Edith Bruck: Recounting the Holocaust Until She Can’t

It's hard to walk away from a writer once she tells you surviving the Holocaust is like being pregnant with a monster she can never deliver or abort.

The comparison comes from Edith Bruck's 2014 nonfiction book, Signora Auschwitz.

Similarly, as a part-time literary translator, I find it very hard to leave things be when I see an author like Bruck remain largely un known in America because her works haven't been translated into English.

I am doing my small part to try to introduce Bruck to a wider English-speaking audience by publishing some of her poetry in translation, and also by doing some comparative literature research at the New York Public Library during a short-term fellowship that will began next month.

In the meantime, I wrote a review of Bruck's new memoir IL PANE PERDUTO, which hasn't been translated into English yet, for Three Percent. It was one of five finalists for this year's Strega award, Italy's highest literary prize.

Bruck has spent her career writing about the Holocaust in myriad ways, publishing fiction, nonfiction and poetry informed by her experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis. In this new memoir (published by La Nave di Teseo in 2021), we learn in this work that when she was 12 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz, and was immediately separated from her mother in a brutal scene. Bruck writes that later, after being yanked away, another prisoner who had been at the camp long enough to become a hated kapo pointed to smoke from the gas chambers and said, “You see that smoke?” When she nodded, he said her mother had been burnt alive, adding, “Your mother has become soap like mine.” 

More than 75 years later, the Hungarian-born Bruck remains committed to telling the story of the Holocaust. The 89-year-old transnational Italian writer’s new book, Il Pane Perduto, was one of five finalists this year for the Strega award, Italy’s highest literary prize. For the woman known to some as “Signora Auschwitz,” it’s of a piece with a long body of literature in which she has likened the experience of surviving the Holocaust to being eternally pregnant with a monster she cannot abort. And she has pledged to bear witness until she can’t.

Read the rest of the review here:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2021/07/08/edith-bruck-recounting-the-holocaust-until-she-cant/