On one side there was Gino and Rasetti, the mountains, the “black schists,” the crystals, the insects; on the other was Mario, my sister Paola, and the Ternis who detested the mountains and loved stuffy rooms with the windows closed, dimmed lights, and cafés. This latter group loved the paintings of Casorati, the theater of Pirandello, the poetry of Verlaine, Gallimard editions, Proust. They were two incommunicable worlds.

I didn’t know yet which side I would choose. They both attracted me. I hadn’t yet decided if, in my life, I wanted to study beetles, chemistry, or botany, or if, instead, I would paint pictures or write novels. In Rasetti’s and Gino’s world everything was clear, everything would unfold beneath the light of the sun, everything was plausible and without mysteries or secrets. The discussions, on the other hand, that Terni, Paola, and Mario had while sitting on the couch in the living room were tinged with mystery and obscurity, arousing in me a combination of fear and fascination.

“I’m bored!” my mother said. “I have nothing to do anymore, there’s nothing more for me to do in this place. Everyone has left. I’m bored!”

“You’re bored,” my father responded, “because you have no inner life.”

“He is someone,” my mother said, “who is very sophisticated, intelligent, translates from Russian, and does beautiful translations.”

“But,” my father said, “he is very ugly. Jews are notoriously ugly.”

“And you?” said my mother. “You’re not Jewish?”

“I am, in fact, ugly too,” my father said.

By the time she was writing Family Lexicon, Ginzburg was already known to be—in her fiction and her journalism—a severe and unrelenting critic of hypocrisy and whatever else she deemed less than exemplary. Her frequent contributions to the Italian newspapers L’Unita and La Stampa had earned her a reputation as a gadfly and truth teller. Even in Family Lexicon, Ginzburg’s gift for comedy in no way obstructs her cleansing, urgent will to chastise and correct. Though Beppino’s virulence can make him seem grotesque and fearsome, his refusal to let stupidity pass or to keep his mouth shut about the criminally culpable and therefore stupid Mussolini is bracing and, for Ginzburg herself, clearly challenging. Can we find it in ourselves as readers to adore a man who tells his children to stop behaving like negroes? No doubt Ginzburg knew she was making it hard for herself in placing before us a man who would seem, much of the time, incorrigible and unbearable. But she knew, too, that her man was a Jew in fascist Italy and the head of a family of resistance fighters. Ginzburg concedes nothing in her portrait of Giuseppe Levi, exposing his worst features while allowing him to seem somewhat generous in the extravagance of his passion and in his refusal to be genteel or moderate. Ginzburg often found ways to praise and admire people who knew how to live within their limitations, but she had no patience for people who were timid when circumstances demanded something more. Her own father always reminded her that mildness, like correctness, was not—certainly not always—a virtue. Whatever our misgivings or reluctance, by the time we reach the end of Family Lexicon we readily acknowledge that Giuseppe Levi is the hero—lowercase hero—of the book. It is not easy to embrace such a man, but we come to love him as a great character without whom a great book would lack the essential drive and buoyancy that color its every page.

Ginzburg is not an ostentatious writer. Her prose is famously terse and forceful, an instrument in which the smallest things are made to seem fresh and telling. In Family Lexicon she doesn’t disclose much about her own thoughts or feelings growing up in the Levi home, but when we learn about everyone else in the family circle, in such extraordinary detail and gesture, we readily feel what it was like to be among them. Vulnerabilities and incoherencies are captured more or less as a matter of course, with only occasional commentary. The child, Natalia, as drawn by her adult self, is remarkably nonjudgmental; even when she reports her mother’s preference for the company of her more gregarious sister, she does so without disdain or envy, perhaps taking consolation in obvious signs of her own difference, a difference that would eventually become distinction. In effect, Ginzburg conveys not only impressions but a fully intelligible way of thinking about them without underlining her views or striking edifying postures. For all the humor in Family Lexicon there is also an unmistakable gravity that is not to be confused with explicitly formulated ideas or convictions.

Of course Family Lexicon cannot possibly recover from this blunt, devastatingly terse report. Not even the Levi family can summon the voluble bluster and blab to lift their lives back onto the plateau of anxious comedy where they had once resided. Postwar Italy is in ruins. Everyone is older. There is not much to laugh about, and yet the book ends on something of a comic, but hardly resolved, note. The war has been survived, for the most part, but survival is a work in progress. Si tira avanti. The family moves forward, inching its way toward recovery. The losses have been enormous, but their instincts are to retrieve what they can, and as always recovery will be bound up with the recovery of laughter, or at least with recovering the reliable triggers for laughter: the sayings, spells, and familiar locutions forged by a shared experience which, though now marked by deep sadness, are the true mark of their identity and their common will to live.