- Paperback: 273 pages
- Publisher: ORION; New Ed edition (2 Nov 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 187001569X
- ISBN-13: 978-1870015691
- Product Dimensions: 13.8 x 2 x 21.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,180,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Frederic Raphael, Books of the Year, Sunday Times
'Luminous, almost light-hearted, autobiography about a family of Italian Jews under Mussolini.'
(
'The tone of Segre's beautifully written autobiography, which reads like a Bildungsroman, is certainly ironic rather than tragic.'
Adrian Lyttelton, (The New York Review of Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Precious testimony,
By
This review is from: Memoirs Of A Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story (Paperback)
I adored this book when I first read it, but I couldn't have told you why. Looking at it again, I see it is beautifully translated; that always helps. (Though translation is perhaps not the right word, since the author, being like the good European Jew he is at home in multiple tongues from French to Friulian, undertook it himself.) The Italian portion occupies getting on for half, and one doesn't see how Palestine's 'dessicated vitality' can possibly match up, but one has only to meet the tamarind seller on p113-14 to be hooked. The short-lived phenomenon Pinglish was new to me, as was the - I suspect equally short-lived - idea of recruiting Palestinian women to succour the Holocaust's remnant. Amid the chronicle there is much self-analysis (but, pace the other reviewer, he is really very engaging) and dizzying politico-philosophical discussion redolent of its period (there's a similar feel, if I recall, to Koestler's Scum of the Earth) but the whole is cunningly, lovingly constructed; youth's bluster and confusions have rarely been better conveyed. Chapter 10's extraordinary - just don't cheat and read it out of context. Among many great memoirs, a disproportionate number of them Jewish, this one's a stayer
3.0 out of 5 stars
What an odd book...,
By Jezza (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Memoirs Of A Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story (Paperback)
Very hard to categorise, and a mixed bag of impressions/reactions. Some of this is memories of Segre's childhood in a comfortable, assimilated Italian Jewish family - father a local notable, stalwarts of the local fascist party, no experience of anti-semitism or Judaism or secular Jewish culture; some of it is his experience of migrating to Palestine during the war, and serving as Palestinian Jew in the British Army. The tone sits somewhere between self-deprecating and self-loathing - it's often quite uncomfortable how much the older Segre seems to dislike his younger self, though it's always well observed. He doesn't seem crazy about anyone else either - the women he falls in love with, the British, the Arabs, the Zionists. Only the Italians seem to come off lightly - as honest and decent, even when they are Fascists. Glad I read it, but won't be racing to read his critical thoughts on Israel and Zionism - what I've got from this suggests there won't be any startling insights.
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