Journal

Emanuele Levi

1822–1823

We will compose a little book that will also serve as an amusement when, in ten years’ time, we want to look back into the past and observe what we lived through. All people have a weakness for remembering the past, as if they want to take up the thread of their lives again and return to their first youth. (28 January, 1822) [ . . . ]

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Creator Bio

Emanuele Levi

ca. 1811–?

Emanuele Levi is known to us through his precocious diary, written during the Restoration period of early nineteenth-century Italy. For a year and a half, Emanuele wrote about life as he experienced it in Asti, where he was sent at age eleven to attend the Jewish school. The diary was written in a copybook, reviewed by his tutor Lazzaro Artom, and forwarded each week to Emanuele’s parents.

Related Guide

Life Writing: Biography, Autobiography, and Ego Documents, 1750–1880

The famous and the obscure, women and men, in epitaphs and private letters, ethical wills, cookbooks, and religious reflections, all reflect aspects of Jewish life in a period of great transition.

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