Neither Rich, Nor Poor, Neither Jewish, Nor Catholic: The Legacies of Natalia Ginzburg’s Negations

In her essays on her childhood and in Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg repeats that she was mixed or nothing in a series of ways: neither rich, nor poor; neither Jewish, nor Catholic. While at times Ginzburg’s reflections on her nothingness lead to remarks about a sense of displacement or not belonging, in her essay “The Little Virtues” Ginzburg highlights the power of being neither rich nor poor, a space which creates the possibility of money not guiding one’s life. This chapter follows the negations of Ginzburg’s essays to analyze her creation of spaces that offer alternatives to the categories determined by society. Ginzburg’s non-ideological grappling with these neither/nor spaces make her appealing for a variety of writers, especially in this century. The second half of the chapter considers how Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith use the evasive essay form to think through new models of being beyond conventional categories of class, gender, religion, nationality, race, and even language.