Writing the Shoah for Young Readers: Lia Levi’s Una valle piena di stelle

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the strategies that Lia Levi implements in her 1997 children’s novel, Una valle piena di stelle, to depict a tale of persecution in the Italian Shoah. I argue that Levi’s main goal in the novel, whose target audience is adolescents, is to evince the dangerous consequences of state-sanctioned persecution and to guide her readers’ formation as ethical citizens. Levi’s narrative creates an affinity between child protagonist and child readers that emotionally engages the latter in an exploration of the Shoah experience. With her child protagonist safe in neutral Swiss territory, Levi depicts instances of the Swiss refugee camp experience that allude to specific experiences within the Nazi concentrationary universe. Thus, the novel serves as an immediate reminder of the consequences of racial laws and a historical lesson on Fascist Italy’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. I contend that this edifying tale of persecution, loss, and the promise of eventual reconstruction, aims to develop a reader committed to ethical action and who will mature into an agent against racist oppression.