As an observer of contemporary Italian culture, I have been struck by the recent outpouring of texts and films on the subject of the Shoah, evidence of what Fabio Girelli-Carasi sees as the belated emergence of a Jewish discourse in the Italy of today. During my years as a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was aware of a distinct reluctance on the part of writers and directors to confront this chapter in Italian history. Of course, there was Giorgio Bassani, but he was “ghettoized” by the intellectual Left for a perceived lack of ideological engagement – a failure to represent the possibility of an activist response to Fascism and the residual injustices of the postwar period. I was dimly aware of the achievements of Primo Levi, but that awareness was clouded by a kind of respectful reticence, almost a sense of embarrassment, about his writings on the part of the critical establishment. This discomfort took the form of taxonomic indecision – how to characterize this body of writing? Was it literature or history, autobiography or legal brief – in other words, how do we label and accommodate the text of witness? Such unease, of course, reflected a far deeper problem – the Italian hesitance to tell the Holocaust story at all, the reluctance to face what the eminent Italian director, Ettore Scola, would call “a passage little frequented, and hardly edifying, of our History.”