Elena Ferrante ‘Unveiled’ as Jewish German Translator
Image by Anya Ulinich
An expose by The New York Review of Books claims to have found the identity behind the massively popular pseudonymous author, Elena Ferrante.
Claudio Gatti, better known for his investigations of the money behind Oil for Food and other political financial stories, claims that the evidence points to Anita Raja, “a Rome-based translator whose German-born mother fled the Holocaust and later married a Neapolitan magistrate.”
Neither she, nor her author husband (material because the financial evidence includes notes about their shared income), nor her publishing house have confirmed the story.
Some fans are angry at the intrusion, but Gatti and others point to the biographical teases that “Ferrante” has put out in her interviews and writing.
Gatti notes that Raja, unlike Ferrante, “… was born in Worms, Germany, into a family of Polish Jews who emigrated from Wadowice, a town west of Krakow. She spoke Italian with a strong German accent.” He wrote a separate article on Raja and her family history, outlining their experience of “pogroms in Poland, Nazi persecution in Germany, anti-Semitic laws in fascist Italy and the Holocaust, which took the lives of her great-grandparents and a dozen other members of her family.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
