Overview

Donato Manduzio was an illiterate Southern Italian peasant who only learned how to read and write at the age of thirty-two, while convalescing from a wound during the First World War. His subsequent reading of Scripture and the visions he experienced led him to turn to Judaism and to seek an official conversion for himself and seventy-odd followers. For twelve of the sixteen-year-long process, Manduzio wrote about his experiences. Although some excerpts from the Diary have been translated, the manuscript has remained unpublished either in Italian or in any other language up to this day. This book translates the full text of Manduzio's Diary from the original Italian into English, making it available at last to a wider public. After providing a social and historical framework for the trajectory of this remarkable man, it retraces Manduzio's mystical visions and spiritual development, as well as his struggle to create and maintain a Jewish community in a remote corner of Apulia at a time when Fascism was taking hold of Italy. It also shows how the text fits in the context of religious conversion narratives and of literary studies, thus shedding a fresh and fascinating light on the subject.This book will be of interest to specialists of autobiography, Jewish studies, Italian studies, and cultural studies. The Diary's literary qualities and riveting story-telling will also make it a must-read for general audiences.

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9781443812764

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Reviews

Serfaty brings numerous disciplines into her discourse, ranging from philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, sociology, mysticism, to literary autobiography, besides history and anthropology. She truly knows how to conduct research-and not just on books and about books. She is a sophisticated thinker, who seamlessly combines theory with more practical considerations aimed at bringing to the fore what is truly human and humanistic. Working on Manduzio not only required excellent knowledge of Italian, but also an understanding of Apulian dialect, Italian countryside folklore, small town mentality (which can be tricky to acquire even for an Italian native from a different region, let alone a second-language speaker), an understanding of the intricacies inherent to Italian Judaism (the oldest Jewish diaspora, dating back to before the destruction of the Temple in the 1st century CE), excellent translating abilities dealing with a text that at times loses the sense of its overarching purpose and gets lost in minutiae, but above all an incredible skill for historical, cultural, as well as literary analysis. While she relies on previous studies for gathering information about the group of Sannicandresi and offering a background for their story, she bases her interpretation exclusively on the text. In the last portion of the book in particular, Serfaty shows her strong background in close textual analysis, while her linguistic and stylistic sensibility transpires throughout. Although her greatest merit will be considered translating Manduzio's Diary in its entirety for English-speaking readers for the first time, her book is positioned to renew interest and offer an original interpretation of Manduzio and his group of followers for the benefit of future scholars fascinated by this particular case or even those who are researching conversion narratives more in general. Alessandro Vettori, Rutgers University's Italian Quarterly, December 2018

Author Information

Viviane Serfaty is currently a Senior Lecturer in English at Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee, France. She focuses on two major research areas, the use of the Internet in the public and private spheres, and diaries and autobiography. She has carried out extensive research on self-representational writing, from its origins to its contemporary transformations on the Internet. In several essays and in a groundbreaking book, The Mirror and the Veil, she has perceptively analyzed the multiple dimensions and distinctive characteristics of diaristic writing.

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