Jews have been kicked out of one place or another since the Garden of Eden. However, for the Finzi-Continis, a very wealthy Jewish family living in 1930s Italy, that history of persecution is useless as a predictor of their impending doom at the hands of Mussolini. Their eponymous garden is hemmed in by large stone walls, isolated from the goyim, and falsely insulated from the crescendo of danger. The tennis court, nestled in the very center of the family's sprawling Ferrara estate, serves as the narrative and physical locus of the story. It is there that the narrator, a young, middle-class Ferrarese Jew, falls in love with the gorgeous Micol Finzi-Contini. And it is there that the Finzi-Continis try to retain their grasp on a normality that is rapidly disappearing.

We know from the prologue that the Finzi-Continis will share the fate of 7,500 other Italian Jews. The story is a flashback, set off by a graveyard reverie as the narrator passes Etruscan tombs years after the war. And although their end is clear, we too are as eager as the narrator to escape the future for the comfort of a status quo of leisurely tennis matches and long lunches. Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini are the sort of delicate, well-mannered creatures all parents wish their progeny to be. It's easy to see why the narrator falls so hard for Micol: she's beautiful, witty, ironic, inconstant, rich, and flirty. After she invites him to join their informal tennis club, he becomes enamored. Although their romance is tepid at best, for the narrator, Micol is the great love of his life. His vaguely ridiculous romantic flailing about is painfully familiar to all of us, but the pathos of the affair comes from the way the older narrator relates the winding tale with such ironic equipoise.

As Italy's racial segregation laws force the Jews to retreat from public life, the Finzi-Continis are one step ahead, blissfully playing a game of tennis on familiar terrain, seeking refuge in what they know.

-Joshua David Stein