Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew [Paperback]

Dan Vittorio Segre (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1995 | ISBN-10: 1568214375 | ISBN-13: 978-1568214375 | Edition: 1st Jason Aronson Inc. softcover ed

This memoir brings to life Dan Vittorio Segre's childhood as a Jew raised in fascist, pre-World War II Italy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author, now in his 60s, is a Haifa University professor, a Jew who grew up in Fascist Italy. With a sharp eye for vivid details, Segre recounts his comfortable childhood in the Piedmont, where his parents were at once assimilated Jews and vigorous Italian patriots. The crisis that sparked his quest for self-identity came in 1938, with the passage of Italy's first antiJewish laws. Once sheltered amid a natural-seeming Fascism, Segre suddenly discovered his "Jewish condition." At 16, virtually ignorant of Judaism, he fled to Palestine, where on a kibbutz and in the British army he worked to understand "the meaning of the new life facing me." Segre's reflections on people and incidents give considerable depth to this unusual story of coming of age.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Born into a wealthy, assimilated Italian-Jewish family that supported fascism in the interwar years, Segre has written an absorbing memoir reflecting on the feelings and reactions of a 16-year-old whose idyllic adolescence was interrupted by race laws, and who ventured in 1938 into an alien Zionist collective society in Palestine. Focusing primarily on a six-to-seven-year span, the book is no mere chronicle. Rather, as a collection of vignettes of people and events, it serves as an occasion for a wiser, introspective adult, a professor of Zionism at Haifa University, to reveal retrospectively the fears and inner debates of his soul in a tumultuous historical era. This captivating memoir illuminates the problems of modern Jewish sensibility in its struggle over the meaning of Jewish identity, messianism, and Zionism. Benny Kraut, Judaic Studies Dept., Univ. of Cincinnati
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Jason Aronson; 1st Jason Aronson Inc. softcover ed edition (March 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568214375
• ISBN-13: 978-1568214375
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,349,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Nice Piece of Memoir, December 10, 2007

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew (Paperback)

Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew is a unique personal history of the Jewish experience in Palestine between the wars in that it chronicles the life of a man largely lacking ideological commitment to Zionism. Segre's story is more about a young man buffed by external forces and an internal lack of solidity. This story could easily lose the reader's sympathy, but Segre is honest and gentle in the telling of his tale, giving a new twist to the coming of age story, one molded by the catastrophic events of Jewish history in the mid-twentieth century.