Career
After her marriage, she used the name Natalia Ginzburg (occasionally spelled "Ginzberg") on most subsequent publications. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparte in 1942, during Fascist Italy's most anti-Semitic period.
Ginzburg spent much of the 1940s working for the publisher Einaudi in Turin in addition to her creative writing. They published some of the leading figures of postwar Italy, including Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg's second novel was published in 1947.
Her and her husband's experience during the war altered her perception of her identification as a Jew, and she thought deeply about the questions aroused by the war and the Holocaust, dealing with them in fiction and essays. She converted to Catholicism, arousing controversy among her circle, because she believed that Christ was a persecuted Jew.
Beginning in 1950, when Ginzburg married again and moved to Rome, she entered the most prolific period of her literary career. During the next 20 years, she published most of the works for which she is best known. They were deeply involved in the cultural life of the city.
In 1964 she pla yed the role of Mary of Bethany in Pier Paolo Pasolini's controversial The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
Ginzburg was politically involved throughout her life as an activist and polemicist. Like many prominent anti-Fascists, for a time she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament as an Independent in 1983.
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