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Giacamo Debenedetti (1901-1967) was a professor at the University of Messina and the University of Rome, an editor at an Italian publishing house, Italy's foremost critic of twentieth-century literature, and a friend of leading leftist intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Neruda.
The most important chronicle of the German roundup of the Jews of Rome written to date . . . Estelle Gilson's wonderfully written translation of Mr. Debenedetti's work is very readable and quite interesting. October 16, 1943 is one of the finest accounts ever written about the massive German roundup of Jews in Rome on the date of its title. Debenedetti's mastery of the facts, literary ability, and concern for the human dimension make this tragic event come alive in all its horror. His work is both a valuable contribution to the historical record and a moving tribute to the more than one thousand Jewish victims of a Nazi atrocity in the Eternal City. This slim book is a humanistic triumph by one of Italy's best-known literary critics. Debenedetti's October 16, 1943 is considered the earliest work of Italian Holocaust narrative and was fundamental for later historical and fictional accounts of the Rome ghetto round-up. A departure from Debenedetti's better-known critical works, it was written with a keen literary ear and careful attention to the facts. Some of its pages are as moving as any in Italian Holocaust literature. This American edition provides a useful introduction and notes by the translator, as well as a new translation of Moravia's personal comments and Debenedetti's contemporary work, Eight Jews. Debenedetti's powerful October 16, 1943 is a brief and invaluable documentary, written with extraordinary calm and grace . . . translator Estelle Gilson adds a fascinating epiologue on the unknown fate of the Roman Jewish libraries archives. Debenedetti's eyewitness account of these events, and those days preceding and following it, were written a year after the event, and are the most vivid and detailed description of the round-up. For anyone who knows the particular fate of Italian Jewry at the hands of the Nazis, these brief works have a devastating effect. Gilson's nuanced translation of this indispensable Holocaust document introduces U.S. readers to a formidable Jewish intellectual. [She] skillfully renders Debenedetti's heartbreaking evocation of Rome's mood that autumn. Gilson's essay on the fate of the Jewish libraries and Alberto Moravia's preface round out this short, immensely fertile book on the Holocaust in Italy.
