Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) was a Jewish Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and intellectual. A cosmopolitan writer concerned with the problems of Jewish identity and history, Bassani was deeply affected by the persecution and deportation of Italian Jews under Mussolini. His personal experience of this period and its aftermath was fundamental to the creation of his masterwork, the Romanzo di Ferrara (Romance of Ferrara).

In The Drama of the Assimilated Jew, Lucienne Kroha makes Bassani’s personal and literary journey accessible to English-language readers. Kroha’s close, intertextual reading of Bassani’s novels and short stories reveals Bassani’s focus on the issue of Jewish masculinity and his profound engagement with the work of Freud, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann, whose ideas he appropriated and re-cast to construct the fictional story of his own personal struggle.

Lucienne Kroha is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill University.

Lucienne Kroha's profile page

‘A wide ranging, thought-provoking and intelligent reading of the work of Giorgio Bassani… Kroha’s book makes an important contribution to Bassani studies as well as to Jewish studies and gender studies.’

Journal of Modern Italian Studies vol 20:02:2015

‘There is much to praise in this monograph…. With her subtle and compelling argument, Kroha has given us more elements to better evaluate the place of Bassani in Italian and European Jewish and non-Jewish literary culture.’

Annali d’Italianistica Vol 33:2015

‘The Drama of the Assimilated Jew offers a comprehensive and highly integrated analysis of Bassani’s major works, and will be an invaluable tool for scholars of Italian Judaism, modern Jewish Literature in Europe, and the sociology and psychology of Jewish masculinity.’

Italian Culture vol 34:01:2016

‘There is much to praise in this monograph… With her subtle and compelling argument, Kroha has given us more elements to better evaluate the place of Bassani in Italian and European Jewish and non-Jewish literary culture.’

Annali d’Italianistica vol 33:2015