The painful history of Italy's "years of lead" through the portrait of a furious generation.

To tell the story of the Italy of the Red Brigades, Sergio Luzzatto chose to follow one red thread, one central biography, while placing it in a broader and evocative choral perspective. The red thread comes from the short and bloody life of the former sailor turned radical Riccardo Dura. It was Dura whose killing of the communist worker Guido Rossa set the Red Brigades on their violent path and changed the history of Italy. And it was Dura whose own murder by the police placed the ambiguous seal of martyrdom on left-wing terrorism. The choral perspective comes from the faces and voices of Genoa, the city where the armed struggle began and where it ended. The history of the armed struggle must be understood by looking at the many rather than at the one individual, by looking back at the Italy of the Sixties that gave birth to the movement, as much as the Italy of the Seventies where it played out. Migration, the family, the school, the factory, the "movements", the square, the university, the prison: this history of the "comrades who made mistakes" starts out as a Bildungsroman before turning into a detective novel.

Moshe's Children presents the inspiring story of Moshe Zeiri, a Jewish carpenter responsible for rescuing hundreds of Jewish refugee children who had survived the Final Solution. During the liberation of Italy, Zeiri, a volunteer in the British Army in Italy, assumed responsibility for and vowed to help around seven hundred Polish, Hungarian, Russian, and Romanian children. Although these orphans of the Shoah had been deprived of a family, a home, and a language and were irreparably robbed of their past, they were able to rebuild their lives through Zeiri's efforts as he founded the largest Jewish orphanage in postwar Europe in Selvino, Italy, where he began to rehabilitate the orphans and to teach them how to become citizens of the new nation of Israel.

Moshe's Children also explores Zeiri's own story from birth in a shtetl to his upbringing and Zionist education, his journey to the Land of Israel, and his work there before the war.

With narrative verve and scholarly acumen, Sergio Luzzatto brilliantly tells the gripping stories of these orphans of the Holocaust and the good man who helped point them to a real future.