Women Holocaust survivors: A Reading List

To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27), below you'll find all the books I have read or want to read by or about women who survived the Holocaust. Note, this list is NOT exhaustive!  Mainly Italian authors, for starters. But a good primer on works involving a group of survivors that has often been marginalized, as I wrote in an article for the American Scholar last year. 

Available in translation

Who Loves You Like This, Edith Bruck (Paul Dry Books; Thomas Kelso, translator)

Lost Bread, Edith Bruck (Ibid., Gabriella Romani and David Yanoff, translators)

Letter to My Mother, Edith Bruck (Brenda Webster and Gabriella Romani, translators)

There's a Place on Earth, Giuliana Tedeschi, (Tim Parks, translator)

Sentenced to Live, A Survivor's Memoir, Cecilie Klein

Ravensbrück, The Women's Camp of Death, Denise Dufournier

Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz 

Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo (French resistance fighter)

A Scrap of Time, Ida Fink (a collection of stories that includes "The Key Game" -- devastating)

Distant Fathers, Marina Jarre (click to read my reviews of both Jarre titles)

Return to Latvia, Marina Jarre (both Jarre books were translated by Ann Goldstein)

*Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (I cited this book in the article I published in the American Scholar about women Holocaust survivors)

Not available in English translation

L'esile filo della memoria, Lidia Beccaria Rolfi (This book begins a few days before the writer was liberated from the concentration camp called Ravensbruck, which is fascinating because it deals with the saga of afterward. As if the saga of before -- the camps -- weren't enough.)

Come una rana d'inverno: Conversazioni con tre donne sopravvissute ad Auschwitz, Daniela Padoan (interviews with three women who survived the Holocaust) 

Il silenzio dei vivi, Elisa Springer

Andremo in città, Edith Bruck (Note, I'm translating this, thanks to an NEA grant)

Due Stanze Vuote, Edith Bruck (" ")

Transit, Edith Bruck

Signora Auschwitz, Edith Bruck

Scolpitelo nel vostro cuore, Liliana Segre

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My Tiny Love Story in The New York Times

I've written a tiny love story for The New York Times and I think I'd like to compose one for everyone I've ever loved!

But I started with my first best friend, and it's a pretty good place to start.

World, this is my sister, Denise!

Coming to my rescue -- not for the first time.

The words came to me one day while I was taking a walk. That's so often how writing works, and in this case, since it's only 100 words, the few lines that might surface while out and about suffice!

We've had a two-year period of losses, but as monumental as those events were, little moments and gestures can often be decisive. Little moments that act like life boats.

To read the entry properly, click here.

Ryan Holiday: These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life

I don't agree with all of them, but I do find this list (link below) of 'reading rules' intriguing, and I agree with the author (Ryan Holiday) that any aim at reading well, widely and frequently can benefit from a strategy.

The rules I agree with:

–"Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. I’ve read at the Grammy’s and in the moments before going under for a surgery. I’ve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get."

–"In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core."

–"Don’t just read books, re-read books. There’s a great line the Stoics loved—that we never step in the same river twice. The books don’t change, but you do."

Read more here:

https://ryanholiday.net/these-38-reading-rules-changed-my-life/

First line of "The Great Gatsby" -- in Italian

One day, for no particular reason, I decided I absolutely had to know the opening lines of the Italian version of my favorite novel – and I needed to record it somewhere … here, of course. So without further ado, I give you F. Scott Fitzgerald in Italian:

Negli anni più vulnerabili della giovinezza, mio padre mi diede un consiglio che non mi è mai più uscito di mente. "Quando ti viene voglia di criticare qualcuno," mi disse, "ricordati che non tutti a questo mondo hanno avuto i vantaggi che hai avuto tu."

Which in English is:

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

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Happy heavenly birthday, Mariateresa Di Lascia!

Today is the birthday of Italian author and parliamentarian Mariateresa Di Lascia -- she would have been 69. She died in 1994 after writing a few short stories and completing a lone novel.

I encountered her work when I was commissioned to write an article for the Literary Hub site about Italian novels that hadn't been translated into English yet -- but should be. 

The novel, Passaggio in Ombra (my English title: "Into the Shadows") is a coming-of-age work that is one of many books to light the way for Elena Ferrante (both authors featuring women narrators bucking convention). As I've written before, Di Lascia’s novel analyzes and exalts the interior lives of a group of women buffeted by their limited choices, their unruly desire for freedom and the price they pay for these desires (something anyone suffering from #Ferrantefever would understand).

I won a $5,000 grant from PEN America to jumpstart my translation work on the manuscript. Unfortunately it has yet to find a publisher. You can read an excerpt of my translation here.

One of the lines I love best isn't in this excerpt and is about the narrator's father:

"When he thought about how his life would turn out, what form it would take if indeed it would ever bend itself to a specific shape, he felt something inside of him rebel. As if it would be an unbearable imposition. In those days, he had one lone desire: to preserve for as long as he could -- maybe even forever -- the freedom to have no direction of any kind."

I've had to put her work aside because I have an NEA translation grant to work on selected short stories by Edith Bruck. But one day, I will return to the Di Lascia manuscript one day and I hope to publish it. 

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