with Dr Mirna Cicioni
In English
It is well known that Primo Levi was deported to Auschwitz as a Jew, but perhaps not everybody knows that he was arrested on 9 December 1943 as a member of one of the first Resistance units in the Val d’Aosta.
The talk will analyse some debates which took place in Italy in early 2013, after the publication of two books whose main focus is a ‘dirty secret’ of Levi’s partisan unit: the trial and execution of two young members of the unit.
Mirna Cicioni was born in Rome and is currently Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She taught Italian language, linguistics and culture for over thirty years in the UK and Australia. She has published an introductory monograph on Primo Levi (Primo Levi – Bridges of Knowledge, 1995) and several articles on the Italian women’s movements and on post-World War II Italian Jewish writers (Levi, Bassani, Ginzburg, Sereni, Zargani).