for confusion, an “inability to identify and pursue the truth, through millions of implications, explanations, and ramifications”. Whataboutery and both-sideism are rampant, and “man is weak and unprepared before the complexity of facts”. And success is no measure of virtue, because the winners have such “hateful faces”. Indeed, “we cannot even imagine a happy world where winners might not be hateful”. It is only after confronting such impasses that Ginzburg outlines, at the end of her essay, a morality derived from the clear identification of losers in any situation: “Only in those who lose do we feel we might recognise fellow human beings, because if we call them unlucky, downtrodden victims, at least in the present moment we can be certain that we are not mistaken”.

While reprising these themes, Ginzburg grapples directly with her Jewishness in the second essay, written in 1972 in response to the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants during the Munich Olympics. “The Jews” begins with a refusal to speak with journalistic glibness about the killings, and quickly turns into a ruthless exercise in self-critique: “When I heard about the Munich massacre, I thought that once again they had killed those of my same blood.” And then: “I felt contempt for myself because it was a thought to be despised. I do not believe at all that the blood of Jews is any different from that of others.”

She then untangles the complicities of class and education that make Zionism a formidable cultural and spiritual as well as military force: “I am Jewish and had a middle-class education. This education instilled in me some false notions… With regard to the Jews of Israel, I think I believed that they had rights and a superiority over Arabs. At a certain point, this started to seem like a monstrous idea to me. I tore it up and trampled it furiously. But I realised that I had fostered that monstrous idea within me for many years, like a plant on a windowsill.”

Her disavowal of ethnic-religious sectarianism may seem as blunt as that of Hannah Arendt, who told Gershom Scholem (after he complained) that she did not love the Jewish people, or “any people or collective” and that “the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons”. Arendt was not untouched, however, by the snobbishness of the European intellectual elite, and was prone to lapsing into an expression like “oriental mob”. In contrast, Ginzburg seems remarkably liberated from any social conditioning; she recoils from the racial and civilisational hierarchies forged by capitalist and colonial modernity, and passed off as “natural” by Western media; and she more presciently identifies Israel as the latest incarnation of an old expansionist ideology that sees genocide as a necessary portal to progress, or a Gaza Riviera: “When someone speaks of Israel with admiration, I feel that I am on the other side… I know few things about myself, but I know with absolute certainty that I do not want to be on the side of those who use weapons, money and culture to oppress farmers and shepherds.”

More boldly, Ginzburg writes of Palestinian militants that “it is impossible to ask them to spare the innocent. It seems to us that in the inhuman and desperate places they inhabit, the guilty or the innocent no longer exist, because the world no longer possesses the shades of guilt or innocence; the world is inanimate and uninhabited and all of one colour. Within it, there is nothing but death, and a life reduced to a rag that can be thrown away in a swift gesture, finding it to be no better than death, and in any case, of the same colour”. Such sympathies were not unusual among left-wing Italian Jews who had known life as death during the most desolate years of their battle against fascism. In 1969, a few months after a disillusioning trip to Israel, Primo Levi signed a statement in the left-leaning journal Il Ponte that endorsed Palestinian violence against the country, deeming it ‘‘resistance’’ and not ‘‘terrorism’’.

Still, Ginzburg’s essay incited much commentary, some of it mildly critical, including from Levi.¹ Others criticised her for her lack of faith in progress or for believing that violence is inevitable – certainly, she allowed herself no pablum about peace or co-existence. Alberto Moravia claimed that “Natalia has ‘privatised’ and ‘personalised’ the Munich tragedy with the courage and immodesty characteristic of artists when they search deep inside their souls for the origins of their art”. Moravia clarified that “she was right to do so, since from within this territory, which is ultimately that of art, she can tell us authentic things”.

But the territory from which Ginzburg spoke of authentic things was not of art, or even socialism. Rather, it was of a quasi-Christian morality that reserves the greatest compassion for the weak, the insulted and the injured. Those who didn’t think much about Gaza before 7 October 2023 but protested, at often great personal cost, against the political and cultural institutions leading and enabling a campaign of mass extermination are driven by the same simple recognition – of a cruel disparity of strength between a nuclear-armed state and the unarmed civilians it is massacring with the help of the world’s most powerful countries. They have been viciously crushed; and they have been mocked, most recently by Hillary Clinton, for their ostensible lack of historical education. Ginzburg would have honoured their profoundly ethical dissent (she and other antifascists of her generation knew all too well the kind of historical education that justifies the slaughter of children). She would have shared, too, the horror of countless Jewish dissenters over the fact that “those who once were victims can now inflict violence on their fellow beings and fail to see in them what they themselves were yesterday”.

Ginzburg recognised victimhood as the central condition of societies rife with violence and injustice of every kind. Yet she conferred on it only a provisional virtue. For she knew that “men and people undergo swift and horrible transformations” and that victims can turn into coldblooded executioners. In 1988, three years before her death, she defined Israel as “fascist”; she would have been far less surprised than her critics by the country’s blithe genocide and sponsorship of pitiless ethnonationalism globally. As winners with hateful faces rampage unchallengedly across the Earth, how persuasive she is in “The Jews” when she says that “the only choice available to us is to be on the side of those who die or suffer unjustly. Some will say that this is an easy choice, but perhaps it is the only choice we can make today”.

Universal Pity

I believe that the worst misfortune that has befallen us is that it is now so very hard to distinguish the victims from the oppressors in any event that takes place. Faced with an event, whether private or public, our thoughts desperately go in search of the causes that determined it, and its possible culprits, but ultimately they come to a halt, dismayed, as the causes seem innumerable and reality is too tortuous and complex for human judgement. We discover that no event, whether private or public, can be thought of and judged in isolation because, as we dig deeper, we find endless ramifications of other events that preceded it and are at its root. In such a submerged labyrinth, identifying the guilty and the innocent seems a hopeless task. The truth seems to leap from one point to another, skipping and darting in the shadows like a fish or a mouse.

We have seen with our very own eyes that those we had loved and pitied as victims can all of a sudden change, all of a sudden appearing to us in the hateful guise of cruelty and persecution. Yet we can’t help seeing in them the victims they once were. We do not know whether we should continue to understand and pity them as victims, or judge them solely on their new appearance. And it seems horrible and incomprehensible to us that those who once were victims can now inflict violence on their fellow beings, or fail to see in them what they themselves were yesterday.

We realise that, if we dig deep enough, there is no human being or human condition that has not suffered some injustice or does not deserve our understanding. But within such universal understanding, no one could ever be judged or condemned. Individual responsibility and moral judgement thus seem destined to disappear from the face of the earth.

The eldest among us, meanwhile, have a clear memory of a time not so long ago when taking sides and identifying what was right or wrong in the world around us was extremely simple. The image of truth was clear, then, unmistakable and unshakeable before our eyes, and we always knew where it stood. We would never have thought then that the truth might one day appear to us secret and elusive. Events were easy to judge, displayed before our eyes in clear colours and projecting a clear and radiant image of the truth, and it wasn’t just that the reality in our minds then was much less full and vast, so that we moved through it confidently in both indignation and assent. But the thought had not yet dawned on us then that innocence and guilt are so often linked in such tight knots that human beings, with their inadequate, crude yardstick and poor senses, are unable to undo them. The idea had not yet crept into us that man is weak and unprepared before the complexity of facts.

The awareness of our inability to identify and pursue the truth, through millions of implications, explanations and ramifications, is a source of profound unhappiness for us. Faced with any action that we might be tempted to label cruel and unjust, we tell ourselves, or are told, that there are other actions in other parts of the world that are even more unjust, more cruel and bloody. And so the time to be indignant is forever delayed or projected elsewhere. When we think we have identified evil, or the culprit, in the form of a specific person onto whom we would like to direct our righteous hatred, we tell ourselves, or are told, that behind that person there are institutions, powers and a maze of interests, and that that person, when carefully observed, is ultimately nothing more than a helpless, blameless victim. And we have understood, or been told, that our individual indignation or approval is meaningless, and that the main thing is to be neither indignant nor approving, but to study the causes and origins of each event.

We think, or are told, that it’s stupid to apply our usual yardstick of good and evil. We ourselves define it as crude, inadequate and outdated. In using it, we feel as though we were using a spade when our limbs and mind are now accustomed to compasses and calculators. We are ashamed to use such a crude, homespun yardstick. And yet we believe that, though we might deride it and consider it crude, it is nevertheless a precious and irreplaceable tool. Without it, the world is totally indecipherable to us. Of course it’s an inadequate measure, in the sense that we are now faced with a teeming, immense expanse, and our faculties have become weak and hesitant and no longer even know how to use it. Perhaps the secret would be to make such a tool more articulate, subtle and sensitive, to turn it into something that moves in tandem with our intelligence. But we do not know that secret, and are very far from knowing it. So today, the instrument of good and evil falls from our hands like a spade, and we can only lament its crudeness and inadequacy.

For every event that happens, whether private or public, in which we are witnesses or protagonists, our instinctive reaction is one of indignation or approval. We are filled with love and hate, and we would like to know, at all times and at every moment, where to direct them. Not knowing where and to whom we should direct them, because we tell ourselves or are told that individual responsibilities in such a complex situation are of minimal importance, we find ourselves burdened by a heavy load of love and hate, and we do not know what use to make of any of it. It spoils and decays on our arms and at our feet, and we stare at reality with a gaze veiled by fatigue and universal pity.

Feeling discouraged from attributing value to our moral judgement, and being greatly ashamed to use it, we find we have nothing at our disposal nowadays other than to feel a great pity for ourselves and for the universe as a whole. In this universal pity, we are absolutely certain that we are not mistaken. It seems to us the only sentiment that we can abandon ourselves to without being in the wrong. That there should be such an overflow of pity in us and in our fellow human beings seems strange, because the world around us and the events that occur in it are supremely cruel and ruthless, and there is never a shadow anywhere of that profound pity that reigns in our spirits. That may be because our universal pity is not sustained by either intelligence or a genuine desire to make the world a better place, or to become better ourselves, but is simply the result of fatigue and confusion. It is just like a nervous fit of tears, after which we feel devastated, but no different. Moreover, we know that we are not wrong to cry, because what is beyond doubt is that the world we have received is one worthy of tears.

In such a world, the victors easily take on hateful faces. Victory immediately takes on immense, monstrous and unreal dimensions, having no connection whatsoever with the human population. Ours is a world of unhappy weak people, which hates to generate winners since it knows that winners will immediately take on inhuman habits and don unreal, squalid and lugubrious masks. That is why we don’t know which side to be on, though we still feel compelled to side with those who lose. It’s all that we can do in our desperate and confused search for someone that we can love without error. Ours is not a moral choice, perhaps, but rather a way to obey to an instinct of affinity. We cannot even imagine a happy world in which winners might not be hateful. Only in those who lose do we feel we might recognise fellow human beings, because if we call them unlucky, downtrodden victims, at least in the present moment we can be certain that we are not mistaken.

—October 1970

The Jews

The day after the events in Munich, the Catholic Press Association phoned me, saying that they were conducting an inquest into the massacre and asking me to express an opinion. I refused to respond. I said that I never respond to inquests. To say four sentences on the phone seemed stupid and pointless to me. But later I felt an urge to reply to the Catholic journalists, at length and in detail. I didn’t have just one opinion I wanted to express, but many, and above all I wanted to gather together some thoughts that I found scattered in me.

When a tragedy occurs in the world, we tend to think about how we ourselves might have acted if we’d been its protagonists, or if we’d had the power to act. Since power is far beyond our reach, these thoughts are just empty fantasies. Even so, I still wish to say how I would have acted in Munich, if I’d had the power to act.

If I had been Golda Meir, I would have freed the 200 prisoners, as the guerrillas demanded. They say you should never give in to blackmail. It seems to me that even blackmail should be accepted in a case of great common misfortune. They say that once freed, the 200 prisoners would have captured more innocent people and spread more carnage. But the world today is constructed so disastrously that it’s necessary to decide from one moment to the next how we should defend ourselves, and who we should defend. I believe that those nine hostages ought to have been saved, and that all other considerations should have been set aside. I think that if Golda Meir had freed the 200 prisoners, she would have taught the world a lesson not of weakness, but of strength – or, at least, of the sole power we can legitimately believe in, which is a power not bent on winning and ready to lose, a power that does not come from weapons, oil or pride, but from the spirit.

Had I been the head of the German police, I would have let the guerrillas go unharmed, and taken the nine hostages wherever they wanted. If there was even the slightest chance that one of the hostages might have been saved, that chance should have been considered essential by all.

If I had been the head of the Olympics, I would have suspended the Games because they obviously no longer made any sense.

Finally, if I had been a head of state, I would have asked the US to withdraw its troops from Vietnam. Of course, I would already have asked them to do so, but I would ask them even more so now. I don’t think Vietnamese children are any different from the nine Israeli hostages. The only difference is that we have all become accustomed to knowing that Vietnamese children are dying, and we have even become accustomed to watching them die, having observed them without batting an eye in movies, or on television. But that is a horrible addiction. The fact that there is a war in Vietnam but that the Olympic stadium was intended to be a so-called island of peace does not seem to me to be an acceptable distinction. It is false to believe that islands of peace might still exist in a world such as ours. And the destinies of men are so strung together and intertwined today that a war in one part of the world spreads indifference, habituation and familiarity with massacres on a daily basis. If the US were to suddenly withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the nine Israeli hostages would not have died in vain.

When I think of the guerrillas, I feel a kind of inhuman horror for them. Such inhuman horror can only be inspired by the presence of inhuman despair. When we recognise the traits of inhuman despair, we feel our usual feelings vanish from our spirit; we no longer feel hatred, contempt or pity. Our spirit turns to stone. We feel as though we had encountered a desert of stone on our path, one where hatred, contempt and pity could not grow, any more than trees could. When we think of the guerrillas with such inhuman horror, we become for a moment like them, or like the notion we have of them. We turn to stone and lose the breath of the spirit. We should defend ourselves against such inhuman horror, because it is abhorrent.

The guerrillas might represent the extreme limit of our own not-yet-inhuman despair, exuding pity and contempt, with which we have long been accustomed to living. The keys to understanding the guerrillas are to be found, perhaps, in our own despair. They seem to us to come from a world that is not ours. But the paths they have followed to reach such inhuman despair seem indecipherable and inhuman to us, maybe because we have never encountered those paths, or understood how different and remote they were, or how close and similar they are to the paths we ourselves have trodden.

We know very few things about guerrilla fighters, but we know that they are willing at all times to throw their lives away, as well as the lives of others. When they throw their lives away, we do not think of courage, and when they throw away the lives of others, we do not think of cruelty. And that’s why they appear to be endowed with a power that we could not possibly reach by the sound of our voices. It is impossible to ask them to spare the innocent. It seems to us that in the inhuman and desperate places they inhabit, the guilty or the innocent no longer exist, because the world no longer possesses shades of guilt or innocence; the world is inanimate and uninhabited and all of one colour. Within it, there is nothing but death, and a life reduced to a rag that can be thrown away in a swift gesture, finding it to be no better than death, and in any case, of the same colour.

I am Jewish. Everything that concerns Jews always seems to involve me directly. I am Jewish only on my father’s side, but I have always thought that my Jewish side must be heavier and more cumbersome than the other. If I happen to meet someone somewhere and discover that they are Jewish, I instinctively feel that I have some affinity with them. After a minute, I may find them hateful, but a sense of secret complicity remains in me. This is an aspect of my nature that I find strange and don’t like at all, because it is in stark contrast to everything I have always thought all my life, because I believe that there are no affinities among Jews other than extremely superficial ones, and because I think that people should transcend the boundaries of their origins. This is what I think, but when I meet a Jew, I cannot suppress a strange and murky feeling of complicity.

When I heard about the Munich massacre, I thought that once again they had killed those of my same blood. I thought this amid a sea of other thoughts, but I thought it. In thinking it, I felt contempt for myself, because it was a thought to be despised. I do not believe at all that the blood of Jews is any different from that of others. I do not believe that there are divisions of blood.

I am Jewish and had a middle-class education. This education instilled in me some false notions. I must somehow have inhaled, in childhood, the idea that Jews and middle-class people had rights and a superiority over others. I was certainly never told anything of the sort at home; in fact I was taught that all people have equal rights. But there must have been an idea of superiority present in the structure of my education. We struggle all our lives to free ourselves from the flaws of our education, but those flaws remain imprinted on our spirit like tattoos. All through our adult lives, we spend our time wiping those tattoos away from our spirit.

With regard to the Jews of Israel, I think I believed that they had rights and a superiority over Arabs. At a certain point, this started to seem like a monstrous idea to me. I tore it up and trampled it furiously. But I realised that I had fostered that monstrous idea within me for many years, like a plant on a windowsill. Even though I furiously tore it away and trampled it, I am not entirely sure that there aren’t scattered fragments of it left in me. Our monstrous ideas have the virtue of helping us understand our inner landscape. A monstrous idea grows and proliferates quietly without making anything around it disappear. It grows and proliferates along with our best impulses and our thirst for justice and equality, without making them disappear, but turning them little by little into a pile of sodden straw.

Our monstrous ideas should also have the virtue of allowing us to understand what our enemies, or those we call our enemies, might be like. They should teach us to look on others with tolerance and close attention. After we have torn those ideas apart and trampled them, we should remember them, and stop thinking of ourselves as the children of a universal good.

I have sometimes thought that the Jews of Israel had rights and superiority over others because they survived extermination. This was not a monstrous idea, but it was a mistake. The pain and slaughter of innocents that we have witnessed and suffered in our lives do not grant us any rights over others, nor any kind of superiority. Those who have known the weight of fear on their shoulders do not have the right to oppress their fellow human beings with money or weapons, simply because no living soul in the world has that right.

When it comes to the Jews of Israel, this is what happens to me. If someone says anything against them, I feel a sense of revolt and dark offence. I feel as though my own family were being offended. But if someone speaks of them in admiration and devotion, I feel all of a sudden that I do not share those feelings, and find myself on the other side.

After the war, we loved and pitied the Jews who went to Israel, thinking that they had survived extermination, that they had no home and had nowhere to go. We loved in them the memory of pain, their fragility and wandering gait, their shoulders weighed down by fright. Those are the traits we love in people today. We were not at all prepared to see them become a powerful, aggressive and vengeful nation. We hoped that they would be a small, defenceless and close-knit country, that they would, every one of them, retain their frail and bitter identity, both pensive and solitary. Perhaps that was not possible. But that transformation was one of the horrible things that have happened.

When someone speaks of Israel with admiration, I feel that I am on the other side. I realised at some point, perhaps too late, that the Arabs were poor farmers and shepherds. I know few things about myself, but I know with absolute certainty that I do not want to be on the side of those who use weapons, money and culture to oppress farmers and shepherds.

Our instinct pushes us to take one side or the other. But in truth, it is perhaps impossible today to take one side or the other. Men and people undergo swift and horrible transformations. The only choice available to us is to be on the side of those who die or suffer unjustly. Some will say that this is an easy choice, but perhaps it is the only choice we can make today.

—September 1972

1. See Domenico Scarpa’s “Natalia Ginzburg’s Essay ‘The Jews’ and Its Trials” (2017).
2. These essays will be included in Ginzburg's Collected Essays, in translations by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, to be published by NYRB Classics in 2027.