The Jewish husband /

Dino Carpi's family runs the Albergo della Magnolia, a popular Italian hotel named after Dino's favorite magnolia tree, which sits in its courtyard. When Dino comes to the aid of one of the hotel's guests, Sonia, who breaks her leg during a New Year's Eve celebration, the two fall madly in love. Their relationship is complicated, however, when Sonia, a wealthy Catholic, discovers that Dino is Jewish, a bond doomed under the 1930s Fascist, anti-Semitic regime. Sonia's intimidating father suggests a plan for Dino to conceal his birthright so that he and Sonia can continue their relationship. Despite the deepening conflicts between the two families, Dino and Sonia marry and have a child. As government race laws become increasingly severe, Dino discovers that the compromise he made for love comes at a much greater cost than he could have ever imagined. Dino's story unfolds as a one-way correspondence; thus, parts of Levi's novel read like an urgent stream of consciousness, contrasting love's fervor with the steely veracity of history.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2009 Booklist

Levi subjects love to the inexorable tides of history in this articulate and resonant novel. In 1930s fascist Rome, Dino Carpi encounters Sonia Gentile when she breaks her leg at his parents' hotel on New Year's Eve, and as the Italians say, it's amore a prima vista. But their burgeoning relationship appears mortally wounded when Sonia discovers that Dino is Jewish. Sonia's father is a devout Catholic and well-connected supporter of Il Duce. Faced with the possibility of losing the object of his ardor, Dino enters into a compromise with Sonia's father in which he effectively denies his heritage in order to secure her hand. At first merely anxious about the personal implications of this bargain, the real consequences for the couple, their extended families and their young son Michele become increasingly harrowing as the Fascist regime imposes evermore restrictive laws on Italian Jews. The historical milieu performs admirably as the catalyst for a shrewd meditation on love's spectrum, from turbulent passion to petty jealousies. Though the beginning is slow going and disordered, Levi's crystalline prose gradually generates an emotional groundswell of unexpected intensity. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Levi's English-language debut, 2001 winner of the Moravia Prize in Italy, uses a romance to dramatize the plight of Jews under Mussolini. It's love at first sight when Dino Carpi approaches the beautiful young woman lying on the ballroom floor in his parents' hotel in Rome. She has broken her leg in a fall. Dino is a teacher, a classicist and an admirer of the Greek poet Pindar, who prized the harmony which Sonia exemplifies. This happened in 1930. It's now 1967, and Dino, an old man in Tel Aviv, is writing his life story as a long letter to a recipient in Italy whose identity will remain unknown until the end. (It's an awkward device.) The story hinges on the fact that Sonia is a Gentile and Dino is a Jew, though only the twice-a-year kind (Yom Kippur and Passover). She reciprocates his love, and the nonobservant Dino accedes to the demands of Sonia's father, a wealthy banker and ardent fascist, that their marriage be Catholic and his Jewish roots stay hidden from their prospective children. Such a wimp does not make a stirring protagonist, and there's no drama in Dino's plodding account of his relationship with the equally passive Sonia. Their wedding and honeymoon barely rate a mention. Sonia's family are reactionary bores, with the exception of rebellious kid sister Lorenza and witty, iconoclastic cousin Gherardo. They provide the only sparks of life until 1938, when Mussolini turns up the heat with his anti-Semitic proclamations. Dino is fired; his father sells the hotel. Pliant as ever, Dino goes along with Sonia's plan (hatched by her father) for him to disavow paternity of his six-year-old son Michele; he even agrees to the annulment of his marriage. Only when militantly antifascist Lorenza dies in a suspicious "accident" does Dino express his outrage, but it's too little, too late, and his solo flight to Palestine is anticlimactic. Dramatic material that has been better explored elsewhere, notably in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.