On the Occasion of the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for the series THE SEASONS OF LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE | Book Club, forth out of nine lectures/converstations by Shirley Finzi Loew on how Italian writers have interpreted childhood, adolescence, love, motherhood, professional achievement and old age. Event held in Hebrew. FREE ADMISSION, subject to mandatory reservation at the bottom of this page.
Giorgio Bassani’s acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature.
Made into an Academy Award winning film in 1970, “The Garden of the Finzi Continis “is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially by their charming daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continis becomes a sort of idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world. Years later after the war, the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol, and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.”
- The nine lectures are a series. Mandatory FREE registration at the bottom of this page. For further information, please contact the Italian Cultural Institute of Haifa at 04-8536091.
- Participants are invited to read the novel in Hebrew or in the original language before each lecture.
Shirley Finzi Loew graduated in Computer Engineering (Technion). After making a career in the computer industry, she moved to literature. She graduated in comparative literature (University of Haifa) with a thesis on Elsa Morante’s novels and has been working as translator from Italian into Hebrew since then.
Event held in Hebrew.
Refreshments from 18:15.
Monday, January 27, 2020, at 18:30
Italian Cultural Institute in Haifa, Rehov Meir Rutberg 12 – Haifa
FREE ADMISSION, subject to mandatory reservation at the bottom of this page.
Reservation no longer available