Dan Vittorio Segre – författare

'I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head.' From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre's memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled fascist Italy and Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws only to be thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine, completely unprepared for the dangers of life there during World War II. Beautifully narrated, "Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew" is an ironic, philosophical meditation on the historical reverberations of the twentieth century.

"Taut and illuminating ... memorable ... written with the humility of he who confesses himself and with the honesty of he who bore witness." Primo Levi"Luminous, almost light-hearted, autobiography about a family of Italian Jews under Mussolini." Frederic Raphael, Sunday TimesSegre tells the story of his childhood and adolescence in Mussolini's Italy. Nurtured in a world of aristocratic privilege, he emerged naive and unprepared for the realities that awaited him. The crash of 1929 and the introduction of Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws saw him on the boat to Tel Aviv, a rare immigrant with a first-class ticket, jacket, silk tie and detachable linen collar, thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine in the 1930s. Segre explores the pathos and contradictions of such situations with a keen sense of irony which lifts the book out of the world of memoirs and into the realm of literature.