Ginzburg offer powerful evidence for a general opening of mainstream literature towards representation of the Holocaust, although all of them approach the genocide from an oblique or even implicit angle, telling local stories, following premonitory moments or aftereffects, exploiting the looming shadow of the genocide in readers' minds.

If we turn to the field of translated fiction, we find two examples of powerful international successes translated into Italian in 1959–60. The Israeli survivor-writer known as Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (the pseudonym was his concentration camp number) published the international bestseller _House of Dolls_ in 1953; translated by Mondadori in 1959, it went into seven editions in nine months. Set in a camp brothel, _House of Dolls_ was one of the first controversial Holocaust fictions, one of the first major works tothe annihilation camps; and the unleashing of the power of the split atom by the researchers at the Manhattan Project (more than one of them, of course, Jewish refugees from Fascism and Nazism, including Enrico Fermi)—demonstrated for postwar generations the appalling possible risks of perversions and disproportionate violence in the pure application of reason and the scientific method.

This critique of science through these two historical singularities came to have particular resonance in Italy's cultural field of Holocaust awareness for the simple reason that the most prominent of Holocaust witnesses and writers in Italy, Primo Levi, was also a professional scientist and intensely devoted to giving voice to his field of chemistry and to science in general in his writing, to combatting what the Cambridge writer and scientist C.