Skip to main content
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg_photo_vdecola S (1).jpg
Ebe Cagli Seidenberg (photo courtesy of Valery DeCola)

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg was born in Ancona, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea, on 23 February 1915. She was raised in Rome in a middle-class Jewish family which, like the majority of Italian Jews, considered itself assimilated. Both her parents were well educated: her father, a businessman who had lost his fortune during World War I, taught applied mathematics in a technical high school, while her mother worked as an editor of the International Red Cross publications and published several novels and children’s books under the pseudonym of Fiducia. Ebe was one of five children, three daughters and two sons. One of her siblings, Corrado Cagli, was a well-known artist.

She received her formal education in Rome (including a university degree) and left Italy for the United States right after Mussolini’s government passed the 1938 racial laws. In the US, she obtained her doctoral degree in Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University. There she met her future husband Abraham Seidenberg, a mathematician with whom she moved to Berkeley, California, in 1945. In her new setting, she started her literary activity under the supervision of Wallace Stegner, and in 1957 published her first novel, Before the Cock Crows, with Little, Brown and Company, in English, under the pseudonym of Bettina Postani. Several positive critical reviews of this book inspired her to continue writing, but interestingly she chose to write all her subsequent works in Italian. After her husband’s death in the late 1980s, she moved back to Rome permanently. Her published work amounts to nine volumes of novels and short stories, five of which make up a ‘cycle’ devoted to the theme of exile, Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato (1975-1991; Cycle of the Forced Exile), and are centred on experiences of deracination, liminality, memory, and identity. Ebe Cagli Seidenberg died in Rome in 2002.

Compiled by Evelyn Ferraro (Santa Clara, CA)