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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