Edith Bruck & International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27)

Unfortunately, I won’t make it to NYC today where outside of the Italian Consulate the names of all of the Italian victims of the Nazis will be read as part of a solemn, annual ritual that I’ve attended multiple times since I began translating Edith Bruck’s work. But I’m thinking of her (and all of those who were persecuted during World War II), along with the loved ones she lost, “swallowed up,” as she wrote, during “the long dark days of annihilation.” 

If you’d like to read some of her work, below you’ll find links to some of my translations of her fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

*My translation of a speech she gave called "My Alma Mater Is Auschwitz":

https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/essay/my-alma-mater-auschwitz-edith-bruck

 

*An excerpt of her second short story collection, Two Empty Rooms:

https://jewishcurrents.org/two-empty-rooms

*Translations of some of my favorite poems by Edith Bruck, including one in which she writes, "If there’s another life/I will be a yellow star/ To remind you once upon a time​/there was Auschwitz​":

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/edith-bruck-versi-vissuti/

*Last but not least: This Darkness Will Never End, my translation of her seminal 1962 short story collection:

        Click here to buy from Amazon

        OR here to buy from Bookshop

Wait, one more thing: here’s a recording of a talk I gave about my translation, courtesy of the wonderful librarians in Northampton, Massachusetts (it includes a lot of biographical information and anecdotes from my visit with Edith Bruck last summer in Rome).

I’ll close with one of my favorite lines from Edith’s work:

Sometimes it takes so little

Almost nothing

A simple gesture

A glance;

As when in the Lager

They allowed you a potato

A turnip

A tattered glove

Life is beautiful in those moments

And human beings so very kind

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What I read in 2025

Not a great year in reading for me and I am all to blame, a self-inflicted wound owing to distraction and commitments related to the translation (I also taught a class at Wesleyan, which requires me to re-read a lot of books from the course text list and thus neglect any non-course books I may have been reading). 

But I do like to log the year in reading and so here are a few books that sparked my imagination in significant ways:

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

The experience of reading John and Paul was so seismic that I wonder if perhaps I've been excluding a genre that I would otherwise love, namely biographies.

It’s been a while since I devoured a book the way I read this book. As I wrote in my journal, "I’ve been staying up until 11 p.m. reading it – not looking at Facebook, not fooling around with the laptop. Just reading as much of the book as I can manage – running to it whenever I have a moment free."

Am I reading the wrong books? So should I be reading more biographies? Or books about rock icons I love?! (Quick! Someone send me a biography of Bono and/or U2)

I think childhood -- and childhood obsessions -- could be the key here. When I read about the Beatles, it's as though I am reading about someone I knew – as if someone wrote a biography of St. Anthony’s High School or the streets of Florence or my mother. I followed the Beatles so closely as a young girl that I suppose that's why. As I wrote on Goodreads, it was part and parcel of my girlhood obsession with the Beatles to explore in minute detail the inner workings of the Lennon-McCarthy songwriting partnership, and thanks to this wonderful dual biography of the two Beatles, I can do just that. For anyone who's ever had any kind of Beatle worship, this book is essential. And what an interesting concept! Exploring this relationship as a one-of-a-kind partnership that eschews easy definition. 

I read another book that fascinated me while also being revolting:

Nobody's Girl by Virginia Giuffre

I both recommend and don't recommend this book by one of the best-known victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Would you like to confront pure evil? On the other hand, I made a point of purchasing the hardback so that my purchase could be counted in the hopes there are many, many sales. Sales = interest. Sales = this topic is important.

Per my routine, I also read a book by French novelist Patrick Modiano (which I was even able to review for the Boston Globe) and I re-read A Christmas Carol, something I've been doing every year at Christmas for about a decade (it's worth reading each year a line with which Marley chastises Scrooge: "Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business...")

And I read another book that satisfies my nascent need to know everything about Nazi-occupied Europe: The Propagandist. I wrote about it for the 'What We're Reading' rubric published by The Common literary magazine (back in March). It's a fascinating though also revolting book about a French family that was pro-Hitler during World War II and most notably long afterwards as well! I believe it caused a bit of a stir when it was published in France. 

I also began reading (not read, in the past tense) (see distraction above, also insistence on reading multiple books at once) Eichmann in Jerusalem, the seminal account by Hannah Arendt of Adolf Eichmann's infamous trial for war crimes. There are a few books in the world that are so fundamental for understanding human behavior that you can glean quite a bit by reading half or failing to finish, and this is one such book. What I read about Eichmann's attitude, his ordinariness, his spoken testimony at the trial, the fact that he lived for quite a few years (dare I say happily?) in Argentina before being captured, all of this furnishes me with new horrifying information about the semi-recent historical event that engrosses me the most. (But I plan to finish it this year). 

Similarly, I read a book I'd long been searching for: Lettera da Francoforte by "my" author, Edith Bruck (translation: Letter from Frankfurt; not available in English). I found it at Il Libraccio in Florence -- a review copy, I believe, since on the front it says "inedito," ('unpublished'). It's the story of a Holocaust victim who tries to apply to a compensation program run by the German government. No, I do not know how autobiographical this work is but I'm going to see if I can find out. Did Edith ever apply to this fund? Is this fund real? I've come to know a little bit about the Claims Conference, which distributes compensation to victims of the Holocaust but I don't believe it is run by Germany.

What I'm Reading: The Art of X-Ray Reading

Writers are readers, right?

They have to be, and the author of the book, The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing, does an amazing job of showing the fruits we enjoy when we read very closely.

Roy Peter Clark examines work by James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Zora Neale Hurston and Joan Didion, among others. Not summaries, not book reports but a deep examination of word choice, and how authors "create" meaning through the particular order of words.

Much of it is work I've read but perhaps not in this way or with the particular lens he employs. And besides, a short story like Joyce's "The Dead" is ripe for re-reading, savoring, deciphering, dissecting, all of which you'll find in the chapter dedicated to Joyce. As you can imagine, he examines the final lines of the story where words are repeated and he talks about the deft use of repetition here -- in other contexts, it could be something to avoid but the conscious re-use of particular words underscores the paralysis experienced by the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy.

In the back, Clark compiled a list of a long list of great sentences from a wide variety of works.

I actually read this book in 2025. I've been meaning to finish this post for a while but other commitments came first.

Before I conclude, let me say something about one section that I especially recommend: his analysis of the Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming." I've published the first stanza in another blogpost but it's worth reproducing it again in part, especially in light of the author's focus on the word gyre, which he says is an unusual word:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre//The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Clark gets into the nitty gritty of the word's Greek origins, offers synonyms (vortex, maelstrom) and also notes it comes at the end of a sentence that begins with the repetition of a present participle -- unusual. A poem written to reflect a period of political turbulence, completely embodied in one word.

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To the ends of the word...: The Bishop's Bedroom by Piero Chiara

I am not the only one who enjoyed The Bishop's Bedroom! Happy to share this link to a review of the work by Piero Chiara, which was translated magnificently by Jill Foulston.

Here's the link to the blogpost with the review on a blog called To the Ends of the Word:

To the ends of the word...: The Bishop's Bedroom by Piero Chiara: The Bishop's Bedroom by Piero Chiara Translated by Jill Foulston

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A poem for today? The Second Coming by Yeats

(First stanza, only. How prescient W. B. Yeats was!)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 (Thanks to the Poetry Foundation. Also thanks to Roy Peter Clark for his wonderful analysis of this poem in his book, The Art of X-Ray Reading). (Also: photo courtesy of me! From our 2024 trip to Ireland, which included a stop at his grave).

Please review 'This Darkness Will Never End' on Amazon

I've been talking up my translation every way I can -- blogposts, public readings, bookfairs, Facebook messages, a trip to Ohio, mentions in a family Christmas newsletter, you name it!

And I've been foisting this work on everyone I know since it was published last April.

But I've neglected to say anything about reviewing This Darkness Will Never End on Amazon. Probably because I was born in 1850, as I like to say (I also like to add that Leo corrected me one day with this quip: "More like 1770." Ouch!) And also because I've been focused on readings, my dayjob, Leo, breathing, etc.

I do, of course, use Amazon! All the time. 

And I do want people to find it on Amazon! A famous author actually did just that and she got in touch with me, which was amazing.

You don't need to be famous to leave a review on Amazon of This Darkness Will Never End.

You just need to have some thoughts about the translation or Edith Bruck. So if you've read it, I hope you will leave a review and provide some honest feedback. Here's the link again:

https://www.amazon.com/This-Darkness-Will-Never-End/dp/1589882016

GRAZIE di cuore!

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At a little library near you: 'This Darkness Will Never End'

UPDATED I've been dropping off copies of the translation at little libraries, including the one in Washington Market Park in Manhattan seen in the photo. I affix a note that explains how the book is a gift to whoever finds it and perhaps if the reading experience is a pleasure, would the person consider buying a copy for a friend?

Thousands of books are published each year and it's easy for a book from a small press to get lost, especially a translated title. So I took it upon myself to find a new way to introduce the book to a wider audience.

Since This Darkness Will Never End is a short story collection, I think it will work well for book clubs and I've devised a book club guide that you can find here.

It's also good for course adoptions -- thanks to Otterbein for proving this! My translation of Edith Bruck's first short story collection complements other Holocaust narrative texts such as works by Primo Levi or even The Diary of Anne Frank.

UPDATE: Copies of the translation have also been placed in Little Libraries in Boston, New Haven and Belmar, NJ.

Now that I think about it, I should have included my email address on the note affixed to the translation -- that way, I would possibly know who found the copy. Like a message in a bottle!

If you haven't read the translation yet, here's hoping you find a copy in a little library near you! Or you can buy it here or on Amazon (where you can consider writing a customer review!).

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I eloped "with" Italy 30 years ago

How odd to conclude that among the loves of your life is an entire country, in addition to the real loved ones, like Leo.

I am, of course, talking about Italy, a country that for me is nothing less than a shaman, no safer than those Sirens who ensnared Odysseus, and more akin to a being that enthralls (enchants/bewitches) me than a landmass. Also: a twin who lives mainly in my mind but who nonetheless follows me wherever I go.

And it's been following me for a long time: 30 years ago this year, I left America to live in Italy.

Dates. Anniversaries. Milestones. The accumulation of years. I dwell on these notions a lot. But because I've been busy promoting This Darkness Will Never End, my first book-length translation, I haven't had a chance to reflect much on the fact that three decades ago this year, I left for Italy. 

Thus began my expat life -- the years, for better or for worse, against which all the subsequent years would be judged.

Thirty years ago, I eloped to -- and with -- Italy. And 'eloped' is the right word because the transaction lacked the solid planning of a wedding. I escaped with my paramour and let all the naysayers (who wisely said, 'You don't have a job...') be damned. All I knew was that, following my graduation from Wesleyan, I'd secured through a friend a summer "job" as a tutor to a bunch of rich Romans whose children attended an American school in Rome. And then I would go on to Pisa where I would be the guest of a doctor whose cousin worked in my department at Wesleyan.

After that, who knew? Not I, but I didn't care. I only knew one thing: my days of living in one language were over. Once I'd tasted bilingual life, it was the only one for me. As I mentioned in a previous post, once you've heard and understood Italians speaking their native language, I don't think you can go back to the English-only world. I couldn't. 

Before the year was out, I migrated to Florence, a city I'd circled warily. It's hard to believe this, but I was on Team Siena back then. I'd spent a semester in Siena as a student and found Florence dirty and chaotic whenever I visited.

But one Sunday, the doctor who was hosting me in Pisa had to work all day at her hospital in Florence and she invited me to come along. The city enchanted me! Perhaps because she dropped me off somewhere other than the dodgy train station or due to the quiet hum of a weekend but I can remember crossing one of the bridges that span the Arno and succumbing to the magic of Florence.

Lasciate ogne speranza: for me, at that point, I could abandon all "speranza" -- hope -- of ever falling out of love with Florence or Italy. Like the author of those famous words, I would spend the rest of my life thinking about enchanting, beguiling, occasionally wicked Florence.

As I've said before, if my life were a novel, I might call my departure for Italy the “inciting incident.” It followed that semester abroad where I'd resolved to truly immerse myself in the culture, and being fluent in Italian became an obsession—a lonely one, since I often forced myself to forfeit outings with other Americans so I could instead practice Italian. 

What's ironic: I’d struggled to learn the language in my freshman year of college, but once in Italy, nothing short of fluency would satisfy me. In an essay I wrote for The Millions, I noted that one of the first words I learned on the ground in Italy was the verb scherzare. "It means 'to joke' and is indispensable for following almost any conversation with Italians. During a trip I took to Sicily, a Palermo policeman warned me about strange men near the station by yanking on the skin below his eye with his finger, and uttering a single word, occhio, which simply means 'eye.' I was hooked," I wrote. Mastering Italian became a pursuit not unlike bedding men or getting drunk.

I had very little money when I lived in Italy, and no real career to speak of. In fact, when I returned to the States, I was at loose ends (since I hadn't been building a professional foundation, or so I thought). I can recall visiting the beach with my sister, who uttered an immortal line about my lack of a real job when I lived in Italy, which caused a bit of a stir between us at the time.

She wasn't wrong. But she may not have realized what Dad had intuited. Knowing not only that he was a world traveler but also that his library included books by many authors who made the most of their ex-pat years, I believe my father sent me off to Italy so that I could truly live, so that I could collect the kinds of experiences that fiction and other writing spring from.

Of course him being him (a contrarian), he had an unforgettable comment when I decided to return home from Italy: "It's all downhill from here." I was 25!

It took me many years to get over leaving Italy. Perhaps because I moved from a medieval tower in the center of Florence to an apartment in a car-infested Atlanta suburb. I can recall crying in the car in Atlanta whenever we listened to Italian music (and forget watching Italian movies -- total sob fest).

Eventually I forced myself to develop interests in other countries, such as Mexico, which we visited quite a few times. I even allowed myself to study Spanish, although it felt as though I were betraying my true love, Italian.

And then when I'd finally moved on, I allowed myself after many years to return to Italy, only to discover that I still wanted what I shouldn't want: to live in two places and two languages, which is to say, live in Italy and the US. The compromise? I live in two languages by translating Italian literature.

The experience of living in Italy was so rich, it's as though everything that came after paled. Luckily, I became a mother and that feeling dissipated because the experience of being a mother is much more powerful than adoring a culture or way of life.

But the experience of living there continues to shape my life today (and the mementos that have proliferated throughout my house. It dominates what I read, and it spurred me to translate, and it influences where I choose to vacation (and my dreams for retirement, which I recently concluded should begin with a year's wandering through Italy).

I continue to marvel over Italians and the Italian way of life. At one point during our travels last summer, I developed an obsession with the Roma-Viterbo train line, which is separate from Trenitalia. As I wrote here, it's not entirely odd: our apartment in Rome overlooked one of the stations on the line. And when I am in Italy, I am immersed in "my beat," which I define as the ordinary aspects of Italian life, the parts of Italian life that an average Italian contends with. I found it reminded me of the PATH trains that link lower Manhattan to New Jersey inasmuch as it's both local and separate. They are like an alt subway line, which is slightly odd. If you were a traveler to NYC, you could mistake them for the actual subway system, no?

And I continue to silently beg Italians to keep being Italian (especially as I note developments such as a Starbucks coffee location on Via del Corso in Florence. Ma dai! Non ci voleva).

So my dear Italy, I'm very happy we eloped all those years ago! I'll remain true to you until my dying day.

-30-

For CNN Travel: why can't America have more piazzas?

Piazza Navona. Piazza Santo Spirito. Campo dei Fiori. Piazza Duomo (Milan). Just some of the piazzas I love. 

And since I now work as a contract editor for CNN Travel, I recently published an article about how much Americans have come to love public squares in Europe -- in increasing numbers, too -- only to return home disappointed that most of our towns and cities don't have these wonderful outdoor communal living rooms.

My photo editor at CNN found a gorgeous photo of the epic piazza in Lucca that has the distinction of being one of the only fully-enclosed piazzas in Italy (fully-walled, in other words; you enter through arches/porticos, not a road) (click on the link for the story to see it). I'm using here a photo of Piazza San Carlo in Torino, which is also dazzling. I took it several years ago on a whirlwind, solo trip to Italy on the occasion of the Salone del Libro -- Italy's largest book fair.

You can read the story here:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/19/travel/europe-public-squares-american-development

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Meeting Donatella Di Pietrantonio at Rizzoli this year

At an event at Rizzoli in Manhattan earlier this year, I asked Donatella Di Pietrantonio to autograph one of her books that I love -- L'Arminuta (English: A Girl Returned) and when I told her I did some translation work, she gushed over the efforts and mission of literary translators (I do, too, largely because I am still trying to find my footing in this essential branch of literary philanthropy). Take a look at her message: "A Jeanne, grazie per il grande lavoro che fa." Translation: "To Jeanne, thank you for the important work that you do."

The book is a novel set in the author's native Abruzzo, and Di Pietrantonio is one of a wave of Southern Italian women authors who have emerged in the literary landscape remade by Elena Ferrante.

I reviewed the translation for the Kenyon Review and as I noted in the review, Di Pietrantonio "grapples with the holy trifecta of human emotions (and thus, fiction): love, longing and loss." It is the stunning story of an adoption undone but so much more than that. To quote the review again:

For much of this novel, published in Italy in 2017, the narrator is caught between two mothers. Di Pietrantonio often figuratively—and skillfully—sets one mother against the other: “Every Saturday the mother in the town was obliged to give me a small sum, which came by some means or other from the mother on the coast.”

No surprise, the author is a class act! How lovely it was to meet her, at a conference dedicated to Italian literature (which, hint hint, I hope Rizzoli and the Italian Cultural Institute will host again in 2026).

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Edith Bruck & My Year in Translation (2025)

It was the year of the milestone for me -- I published my first book-length translation, This Darkness Will Never End. I both love and hate to admit that I've wanted to translate a book since studying Italian at Wesleyan, which was a while ago, hence the hate. (I have a similar push-pull when asking people to buy the translation -- read 'til the end to see what I mean).

As a result of the work required to promote the book, my annual tallying up of creative pursuits is a bit thin, although in support of the translation, I also published two shorter translations online of work by Edith Bruck:

*An essay called, “My Alma Mater is Auschwitz,” (in World Literature Today, published on Jan. 27, 2025, in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day)

AND

*An excerpt of Ms. Bruck's 1974 novella, "Two Empty Rooms," in Jewish Currents. 

As I staged readings for the translation around the Northeast (see pic of a book event in Connecticut) and taught a course at Wesleyan, I managed to spend very little time writing essays this year, although since my work at CNN has changed (I'm now working for CNN Travel), I did produce some travel writing, including an article that I wrote about the dearth of piazzas in the US and another about visiting the liberal enclave of Northampton, Massachusetts.

But I did blog, especially about Italy! You might like this post. Or perhaps you want to hear me drone on about the little keepsakes I insist on buying? Read this post. 

And in addition to blogging about Italy, I also somehow wrote a blogpost in remembrance of Liz that readers found even though I didn't share it on social media. In fact, more people have read this post than any other post I've ever written in nearly 20 years of blogging. Perhaps there are lots of other translators or writers out there who only reach a milestone after the person who would have appreciated it the most has died and that's why so many people read it -- ? But maybe it's easy to explain: grief is our shared possession, the one club every single human being will join, wittingly or unwittingly. 

It's worth mentioning one more bit of writing: I published my first obituary with CNN -- one that I had pitched to write for our pre-written obit file and which combined my dayjob with my after-hours work: Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor died at age 113. I finished the pre-write not too long before she unfortunately left us.

I did little in the way of literary criticism but I managed to publish a review of a book by one of my favorite authors, Patrick Modiano, for one of my favorite newspapers, The Boston Globe. 

What were you up to this year? What milestones did you reach or move toward?

One last question: As you contemplate gifts for Hanukkah and Christmas, will you consider giving someone you love This Darkness Will Never End?

I'm proud to have reached this milestone and I've found hard work is its own reward. But I believe in Edith Bruck, I believe in the powerful message of survival her work transmits and I believe we must know our history so my Christmas wish is to spread the word about this translation as far as it can go. Spreading the word, for better or for worse, means selling more translations (including ebooks!).

Yours in reading, Jeanne

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What I'm reading: Ginzburg, sempre Ginzburg

I keep a book log of what I read, and it's now evolved into more of a book journal because I love noting passages that intrigue me. And I also note whether I am "reading" or "re-reading" a work. Each year, I am always re-reading something by Natalia Ginzburg.

But this year, I am actually reading new works by her as well! Not just revisiting Lessico Famigliare ("Family Lexicon," from NYRB, in the superb Jenny McPhee translation) or Le voci della sera, which is one of my favorites, but actually venturing into new Ginzburg territory, namely:

Vita immaginaria

Mai devi domandarmi

And in particular, I'd like to highlight the following work, which, as you will learn, is quite unusual:

È difficile parlare di sé

This last work is for the Ginzburg completist, and I keep it on the bedside table, which is to say I am not reading it cover to cover bur rather dipping into it as time allows. 

It is, and I kid you not, the transcript of a series of television interviews with Ginzburg in which she mulls over all of her major works, prompted by host Marino Sinibaldi. There were also some guests who made appearances -- critics and colleagues from Einaudi and some other famous writers. All of her works and each stage of her career, lovingly explored.

What's especially compelling is she elaborates on the death of her husband, Leone Ginzburg, at the hands of the Fascists, in a way she did not in any of her major published works. She reported on his death in her seminal essay, "Winter in Abruzzi," if reporting can consist of a single line (I don't blame her one bit -- when the candle of hope is brutally snuffed out, often the less said the better).

Of particular interest to me now among the works explored in the compendium is the essay "Gli ebrei," ["The Jews"], which appeared in Vita immaginaria and which was published immediately following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre where Israeli athletes were murdered.

Most notably, she wonders if the Jews who settled in modern-day Israel should have settled elsewhere, if they should have been given land elsewhere (she mentions Canada). She says many other amazing things in this essay (and the book of transcripts, for that matter) about her identity as a woman with a Jewish and Catholic upbringing. I highly recommend it!

I've written about Ginzburg's work for the Kenyon Review and also for the literary site, Reading in Translation. She remains an enigma -- someone who lived a traditional woman's life, writing in fits and starts when she wasn't changing diapers or putting dinner on the table, someone who eschewed feminism, someone who can at times be hidden in plain sight, to quote an article about her, but who has become in the US arguably the most famous Italian woman writer, aside from Elena Ferrante, possibly, only possibly. She might be THE most famous Italian woman writer for Americans.

More so than Elsa Morante. More so than Grazia Deledda. More so than Dacia Maraini.

If you haven't read any works by her, begin with Family Lexicon (preferably the Jenny McPhee translation published by NYRB). It won the Strega, which is Italy's highest literary award.

And happy reading!

Come to a reading in Northampton on Dec. 8

Event alert!

I'll be reading from my translation, This Darkness Will Never End, on Monday at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, home to Smith College. Here are the details:

        Mon., Dec. 8, 6 p.m.

        Forbes Library, 20 West Street, Northampton, MA.

I plan to excerpt a part of a speech I gave about Edith Bruck at Otterbein College in October. The title is, "The Age I Was When I Lost Everyone and Everything."

For more information, visit the library's event page.

See you there!

Why you should press 'record' on Thanksgiving (my Bos. Globe essay)

I'm reposting a version of an essay I wrote for The Boston Globe several years ago that contains some advice I still like to offer folks, especially at this time of year. It's an essay about the power of recording our loved ones' words, and the power specifically of recording my son's words and also those of my mother, in what was one of the last good recordings I made with her. 

Be fair warned, though: "Sound gets inside of you -- it inhabits you. It can break your heart."

Here's the essay:

During a weekend visit to New York last winter, I recorded my son’s impressions of the city. I began by asking where we were. I thought he would simply say “Manhattan” or “at the hotel,” but Leo, then 9, said, “We’re in a hotel in New York City, in North America, on a planet known as Earth, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, in a universe known as the Universe.”

When I became a mother in my late 30s, I wanted to do more than take photos or videos of my son. I wanted to remember his speech development by preserving his sounds. So I recorded him.

Jay Allison, the founder of “The Moth Radio Hour,” once told me that humans relate to sound in a way that’s distinct from other media.

“Sound literally gets inside of you — it inhabits you,” Allison said. “It can break your heart. That’s different from photos, which remain on the outside.”

I recorded Leo’s snores, his gurgles, his first words. Some recordings are filled with his guffawing as he watches TV. His belly laughs are a tonic.

Recording has been a tradition in my family. My late father recorded conversations with my sisters and me on a handheld tape deck. Piling into his den, we crowded around his desk as he pressed the two large play and record buttons. Later, we would listen back to the tape with glee.

Far too late, I grasped the importance of recording my mother and father. If pure joy compelled me to record Leo, pure dread inspired me to begin recording my parents a few years ago. What would happen to their stories when they died?

Before it was too late, I needed to piece together one bit of crucial family history that had never been fully explained: What had happened when my mother’s younger brother died in a car accident at age 18?

She rarely mentioned him during my childhood, except to say that my grandparents never recovered from the loss of their oldest son, whom everyone called Spike. I only gleaned a few snippets about him during the adults’ cocktail hour at my grandparents’ house: He had an outgoing personality and was a football star.

My mother was 19 when he died. Now, in part because of my recordings, I see his death, in 1957, as an event that has hovered over her entire adult life.

Recording my mother’s words made sense for another reason: Video is for action, and her action days are behind her. At the time of my last good recording, she was 83. She sat down in her chair at the foot of the stairs, and, bathed in the glow of a floor lamp, she lit a cigarette. She was game to talk about anything but the present or recent past, which dementia had begun to scramble in her brain. More or less housebound, she spent most days chain-smoking and dozing off, unsure of the month or sometimes even the season.

Her mental fog would soon force us to move her to a nursing home, but when I asked about the circumstances of Spike’s accident, barely a second elapsed before she began reciting a chronology of events. It was as if she was supplying answers she’d had at the ready for decades.

The accident had occurred during the summer. Spike was driving a convertible. A top student, he’d been given the car as a graduation gift from my grandparents, following his acceptance at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He’d been killed instantly when his car collided with an embankment and flipped over.

The funeral was held at his Catholic high school. “Oh God, thousands of people came,” my mother told me. “Thousands.” It doesn’t matter that she’s likely wrong about the number — it matters only that in her mind’s eye, legions of people came to pay their respects to the luminous brother she’d lost.

It wasn’t until months later, when I listened again to the recording, that I discovered a moment I had overlooked. After the funeral, my mother told me, they drove out to the cemetery, which was some distance away. At one point during the muggy hour-long drive, the road curved, and my mother turned to look behind her. And that’s when she glimpsed through the back windshield the headlights of the dozens and dozens of cars following the hearse to her brother’s final resting place.

More than anything else, that image crystallized for me the tragic loss she’d borne for 65 years.

Recording affords us the ability to save not just our parents’ voices but their stories.

“People would tell us, ‘I have a recording of my father’s voice, and it’s all I have left,’” Allison told me. “It was an actual part of the person — it contained his breath.”

In the years to come, these recordings that contain my mother’s breath will remain precious to me. And the little that I learned about Spike furnishes me with an outline of the uncle I never knew and his role in my mother’s life.

This holiday season, consider pressing “record” on your smartphone when you’re around the table. The sounds of gathering — the voices, the stories, the ambient clatter — will fill an audio time capsule you’ll cherish on some future day when you’re longing in vain to hear a loved one’s voice.

You can also read the essay (with the full image of the wonderful photo they chose) on the Globe site:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/23/opinion/why-you-should-record-your-holiday-dinner-conversations/ 

Please Give the Gift of Reading ‘This Darkness Will Never End’

As long as I'm alive, so are they -- in my books, in my heart.

This precious thought is one of many that Edith Bruck ("my author") shared with me in July when I visited her in Rome. We were speaking about her parents, and in Italian, her words were, "Finché vivo, vivono loro ... nei miei libri, nel mio cuore."

It's a sentiment that resonates deeply with me, even though my life's story is completely different from Edith Bruck's.

I, too, will do anything to keep the memory of my parents alive. And I'm so grateful that they conveyed the importance of literature, and also that they signaled to me early in my life the critical, painful and cataclysmic moment in modern history represented by the Holocaust.

In her case, she's kept alive the memory of two souls who were cruelly persecuted and then executed by the Nazis in 1944. For more than 80 years, she's borne witness to their tragic ends.

And the least I can do, as a translator of her work, is spread the word about her work, and share in the toil in one tiny way by translating her short stories.

Publishing This Darkness Will Never End, my translation of Edith's first short story collection, has been the highlight of my year, and it's given me membership in a club I deem quite special: the group of translators of Edith's work. They are translators of work by an Italian woman author. And last but not least, they are translators of works by Holocaust survivors. 

The colorful stories in this collection unearth a lost way of life: the rituals, preoccupations and joys of devout Jews living in rural Hungary in the years leading up to World War II. There are stories about the fearsome shochet who deems meat kosher -- or maybe not! -- and stories about the desperate but occasionally hilarious ways a poor man may attempt to feed his family.

The Holocaust looms like a specter in many of the stories -- sometimes only in the background, sometimes as the engine that drives the story to its harrowing climax -- but these tales are also testaments to the power of love and the primacy of familial bonds.

Her personal story is mesmerizing. Deported as a teen by the Germans, she survived Auschwitz and eventually made her way to Italy where she quickly mastered the Italian language, which became the instrument of her deliverance. She's published fiction, nonfiction and poetry. So treasured is she in Italy, Pope Francis insisted on meeting her and the two struck up a wonderful friendship.

At 94, she continues to write, dream, remember, share.

To those of you who have read the book, my thanks always. As you contemplate gifts for Hanukkah and Christmas, will you consider giving someone you love This Darkness Will Never End? 

You can buy the book on Amazon, at Bookshop or directly from the publisher. You can also buy it at Barnes & Noble, available to order and pick up at your local store or read as an e-book.

As I told the students at Otterbein College where I was invited to speak this Fall, this darkness will never end but thanks to Edith Bruck’s persistence, it has been transformed into literature, which will light the way for generations to come. And thanks to the great fortune I have to be the translator of this book, I have met so many of you and heard your impressions of the stories in addition to the impact of Edith Bruck's life on your understanding of the world and what it means to be human. We belong to a community of readers and that's a membership card that I hold dear. How big can we make this community? Help me make it very big.

Thank you!

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What I’m reading: 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'

What I’m reading:

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

It’s been a while since I have devoured a book the way I am reading this book. I’ve been staying up until 11 p.m. reading it – not looking at Facebook, not fooling around with the laptop. Just reading as much of the book as I can manage – running to it whenever I have a moment free.

HOW TO CAPITALIZE ON THIS?

Am I reading the wrong books?

Should I be reading more biographies?

I think childhood -- and childhood obsessions -- could be the key to understanding my readerly swooning here. When I read about the Beatles, it's as though I am reading about someone I knew – as if someone wrote a biography of St. Anthony’s High School or Eclectic House at Wesleyan.

Growing up, I listened to Beatles albums a lot. Thanks to my uncles Joe and Pat, we learned about the Beatles as children and had the records. I loved the anthologies to start and then later Abbey Road, The White Album and Let It Be.

As a tween and young teen, I would obsessively listen to Beatles-only radio programs (for example, Scott Muni's "Ticket To Ride"). I studied the album covers for clues just as I was told to do so on these programs. And the drama of their breakup was something I felt keenly -- more than a decade after the actual breakup!

The book is also just plain fascinating.

As I wrote on the Goodreads site, I don't think I could love this book more! I am returning to my girlhood obsession with the Beatles and exploring in minute detail the inner workings of the Lennon-McCarthy songwriting partnership, thanks to this wonderful dual biography of the two Beatles. For anyone who's ever had any kind of Beatle worship, this book is essential. And what an interesting concept! Exploring this relationship as a one-of-a-kind partnership that eschews easy definition. 

It's about friendship, it's about collegiality, it's about boyhood but it also confirms the partnership. I literally cannot put it done! Excellent work, Ian Leslie.

For more information about the book, visit the author's website where he details the genesis of this project:

https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-paul-mccartney

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The coolest thing: praise for “The Quiet Exhilaration of Learning Italian”

An academic in Italy read the essay I wrote for The Millions about learning to speak Italian and reposted it to LinkedIn with the most amazing comments!

She actually called it "un bellissimo articolo" -- a beautiful article!

I believe this is one of the few times I've read something in Italian that's commenting on my writing (outside of graduate school!):

Chi ama parlare, ma soprattutto vivere, una lingua riconoscerà subito questa sensazione: non è (solo) comunicare, ma anche acquisire una nuova identità e scoprire un altro modo di stare al mondo.

Translation: "Anyone who loves speaking but especially living another language will immediately recognize this sensation: it's not only communicating but also acquiring a new identity and discovering another way of being in the world."

How truly wonderful this is! Thank you, Gaia. Molto gentile!

Here's Gaia's post:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358807293552971776/

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My favorite photo of Florence?

I took this photo one morning over the summer as I walked the streets of "my city." Firenze. Florence. The City of Dante. Also: The city of Jeanne. I'd finally made it across the river to revisit my old neighborhood and check on Piazza Santo Spirito, my old stomping grounds.

The morning that I took this photo, I stopped at Caffe Ricchi by Santo Spirito for a cappuccino and as I wrote in an earlier post about the trip, when I asked the barman there about a sign listing soy milk cappuccino, he said it tastes like cardboard. Old-school Italy remaining old-school Italy -- yay. The piazza was largely empty, I guess because it was all of 7:30 a.m. but how delightful.

On the way home to our apartment, I passed a throwback record store and peering into the window, I saw a Beatles album whose cover read in Italian, "Aiuto." Aiuto = Help. That's the famous “Help” album – translated for the Italian edition. LOVE IT!

Anyway, this might be my favorite photo of Florence from this trip. It remains such a beautiful city -- especially if you're able to step away from the areas that are heavily populated with tourists.

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