First words
Subtitle: a childood in Fascist Italy
By: Rosetta Loy ; translated by Gregory Conti.
Publisher: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 186
Subjects: Loy, Rosetta, -- 1931- -- Childhood and youth.; Jews -- Persecutions -- Italy.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Italy -- Personal narratives.; World War, 1939-1945 -- Religious aspects -- Catholic Church.; Italy -- Ethnic relations.
Genres: Personal narratives.
Work titles: Parola ebreo.
Description: "In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up in the heart of the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood world of velvet and lace, airy apartments, indulgent nannies, and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's Fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews.".

"In First Words, Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, shifting with powerful effect from a lyrical evocation of the many comforts of her class to the accumulation of laws stipulating where Jews were forbidden to travel and what they were not allowed to buy, eat, wear, and read. She reveals the willful ignorance of her own family as one by one their neighbors disappeared, and she indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity.

And with hard-won clarity, she presents a dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and the Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italy's Jews."--BOOK JACKET.