NONFICTION - Jan. 5, 1992

BENEVOLENCE AND BETRAYAL by Alexander Stille (Summit Books: $25; 349 pp.) . Stille examines the complex plight of Italian Jews under fascism: They were spared deportation because of the government’s initial unwillingness to participate in the program--until the 1938 racial laws made them outlaws overnight. Rather than an overview, Stille gives a detailed history of five families whose experiences represent the range of possibilities. The patriarch of the Ovazza family of Turin was a leader of the Jewish Fascist movement; the members of the Foa family, also from Turin, included a member of the anti-fascist underground and his brother, whose anti-fascist sympathies did not preclude membership in the Fascist Party. In each of the five histories, Stille proves himself an adroit interviewer, able to elicit remarkable detail from surviving family members, and equally adept at shaping those fragments of information into carefully crafted stories that, as with the best nonfiction, always resonate beyond their specific boundaries.