16 October 1943. History, Memory, Literature

The thesis considers the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy during the German occupation of 1943-45, which took place in Rome on 16 October 1943. It examines Italian cultural memory of the Roman round-up through the perspective of literary writings over the long post-war era, exploring the triangular relationship between history, memory, and literature. It uses the methods of cultural memory studies to analyse the influence of literature on individual and collective memory: in other words, on the reader and on society. The corpus of enquiry of this PhD project is based on the four most complex and influential Italian literary texts dedicated to the Roman round-up. They are texts of different and mixed genres: a chronicle-narrative-essay published in book form in 1945 by Giacomo Debenedetti, 16 ottobre 1943; a historical novel published in 1974 by Elsa Morante, La Storia; an autobiographical novel-essay published in 1997 by Rosetta Loy, La parola ebreo; and a work of popular history published in 2013 by Anna Foa, Portico d’Ottavia 13. These four works absorb different sources, ideological or historical viewpoints, and individual memories. They are examined and re-read as autonomous texts and in dialogue with each other, underlining the strong intertextuality between them. The socio-cultural context of the years in which they were published is considered, thus mapping changes and developments in Italian cultural memory of the Holocaust over the last seventy-five years. The thesis demonstrates that these four texts have stored and transmitted knowledge, as well as transformed it into an element of artistic texts. It discusses how they have engaged in an enduring dialogue with historians regarding the interpretation of the Roman round-up. It shows them to be bearers of historical knowledge and channels of memory; not only outcomes of remembrance, but also active ingredients in the process of forging cultural memory.