Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, dies at 113 (CNN)

My first published obituary for CNN -- and I'm proud to say it is one I pitched, and one I knew we had to have.

Rose Girone survived both German and Japanese persecution, and managed to live eight decades beyond  the end of World War II.

Girone was one of about 10 pre-written obits I completed. Thanks to the USC Shoah Foundation, I was able to watch hours of interviews with Girone where she matter-of-factly described the treatment she endured first in Germany, as a young pregnant wife, and later as a refugee in China, under Japanese domination.

It's a rare instance where elements of my two part-time gigs converged: editing for CNN and researching the Holocaust for my literary translation work.

Read the full obit here: 

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/us/rose-girone-obit

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Birthday journal

Normally for my birthday, I record an entry in my digital journal. A habit whose name in shorthand is, 'Birthday Journal.' Just a diary entry designed to note and provide my mental temperature for future me, who will be re-reading Birthday Journal entries to revisit, to reminisce, to relive.

And I intend to continue with the tradition but I also decided to do something else this year.

I am feeling particular vulnerable this birthday and so I am reaching for my security blanket -- writing. The writing I've managed to produce AND publish. It's a selfish exercise -- safely indulged perhaps only on one's birthday or death bed, and not sure about the former -- but perhaps it could shed a bit of light for those similarly vulnerable this year for any kind of reason.

So here are bits of of my own writing that fill me with pride, and which are not behind a paywall that I can't scale (the links to the pieces for The New York Times are gift articles):

About motherhood (The New York Times):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/well/family/recording-the-sound-of-my-childs-voice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.104.mPll.Ay79fdY7jDCL&smid=url-share

About issues of great personal interest, including our Down Syndrome friends (NYT):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/well/family/in-toy-ads-and-on-the-catwalk-models-with-down-syndrome.html?unlocked_article_code=1.104.cPce.3-6WkMS7lv1k&smid=url-share

About grief (Brevity):

https://themillions.com/2023/01/the-books-that-made-my-father.html

About the glorious 1980s!!! (CNN)

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/entertainment/brat-pack-documentary-mccarthy-cec/index.html

About dogs! (namely Caramel!)

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/the-dog-journal/

About language and its intoxicating ways (The Millions):

https://themillions.com/2023/11/the-quiet-exhilaration-of-reading-in-italian.html

Thank you all for your support!

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This Darkness Will Never End -- Publication date! And pre-order link!

One day, Leo spotted a book in translation on a shelf in our house. Looking at the cover where the translator's name appeared, he said, "When will we see a book that says, 'Translated by Jeanne Bonner'?" 

Today, my son. Today! (Because when you were born, I was reborn.)

A box of copies of my translation, This Darkness Will Never End, arrived today. So it's real! I can scarcely imagine the joy you'd feel if you published a book of your own writing. I am elated to bring out the work of another writer through my translating hand but I would guess seeing your own thoughts published in a book would make you (=me) weak in the knees.

Nothing is really like birthing a baby but, wow, birthing a book is also a long, tense, task-filled process!

It's been 7 years since I first read Edith Bruck's short story collection, Andremo in città. Seven years since I felt that lightning bolt: these stories need to be available in English. And now they are.

Thanks to those of you asking about how to buy a copy of my translation.

The book will be officially published on April 22 but you can order it directly from the publisher (Paul Dry Books) and it will be shipped to you immediately:

https://www.pauldrybooks.com/products/this-darkness-will-never-end

Or you can buy it from Bookshop:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-darkness-will-never-end/21622230

Amazon has it, too.

https://www.amazon.com/This-Darkness-Will-Never-End/dp/1589882016

Give me feedback if you encounter a problem. I am not sure when Amazon or Bookshop will ship the book.

Readings

I'll be reading from the book at various libraries and bookstores in the Northeast, including:

Philadelphia City Institute Library

May 5

5:30 p.m.

Stay tuned for other readings!

I hope to reach a lot of people through events. Are you part of a group that would like to host me? Is your book club looking to read a lost Italian/Jewish classic short story collection? Let me know!

If you're interested in learning more about Edith Bruck or finding other examples of her work in English, keep reading.

I wrote an article for the journal, The American Scholar, on overlooked women writers who have borne witness to the Holocaust that features Edith:

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-forgotten-writers-of-the-shoah/

I've translated some of her poems, including one that made it into The American Scholar's Read-Me-a-Poem podcast:

https://theamericanscholar.org/at-the-american-express-office-by-edith-bruck/

More poetry here, published by Asymptote Journal in 2020:

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/edith-bruck-versi-vissuti/

You can also read one of the stories from This Darkness Will Never End -- “Silvia.” It won a prize and was published in Hunger Mountain:

https://hngrmtn.org/issues/hunger-mountain-27/translation/

You can also read her other books in English: Who Loves You Like This and Lost Bread (also published by Paul Dry Books of Philadelphia) or Letter to My Mother (published by MLA Publications).

Grazie di cuore!

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What I bought at Rizzoli (Jan. 2025)

I had to travel light when a few weeks ago I visited Rizzoli, my favorite bookstore in New York City: so just two books. But the one by Donatella Di Pietrantonio? (Borgo Sud) Pinch me! -- I had actually met her that day as part of the Multipli Forti Italian literature conference organized by the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU, Fordham and Rizzoli, among other organizations.

As for Un bene al mondo, by Andrea Bajani, well, I am still limping after immersing myself in his novel, Se consideri le colpe, (stunning English translation by Elizabeth Harris, "If You Kept a Record of Sins," published by Archipelago). It's about a boy whose jet-setting mother largely abandons him to pursue a career -- and a love life away from her husband -- in Romania. I can only hope this new title by Bajani offers slightly less anguish, otherwise I won't recover.

I must admit -- having just reviewed a new Patrick Modiano novel for the Boston Globe -- that I fleetingly eyed the French section. As the Rizzoli shopping bags proudly proclaim, the bookstore carries books in Italian, English AND French!

I'm sure some visit the store because it is stunningly elegant.

Others may visit the store because it is a short block from Eataly, or because it's on a wonderfully tranquil block of Broadway that more or less deadends into Madison Square Park.

And, of course, the shop has dozens of book-adjacent gift items -- the most incredible journals, for example. (And sometimes La Settimana Enigmistica).

But I go for the foreign books, and one day, I am going to give into my urge to buy French books, too!

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"My Alma Mater is Auschwitz" in World Literature Today

Thrilled to say my translation of a speech by Edith Bruck entitled, "My Alma Mater is Auschwitz," has been published!

Edith gave this speech in 2018 when she received an honorary doctorate from a university in Rome. It gave her occasion to ponder her own education, which was interrupted when at age 12, she was seized from her loving home and sent to Auschwitz, so unsurprisingly, she approached the topic from an unusual angle that demands our full attention.

The piece begins:

 As the poorest among the poor, with or without anti-Semitism and the race laws, I wouldn’t have been able to attend university. My alma mater is Auschwitz, a place that’s become the symbol of absolute evil among the 1,635 concentration camps that belonged to the ultra-civilized Germany and other countries allied with or occupied by Hitler.

Auschwitz: the university where you learn everything. Above all, to know yourself. There, you learn anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology, faith and religion. The value of life, the value of bread. But it also teaches the sorrow you feel when a blonde child spits on you.

There’s much to learn for the man who in slavery is defenseless and incapable of looking after himself. There’s much to learn for the woman who’s stronger and more resistant to the pain, shrewder and more capable of coming up with tricks to evade selection for the crematorium. The woman who learns to make herself invisible in order to gain another day of life.

You also learn the lingo of swear words. The range of behavior among the different social classes. Shame and pity for the guards, though the cold, the hunger and the terror cloud your reason and don’t permit much feeling.

You learn to understand everything. You understand the dehumanizing of the deported who become Kapos. You understand and pity the companions willing to take on a miserable job in exchange for the chance to steal a piece of turnip from the bottom of the soup pot.

But you also discover light in the darkness. When for example a soldier gives you a warm potato, a tattered glove, when he leaves a bit of jelly in the mess tin he’s tossed you to wash, and when he asks you, “What’s your name?” It sounds like the voice of heaven. You’re no longer prisoner #11152. You exist!

And so, you begin to hope you’ll come out of that hell, and come out a better person because you won’t ever forget three things: that you’ll never be a racist, a fascist; you’ll never discriminate against anyone; and you’ll never be like your persecutors.

You can read the rest at World Literature Today:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/essay/my-alma-mater-auschwitz-edith-bruck

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Remembering the Holocaust at the Italian Consulate (Jan. 27)

On January 27, a crowd will gather outside the Italian Consulate in New York, no matter the temperature. 

It always does for International Holocaust Remembrance Day when the Italian consul, staff from Centro Primo Levi and others take turns reading the names of thousands of Italian Jews who were deported from Italy by the Nazis and killed in concentration camps across Europe. It will be one of many events connected with the day, which will mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. 

But Italy has a special – and damning – connection to the Holocaust. It collaborated with Germany on pushing Jews to the margins of society through the 1938 Racial Laws, among other measures, and then exterminating as many as possible. 

This event is arguably sui generis because while Italy played a critical role in persecuting the Jews, the country had a relatively small Jewish population and so the number of names read is a little less than 10,000 -- a number that allows for reading all of the victims' names in the space of a day. It is a one-of-a-kind commemoration for those who somberly read the names and even for the strangers walking by on their way to work or school, hearing even just for a moment an echo of all that was lost.

And I will be there to pay my respects. What's commemorated on Jan. 27 is on my mind night and day, as I await final publication of This Darkness Will Never End, my translation of Edith Bruck's 1962 short story collection (Italian title: Andremo in città).

For more information:

https://primolevicenter.org/events/giorno-della-memoria-2025/

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Writing about Patrick Modiano for the Boston Globe (Jan. 19, 2025)

So thrilled to write about Patrick Modiano in the Sunday Boston Globe. His newest novel, Ballerina, which will be published this week by Yale University Press, reminded me of a saying attributed to Henry Moore about the necessity of having a task that consumes you every day -- one that you'll never be able to complete, however. Presumably Moore was thinking about sculpture but what about writing fiction in a bid to exhume the personal and political ghosts of wartime Paris?

Modiano has published dozens of books -- yes, dozens -- and nearly all of them circle a particular time period -- the Occupation and the 30-year-period that followed in France -- and a particular obsession: what Daddy did during the war.

As I mention in the review, Modiano's father was Jewish and on the run from the Nazis. A terrible story and regrettably very common in that period but Alberto Modiano took a different approach: if the Nazis essentially outlawed his Jewish identity, then an outlaw he would be, trading goods on the Black Market, possibly collaborating in odd ways.

In Ballerina, which was translated by Mark Polizzotti, Modiano only touches on such things obliquely but the mystery of his father's existence  -- and also the neglect shown both by Albert and Albert's wife to their two children, including young Patrick -- continues to haunt France's most famous living author.

Read the review at the Globe site here:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/15/arts/in-ballerina-patrick-modiano-again-revisits-wartime-paris/

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My new English translation -- This Darkness Will Never End (out soon!)

Today I sent back corrections on the typeset proofs of my translation, This Darkness Will Never End.

Hundreds of little steps, seemingly, are behind the publishing of a book, in this case a translation of a short story collection by Edith Bruck. Conferring with the editor at Paul Dry Books, my publisher. Conferring with the marketing executive. Contacting bookstores about the possibility of holding a reading. 

All of this after spending a year translating the book!

So, lots of work but what a hum there is in my little heart! What a labor of love it has been. I am grateful for: 

*Translating a book from Italian, which is such a vital part of my life it feels like a twin that follows me everywhere. 

*Translating a 1962 classic that's been overlooked by the Anglophone world, and one that's by a woman author. 

*And translating a writer whose experiences of the Holocaust have forced me to conclude I don't know enough about this critical period of history -- and I never will. So I will simply study it for the rest of my life. 

As I noted in an article for the American Scholar about the work of women survivors, the experiences of women often offer a different perspective on the Holocaust but it's one that's sometimes been marginalized or forgotten so I still have so much to discover.

Oh and the book has its own page on the publisher's site. Here it is:

https://www.pauldrybooks.com/products/this-darkness-will-never-end

Edith once called Auschwitz "the University of Evil," but she said, "You also discover light in the darkness."

The book will be published in April -- so please, stay tuned.

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All I Want for Christmas is Guglielmo Coffee

Even at my advanced age, I find a lot of gifts under the tree. But the one I want most is a mega shipment of Guglielmo coffee!

The American distributor for the brand is based in Massachusetts, and every year, Il Nostro Inviato (the original 'friend of the blog') orders it to be shipped to our home (now in Connecticut, but before in Atlanta). 

One sip and I might as well be in Southern Italy.

Yes, yes Lavazza is Italian coffee, and I drink it. But brands like Guglielmo and Caffe Kimbo offer a very intense coffee experience! You are left in no doubt that you've had -- and almost certainly savored -- a cup of Joe (or Giuseppe, as the case may be).

The brand also has a very cool motto: Il caffe che fa centro. The coffee that hits the spot!

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The Year in Translating Women (one specific woman) -- 2024

Every year, I tally up what I've accomplished professionally -- mainly my year in writing, but also translation. Basically, what I've managed to publish.

I started blogging about this because I noticed a wildly successful writer (Alexander Chee) did so. (He's a hard act to follow!)

Looking back on this year, I find there's not much published writing to consider! Not much writing, period -- but a lot of translation. 

This was the year I completed my first book-length translation manuscript. (See cover mockup at left).

And like all of the short stories and poetry that I've translated and published, the book is by a woman author. Thanks to Paul Dry Books for continuing to invest in Edith Bruck, an important transnational Italian writer!

I did publish a little writing this year -- including a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times! -- and an essay about the Brat Pack documentary for CNN. 

But mainly, I plugged away at the monumental task of revising, polishing, proofing and publishing a translated book.  And I'm thrilled it's a translation of a book by a woman.

Translate women.

It's all I've done in the seven years that I've been translating Italian literature.

It’s not surprising that I would come to think of this as my mantra, my purpose. Women's achievements inspire me. They make me feel as though I have vicariously achieved something, so I've enjoyed discovering emerging Italian women writers and also overlooked authors.

(It’s also easier for me to confine my translation projects to women authors: I don’t work full-time as a literary translator.) 

I stumbled into the field after earning an MFA and seeing the literary world as a potential home not only for my original writing but also for translated works of literature. Specifically works written by Italian women writers that I could smuggle into English.

Women and men, of course, share many of the same concerns, emotions and hardships, all of which can fuel the best writing.

But because the circumstances of their lives have often been different – a focus on caregiving for women, fewer work opportunities historically, mortality related to bearing children -- the experiences they've drawn from are often fundamentally different. In the case of the Holocaust narrative I’m now consumed by, women who were deported to Nazi concentration camps had to contend with the same inhumane conditions as the men -- meager rations, freezing temperatures, disease, evil guards -- but also fear of sexual predation, clandestine pregnancies and decisions regarding separation from their children that frequently hinged on the mother or the child headed for certain death.

There are many others focused on promoting translated works by women, including the Women In Translation initiative, which sponsors Women in Translation month every August.

But we still have a long way to go.

The first book I began translating seriously was Passaggio in ombra by Mariateresa Di Lascia. I learned about it while writing an article for Lit Hub about overlooked works by Italian women writers. The book won the highest literary award Italy confers -- the Strega -- but has somehow not been published in English.

(My translation manuscript, "Into the Shadows," isn’t finished but I plan to return to the project in 2025, after shepherding This Darkness Will Never End into print; I won a PEN grant for the manuscript-in-progress and I remain grateful for it!).

That project gave me my mission: paying special attention to works by women overlooked by the literary world.

So now I translate women, I review literature by women writers and I look for any opportunity to spotlight books written by women. And I will continue to champion the work of women!

Here’s some of the work I’ve done so far to advance this mission:

*An article for the journal, American Scholar, on overlooked women writers who survived the Holocaust: 

"The Forgotten Writers of the Shoah" 

*An essay for Ploughshares about the ways Mariateresa Di Lascia's work anticipated the #MeToo movement:

“The Lives of Women”

*Translations of Edith Bruck's poetry, including one poem that made it into The American Scholar's Read-Me-a-Poem podcast:

https://theamericanscholar.org/at-the-american-express-office-by-edith-bruck/

(More poetry translations published last month by The Common at Amherst College here)

*Translation of a short story by Edith Bruck that will appear in This Darkness Will Never End (and which won the Hunger Mountain Translation Prize)

https://hngrmtn.org/issues/hunger-mountain-27/translation/

*A review of a book by an important Italian woman author (A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio) for the Kenyon Review:

https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/a-girl-returned-by-donatella-di-pietrantonio-738439/

*Translation of a short story by F. Marzia Esposito (published in Asterix, which is edited by the wonderful Angie Cruz):

“Autumn Lessons”

Here's to women and the unique stories they have to tell in all the languages of the world!

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“Come ti senti quando parli in italiano?”

How do I feel when I speak Italian, you ask? Te lo dico! ... And thanks to Pensierini magazine for publishing my short piece on their website. Sometimes I also feel the need to write in Italian!

     “Come ti senti quando parli in italiano?”

Quando arrivai a Siena nel 1993, sono rimasta totalmente spaesata. Avevo studiato l’italiano all’università in USA ma nessuno mi aveva detto che a Siena (come in tutta la Toscana) la gente aspira la ‘C’. Sono arrivata come studentessa per un soggiorno di sei mesi e girando per Siena, non capivo e non mi facevo capire.

Di preciso, non avevo capito che si trattava non solamente di un paese dove la gente parlava in altra lingua; si trattava di un paese dove la gente pensava in un modo totalmente diverso dalla mentalità americana. Per esempio, quando entravo in un negozio e la commessa mi diceva, “Dimmi.” In America, nessuno dice “dimmi” quando entri in un negozio! Non bastava sostituire le parole – bisognava fare molto di più.

Per leggere il resto del testo//to read the rest, visit:

https://pensierini.blog/come-mi-sento-quando-parlo-in-italiano/libera/