Why Giorgio Bassani Matters: The Elegiac Imagined World of Bassani and the Jews of Ferrara

In the United States, Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) is undoubtedly the most neglected major European Jewish and Holocaust writer, although Bassani's novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), was made into an Oscar-winning film by Vittorio De Sica (1971). Yet in Italy Bassani, along with Primo Levi, is considered one of the two pre-eminent writers of Italian Jewry as well as one of the most important Italian writers of the twentieth century. Bassani was part of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, that dates back hundreds of years. Focusing on twentieth-century Ferrara, he has written a series of magnificent historically inflected dramas of the human psyche living on the edge. Bassani's stature grows when one reads his major works one after the other because they are episodes in a fully rendered fictional history of Ferrara that is strongly related to Ferrara's actual history from 1860 to after World War II. Not only recurring characters but also recurring references to real historical events give authenticity to Bassani's Ferrara.