Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism

Name: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism
Author: Alexander Stille

Alexander Stille

award won

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Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism

Alexander Stille

award won

score

Benevolence and Betrayal won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1992. Through the lives of five Jewish families during Mussolini's era, Alexander Stille explores what happened to Italian Jewry under Fascism. Drawing on personal memoirs, private papers, interviews with survivors, letters, and diaries, Stille reconstructs their experiences with meticulous research and comprehensive understanding. The book gives faces and personalities to people who might otherwise have been consigned to anonymity. Stille does not blunt the dense irony, whim, caprice, black comedy and braided motives implicit in every story — the paradoxes and ambiguities and contradictions. He recognizes that the best and worst instincts often resided within the same person, and he does not diminish the goodness of the good or exculpate villains of their villainy. These stories are filled with courage and tragedy, spies and counterspies, escape and destruction. They reveal the plight of Italian Jews as they navigated accommodation with a flag-waving government, demonstrating that dictators, benevolent or otherwise, cannot be trusted.

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