'Two Empty Rooms' excerpted in Jewish Currents

Thanks to Jewish Currents magazine, another part of Edith Bruck's body of work has made the journey into English.

The web and print magazine has published an excerpt of Ms. Bruck's Two Empty Rooms (Due Stanze Vuote), which I have translated but which hasn't been published yet in English in its entirety. It complements This Darkness Will Never End.

Ms. Bruck has only published two short story collections but both are stunning and even though they both touch on the "absurd reality" of survival, they do so in different ways. Two Empty Rooms, which was published in 1974 and was a finalist for the prestigious Strega literary prize in Italy, is nothing short of a reckoning with the past. Specifically a Holocaust survivor's past -- which includes a village full of people who did little when she was deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

But as Judith says in the title story, Ms. Bruck isn't here to "accuse" anyone but rather to report, to probe. How is it that human beings can be this way?

The editors at Jewish Currents homed in on some of the most provocative lines in the novella, using them as pull quotes. Namely:

-- "When they took you away, I thought, Finally I won't see them suffering anymore."

-- "A real live Jewish woman! She used to live here."

My thanks to Nathan Goldman, one of the magazine's fine editors who worked closely with me to bring this work into the English-speaking world.

Now what publisher would like to publish the entire collection?

Please take a moment to read the excerpt here.

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