This memoir brings to life Dan Vittorio Segre's childhood as a Jew raised in fascist, pre-World War II Italy. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly The author, now in his 60s, is a Haifa University professor, a Jew who grew up in Fascist Italy. With a sharp eye for vivid details, Segre recounts his comfortable childhood in the Piedmont, where his parents were at once assimilated Jews and vigorous Italian patriots. The crisis that sparked his quest for self-identity came in 1938, with the passage of Italy's first antiJewish laws. Once sheltered amid a natural-seeming Fascism, Segre suddenly discovered his "Jewish condition." At 16, virtually ignorant of Judaism, he fled to Palestine, where on a kibbutz and in the British army he worked to understand "the meaning of the new life facing me." Segre's reflections on people and incidents give considerable depth to this unusual story of coming of age. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Born into a wealthy, assimilated Italian-Jewish family that supported fascism in the interwar years, Segre has written an absorbing memoir reflecting on the feelings and reactions of a 16-year-old whose idyllic adolescence was interrupted by race laws, and who ventured in 1938 into an alien Zionist collective society in Palestine. Focusing primarily on a six-to-seven-year span, the book is no mere chronicle. Rather, as a collection of vignettes of people and events, it serves as an occasion for a wiser, introspective adult, a professor of Zionism at Haifa University, to reveal retrospectively the fears and inner debates of his soul in a tumultuous historical era. This captivating memoir illuminates the problems of modern Jewish sensibility in its struggle over the meaning of Jewish identity, messianism, and Zionism. Benny Kraut, Judaic Studies Dept., Univ. of Cincinnati Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.