Natalia Ginzburg was born Natalie Levi on July 14, 1916, in Palermo, Italy. Her father was Jewish and her mother was Catholic, but Ginzburg was raised in a non-religious environment. She grew up in Turin, where her father was an anatomy professor at the university.

World War II and the fascist Italian government that instituted severe restrictions on the rights of Jews had a profound effect on Ginzburg's life. In 1938, the year in which anti-Semitic laws were passed in Italy, she married Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish publisher and antifascist political activist. In 1940 Leone was sentenced to live in the countryside as a means of political isolation. Natalia and their three children lived in the rural town of Pissoli until Armistice Day in 1943. During this time, Natalia's first novel, The Road to the City (1942), was published under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparte to avoid legal restrictions that banned Jews from...