Lettera alla madre

Edith Bruck

Modern Language Association of America, 2006 - Biography & Autobiography - 250 pages

Through literary works and public appearances, Edith Bruck, born 1932 in Hungary, has devoted her life to bearing witness to what she experienced in the Nazi concentration camps. In 1954 she settled in Rome and is today the most prolific writer of Holocaust narrative in Italian. The book is composed in two parts. "Letter to My Mother" - an imaginary dialogue between Bruck and her mother, who died in Auschwitz - probes the question of self-identity, the pain of loss and displacement, the power of language to help recover the past, and the ultimate impossibility of that recovery. "Traces," a story of a journey without return, completes the diptych. Bruck's experimental fusion of memoir and fiction portrays the Holocaust from a female perspective and highlights the role of gender in the creation of memory.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 44
• Section 3: 128

About the author

Edith Bruck has lived in Rome since 1954. She is the author of several novels, collections of short stories, and volumes of poetry. She writes for radio and television and has directed several films. Bruck's works--for which she has won numerous literary prizes--have been translated from the original Italian into Dutch, German, Swedish, and Hungarian. Who Loves You Like This is Bruck's first work to be translated into English.

Gabriella Romani is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Seton Hall University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Lettera alla madre; Volume 18 of Texts and translations: Texts
• Author: Edith Bruck
• Editor: Gabriella Romani
• Publisher: Modern Language Association of America, 2006
• Original from: the University of Wisconsin - Madison
• Digitized: May 19, 2010
• ISBN: 0873529359, 9780873529358
• Length: 250 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; History / Holocaust; History / Jewish; Holocaust survivors; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Literary Criticism / European / Italian; Social Science / Jewish Studies; Women; Women - Italy