Tiber Afire Format: Paperback

"A quiet, leisurely, and moving account of Jewish life in Rome during World War II. . . . This is a memoir rather than a history, and the author writers with that lack of focus and richness of incident that most young lives contain: the intellectual pretensions and ambitions of his classmates, the anxieties brought by news of invasion or deportations, the simple traumas of adolescence, the strange beauty of Rome--all are portrayed with the same deliberation and seriousness. . . . [Della Seta] gives a novelistic quality to the story, profound in its pathos and depth." --Kirkus Reviews

As in many other cities in southern Italy, Jews had had a long presence in Rome and were part of civic life at every level. All that changed in 1938, when the fascist Italian government set into motion laws that stripped Jews of the right to own productive property, to vote, even to attend high school. Fabio Della Seta, a student at the time, records how he and his young friends coped with life in a city that suddenly declared a large part of its citizenry unwelcome aliens. As a document of that terrible time, his book belongs on the shelf next to Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped in Eboli and Giorgio Bassani's Garden of the Finzi-Continis.