Ask your library to buy THIS DARKNESS WILL NEVER END

Did you know you could ask your public or university library to buy a book that you'd like to read?

Yes!

And that book could be This Darkness Will Never End, my translation of Edith Bruck's debut short story collection.

I'm thrilled to say the New York Public Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia have already bought copies. Pending requests include Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago.

(If you live in any of these cities, go ahead and make a second request. It can't hurt!) 

(Click here for Los Angeles: https://www.lapl.org/suggest-a-purchase)

Atlanta friends, the book is not part of collections in Fulton County or DeKalb, so can you help?

I asked my library in West Hartford to buy a copy, and they did! (They hosted me for a reading, too.) Wesleyan University also has a copy.

The book is of particular interest to survivors of the Holocaust and anyone who knows a survivor, but it's also popular with readers of Italian literature, lovers of short stories and fans of Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning 1997 movie, "Life Is Beautiful," which film scholars say was partly inspired by the title story of my translation.

When Edith first began publishing her work in Italy in the late 1950s, Italian critics compared her to Anne Frank. The young Dutch girl's diary had been published a few years before Edith's debut came out in Italy.

Just as Anne's diary captures a surreal moment of families in hiding, the stories in my translation reveal a lost world of poor Hungarian Jews, at the mercy of the Nazis and the many collaborators they inspired during their campaign of hatred. And yet, Edith still manages to evoke the joys of a loving family, and the gift that is remembrance.

All of this to say, it's a work that would be a credit to your library.

I'm grateful for all of the support I've received from libraries. I gave readings of the translation at libraries in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The Forbes Library in Northampton even recorded my talk, which you can see by clicking here.

I'll close with a photo of my translation on a shelf not at a library but at Atticus Books in New Haven (you can also ask your favorite indie to buy it). When I visited the city for CNN Travel, I was thrilled to see the bookstore stocked my translation!

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Re-discovering New Haven for CNN Travel

I got to visit New Haven on the company dime and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Now you can, too -- here's my story. It's part of a series we've been doing for three years on the best towns in America that fly under the radar and are often far from the major metropolitan areas.

New Haven is home to Yale -- which you can see in this photo I snapped -- and it's also one of the most walkable cities I've visited in the US.

Here's a note I scrawled in my journal:

New Haven is glorious! I don’t really say it happily but rather with a not-so-healthy dose of jealousy and what-if-ism! It would appear getting into Yale is a golden ticket in more ways than one. You get to live in a beautiful, vibrant city that’s walkable and architecturally alluring (in addition to studying at one of the finest universities in the world).

Before I forget: New Haven is for walkers. I walked so much. So it was really unavoidable that I’d love it, I suppose.

Also, my translation, This Darkness Will Never End, was on the shelf at Atticus! YES!

Fun fact: I gave all of my leftovers to men on New Haven Green who appeared to need food.

Moment of beauty after the visit: I bought Leo a small puzzle of the painting The Wave at the Yale Art Gallery and he really liked it. He asked to open it immediately and then instead of watching TV, he began to assemble it. When we turned on “Father Ted” after a bit, he didn’t pay much attention to it, preferring instead to painstakingly find pieces of boats that appear in the painting.

(The Yale Art Gallery is quite nice and I didn’t even get to visit the sculpture garden – home to an Alexander Calder – because of the rain).

Anyway, please read my CNN story!

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