Sixth form 1939 / Marcella Olschki ; translated by Keith Botsford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Olschki, Marcella.

Contributor:

Botsford, Keith, 1928-2018.

Standardized Title:

Terza liceo 1939. English

Language:

English

Italian

Subjects (All):

Jewish girls.

Teenage girls.

History.

Italy--History--1922-1945--Fiction.

Italy.

Teenage girls--Italy--Fiction.

Jewish girls--Italy--Fiction.

Genre:

Fiction.

Novels.

Physical Description:

62 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First English language edition.

Place of Publication:

[London, England] ; [Milford, Conn., USA] : Toby Press, 2002.

Language Note:

Translated from the Italian.

Summary:

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.

The writing is serene and lucid, the time and the place beautifully set in the minimum number of words, but the subject, the corruption that comes with politics, is made mercilessly clear. How can one grow up, if not by asserting one's own freedom?

ISBN:

190288163X

OCLC:

51069554