Meet the Author. Lia Levi

Lia Levi was born in Pisa on November 9, 1931, to a Jewish family of Piedmontese origins. After the promulgation of the Fascist racial laws in 1938, Lia Levi’s family left northern Italy and found refuge in Rome. Levi remained in Rome, where she completed her studies in philosophy and became a successful journalist. For more than thirty years she has directed the Jewish monthly Shalom.
 

Lia Levi is best known as the author of several works of fiction largely dedicated to Jewish themes. She belongs to a generation of well integrated Jewish intellectuals whose literary works testify to the renewed interest in Jewish history and cultural traditions that developed among European intellectuals and artists throughout the 20th century. Her first novel, Una bambina e basta (Just a Child), was awarded the Elsa Morante Prize in 1994.
 

Lia Levi’s works convey to readers a strong sense of confidence in the act of writing and in the possibility of transmitting historical memory to future generations. Faithful to the Jewish commandment of preserving the memory of the past—to the command to remember the exodus
 

from Egypt every day of one’s life—Lia Levi wrote books in which historical events of our recent past are told for adults and children, as in the case of her Tutti i giorni di tua vita (All the Days of Your Life), 1997. Her previous novel, L’amore mio non può (My Love May Not), was staged by Manuela Kustermann. Her latest book, The Jewish Husband, will be published in the US in October by the prestigious Europa publishing house, the first US publisher dedicated to fiction in translation. (From: Lia Levi’s biography by Giorgio Parussa, Jewish Women Archives).
 

On November 3 Lia Levi will appear at Westchester Italian Cultural Center
 

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