Stories of Jewish Life: Casale Monferrato-Rome-Jerusalem, 1876-1985 is an unconventional memoir-an integrated collection of short stories and personal essays. Author Augusto Segre was a well-known public figure in post-WWII Italy who worked as a journalist, educator, scholar, editor, activist, and rabbi. He begins his book with stories shaped from the oral narratives of his home community as it emerged from the ghetto era, continues with his own experiences under fascism and as a partisan in WWII, and ends with his emigration to Israel. Spanning the years 1876 (one generation after emancipation from the ghetto) to 1985 (one generation after the Shoah), Segre presents this period as an era in which Italian Jewry underwent a long-term internal crisis that challenged its core values and identity. He embeds the major cultural and political trends of the era in small yet telling episodes from the lives of ordinary people. The first half of the book takes place in Casale Monferrato-a small provincial capital in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy. The second half, continuing in Casale in the late 1920s but eventually shifting to Rome then Jerusalem, follows the experiences of a boy named Moshe (Segre's Jewish name and his stand-in). Moshe relates episodes of Italian Jewry from the 1920s to the 1980s that portray the insidiousness of fascism as well as the contradictions within the Jewish community, especially in its post-ghetto relationship to Italian society. The painful transformation of Italian Jewry manifests itself in universal themes: the seductiveness of modern life, the betrayal of tradition, the attraction of fashionable political movements, the corrosive effects of totalitarianism, and ultimately, on the positive side, national rebirth and renewal in Israel. These themes give the book significance beyond the "small world" from which they arise because they are issues that confront any society, especially those emerging from a traditional way of life and entering the modern world. Students, scholars, and readers of Jewish history, Italian history, and fiction with an autobiographical thread will find themselves captivated by Segre's stories.

In this lyrical memoir, translated for the first time into English, noted Jewish historian, author, translator, and activist Augusto Segre not only recounts his rich life experiences but also evokes the changing world of Italian Jewry in the twentieth century. Raised in the traditional Jewish community of Casale Monferrato in the former ghetto, Segre depicts the changes wrought on his people by emancipation, fascism, world wars, and the Holocaust.
Segre was a vocal opponent of Italian fascism and a combatant in Italy's partisan war against the Nazis. With the help of Italian peasants, he and his family spent eighteen months evading German and Italian fascist soldiers during the German occupation of Italy. Segre also was an ardent Zionist who helped refugees escape to Israel and ultimately immigrated himself in 1979. He spent three months in Israel in 1948, chronicling Israel's War of Independence. With an ethnographic eye, Segre interweaves his own memories with those of his rabbi father and uses newspapers, public documents, and letters to reveal the shared emotions and moods of a people and the impact the greatest events in European and Jewish history had on them all. The trend of Italian Jews toward assimilation was evident in Segre's time, and an awareness of it pervades this work. Memories of Jewish Life provides a rare glimpse into a traditional, religious and vibrant working-class Jewish community that no longer exists.