Child of the Ghetto: Coming of Age in Fascist Italy, by Edda Servi Machlin - SIGNED

Child of the Ghetto: Coming of Age in Fascist Italy - A Memoir: 1926-1946, by Edda Servi Machlin. 1995 first printing hardcover. 312 pages, very nice condition. Out of Print & SIGNED.

In this moving memoir, Edda Servi Machlin (1926- 2019) recalls her experience as a Jew in Italy under the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. Born within the walls of the ancient Jewish Ghetto of a small hill town in Tuscany, she saw her childhood end abruptly and brutally with the introduction of the Leggi Razziali, which deprived Jews of all civil and human rights. Official anti-semitism and second-class citizen status were followed by the threat of extermination, as the Nazi-fascists began the implementation of the Final Solution in German-occupied Italy.

In 1943, her parents and youngest brother were sent to a concentration camp in northern Italy (from which they were later liberated), and she, two brothers and a sister fled into the hills of Tuscany. “We found safety in the ranks of the partisans,” she wrote, “and with those generous farmers who risked their own lives and the burning of their farms to shelter us.” She lived as a fugitive, repeatedly avoiding detection as a Jew and narrowly escaping deportation to the death camps. After the war, she became famous as a survivor and for her renowned cookbooks on traditional Jewish cuisine.