All Our Yesterdays

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The culmination of war brings great relief and joy to the surviving characters, normal life can finally resume but will it ever be the same?

It’s just a question of time before they are herded onto trucks and trains to be shipped to concentration camps. One goes to bed after supper and sleeps until noon; another has insomnia and paces the floor all night. Yet, despite this confidence and optimism, the ravages of the war remained with my grandparents their entire lives – and the impact was felt by their children and grandchildren. In 1944, Leone was imprisoned, tortured and killed by the incumbent regime for his covert work on an anti-fascist newspaper.After the death of Anna’s father, near the beginning of the novel, Ippolito befriends Emanuele, one of the boys from the house opposite.

As you say, it’s fascinating to see how some elements relate to Ginzburg’s own life experiences, especially the upheaval of war and its impact on family life.With air raids, constant movement of soldiers and distant bombs going off, the two families prepare their basement for survival mode.

It’s also clearly a novel informed by personal experiences and memories, written by a woman who lived through the turmoil of a country at war – a point that adds a genuine sense of poignancy and authenticity to the story as it unfolds. her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life. The essence of the themes covered includes the impact of war on society, the constant nerve-wracking tussle between the brutal reality of daily violence and trying to lead some semblance of a normal life despite it all, how the worldview shrinks to everyday existence coupled with an all-pervading sense of stasis. It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover .If Braun seems to have no regret about the horrors he enacted, he is at least traumatised by the deaths of his wife and child, who were killed in Operation Gomorrah, the allied bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Earlier, when she watched her elder siblings and their friends become involved in the resistance to fascism, she found herself fantasising about revolution: she ‘pictured herself upon the barricades … firing off a rifle and singing. I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books.