Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature by Mara Josi, Cambridge, UK, Legenda Modern Humanities Research Association, 2023, xi + 179 pp., £85 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-839542-11-4

History, Memory, Literature starts with a mental exercise: Mara Josi invites readers to perceive the Holocaust through an imaginary prism.In doing so, we are encouraged to consider how a broad, supranational perspective on the Holocaust encompasses numerous smaller-scale facets, including lesser-studied national and local episodes.One such local event is the round-up of the Jews in Rome on Saturday 16 October 1943, when 1,259 persons were arrested by German occupiers and most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from the Tiburtina railway station two days later.The ways cultural memory of this local episode in history has developed remain understudied; research on representations of the Holocaust in Italian literature has predominantly focused on testimonies of the extermination camps while, more broadly, Italy is still considered a marginal case in Holocaust Studies.Josi's monograph responds to this lacuna by investigating how cultural memory of the Roman round-up has been co-constituted, elaborated, and transmitted through four literary texts: Giacomo Debenedetti's 16 ottobre 1943, Elsa Morante's La Storia, Rosetta Loy's La parola ebreo, and Anna Foa's Portico d'Ottavia 13.Josi successfully manages the metaphorical prism as she zooms in on personal memories and single modes of representation, while also considering a broad perception of Holocaust memory in Italy.The four selected texts are each collocated within different historical and memorial contexts and have all offered critical perspectives on dominant interpretations of the Holocaust in Italy.Debenedetti reports on the round-up in 1944 while the war was still ongoing, and the Roman episode was largely unknown; Morante narrates the round-up in 1974, when representations of the Holocaust focused on the extermination camps; Loy reflects on responsibility regarding the Roman round-up in the 1990s, when far-right politics forged new, often revisionist interpretations of the Holocaust; Foa's book marks the seventieth anniversary of the round-up in a period characterised by heightened interest in the Holocaust in Italy.The corpus is tested against a theoretical framework that is meticulously set up in the first part of the book and combines different approaches in Cultural Memory Studies to explore the contribution of literature to constructing cultural memory of the Roman round-up.Cultural memory is perceived as 'a product of personal memories which are told in different media' (p.3), so Josi first considers the four works in relation to the authors and their personal memories of, and connection to, the Roman round-up.