Il tempo dei chissà by Elena Loewenthal

A conversation with ELENA LOEWENTHAL about the book *Il tempo dei chissà* (Einaudi, 2026).

The Turin Novel: Sometimes, places themselves take on the burden of memory, holding onto what has transpired even when those who inhabit them would prefer not to know—or to forget. In an ordinary apartment building in Turin, the quiet is disrupted by a constant coming and going of new tenants, movers, and workmen. For the Widow Bonelli—a long-time resident, nostalgic and full of resentment—this influx of the new feels like a personal catastrophe: the end of a stable, harmless era; the end of order. Yet, the “good old days” she longs for were, for others, a time of alienation, loss, and suffering. It was in this very building, in the late 1930s, that the Auerbach family received a letter announcing the revocation of their Italian citizenship. There was no dramatic rupture—only a gradual slide from a life recognized by the state to one merely tolerated, until eventually, even that tolerance vanished. Through the stories of this family and others, *Il tempo dei chissà* (“The Time of the ‘Who Knows'”) moves vertically through the years, like an elevator—slow and temperamental—that allows us to encounter the ghosts of those who were already ghosts while still alive: the stateless, the exiles, the clandestine fighters. There is Ermanno, who as a boy was an enthusiastic *Balilla Alpino* (a youth-group member), but who would later return to the mountains as a partisan known as “Ico.” And there is his friend Ada, who observes a changing world without ever receiving an explanation, and who eventually leaves Turin with her mother and her uncle Eugenio—the latter sent into internal exile in Lucania. Surrounding them are women who bear the practical and emotional weight of persecution, tasked with keeping life running even as everything falls apart; and men who, at times, are capable of heroic acts, and at other times, only of quiet, subtle withdrawals.

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