The central character in Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, and his repulsive flaw

Natalia Ginzburg's "novel" Family Lexicon (1963?, NYRB publisher, Jennifer McPhee tr. and excellent notes!) exists right on the border between fiction and nonfiction; she says in her forward that she uses real names throughout and everything in the book is to her memory accurate - however, she notes that it's not a memoir in the conventional sense in that there are many "lacunae" that she makes no attempt to fill, nor does she do any fact-checking or historical research. OK, it's therefore just about her family and centers on the many family phrases and sayings and scribbled poems and neologisms. I expected more, and I suspect would be getting (I'm about 60 pp, of 1/4 through the work) more out of this had I read more of NG's fiction and had I known more about her long career in the postwar Italian politics and the antifascist movement. I'm not so interested in the squabbles among the five siblings, sometimes breaking out in fist-fights among the brothers, nor in the many friends and acquaintances of the family during the prewar years in Turin; there are a few references to struggles against the fascists, and maybe will be more later in the book, but I expected more of a political document - my bad, as the title promises nothing like that. What does hold my interest and I suspect that of most readers is the portrayal of her tyrannical and eccentric father (Leopold Levi, I think is his name) - a brutal man, critical all the time of everyone but himself, a snob who claimed to detest snobbery, subject to such violent fits of rage that one would think he may have an illness or a brain tumor. He bullies his wife and children - and amazingly NG gets some comic moments out of this, e.g., her father insisting that they all go off for mountain hikes almost every day - and that they tromp along in hobnailed books with many provisions (others are hiking in shoes or sandals) and snow-glare glasses but no hats. Sadly, at least one of the sons/brothers seems to have inherited his father's propensity for pointless rage - and we wonder what damage he did to the young NG;s psyche (she does not reflect on this). The success and quality of this work will depend, over the next 150 or so pp., how her father develops or changes and how the family is caught up, or not, in the political currents in Italy in the 1930s and 40s. Also worth noting that the father speaks at times with horribly racist language - which McPhee makes no effort to disguise - a reprehensible trait in any adult but especially so in a Jewish scientist and supposed intellectual. Did he change his views when the axe was about to fall on him and his kin?