Natalia Ginzburg (Italian: [nataˈliːa ˈɡintsburɡ], German: [ˈɡɪntsbʊʁk]; née Levi; 14 July 1916 – 7 October 1991) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Natalia Ginzburg
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Ginzburg and President Sandro Pertini, early 1980s
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| Born | Natalia Levi (1916-07-14)14 July 1916 Palermo, Italy |
| Died | 7 October 1991(1991-10-07) (aged 75) Rome, Italy |
| Pen name | Alessandra Tornimparte |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | Italian |
| Alma mater | University of Turin |
| Genres | Novels, short stories, essays |
| Notable works | Family Sayings see more below |
| Notable awards |
Bagutta Prize La famiglia Manzoni |
| Spouses |
(m. 1938; died 1944)Gabriele Baldini
(m. 1950; died 1969) |
| Children |
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| Relatives | Giuseppe Levi (father) |
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Natalia Levi Ginzburg
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| Deputy of the Italian Republic | |
| Personal details | |
| Political party | Italian Communist Party Independent |
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Anactivist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983, she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an independent politician.
Born as Natalia Levi in Palermo, Sicily, in 1916, she spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi (the sister of Drusilla Tanzi), was Catholic.[1][2] Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola (who would marry Adriano Olivetti) and her three brothers as atheists.[3] Their home was a centre of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At the age of 17 in 1933, Natalia published her first story, "I bambini", in the magazine Solaria.
In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra.[4] Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian.
Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941 to 1943 to Pizzoli, a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him.[5]
Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in incarceration in 1944 after suffering severe torture.[5]
In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969.
After her marriage, she used the name "Natalia Ginzburg" (occasionally spelt "Ginzberg") in most subsequent publications. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym "Alessandra Tornimparte" in 1942, during Fascist Italy's most anti-Semitic period, when Jews were banned from publishing.
Ginzburg spent much of the 1940s working for the publisher Einaudi in Turin in addition to her creative writing. They published some of the leading figures of postwar Italy, including Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg's second novel was published in 1947.
The experiences that she and her husband had during the war altered her perception of her identification as a Jew. She thought deeply about the questions aroused by the war and the Holocaust, dealing with them in fiction and essays. She became supportive of Catholicism, arousing controversy among her circle, because she believed that Christ was a persecuted Jew.[5] She opposed the removal of crucifixes in public buildings but her purported conversion to Catholicism is controversial and most sources still consider her an "atheist Jewess."[6]
Beginning in 1950, when Ginzburg married again and moved to Rome, she entered the most prolific period of her literary career. During the next 20 years, she published most of the works for which she is best known. She and Baldini were deeply involved in the cultural life of the city.
In 1964, she played the role of Mary of BethanyinPier Paolo Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
Ginzburg was politically involved throughout her life as an activist and polemicist. Like many prominent anti-Fascists, for a time she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament as an Independent in 1983.
In 2020, the New York Review of Books issued Ginzburg's novellas, Valentino and Sagittarius, translated into English by Avril Bardoni in 1987, in a single volume. In her new introduction for this edition, Cynthia Zarin observed that location "maps the emotional terrain" in these two works as in Ginzburg's other works: the apartment, the living room, the café where events transpire.[7] At a book talk to honour its debut, Zarin and the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri discussed the significance of Ginzburg's works and career.[8]
