L’eredità indispensabile di Primo Levi: da Eraldo Affinati a Rosetta Loy tra storia e finzione

Studying and analyzing the political, psychological, and historical reasons that led to an event of the proportions such as those reached by the Shoah took, and still takes, much time. Scholarly studies now span many decades as they try to tie parts of the whole in a full trajectory of implications and repercussions in the present. In fact, even in order to form a coherent historiographic discourse pertinent to the Shoah, historians’ debates were constantly reassessing the coordinates of such event. When it comes to its literary ramifications, we note that a temporal lapse separates the first writings, the testimonials and first written renditions of survivors’ experience in the camp, from more recent and distinctly literary works that continue to infer on the Shoah a historical period, not quite, yet, like the Renaissance or the Risorgimento (Sarfatti 2006). While the temporal lapse occurred between the early production and the latest one would indicate a mending of the fissure occurred in Jewish culture, Italian writers Eraldo Affinati, Helena Janeczek, and Rosetta Loy, heirs to Primo Levi’s legacy, discuss with fictional tools the behavior of human nature when placed under extreme situations. Today, awareness and knowledge of the events call for a renewed sense of ethics and responsibility. Writing fiction about the Shoah has become the validation of such renewed responsibility for what happened.