The Italian Jewish novelist and poet Giorgio Bassani was the first writer to discuss the condition of Jews in Italy under the anti-Semitic laws of the fascist regime in the late 1930s. Bassani's works, together with those of Primo Levi, provide the most comprehensive literary portraits of contemporary Italian Jewish life. Bassani's work conveys his pessimistic view of life, which is closely connected with his Jewish origin and his sense of loneliness and sadness associated with the history of the Jewish people. The racial persecution by the fascist regime sharpened this self-perception, bringing Bassani to a rebellion that, even before it led him to join the partisans, was ideological and moral. This self-perception places Bassani's fiction in the context of the literature of the Resistance and the Holocaust, as well as the particular story of the Jewish community of Ferrara. In an interview in October 1960, Bassani explained, "chi...