In Sixth form 1939, a young Jewish girl is in her last year at school.
She has professors she admires, headmasters who blare propaganda and make inflated speeches, and one teacher - a vitriolic portrait of fascist contempt for truth and justice - whom she loathes for his bullying and his contemptible sense of superiority.
This brief, wonderful and moving novel turns on a postcard the young Marcella - on a holiday trip to the Aeolian island of Lipari, where enemies of the regime are imprisoned - sends to the hated professor, putting an X on the prison window and saying that's where the professor belongs. A piece of frivolity, an act of freedom? She finds herself on trial for contempt of state.
