Edith Bruck’s Lost Bread (2021) tells the story of a girl’s childhood in Hungary, her deportation to and separation from her mother at Auschwitz, her suffering and struggles in the camps, her return to Hungary, her move to Czechoslovakia, her life in Israel, and her tours with a dance troupe in Turkey, Switzerland, and Italy, where she ultimately moves. Published over sixty years earlier, Bruck’s first book, Who Loves You Like This (1959), recounts these same events, but the two works are distinct in terms of details and style. The 1959 one is characterized as testimony and a memoir, while the cover of Lost Bread bears the subheading “a novel.”
Bruck, born in 1931, narrates from a different place in Lost Bread. She is an established author, who has been writing in Italian for over sixty years, and whose works have been translated into multiple languages. Lost Bread incorporates this greater life arc, including the death of her husband Nelo Risi (1920-2015) and the increased distance from her childhood. This removal from the early years of “Ditke” (also young Edith Bruck’s nickname) is due to both time and, more violently, the Shoah. Enacting this distance on a narrative level, the first part of Lost Bread is in the third person, beginning: “Long, long ago lived a girl who, under the spring sun, with blond braids bouncing, would walk barefoot in the warm dust” (11). This opening contrasts with the first line of Who Loves You Like This: “I was born in Tiszakarad, a small Hungarian village between the Ukraine and Slovakia, on a Thursday night, May 3, 1932.” While both books are moving, deeply personal, and sophisticated literary endeavors, the 1959 memoir arises in part from the necessity to share what might not be known and the 2021 work originates in part from the need for the details not to be forgotten.
The narrative voice of Lost Bread switches to the first person after the family is brutally removed from their home. The “lost bread” refers to the dough her mother had rising when they were taken and continues to worry about, saying over and over again, “il pane, il pane:” “‘The bread, the bread,’ the mother repeated as if she wanted to say goodbye to it, defend it, even aid the loaves in their rising” (32). A reader could have assumed the bread of the title is the lifeline bread of the camps, memorably referred to as “pane-brot-broid-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyér” by Bruck’s friend Primo Levi. These terms evoke the words for “bread” that he heard used in Auschwitz and the last term is Hungarian, the language of Bruck’s first homeland but not of her writing. Bruck explains in the interview with Gabriella Romani added to the English edition of Lost Bread:“If I say bread in Hungarian, kenyér, I think of my mother, and tragic memories come to my mind. I see her with her apron and all the rest. If I say bread in Italian, pane, I think of the bakery where I buy it, of its fragrance but nothing else” (136). Writing in Italian offered Bruck a space of, in her words, “complete freedom” and “salvation” (136). This “lost bread” (pane) is also the loss of being able to say “kenyér” (bread) without also calling to mind the tragedy of her mother’s murder. Since she was so young when she was deported to Auschwitz, Ditke was originally with her mother (“In the left line with the older women, I hung on my mother’s flesh”), headed to the gas chambers, before a soldier forced her to the right.
Lost Bread represents multilingual worlds, with Hungarian, Yiddish, German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, French, and other languages woven into the narrative and author’s life. Both the Italian and English translation have footnotes for some of the phrases that appear. The narrator’s relationships to these languages evolve throughout the work. More religious than her daughter or husband, the mother prays daily in Yiddish: “inching closer to her beloved mother who, raising her eyes to the sky, spoke in Yiddish to her daily interlocutor. Ditke tried to decipher the words, and in a conciliatory tone asked for the first time, who knows why, if God also spoke Yiddish?” (22). The work ends with a letter from Bruck to God, speaking to her mother’s interlocutor, but in Italian and without the same confidence: “I have always wondered, and have yet to find an answer: what’s the purpose of prayers if they don’t change anything or anyone, if You cannot do anything and cannot hear, or see?” (128). Bruck asks God why He permitted Auschwitz to happen: “Why did You let him [Mengele] replace You? Let him point with his burning finger at millions of innocents who invoked You and adored You like my mother” (128). This questioning letter prompted Pope Francis to visit Bruck in her home in 2021, where she “asked him what he meant by saying that he approved of my letter, and he whispered that God is a constant search” (142). The two formed a warm rapport that was the object of frequent news reports, since “two humanities met that day” (142).
The horror of the camps is not presented as the only period of struggle in Who Loves You Like This or Lost Bread. Both portray the poverty and antisemitism of life in Hungary before deportation and the difficulties of postwar life, including people ignoring what survivors had undergone and continued European antisemitism. Who Loves You Like This was translated into English, by Thomas Kelso, in 2000, over forty years after its Italian publication, during which time the memories of women survivors gained new interest for Anglophone readers. This century has seen an increase in English translations of Italian writings by women and Italian works that represent migration, multilingualism, and transnational movements (see, for instance, Marina Jarre, Helena Janeczek, Claudia Durastanti). Translated by Gabriella Romani and David Yanoff, Lost Bread was published in English just two years after its 2021 Italian publication. Three of Bruck’s works are now available from Paul Dry Books: Who Loves You Like This, Lost Bread, and This Darkness Will Never End, translated by Jeanne Bonner.
As both a scholar and translator, Gabriella Romani has fostered this growing English-language attention to Bruck that led to the faster publication of Lost Bread. Romani contributed to the translation of Bruck’s powerful Letter to My Mother for the MLA Texts & Translations (2006, originally published in 1988) and has been in conversation with Bruck for years. Romani has also written on the author’s work repeatedly, not only in introductions to her translations, but also as a scholar, most recently in her co-edited volume Vivere la memoria: Edith Bruck tra letteratura, cinema, teatro (Living Memory: Edith Bruck between Literature, Cinema, and Theater). Lost Bread is framed by Romani’s comprehensive and accessible introduction at the beginning and, at the end, an author’s note and Gabriella Romani’s interview with Edith Bruck, providing additional, helpful context. The cover displays a 1942 photograph of Bruck and her mother.
In their translation, Romani and Yanoff follow Bruck’s commanding rhythms, keeping her piercing questions, her short sentences that underline or make vivid a particular moment, her longer sentences that explore complex interactions with searching honesty, and her quotations in other languages. Lost Bread interrogates the past, but also asks critical questions about the present. Toward the end of the work, Bruck reflects on her Italian homeland today: “As an adopted daughter of Italy, which has given me more than my daily bread, I am and will always be grateful. Yet, today I’m very worried for this country, and for Europe. I feel doubly the toxic wind blowing in the air, polluted by new forms of fascism, racism, nationalism, antisemitism. These are poisonous plants which have never been eradicated and are sprouting again with new branches, their bitter leaves feeding the people who listen to those screaming in their name, who are hungry for a strong identity, for a loud, pure, white Italian-ness. How sad, how dangerous it is.”
Saskia Ziolkowski: You co-translated Edith Bruck’s Letter to My Mother (with Brenda Webster, MLA Texts & Translations, 2006), Enrico Castelnuovo’s The Moncalvos (with Brenda Webster, Wings Press, 2017), and Edith Bruck’s Lost Bread (with David Yanoff, Paul Dry Books, 2023). How did these collaborations come about and what was the process with your co-translators?
Gabriella Romani: Thank you, first of all, for your interest in my work as a translator. It is a relevant aspect of my life as the authors I translated are important to me professionally and personally. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about it.
I met Brenda Webster in Rome through Edith Bruck many years ago. We were both Edith’s friends, both admired her work. Over time we became friends in our own right and began seeing each other in Rome whenever we were both there, often in May, the month Brenda spent in Italy every year with her husband Ira. In one of these meetings, we decided to give it a try and translate together Lettera alla madre, a book of Edith’s we were particularly interested in, because of its depiction of the mother-daughter relationship. Brenda lived in Northern California and I on the east coast, but through email exchanges we set up a system, which consisted of me doing a first draft, then Brenda going over it, and later on the phone we would look together at passages we were still not fully satisfied with. Besides being a translator, Brenda is a novelist and that helped, I think, to make sure that our translation did not feel like one, by which I mean that it would not stand in the way of fully enjoying the text.
As for Castelnuovo and his Moncalvos, after publishing my monograph in 2013 (on Postal Culture in 19th-century Italy), I began working on 19th-century Italian Jewish writers and realized that Enrico Castelnuovo’s novel had never been translated into English. I immediately asked Brenda if she wanted to translate it with me. She read the novel in its original version, I Moncalvo (1908) and was intrigued. Again, we followed the same system and completed the translation in about a year. It took us quite a bit of time, however, to find a publisher interested in publishing it. A problem, unfortunately, not too uncommon in the United States where the publishing industry, unlike the Italian one, is not very receptive towards foreign works of fiction. Only about 3% of books published in the US are translated from a foreign language..
As for my third co-translation, this time with David Yanoff (who is my husband), when Edith’s Il pane perduto came out, a colleague and friend of mine, Graziella Parati, came to me and said: “Gabriella, this book must come out in English, don’t you think?” Her nudging me worked and I decided to give it a go. Unfortunately, Brenda Webster was having health issues and could not do it with me, so I asked David who is a wonderful writer and published fiction himself. We adopted the same system Brenda and I had used: I wrote the first draft, David went over it and, then, we sat and worked on the final translation together. This partnership, first with Brenda and then with David, in which each of the two people is a native speaker of one of the languages involved in the translation, worked very well for me. I am not saying that it is necessary, but it is like being the two lenses of a pair of glasses, each lens exists independently but when used together, they make you see more clearly the overall picture.
SZ: While both important authors with Jewish heritage who write in Italian, the work of Enrico Castelnuovo (1839-1915) and Edith Bruck (b. 1931) are extremely different and I imagine presented different challenges and pleasures to translate. What notable differences were there in terms of how you approached translating a multilingual living author and one from the past, who may have had different assumptions about the audience’s knowledge? Would you share one passage that you spent a particularly long time with or that stays with you as a translator?
GR: Enrico Castelnuovo lived and wrote on the cusp of the twentieth century and the language he uses in his novel reflects his time. Edith Bruck is not a native speaker of Italian, as she was born and spent the first twelve years of her life in Hungary (before being deported to Auschwitz), and the Italian language she adopted to write (only four years after she moved to Italy in 1954) is the product of specific circumstances. In a short essay I wrote a while ago I called her ‘Italian writer by chance’ (scrittrice italiana per caso), meaning that if she had moved to France or the United States, instead of Italy, she would have written in French or English. Having said that I also think it is important to recognize that Bruck has been writing many volumes of narrative and poetry in Italian and should therefore be considered an Italian writer of Hungarian origin rather than a Hungarian writer naturalized Italian, as she is still referred to today by some journalists.
In terms of translating Castelnuovo and Bruck, both authors presented their own challenges. With Castelnuovo, our main concern was to create a language that did not sound too contemporary and retained some of the flavor of the time in which the author lived and wrote. With Bruck, who writes in a seemingly simple Italian (without, that is, the ornate style often used by Italian writers of her generation), we wanted to retain the peculiarity of her artistic voice.
SZ: All of your translations include wonderful introductions that situate the works and provide important context, for new and returning readers. In two of them, you are introducing Edith Bruck to an Anglophone audience. Did (or how did) changes in the critical landscape and Edith Bruck’s U.S. reception between your first translation (Letter to My Mother, 2006) and the most recent (Lost Bread, 2023) influence what you wanted to highlight in the introductions?
GR: All three introductions were influenced by the guidelines received by the publisher, especially in terms of length. I was given a limited number of pages, which did not allow an in-depth introduction. For Lost Bread, in particular, which came out with a small local publisher, Paul Dry Books, I wrote the introduction with a general, rather than specialized, readership in mind. My hope was, and still is, for her work to gain the recognition and visibility that it deserves, beyond the academic world of Italian Studies. She is a main voice of contemporary Italian literature and Italian Holocaust literature.
Her first book came out in Italy in 1959, her last one in 2024 (a new one is about to come out), all written in Italian; her professional career as a writer in Italy spans 60 years and that means that her work is interrelated with several decades of Italian literary and cultural history, however complicated this relationship has been. Within the Anglophone academic world Edith Bruck is well known, but she remains an obscure writer for the wider public. In France, instead, the opposite is true. There she has been widely translated and is read by the general public, while almost ignored by critics. In Italy she has recently reached a celebrity status, and is an easily recognizable face on the media, but critics in Italy too, tend to ignore her. I am happy to say that a volume of critical essays, which I edited with Michela Meschini, and which explores different aspects of Bruck’s work, is forthcoming next month with Peter Lang. It is the first critical volume focused entirely on her, and we hope others will follow soon.
SZ: Along with the translations The Moncalvos and Letter to My Mother you also edited the Italian originals of the works (I Moncalvo, Novara, 2019 and Lettera alla madre, MLA Texts & Translations, 2006). What considerations and issues come to play in editing as opposed to translating?
GR: The editing for both books was minimal and mainly for Castelnuovo’s language in the Italian version, where we eliminated some outdated spelling forms. The addition of some explanatory notes and paratextual material for both of them was intended to provide further context and facilitate the reading for those who were approaching these authors for the first time. Letter to My Mother came out with the wonderful MLA Text and Translation series which publishes foreign works in two volumes, one in English translation and the other in the original language. At the time, Lettera alla madre, originally published with Garzanti in 1988, was out of print and difficult to find in Italy. That is no longer the case as La nave di Teseo has recently republished many of Edith Bruck’s works, including Lettera alla madre.
SZ: What is the relationship between your translation work and your research?
GR: My translation work has been strongly connected to my research interests and my desire to help making works by lesser-known Italian authors available to English-speaking audiences. Both Castelnuovo and Bruck are so-called minor writers of Italian literature, in the sense that they did not enter the Italian literary canon, but they nevertheless represent, each in his or her own specific way, an important moment in the history of Italian literature. Castelnuovo wrote what may be considered the first Italian novel thematically centered on Jewish life, about five decades before the publication of Bassani’s and Levi’s masterpieces, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini and If this is a man. Castelnuovo’s novel, which, if it may not be considered at the same level of aesthetic achievement, nevertheless provides a first important attempt to bring the Jewish question into the Italian literary discourse. Before him, Ippolito Nievo did something like that, with his play Emanuele (1852), which remained, however, unpublished, and basically unknown, until after WWII. As for Edith Bruck, a chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation was devoted to her work, and I kept over the years a strong connection with both the author and her works. If I didn’t produce more critical work on her, it’s just because at one point my research veered towards the 19th-century.
SZ: There has been growing attention to how undervalued translation work is and The American Literary Translators Association recently recommended that translation work should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion. As a professor-translator, do you have any additional thoughts about the relationship between translation work, research, and academia?
GR: I have been very lucky in that I always enjoyed great freedom in my academic work. In my departmental guidelines, translations count (though not with the same weight) as scholarship, and I certainly endorse the recommendation of The American Literary Translators Association to recognize translations during the hiring or promotion process. It is nice to see that translations and translators are now viewed more favorably. Just to give a couple of examples: The American Association of Italian Studies has just instituted a new prize for works in translation (from Italian into English) which goes to the translator. Additionally, it is becoming more frequent to see the translator(s)’ name on the cover of the book, as the result of a public recognition of the translator’s work and his or her contribution to the production of knowledge.
SZ: Do you have future translation plans? What other work by you do we have to look forward to?
GR: Nothing in the immediate future, as I am trying to complete a book-manuscripts on Jewish writers of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. But I am pretty certain that in the not-so-far future I will be looking for another translation project. Also, because I truly enjoy translating, especially when done with someone else.
SZ: Thank you for your responses! We look forward to the book and future translations!
Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She works on Italian literature from comparative perspectives, especially in terms of German-language literatures, modernism, and Jewish studies.