Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
Winter in the Abruzzi
By Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi), one of the most distinguished writers of modern Italy, was born in Palermo in 1916 and died in 1991. During the 1920s and 1930s, as Fascism was taking hold, the family and the circle of intellectuals and artists with which they were connected were actively anti-Fascist. In 1938 she married the scholar Leone Ginzburg. They spent the early war years in political exile in Abruzzi, during which time Ginzburg wrote her first novel, La strada che va in città, published in 1942 under a pseudonym because of the racial laws limiting the rights of Jews. When they returned to Rome in 1944, Leone Ginzburg was arrested and died at the hands of the Fascists. Natalia Ginzburg went on to publish numerous novels, plays, and essays, as well as to found, with a group of fellow writers, the Italian publishing house Einaudi. The following memoir, written in 1944, appears in A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg, published this month by Seven Stories Press.
Feature, 1944 words
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