Strangers at Home

Using popular literature as a window on Italian society and its values, Lynn Gunzberg explores the representation of Jews in novels and poetry written by non-Jews from the beginning of the Risorgimento in the early 1800s to the enactment of the Fascist racial laws in 1938. She shows how the literature of that period contradicts the popular belief that anti-Semitism simply did not exist in Italy until late in the Fascist period. Gunzberg examines writers from Varese and Bresciani in the first half of the 19th century to Carli, Puccini and Callegari in the 1930s who consistently depicted Jewish characters as strange and separate. The study reveals that Fascism's anti-Semitism was anything but contrary to traditional Italian attitudes.