Tag Archives: Paul Dry Books
LONG, LONG AGO AND NOW: SASKIA ZIOLKOWSKI REVIEWS EDITH BRUCK’S “LOST BREAD” AND INTERVIEWS TRANSLATOR GABRIELLA ROMANI
“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.
Edith Bruck and What Women Writers Can Tell Us About the Holocaust
So on January 27, when the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I will be thinking more than ever of Bruck’s words and the words of other women authors who survived the Holocaust. Of the 245,000 survivors left worldwide, 61 percent are women, according to the Claims Conference, which administers compensation from Germany on behalf of victims of the Nazis. But women’s accounts of surviving the Holocaust remain largely unknown.
Hard-boiled Detective Fiction or Socialist Realism? Vladislav Todorov’s “Zift,” Translated from Bulgarian by Joseph Benatov
“Zift” evokes the hard-boiled characters and settings of American detective fiction of the 1930s and film noir of the 1940s. The novel follows the nocturnal adventures of Moth, the first-person narrator, just released from the Central Sofia Prison after doing time for twenty years for a heist gone wrong. Moth – in Todorov’s perverse twist of the noir genre – is a character steeped in communist ideology and traversing the map of a distinctly communist city.