Edith Bruck in the Mirror: Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives 1557536872, 9781557536877

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Fictional Transitions: Blurring the Boundaries between Life and Art
2 Reciprocal Influences between Literature and Cinema
3 Reflections on the "Minor" Poetry of a Successful Novelist: Edith Bruck in the Mirror
Conclusions: Jewish Identity in Italy and "The Two Paths"
Appendix One: Interview with Edith Bruck
Appendix Two: When Art and Life Imitate Each Other: A Conversation with Edith Bruck
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Balma

Jewish Studies

Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies

Edith Bruck in the Mirror

A

This important new study is motivated by a desire to better understand and situate Bruck’s art as well as to advance (and, when necessary, to revise) the critical discourse on her considerable and eclectic body of work. As such, it underscores and analyzes the intermedial nature of her contributions to contemporary Italian culture, which should no longer be understood merely in terms of her willingness to revisit the subject of the Holocaust on the printed page or the silver screen. It also includes previously unpublished interviews with the author. The book will be of broad interest to scholars and students of Jewish (especially Holocaust) studies, Italian literature, film studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial culture. “This is the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the work produced by a main contemporary author of Italian Holocaust literature, focused on Bruck’s overall artistic production (novels, poetry, film, and TV productions). It will offer scholars and students alike a new interpretive perspective and a valuable source of reference for their studies.” —GABRIELLA RomAnI, Seton Hall University

Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives

Edith Bruck in the Mirror

uthor of more than thirteen books and several volumes of poetry, screenwriter, and director, Edith Bruck is one of the leading literary voices in Italy, attracting increasing attention in the English-speaking world not least for her powerful Holocaust testimony, which is often compared with the work of her contemporaries Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani. Born in Hungary in 1932, she was deported with her family to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Christianstadt, Landsberg, and Bergen-Belsen, where she lost both her parents and a brother. After the war, she traveled widely until 1954 when she settled in Rome. She has lived there ever since.

Cover photograph courtesy of Federica Valabrega.

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ISBN: 978-1-55753-687-7

Purdue university Press West Lafayette, Indiana www.press.purdue.edu

 

USD $39.95

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Philip Balma Purdue university Press

Edith Bruck in the Mirror Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives

Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies Zev Garber, Editor Los Angeles Valley College

Edith Bruck in the Mirror Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives

Philip Balma

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

© Copyright 2014 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balma, Philip, 1976– author. Edith Bruck in the Mirror: Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives / Philip Balma. pages cm.—(Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55753-687-7 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-61249-333-6 (epdf) ISBN 978-1-61249-334-3 (epub) 1. Bruck, Edith—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ4862.R7Z55 2014 853'.914—dc23 2013042315 Cover photograph courtesy of Federica Valabrega.

To Katy

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Contents Foreword by Edith Bruck

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1



Fictional Transitions: Blurring the Boundaries between Life and Art

37

2

Reciprocal Influences between Literature and Cinema

69

3

Reflections on the “Minor” Poetry of a Successful Novelist: Edith Bruck in the Mirror 137

1

Conclusions: Jewish Identity in Italy and “The Two Paths”

163

Appendix One: Interview with Edith Bruck Translated by Elizabeth Hellman

177

Appendix Two: When Art and Life Imitate Each Other: A Conversation with Edith Bruck. Translated by Erika Brownlee

191

Bibliography 203 Index

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Foreword In 1945, immediately after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “OK” was the first expression in English that I learned. It’s the language in which Philip Balma has written and is now publishing this volume on my life works. In the years that followed, which were anything but easy, as I am an autodidact, I had made some progress, though unfortunately it was not enough for me to even be able to appreciate or evaluate Philip’s translations of my poems, but I trust him, I trust his clear vision, and I trust his pure heart. I’ve known him for seven years, I know that he is scrupulous, and I hope that some of the human warmth we shared beyond the words may be found within these pages. Like the ethical, moral, and testimonial value of my life as a pilgrim saved by chance, who landed in Italy where, due to an internal need, and adopting the language, I had begun to write while sitting on a half-empty trunk. Perhaps I have written the same book over and over, both in verse and in prose, and maybe I’ve made the same film both for the silver screen and for television; the things I have lived through, that I’ve seen, or those which have struck me, stimulated me to the point of human and social identification and participation. I can only be grateful to Philip Balma who in turn has become a witness himself. It’s important and comforting for me to know, especially with respect to the young, that the turmoil of my existence, never surrendered, has not been useless, and certainly never hopeless—not even in total darkness, where there was and still remains a light, which has now passed into Balma’s hands, and those of his editor. Thank you, Edith Bruck

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Acknowledgments Inasmuch as this project symbolically began a decade ago as part of my research for the PhD in Italian Studies, I’d like to thank the members of my dissertation committee at Indiana University: my director, Andrea Ciccarelli, as well as Peter Bondanella, Massimo Scalabrini, and Michael Berkvam. Their guidance and support during my years in graduate school was both generous and indispensable. I am also forever indebted to Edith Bruck for her kindness and availability, without which much of this project would have been based on conjectures instead of facts. For her infinite patience and wisdom in clarifying the intricacies of the English language, I must thank my wife, Katy Balma, whose drive and work ethic have been a constant source of inspiration. Her loving encouragement has been instrumental in keeping me focused and dedicated to this project over the span of many years. Having embraced the role of unofficial reader and copyeditor throughout all the stages of preparation of this manuscript with altruism and devotion, she played a fundamentally important role in its completion and revision. To all the members of my family, I owe a debt of gratitude for always believing in my abilities, even when I did not. Your love and kindness are my most precious resource, one that I have always been able to rely on. For supporting and facilitating my research in more ways than I can count, I must thank Fabio Benincasa and Marco Pacioni. Special thanks go to my friend and colleague Giovanni Spani, and also to Clementina Ricci from the University of Siena, Eleonora Buonocore from Yale University, Gabriele Scarpelli from the University of Florence, and to Tommaso Tancredi, Emilio Busto, and Kacie Matwijszyn. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Michael Young from the University of Connecticut, who serves as the subject area librarian for Italian Studies. These friends and fellow scholars have helped me to challenge myself and to never lose my passion for the written word and the moving image. For their kindness and professionalism I am indebted to the staff of the CDEC (the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Milan, in

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particular to Michele Sarfatti. Furthermore, I want to acknowledge the courtesy and work ethic displayed by the staff of the Biblioteca Comunale–Palazzo Sormani (also in Milan), as well as the employees of the FST Mediateca Regionale Toscana Film Commission in Florence. A portion of my research on the subject of Gillo Pontecorvo was conducted at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, and was made possible thanks to the Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship. This project was also facilitated in part by a Junior Faculty Summer Fellowship and a generous grant funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, as well as research account funded by the University of Notre Dame between 2006 and 2008. Last, but not least, I’d like to acknowledge Charles Watkinson, the director of Purdue University Press, Zev Garber, the editor of the Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies series, and Becki Corbin. A special word of thanks also goes to the anonymous readers whose feedback was instrumental in helping me to think critically about my own work.

Introduction By talking about Auschwitz, I am talking about today, about what happens today in Europe and the world, about diversity, and about the culture of the other that we don’t know, and so we fear, and maybe we discriminate and we exploit. I believe . . . that multiculturalism is a treasure for us, and we should learn to live together with mutual respect and equal rights. —Edith Bruck, Interview1 The term “Italophone literature” refers to an emerging body of literary works written in the Italian language by first generation immigrants and, in the last few years, by the second generation. Its most striking element is the plurality of its voices and points of view. Italy has, in fact, one of the largest pools of diverse immigrant communities, with approximately 3 million foreigners present in 2006 coming from regions of the world as different as Romania, Albania, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, China, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ecuador, and Peru. The multicultural nature of Italophone literature reflects this heterogeneous immigrant community. —Prem Poddar, Rajeev Shridhar Patke, and Lars Jensen, eds., A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures2

Although Edith Bruck’s autobiographical debut was published in Italy more than 50 years ago, the international community of scholars has never before produced a comprehensive monographic study of her contributions to the Italophone literary scene.3 This volume is intended to fill the staggering critical void that has accompanied her significant presence in the Italian cultural milieu from 1959 to the present.4 The lack of a primary source of information on this author’s life experiences, her works, and their reception poses a significant obstacle to anyone who wishes to look beyond the space she inhabits on the printed page and to any academic figure who chooses to include her works in a college-level course. My hope is that this book will not only help to clarify and synthesize the

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Introduction

eclectic variety of approaches that a handful of scholars have taken to the study of Bruck’s artistic production, but also (and perhaps more so) that my passion and affinity for her diverse body of work will inspire other scholars to continue in my footsteps, as I have done for those who preceded me. A number of (albeit rare) responses to Bruck’s publications have come from Italian scholars in the field of Women’s Studies. What is still lacking among the extant academic inquiries into her career is a work of criticism that stems from a specific interest in Judaic studies: one that endeavors, when her literary and cinematic production calls for it, to analyze the specific context of the Shoah while also attempting to look beyond it, as the author has tried to do in her own personal and professional life. This volume is hence not intended as a specific contribution to the field of Women’s Studies, nor does it fall squarely under the umbrella of Holocaust Studies. In those instances where Bruck’s experiences and her artistic output allow for it, this study advocates for a broader, more inclusive approach to her craft, which cannot be neatly encapsulated in a single academic discipline. 





Edith Bruck (née Steinschreiber) was born on May 3, 1932 in the small Hungarian village of Tiszabercel near the Ukraine border.5 She belonged to a large, impoverished Jewish family. Her childhood was marked by the hardships caused by strong antisemitic sentiments that often complicated the life of the Steinschreiber family. The first years of her life in Hungary are briefly described in her literary debut, the autobiography Chi ti ama così (1959), as well as in her collection of short stories Andremo in città (1962). In her debut, the author makes a point to emphasize the impact of antisemitism on her life in the early to mid-1940s: It was 1942. . . . When we would go to the river for a swim, many would get out of the water saying we would get it dirty. On Saturdays the boys would chase after old men who were coming back from the synagogue and pull on their beards and spit on them. . . . Our family suffered less than the others because we were the least observant. . . . In the evenings we were scared to go out because one time they beat up my brother while he was going to get water. Even in school you would hear people say: “It stinks of Jews.” . . . At school the hatred towards us Jews was growing, and our classmates amused themselves denigrating us in every which way. My teacher was very sorry, and while drying off my face she tried to explain to me that not all men are like this.6

Although, beyond the context of Chi ti ama così, she has seldom written about her youth before the war without filtering her words through the prism of a fictional narrative, the author has occasionally revisited the subject in interviews. In 1996, for example, Bruck estimated that there might have been anywhere from

Introduction 3 160 to 180 Jews in Tiszabercel during her childhood, out of approximately 5,000 residents.7 Almost a decade later, when she was interviewed by Rabbi Roberto Della Rocca in Rome, she briefly returned to those early memories of persecution in Hungary, adding to the vivid picture she had painted previously in her published work.8 Between 1942 and 1944 her life had become “un inferno”: Anyone was authorized to throw you down on the ground, to push you in the mud. . . . When my schoolmates, girls I had played with until the age of 12, put me in the nettles with my bare bottom sticking out, it was very difficult for me to comprehend, and also very difficult to talk about. I still have one of my hearts in Hungary, but it’s a country with which I am absolutely unable, even today after 60 years, to make peace. (27–28)

In 1944, when she was only twelve years old, most of Bruck’s family was rounded up and deported to the Jewish ghetto in Sátoraljaújhely, and eventually taken by force to Auschwitz. She lost both of her parents and a sibling in the camps: her mother and younger brother Laci were killed after the difficult, forced journey by train, while her father died in Dachau shortly before the liberation, emaciated by the forced labor and horrible living conditions to which he was subjected. Bruck miraculously survived the camps along with her older sister Eliz, enduring forced transfers to Dachau, Christianstadt, and BergenBelsen. Their brother Peter survived as well. After being liberated in 1945, she and Eliz journeyed back to Hungary and made contact with their surviving siblings, Margo, Leila, and Peter, but they no longer had a home to return to as a family.9 Even the synagogue in Tiszabercel had been torn down. In fact, it had been demolished directly after the Jews were deported, along with the Jewish cemetery. The non-Jewish (gentile) majority, which constituted more than 95% of the people in the village, believed they would never see any of their Jewish neighbors again.10 Bruck spent almost ten years bouncing around from one country to the next. An endnote to her first book informs her readers that she had begun writing about her family’s experiences in her native tongue in 1945. During this period of transition Bruck moved at first to Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia) to stay with her sister Margo and Margo’s family, which included, at that time, her children and her second husband. Here Edith became pregnant from a relative and was pressured into an abortion.11 She also lost her manuscript during her journey, which she would attempt to reproduce on a number of occasions. At the age of sixteen she married Milan Grün, a young man in his early twenties. Edith, Milan, Margo, and Margo’s family did not remain in Europe very long after the wedding, however. After a few months, in 1948, they migrated from Czechoslovakia to Israel, where Bruck obtained a new passport and a semistable condition of residency that was legally recognized by the state.12 Her time in Israel as a young adult was marked by complicated personal relationships, described in her first book, that led to multiple marriages and

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Introduction

breakups. After her marriage with Milan ended, at seventeen Bruck was briefly married to Dany Roth, a violent and abusive partner whom she quickly divorced. Her third husband was a much kinder man who agreed to marry her so she could put off serving in the Israeli army, which was mandatory. She decided to keep her third husband’s surname, under which she still publishes, even though they were divorced by the time the author was twenty.13 In 1954 Edith Bruck left Haifa and arrived in Rome, planning to stay only for a short period of time. One of her sisters had moved to Argentina, and Edith was waiting to receive some money from her via wire transfer. The funds were supposed to make it possible for Edith to relocate to Argentina as well, but unfortunately they never arrived.14 The author, having carved out a personal space for herself in Rome, remained in Italy where she lives to this day with her now husband, the Lombard-born poet and director Nelo Risi. In an interview published by Brenda Webster in 1993, the first interview with the author to ever be released in English, the notion of free will and decision-making arises more than once, with surprising results.15 In fact, Bruck on this occasion took issue with the mere usage of the word “choice” to describe some of the principal events that have shaped her life, even after the end of the war:

“Could you tell me how you decided to be a writer?” “I didn’t decide, life decided. I didn’t have the faintest idea. . . . It’s hard to say. Certainly this unique experience, this enormous tragedy was a great stimulus whether moral—to witness—or as a kind of pressure to communicate, to exorcize, to vomit a little of the horror. Surely there was this, but I also wanted to write. Even before I was deported, I dreamed of writing poetry.” . . . “I want to make one thing clear. I never chose anything in my life. I wasn’t permitted to choose.” “Not even after the camps?” “No, never.” “But you decided to marry an Italian, for instance.” “That wasn’t by choice, it was love. I’ve never chosen anything. I didn’t choose this country. I came to it by chance. I wasn’t a tourist.” (170–71)

During her first few years in the Bel Paese, Bruck completed her autobiographical debut, telling the story of the first two decades of her life (up to and including her departure from Israel), in a language she had only recently learned. This atypical literary process, which took place in a small basement apartment in Via Gregoriana, is described by her husband Nelo in the introduction to the English translation of the text: Edith concentrated on writing with a briefcase on her knees, . . . The briefcase represented something temporary, like her entire life as a traveler, whether forced or spontaneous. (viii–ix)

Introduction 5 From writing by hand, she went to typing in order to make everything more legible. . . . Even today I ask myself how we were able to decipher that typescript which bore at once the tell-tale signs of confusion and haste—or perhaps of frenzy, as though we were getting rid of a topic so painful because it would open up old wounds.16

Although she may have remained, symbolically if not psychologically, in a continued state of transition during the first years she lived in Italy, Bruck has spoken on the Italian environment into which she inserted herself during the 1950s in fairly positive terms. On multiple occasions she has referred to the notion of Italians being brava gente (“good people”), once even remarking that in the postwar years the citizens of Rome “really shared their dinner soup with people in need. Everything was very different from now. [She] found [her]self at ease with their poverty” (Mauceri, “Edith Bruck,” 607). Beyond the common stereotype of Italians as good people, and their generally open attitude toward foreign cultures in the postwar years, Bruck has also discussed the political climate in Hungary during the Cold War as a factor which made it necessary for her to seek a new home in a different country. Although she has had occasion to reflect on the differences and similarities between her own experience as a Hungarian-born Jew and that of the Italkim,17 she is also fully aware of the specific difficulties endured by the Italian Jewry in the twentieth century. This awareness, which has been brought to bear on her craft as it has developed over the course of five decades, is but one of the features that makes Bruck a unique literary figure in contemporary Italy—a voice that belongs to the cultural patrimony of the nation without being exclusively defined or encompassed by it:18 The seeds of anti-Semitism can easily be planted. It’s the same everywhere, not only in Hungary. One of the greatest virtues of the Italians is that they don’t take anything seriously. The Jews lost their homes, their jobs at the Universities, and everything they had owned here just like everywhere else. But the Italians were good human beings, and they still are, most of them, and after the war there was no Communism here, and all that madness that goes with it. . . . Here you didn’t have to fear the Fascists as much as we feared the Hungarian policemen at home. Also, an ordinary, banal anti-Semitism still exists. It is based on the age-old prejudice that all Jews are rich, clever, and are trying to outdo you.19

Shortly after her arrival in Rome, given the severe financial straits she found herself in, Edith visited the German embassy to inquire about reparations that were being paid out to Holocaust survivors by the German government, through an organization known as the Claims Conference. This “pittance,” as she called it, could have at least given her some form of a monetary cushion to fall back on if she was unable to find work and shelter. Less than a decade after being liberated from the camps, in fact, Bruck did not have a dime to her name. In 2010

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she described her initial visit to the embassy, as well as a lengthy and torturous correspondence that followed,20 in the following terms: I literally had nothing. The German consul began to yell, saying that to receive reparations I at least needed to have some kind of cancer. I ran away from that place and wrote a letter to L’Espresso. There was a scandal and the consul was made to leave Italy. After that experience I abandoned my request for reparations until 1998, I didn’t want to know anything about it and I didn’t want to ask any questions. Then my brother convinced me to try again, saying: “Everyone has received reparations, why not you? Promise me that you will try.” I started down this bureaucratic path, which would have been better to avoid because it lasted seven years. I went back and forth, I procured at least one hundred documents, and they asked me to send them photographs of the wounds (chilblains)—x-rays of all the marks that deportation left on my body. It became a nightmare. Nobody has even the slightest idea of what I went through. I entered this kind of labyrinth, this hell, even if only to see how it would end. The seventh item on this list of necessary documentations required that I find witnesses to prove that I was deported. They asked me things you can’t imagine. I asked [my doctors] if it was possible to photograph the chilblains, because I am full of these little holes all over. They told me it is not possible, that nothing shows up in a photograph. Plus you can’t photograph the pain, the suffering, you can’t photograph the soul and the heart, what you have lost. It is absolute madness. The Claims Conference made me go through all this, so you can’t keep quiet. Whether they are Jews, Germans, Muslims, Japanese, or Americans, it makes no difference. It was such a monstrous and inhuman thing that it had to be denounced. In the end I threatened to go to the tribunal in Strasbourg, because at that point I couldn’t hold back any longer. I went back and forth [between Germany and Italy], I spent a lot of money, every document cost something. I spent at least one million eight hundred thousand lire. Then, they wanted the documents to be translated by translators who were officially accredited by the German embassy, so I found this woman who translated them for forty thousand lire per document. I did everything [they asked] until the end [of this process], even turning to the Hungarians. In order to get a document from them it cost seventy thousand for one, eighty thousand for the other, and then there was the wait. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done. I don’t regret it, though. A book was born thanks to this story. . . . They even continued to deny that I was deported. My status as a survivor was never recognized. It’s not that this book sold well, but I don’t have any other way to denounce something. I can only do it through my articles and the books I write.21

Since the release of her first book in 1959, Bruck has continued to produce a considerable number of works of prose and poetry, and she has also worked as

Introduction 7 a journalist and a screenwriter and director in film, television, and theater.22 Her first professional collaboration on a motion picture came in the late 1950s, when she traveled to Belgrade to work as a consultant for Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò, which was the first Italian film on the Shoah to garner international attention from critics and moviegoers. After the release of her second work, the collection Andremo in città, the title story was adapted for the big screen in 1966. The story of two young Jewish siblings deported from Hungary in 1944 was transplanted to the former Yugoslavia in the screenplay for this feature, which was also shot in Belgrade by Nelo Risi.23 After a brief period in the seventies when she aligned herself with the Italian feminist movement,24 Bruck first sat in the director’s chair in 1979 for the shooting of the ripped-from-the-headlines feature, Improvviso. Including Quale Sardegna? in 1983 and Un altare per la madre in 1986, she has directed a total of three fictional films that were financed by RAI. These features were screened at festivals, released in select theaters, and eventually broadcast on national television, sometimes even years after they were completed. In the mid-1980s she began making documentaries for a TV program entitled Storie vere (“True stories”). These works were devoted primarily to highlighting the needs of underprivileged, marginalized groups in society. In spite of the significant amount of recognition her writing has enjoyed, especially in recent years, Bruck’s filmic production has never before been studied in depth. With the exception of her work as a consultant and screenwriter for motion pictures that are thematically linked to the Holocaust, in fact, none of her cinematic efforts have been the subject of academic inquiry in the past. The epistolary novel Lettera alla madre (1988) is easily one of her most critically and commercially successful literary works, having been awarded both the Premio Letterario Rapallo-Carige (1989) and the Premio Narrativa Città di Penne (1988). Her short collection of stories entitled Due stanze vuote was a finalist for the prestigious Premio Strega in 1974, a distinction she earned a second time in 1993 with the release of her novel Nuda proprietà. In all, she has produced more than 15 books, including a dozen novels, two autobiographical texts, and four volumes of poetry. Her recent novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo (2009)25 coincides with five decades of contributions to the Italian and Italophone literary scene.26 Although Bruck publishes exclusively in Italian, her works have been translated into many languages (English, Danish, Dutch, German, and Hungarian, to name a few). On one occasion the author unsuccessfully attempted to personally translate her own poems into Hungarian. This failure was due to many factors, only one of which was her lack of practice in using Hungarian for poetic purposes at a distance of many years and kilometers from her native country.27 Eventually Bruck authorized someone else to translate the poems. Italian became her principal language in her daily life as well as in her artistic production. This linguistic and cultural transposition initially allowed her to symbolically distance herself from the traumas that she tended to expose and analyze in her narrative and poetic expression. This strategy not only made

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it possible for Bruck to share something unspeakable with her readers but also to filter the geographical and glottological characteristics that defined her experiences as a slave of the Nazi regime and the vicissitudes of the postwar years, conferring upon them a new resonance and a different expressive shell. In a 2009 article focused specifically on Holocaust narratives by European women, Louise O. Vasvári underlined the distinction between those works in which the description of a trauma is subjected to the process of translation—for example, a translation from a journal or diary that was originally produced in the author’s mother tongue—and those produced by writers who were children or adolescents at the time of deportation, and have adopted a new language in their literary production.28 This second category, which would include Edith Bruck, is defined by Vasvári as the “1.5 generation,” a nomenclature that was originally coined by Susan Suleiman29 and was clearly informed by the writings of Elizabeth Trahan:30 Coming from such an impoverished background and with virtually no education, writing in nonliterary Italian, she became an unlikely best-selling author. . . . Her total oeuvre . . . consists of more than a dozen volumes of prose and poetry, creating what might be called a postmodern mosaic of an interface between orality and literacy in the form of testimonial narratives, a fusion of memoir and fiction. (Vasvári 3)

In the introduction to the English version of Bruck’s debut, her husband Nelo Risi took issue with the uncritical approach that has lead some scholars and readers to simply think of her writing in terms of bilingualism: Edith isn’t a product of the Magyar culture; she belongs, if anything, to that Eastern Jewish stock that spoke Yiddish and the dialect of the motherland interchangeably. . . . The deportation . . . and the vicissitudes that followed the war brought Edith . . . to settle by the banks of the Tiber and adopt Italian. . . . In her fiction a reader can find traces of a world suspended between childhood and myth that has its roots in a now-vanished peasant civilization which today finds its greatest representatives in the United States among the writers of the Eastern Jewish tradition. (x–xii)

Although Edith Bruck is still a relatively unknown artist on one side of the Atlantic Ocean, a handful of her works have been translated into English: her debut Chi ti ama così, the award-winning novel Lettera alla madre, the short story “A Surprise,” from the collection Andremo in città, and a handful of her poems from the volume In difesa del padre (1980). In 2006, shortly before the release of the English translation of Lettera alla madre,31 the author was asked what she would like to say to the American public, particularly in light of their lack of familiarity with her works and her life story. As she has done on countless prior

Introduction 9 occasions, especially during her numerous visits to Italian public schools, Bruck seized this opportunity to discuss her experiences in the concentration camps, a theme that pervades a significant portion of her publications: I want to say to the American public exactly what I want to say to the Italian public, to the French public, or to the world. I absolutely want to tell what I have lived through, because not enough is known, so that people don’t forget and so that they don’t deny, so that people don’t distort what happened. I believe that we must—we are absolutely obligated—to let people know what happened, so that it doesn’t happen anymore, as Primo Levi would say—because it is happening, even if it’s happening in a different way or for different reasons, all over the world. I would like to tell, as an innocent person can, what it meant to live such an extreme experience for racial reasons; this is different from political motives. This is an enormous difference, because so many people today—and it’s very convenient—compare Auschwitz to the Soviet gulags. In the Soviet gulags, some horrible things were done . . . maybe just as horrible, but not in that manner, not in that measure, not for those motives; it was a ferocious but different dictatorship; the attempted elimination of the Jewish people was totally different; it was the elimination of a people and not of a group, whether black, yellow, little, or fat. No, it is an entire people that they tried to eliminate with an industrial system; with the accountants of death. It was a death factory where they threw away nothing; where they were using hair for mattresses, skin for lampshades, fat for soap, and ashes for fertilizer. I mean that no other savagery of this kind exists in modern history. There are many other savageries, terrible injustices, but to first persecute and then try to annihilate an entire people, from the youngest to the oldest, only for racial motives, never happened before. And I absolutely do not believe that Auschwitz can be compared—I use Auschwitz as a symbolic place—compared to any other genocide that has happened in the twentieth century. In Christian European society nothing is comparable to Auschwitz. . . . I believe that my books make people uncomfortable, they aren’t very commercial; and so I think that the publisher, whether American, or English, or German, doesn’t readily accept them, and doesn’t want to know about them. Even after all the truth that’s come out, my testimony is received quite poorly, and is even censored. For instance, when they published Andremo in Città in Germany—there are eleven stories, ten were translated, and the one where the German boy becomes Jewish, and the text says, “my brother,” at the end,32 was not translated.33 So, if we’re still at that point, and I’m talking about the sixties, but even now . . . a university professor by the name of Schminke just wrote me saying that he cannot find a publisher for Signora Auschwitz in Germany. As long as we cannot find a publisher in Germany for my books, aside from the two that they have translated, as long

10

Introduction as a Jewish editor is not found in America as well—because Calvino once told me: “Your audience is American. You should have lived in America, you should have written in America, you should have written in English.” It’s not true! Because even Jewish Americans don’t care about anything, they care about selling books, and they take books that give them a greater guarantee of selling, maybe even a bestseller, they care little or not at all for concentration camps; I don’t believe that a Jewish publisher would be more favorable to this subject than another. Moreover, I say that a non-Jewish editor is more favorable than a Jewish one; even if I’m sorry to say it, it’s true. In Israel it’s the same, because in Israel my books aren’t translated. And they translated Primo Levi’s book when he won four or five awards, and then committed suicide. But he hadn’t been translated before. So these aren’t very popular or very commercial books. Editors are only interested in merchandise. When I was in America, I went to a publisher, I can still see his face now—I was accompanied by an American friend of mine—who said to me: “But, Mrs. Bruck,” and he even wrote it to me, “Why do you always write about the war? For what reason?” I explained, “I hope that two, three, four, five, or six people, in reading these works, can change, learn, and grow in their own morality, in their conscience, etc.” And he just said: “But, on what planet are you living?” (Balma, Intervista a Edith Bruck, 80–81) 





Only a handful of scholars have made Edith Bruck’s body of work the focus of their research. Most of the academics in question have been employed, at one time or another in their careers, at institutions of higher education that are located in anglophone countries. The majority of these individuals have tended to engage her work from the perspective of a broader inquiry on the writings of female survivors of the Shoah (Vasvári, for one), hence operating at the intersection between Women’s Studies and Holocaust Studies.34 In fact, even some of the previously cited interviews tend to zero in on Bruck’s relationship with her deceased mother, and the impact that the irreplaceable loss of a maternal figure has had on her publications. This particular emphasis on the artistic ramifications of the brutal death of the author’s mother can be found, to varying degrees, in the aforementioned studies by Webster (1993), Mortara Di Veroli (1996), and Mauceri (2007). The same could be said for some of the scholarship produced by Adalgisa Giorgio, a Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.35 Although the critically and commercially successful Lettera alla madre (“Letter to my mother”) is possibly the book that first brought Bruck’s prose to the attention of these researchers, it’s worth noting that the larger-than-life maternal presence Bruck was robbed of in the concentration camps played a fundamentally important role, long before Lettera alla madre, in her decision to share the story of her family in



Introduction 11

written form. How else, in fact, could one explain her decision to dedicate her debut to her mother, especially considering the magnitude of the damage that was done to her family as a whole? To my mother for the bread that had the best flavor in the world. (n. pag.)

In order to look beyond this significant if somewhat restrictive focus on Bruck’s literary explorations of maternal loss, we must also consider the scholarship of Gabriella Romani. Romani is arguably the scholar who has made the most noteworthy contribution to the dissemination and popularization of Bruck’s work in the anglophone world. Her work as an editor and cotranslator of Lettera alla madre has made Edith’s best-known work accessible to a much broader audience. Her interest in Bruck’s writing, while motivated in part by an affinity and appreciation for women’s writing, can also be attributed to her research on Italian epistolary fiction.36 In 2010, when Bruck’s Privato, her third epistolary novel, was released, it included an afterword penned by Romani, entitled “Scrittrice italiana per caso” (“An Italian writer by chance”).37 In this brief, incisive text she investigates the place of Edith Bruck’s writing in the history of Italian literature, and the role it plays in defining her adoptive nation from both a cultural and social perspective. Her afterword to the novel Privato engages the study of Bruck’s craft concisely and insightfully by considering our novelist’s lengthy artistic journey in light of one of her latest works of prose. However, “Scrittice italiana per caso” is also a text that is indicative of a greater concern with respect to the extant lines of scholarly inquiry that pertain to Bruck’s fiction: in the absence of a single, authoritative point of reference, scholars have often been forced to piece together a disparate collage of articles, essays, book reviews, and interviews in order to make sense of the production of an artist who has been active for more than half a century and continues to write, indefatigably, as if her very life depended on it. The complex mélange of existing scholarly approaches to Bruck’s work calls for a discussion of some of the ways in which a handful of academics have contributed, albeit accidentally and in spite of their best intentions, to the creation of an imperfect and potentially misleading critical discourse. Romani rightfully underscores these interpretational obstacles: How can one . . . interpret a work that, being predisposed to exceeding the limits of cultural barriers and conventions, transforms itself into a meeting ground, in which the “other” becomes an inevitable complement to the I (even in the broader sense of a national subject)? And how can the figure of a writer like Edith Bruck help us to understand the human events which are not only tied to the epochal events of the twentieth century but also to the changes that in last few decades have transformed the face of Italy as well as its most intimate social and cultural fabric? (Romani 183)

12

Introduction

The two questions posed in Romani’s afterword accentuate the fundamentally important function that Edith Bruck’s publications play in the Italian cultural environment of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, yet they also happen to highlight the reasons behind the uneven reception of her work by Italian and Italophone critics. Scholars who are accustomed to limiting their research to those works that are clearly (and, in fact, automatically) identifiable as “Italian” often don’t know what to make of a naturalized Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who happens to publish in Italian. Simply put, the “limits of cultural barriers and conventions” that Bruck’s writings endeavor to shatter and render irrelevant are the same obstacles that have prevented many living scholars from gaining a truly informed understanding of how important a figure she is in present-day Italy. Although one could certainly not count Romani among those academics who have failed to grasp her writing’s significance and its farreaching ramifications, the short text entitled “Scrittrice italiana per caso” bears some of the scars of the same uphill battle that a number of researchers have had to fight to properly situate the works of a translingual author who, in a sense, has been writing before her time; or rather, before the tides of history and social (and academic) change have set the stage for the success and acknowledgment she deserves and is finally able to achieve. Let us be more specific though: Romani states that we cannot include Edith Bruck in the category of letteratura della migrazione (“literature of migration”) in Italy because said category pertains to a more recent phenomenon which has been chronologically circumscribed by a handful of experts in the field of comparative literature to a period of time that began in the early to mid-1990s. She uses the term “transnational” to illustrate the multicultural implications of Bruck’s work, referencing Andrea Ciccarelli’s essay entitled “Frontier, Exile, and Migration in the Contemporary Italian Novel” in her efforts to explain how the label of “literature of migration” has not been applied to a number of Bruck’s works that tend to either address the theme of migration directly, or, instead, deal with its long-term repercussions.38 Ciccarelli’s essay makes use of the terminology “frontier literature” to categorize those texts in which “both the writer and the reader cross an invisible cultural frontier,” yet it also clearly states that since “crossing a border is always a migration of different cultural existences, when a writer chooses a language different from his or her native tongue, the crossing implies the loss of a secret world that is now transposed into a new idiom” (197, 199). He makes a valid argument for why the works of transnational, translingual authors such as Edith Bruck, Giorgio Pressburger (another Hungarian Jew who publishes in Italian), and Fleur Jaeggy constitute “frontier literature,” but in doing so he is adding to (and to a certain extent, revising) the scholarly discourse on literature of migration that has been formulated by others before him. For this reason it is imprecise to state that Bruck has not participated in this artistic phenomenon. The reality of her situation is that she has indeed contributed to this popular vein of Italophone literature, yet many Italian-speaking scholars have failed to draw the necessary



Introduction 13

connections between her works and those authored by other foreign-born, Italophone artists. In fact, Ciccarelli and Romani’s observations on the subject seem to imply an urgent need to reexamine the writings of one of Italy’s principal authorities on literature of migration: Armando Gnisci.39 Gnisci has been a proponent of the study of literature of migration in Italy since the early 90s. He deserves credit for jumpstarting, tentatively defining, and building on this line of inquiry during the course of the last two decades. As a professor and scholar of comparative literature at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” he has lead the way in this field of study since its inception. He has taught numerous courses on Italian literature of migration, published dozens of books and numerous articles, and given countless lectures for the benefit of both skeptics and enthusiastic supporters of his efforts. His scholarship is informed by the writings of Slovakian comparativist Dionýz Ďurišin on the subject of interliterary communities and Weltliteratur, and it points to (and attempts to compensate for) the urgent shortage of postcolonial theoreticians in Italy. It is arguably due to the pioneer-like nature of his research if Gnisci has left behind a trail of unanswered questions and a handful of unsteady theoretical considerations for us to contend with. In consulting his considerable list of publications one is often left with the impression that the passion he feels toward his research caused him to formulate, and subsequently revisit and revise, a handful of theories at a frantic pace, a strategy that might confuse some of his readers but also denotes a sense of urgency he attaches to his scholarship. One can gain a unique insight into how his approach has evolved (and, at times, shifted or backtracked) over the years by consulting a single volume entitled Creolizzare l’Europa: letteratura e migrazione (2003). This work is a collation of four texts.40 It contains a reprint of two books that were published during the 1990s, followed by a previously unpublished work from 2001 and a short essay, which was written on the occasion of the first European festival devoted to migrant writers:41 1. Il rovescio del gioco (1992) 2. La letteratura italiana della migrazione (1998) 3. Perdurabile migranza (2001) 4. Lettere migranti (2002) In the introduction to Creolizzare l’Europa the author states the need for academics to practice intercultural poetics by abandoning their Eurocentric tendencies. Gnisci often refers to this process as one of decolonization, a term which appears frequently in his work (7–8). He reminds his readers that this volume discusses the migratory patterns of the last three centuries in an effort to construct, for the very first time, an Italian postcolonial discourse which had previously only been outlined by a minute number of historians. In Il rovescio del gioco Gnisci limits his area of inquiry in a way that makes Bruck’s body of work (and that of most Jewish migrant authors) appear to have

14

Introduction

played no part in the birth and development of “Italian literature of migration.” He identifies Salah Methnani42 and Tahar Ben Jelloun43 as important representatives of this “zone” of Italian literature which he believes was still taking its primissimi passi (“very first steps,” 21) in 1992, but he fails to look beyond the experiences of a handful of North African authors, applying an exceedingly restrictive conception of “migrant writers” to his study: In both cases we are dealing with two Maghrebian writers, a Tunisian and a Moroccan, culturally French, who decide to write about their Italian experience in Italian. In both cases the writers lean on and collaborate with an Italian writer to bring this absolutely unheard of literary operation to fruition. Both of the books are . . . intercultural texts in the strictest and most original sense with respect to Italian literature. (23)

Gnisci suggests that the most important step a western reader must take is simply to adopt a different, more global outlook on literature. In quoting an excerpt from Salah Methnani’s book Immigrato (1990), which places all immigrants and emigrants in the same category,44 he underlines the universal nature of their experiences and their importance in the sociocultural environment of our time. When Methnani lists a handful of non-Italian peoples whose experiences might compare to his own, he includes immigrants from Ghana, Nigeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, and gli ebrei della diaspora millenaria (“the Jews of the millenary Diaspora”). Given that Methnani himself, an author who constitutes one of the initial sources of inspiration behind Gnisci’s research on literature of migration, feels a kinship and connection with the millions of souls displaced in the Jewish Diaspora, one has to wonder why our scholar from Rome did not produce a more inclusive and universally applicable body of criticism which would allow, at least hypothetically, for a discussion of any and all foreign-born authors who have set roots in Italy and made the Italian language their own. It wasn’t until the release of La letteratura italiana della migrazione in 1998 that Gnisci actually coined the phrase “Italian literature of migration.” Prior to the publication of this volume he had engaged in a taxonomical exploration that initially pondered the need to fluctuate between the terms “emigration” and “immigration,” both of which have a more specific meaning and are hence too limiting in their scope:45 The civil expression of the new globality that we want to concern ourselves with touches us very closely. We are dealing with literature written in Italian by recent immigrants to our country. I propose to define it: Italian literature of migration. . . . Let’s not call it . . . “literature of immigration,” as it might seem “natural” to do—and as I myself have done up until now—but rather: literature of migration. (75–77)



Introduction 15

The foreign-born writers (who consist primarily of novelists and essayists) treated in this text are first-generation immigrants. A number of them are college graduates who speak at least three languages. Aside from Italian, in fact, they tend to speak Arabic (or Wolof) and the language of their former colonizers: French, Portuguese, or English (76). Gnisci finds that these authors consider the Italian language to be neutral in nature, inasmuch as it is not directly connected to the colonial past of their countries of origin. In the case of Edith Bruck, whose literary production he does not factor into the discussion at hand, the Italian language has never been linked to the brutal process of disenfranchisement, deportation, and extermination that her family was subjected to during the height of the Third Reich. Her personal recollections of the traumatic concentration camp experience have always been defined by the almost exclusive use of Hungarian and German, a factor which could certainly attribute the same aforementioned condition of neutrality to her Italophone artistic expression. The adjective Italophone, which describes the linguistic vehicle employed by Bruck in her writing without necessarily (and forcibly) trying to insert her publications into a category that should only pertain to works that are “culturally Italian,” seems preferable to the nomenclature Italian, which would resemble a misappropriation of sorts in this particular case. The term Italophone, however, also refers to the language of the author’s target audience, and it hence defines and delineates a preexisting linguistic and cultural system her work interacts with. Its usage, for the purpose of a literary classification, was first popularized in the writings of American-based scholar Graziella Parati, who initially only applied this nomenclature to recent African immigrants who wrote in Italian.46 In a more recent volume entitled Migration Italy, however, looking back and reflecting upon her previous publications, Parati summarized the itinerary that her inquiries on the notion “Italophone literature” had followed, as they came to include a much more comprehensive list of artists from different parts of the world: “Authored by Africans, Eastern Europeans, and South Americans, as well as other nationalities who write in Italian, Italophone literature included a complex system of narratives that gradually become less autobiographical, experiment with different genres, and dialogue with the Italian literary tradition.”47 The fluctuations in the way she made use of the word Italophone over the years appear to have gone hand in hand with her continued efforts to carry out a progressively more inclusive exploration of migrant writers in Italy.48 Although she has discontinued her use of the expression in an effort to escape its monolingual implications, there is one particular ramification of its usage that is uniquely applicable to the writings of Edith Bruck and other foreign-born authors: “migrant writers are not venturing into a separate literary domain; rather, they are contributing to a hybrid cultural space in which all literature in Italian may be viewed as Italophone, a space affected by wider processes of globalization.”49 Bruck’s eloquent use of the Italian language, much like the Italian passport that she acquired many years after her arrival in Rome in 1954, is not to be

16

Introduction

misconstrued as a sign of cultural or political assimilation. There has not been a particular shift in her writing toward issues that are exclusively relevant to the Italian territory and its citizens. On the contrary—much like the case of the authors championed by Gnisci—her narrative, poetic, and cinematic production speak directly to Italophone readers regardless of their nationality or place of residence. All of her publications are in Italian, yet only a portion of her works are set in Italy. Gnisci’s insistence on defining his field of study with a term that denotes the country in which Methnani and Ben Jelloun’s works are published, as opposed to the language in which they are authored, is not without consequence. A recent essay by Eveljn Ferraro,50 in fact, reminds us that “by choosing to focus on Italophone writers we avoid shifting towards nationalistic interpretations of identity that would otherwise be implied in a debate on Italian migration literature” (102). Ďurišin’s writings on interliterary communities and global literature, which have played a fundamental role in Gnisci’s formation as a scholar, also imply the need to dispose of any and all approaches to the comparative study of literature which are limited by national boundaries.51 In the same spirit of the volume La letteratura italiana della migrazione, we should henceforth abandon the tendency to employ a terminology which limits the range of our academic inquiry in favor of a new and slightly revised definition: Italophone literature of migration.52 In its opening pages Gnisci presents readers with a concept of fundamental importance that complicates his approach to migrant writers in Italy, and is possibly the main reason for the resistance to his research in Italian academic circles: A final consideration: Italy refuses to have a history of colonial power which is comparable to the English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese ones. Hence we have decided not to have an Italian post-colonial question, a post-colonial “theory,” and a post-colonial literature. . . . We Italians need to learn from our migratory past, and also from our brief and exaggerated (in every sense) experience as a colonial power, to deal with the intercultural present, at home and everywhere in the world. . . . [Italian literature of migration] is the Italian version of the emergence of post-colonial literatures in the European languages of the great colonization and of the worldwide parliament of Italian writers which characterizes [the end of the twentieth] century. (82–83)

Gnisci acknowledges the historical existence of a widespread reticence to own up to the injustices carried out during Italy’s colonial campaign in northern Africa, which can be traced in bibliographical terms: after the publication of Ennio Flaiano’s award-winning novel Il tempo di uccidere in 1947, in fact, which was inspired by his participation in the Fascist military campaign in Abyssinia, a half century had to pass for another novel on the same subject to be published in Italian. According to an article by Francesco Cosenza published in the online



Introduction 17

journal El Ghibli, which is devoted exclusively to the study of migrant writers, at least 20 authors hailing from former Italian colonies have published works of literature in Italian: 10 from Somalia, 7 from Eritrea, and 3 from Ethiopia.53 These figures point to the fact that Italy must come to terms with its (albeit limited, yet certainly no less shameful) colonial past in both social and cultural terms. Providing Italophone migrant writers with an environment in which their books are not only welcomed but also granted the serious critical and commercial consideration to which they are entitled is merely one way to achieve this goal, and it is possibly the most logical option for Italian academics to embrace. Nevertheless, Gnisci’s research raises questions of fundamental importance that still remain unanswered. For example, why do his attempts to encourage the production of a specifically Italian postcolonial theory exclude any of the literature that was released during the first four decades immediately following the end of Italy’s brief and unsuccessful colonial period? If his interest in Italophone literature of migration stems, in part, from a desire to use his scholarship to assuage Italy’s national guilt after the failure of its colonial-imperial aims by applying a comparativist approach to the works of migrant writers, why has he limited himself to studying those authors who hail from countries that were colonized by non-Italians? Although the boom in immigration that Italy experienced during the last quarter of the twentieth century goes hand in hand with the chronological limitations that he places on his research, as well as the particular selection of authors (typically nonwhite, non-Europeans) he chooses to study, Gnisci is certainly aware of foreign-born writers who were publishing in Italian prior to the 1990s. His reticence to amend the discourse he has produced so that it includes artists who can (and should) be viewed as precursors of Pap Khouma, Salah Methnani, and Mohamed Bouchane is just as counterproductive as his uncritical and unilateral adoption of August 25, 1989 as a symbolic watershed moment of sorts in the history of Italophone literature of migration. The date in question corresponds to the murder of a South African blue-collar worker named Jerry Essan Masslo in Villa Laterno (near Caserta) by a gang of young Caucasian thieves. The public outrage that resulted from this crime preceded the passing of new laws on immigration, as well as the publication of some of the first books to be written in Italian by African immigrants.54 Gnisci’s formulation of a critical discourse on literature of migration in Italy which focused exclusively on works published after the year 1989, coupled with a widespread hesitation to revise the discourse in question, has resulted (at least temporarily) in a set of problematic distinctions being drawn between various foreign-born, Italophone migrant writers based on their respective countries of origin, the specific colonial histories they might have left behind, and the particular moment in time in which they relocated to Italy and first made use of the Italian language in their writings. These limitations and imperfect systems of classification are also reflected in an online database hosted by the University of Rome La Sapienza which is devoted entirely to Italophone migrant authors. The

18

Introduction

database in question is entitled Banca Dati Scrittori Immigrati in Lingua Italiana (BASILI; “Database of Immigrant Authors in the Italian Language”),55 and it is edited by Prof. Franca Sinopoli, a colleague and frequent collaborator of Gnisci. Although BASILI is both a unique and an important resource, it also fails to acknowledge any work by Edith Bruck published before 1998, listing only six of her books in its limited bibliography.56 Edith Bruck had already received some degree of critical attention before the mid-1990s; for example: her piece entitled “Il cavallo” (“The horse”) won the Teramo prize for short fiction in 1960, and was eventually published in her first collection of short stories (Andremo in città) in 1962. In the late 1980s, her epistolary novel Lettera alla madre won multiple literary awards, and she has been a finalist for the coveted Premio Strega on two separate occasions (1974 and 1993). Given the extent to which Sinopoli’s scholarship has been informed by Gnisci’s, especially in terms of the chronological limitations she has placed on her work for the BASILI database, it is safe to say that we are dealing with a domino effect of sorts. The restrictive approach Gnisci has taken in Il rovescio del gioco (1992) influenced other academics who followed in his footsteps. The terminology “Italophone literature of migration” for which I advocate in this study is intended to embrace the need for a new classification suggested by Ciccarelli (“La letteratura”; “Frontier”). Said definition makes the best use of Gnisci and Sinopoli’s research on one side of the Atlantic Ocean, while benefiting from a close reading of Parati’s publications on the other. The need to bring together and fuse such a diverse variety of academic outputs, which in essence are all devoted to a single purpose, calls for an additional clarification; or rather, another terminological subdivision. One strategy that allows for a potential reconciliation of both new and old taxonomies which have taken hold in this field of study during the last two decades would be to follow Laura E. Ruberto’s assertion that writers who are recent immigrants should be cautiously categorized as emergent:57 Just as immigrants choose their corners in subway stations so will these texts choose their place in cultural history. The literature of Italy’s immigrants continues being created daily, and for this reason, perhaps more than all others, the term emergent is necessary. Such a description is temporary by definition; that is, I would like to suggest that it would be reductionist at this point to codify their status in some pre-existing category. In fact, they resist such codification. Moreover, . . . critical readings of these texts must take into account those qualities which have made them emergent. Lastly, it will only be over time and with more debate that we can understand if my label emergent is useful and appropriate. (139)

Hypothetically, if one takes the liberty of labeling all the Italophone immigrants who have been published since 1990 as emergent voices in Italy’s constantly evolving literary environment, it would follow that a figure such as Edith Bruck, who has been consistently writing in Italian for over five decades, should



Introduction 19

perhaps be described as an established Italophone author. The same could be said for the talented Swiss-born novelist Fleur Jaeggy, who has been a fixture in the catalog of the Adelphi publishing house in Milan since her debut in 1968,58 and also for Giorgio Pressburger.59 In spite of the inherent difficulty in classifying the works of these transnational, translingual authors, and the varying degrees of acceptance they have experienced in Italy and beyond, one could argue that their critical and commercial successes have placed them in a de facto state of canonization as of the end of the 1980s: Pressburger, Jaeggy, and Bruck, are Italian writers, by now recognized as such due to their readership and their critical and editorial success, including the various literary awards which have been conferred upon them. . . . We are dealing with a more cultural than ethnic Italianness, acquired more or less easily and developed to a level of excellent and enviable stylistic abilities, which I believe is not dissimilar from that which had been developed by many intellectuals who were formed at the peripheries of an empire, anxious to receive all that emanated from its center, yet free to choose, to discard or retain only the indispensable parts of what the adopted linguistic and cultural tradition had to offer. And this is why, I repeat, that one cannot set aside their condition of departure which marks them as foreigners, as migrants who are more or less settled. (Ciccarelli, “La letteratura,” 123)

Although it is too simplistic to describe these migrant writers merely as “Italian” authors, the fact remains that using an imperfect definition of this sort is still preferable to relegating them to a perennial status of “artist in limbo.” As much as one might disagree with this nomenclature, its widespread application is almost inevitable once their literary efforts begin to enjoy the recognition they so justly deserve. A small, yet significant turning point in the scholarship of Armando Gnisci came in the form of an anthology he edited in 2006. Nuovo Planetario Italiano60 is a hybrid text, not because of the linguistic hybridization that marks the production of the authors it engages; but rather, because it consists of a compromise between a collection of scholarly writings and a more traditionally conceived anthology of literary works. By embracing the definition of a Grande Migrazione61 (“Great Migration,” 13) that was originally formulated by German poet and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1992, Gnisci attempts to loosen considerably the limitations he placed on his research on literature of migration in the past. For the first time since the publication of Il rovescio del gioco in 1992, his work includes a specific reference to the Holocaust and its effects on the history of European and worldwide migration: Those who placed their lives in a state of flight during the twentieth century of unhappy totalitarianisms and wars of extermination of the world and our species—Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Kolyma . . . belong to this extremely

20

Introduction sad new form of modern history, and they even anticipate the global and general meaning (in the sense of humankind) of Enzensberger, Rushdie, Brodskij, and Walcott’s “Great Migration,” which also belong to all of us who are living together in the world at this time. (21)

In his introductory chapter (one of three in the volume) Gnisci initially offers a generic description of the type of writer he wishes to focus on without specifically referencing any previously omitted artists by name. Although one could easily identify Edith Bruck as a candidate for inclusion in his discussion of the cultural implications of writing in a new language (the language of one’s arrival, so to speak), he does not allude to her directly at any point. He does, however, praise all translingual, transnational writers, Italophone or otherwise, for their courage as well as their inherent relevance in a postmigratory (and/or postcolonial) environment (24). Aside from a fleeting reference to Auschwitz, in Nuovo Planetario Italiano Gnisci does not personally take on the process of revising some of the false steps he took during the first 16 years he devoted to the study of literature of migration. The lion share of this arduous process is left in the hands of his coauthors. The second introductory chapter in Nuovo Planetario Italiano is the work of Maria Cristina Mauceri. Her essay entitled “Scrivere ovunque. Diaspore europee e migrazione planetaria” (“Writing anywhere. European Diasporas and planetary migration”) constitutes the most noteworthy critical innovation in this volume. Mauceri integrates (or reconciles?) Gnisci’s introduction, from both a historical and literary perspective, with the unacknowledged theoretical advances it contains: The current intra-European and extra-European migration of male and female authors towards Italy could appear to Italians to be a new phenomenon because they are experiencing it “live,” but it has numerous precedents in the past. Nevertheless there are, as we shall see, substantial differences between the literary intra-European diasporas and the planetary migration of the last few decades which emphasize the discontinuity with the past. (42)

Mauceri summarizes the history of migrant authors who have arrived in (or departed from) Italy as far back as the Middle Ages. Her insightful synthesis, which includes a discussion of the principal works by Bruck, Pressburger, and Jaeggy, goes a long way to explain why they should at the very least be considered precursors to other immigrant writers who have enriched the contemporary literary scene during the last three decades. Furthermore, by highlighting the experiences of Italian-born literary figures (such as Ungaretti or Marinetti) who left their homeland for a myriad of different reasons, Mauceri indirectly solidifies the would-be status of canonization of multiple foreign Italophone authors who chose Italy as their new home, by design or by chance, during the second half of the twentieth century:



Introduction 21

For Ungaretti . . . it was important to show his own Italian-ness through a profound attachment to his homeland, so he participated in World War I with enthusiasm. Nonetheless, in the depths of his soul he remained a stateless man: in 1935 he moved to Brazil and as he personally admitted “I am a foreigner in Italy, as I am in France, as I am in other places.” . . . (58) An interesting observation: those whose formation takes place elsewhere or are first recognized abroad struggle to find a position in [this] country because the Italian literary world appears to be ready to produce antibodies to expel those who do not conform to local tradition. (65)

Mauceri’s research on the literature of European diasporas highlights the notion that the mobility of Italophone authors is far from a recent phenomenon of the last 25 or 30 years. She also brings to light a handful of biobibliographical elements that unite the writings of artists who immigrated during the postwar period to those North African writers who have traditionally been associated with literature of migration in Italy: both groups of authors have discovered or established themselves as literary figures only after their migration to Italy, by adopting a new language in their writing rather quickly and with an unexpectedly high degree of success. (78–80). Gnisci’s 2009 volume L’educazione del te,62 perhaps inadvertently, sheds light on what may be the most problematic tendency shared by a number of Italian comparativists with respect to migrant authors. Setting aside all other limitations and imperfect systems of classification which have marred this line of inquiry for years, this text plainly exposes Gnisci’s belief that the condition of migrant writers constitutes an infinite state of limbo: I imagine the migrant writer as a foreigner who remains that way and does not integrate himself, even if he lives well in our country; he will always narrate stories beginning from the hollow of his adventure, for everyone and for himself. Like all writers, not only the talented ones. And—let’s keep this between us—the migrant writer has much more to think about and to offer than (mere) nostalgia. (65)

If we allow ourselves to believe that migrant writers do not integrate on principle, then we are forcing them to coexist with, and to some extent depend on, a class of academics who (at least on the surface) tend to welcome them with open arms, who shower them in praise for their translingualism because the unusual nature of their works makes them exotic and marketable, at least in a scholastic sense. If we were to actively assist in the process of “Italianizing” them in the eyes of the general public, if we advocated for their canonization and a shift in how they are viewed on a national and international level (or, to cite Sinopoli, where they are to be placed),63 then perhaps we might compromise their fetishistic appeal—and in doing so jeopardize our own status as “scholars on the cutting edge,” as researchers who straddle the divide between old and new hierarchies.

22

Introduction

One could certainly argue that, in the interest of establishing a genuinely globalized approach to literary analysis, national barriers should be considered irrelevant—yet they should not be spoken of in fluid and flexible terms only when academic figures have something at stake. If Gnisci feels comfortable referring to “our country” (ours vs. theirs) as he nonchalantly places Bruck, Pressburger, Jaeggy, Methnani, Ben Jelloun, and countless others in a permanent state of alterity,64 then perhaps German philosopher Theodor Adorno was right in asserting that the only nation transnational authors can really call their own is a literary homeland which is open to everyone.65 The principal defect which has defined the majority of the scholarship on literature of migration until now (Italian, Italophone, emergent, established, or otherwise labeled) may very well be the insistence of some critics to force a laundry list of authors into a niche that is delineated by a set of inflexible parameters, at the expense of others whose works they are not aware of, or who they simply have not found a way to naturally engage without having to reconsider their primary thesis. These factors have made it necessary to take a polemical tally of wrong turns and missed opportunities that can only partially explain the misshapen critical reception that the Italian literary scene has reserved for some of its most prolific and successful contemporary authors. Edith Bruck and Giorgio Pressburger do not write in their native language, they do not translate their works for an Italophone audience, and they were actively enriching Italy’s cultural milieu long before the concept of literature of migration was ever posited. The horrors of antisemitic violence and discrimination they were subjected to during their youth, which undoubtedly played a role in their decision to leave their native Hungary and settle in Italy, have not yet been fully reconciled with the limited discourse on migrant authors produced by Italian academia. Recent scholarship in postcolonial studies produced by Italians has finally begun to include authors from Italy’s former colonies, giving birth to insightful theoretical innovations and amplifying an all too stagnant line of inquiry. Nevertheless, the relationship between the Holocaust and patterns of migration in Europe—along with their literary repercussions—has not been properly examined by the international community of Italianists. For the time being, scholars and students who seek to familiarize themselves with this fascinating field of study are faced with an overwhelmingly profuse body of criticism which, as of the year 2009, still tended to focus on the traumatic nature of migration as paramount: The migrant way of “gambling with one’s life” resembles the beginning of a Russian roulette; it’s a challenge, in fact, . . . uneasy and absolute, but furthermore it is inexhaustible, because it is played for every moment during every occurrence. . . . Was I right to migrate here? What am I doing here? Is this really the land I dreamed of? Should I hold on or go back? . . .



Introduction 23

Life after the trauma, even if it is fortunate and fruitful, remains an infinite forest of obstacles, as if the crucial and extremely tormented period of the rupture-trauma were spread out over one’s entire existence. . . . Aside from a Russian roulette all of this resembles the post-Auschwitz condition, as it has been witnessed and taught to us by Jean Améry, Primo Levi, and Paul Celan. It resembles the wound of inhuman deportation, which is the monstrous and other negative side of the migration that European civilization actively practiced from Africa to America for a few centuries. (Gnisci 63–64)

Gnisci’s attempt to put forth an equation in which the cruel history of colonial slavery and the injustices of the Holocaust are seen as two phenomena defined by a specular symmetry of sorts is not without value. On the contrary, it is a notion that could radically revise the entire line of inquiry to which he has contributed so prolifically during his career. The link between the Holocaust and the study of postcolonialism has actually been addressed by an American scholar in recent years. In fact, the work in question, authored by Michael Rothberg, was published in 2009, the same year in which L’educazione de te was released. Rothberg’s groundbreaking work, entitled Multidirectional Memory,66 is an interdisciplinary text that aims to reconfigure the two fields in question. This seminal volume explores the relationship between memory and group identity in an attempt to revise the majority of extant scholarship on the subject. Rothberg makes a compelling argument against the widely held model of competitive memory in which “legacies of slavery and the Nazi genocide” are seen as incompatible. His volume analyzes a series of marginal texts (or, as the case may be, marginalized discourses within more popular texts) to highlight a typically ignored or understudied intellectual countertradition in which the collective memories of individual genocides can be benignly compared and contrasted in an effort to reach a more informed understanding of their respective histories. Rothberg rejects “the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources” in favor of a multidirectional conception of memory, “as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3). Adopting Richard Terdiman’s67 contention that “memory is the past made present,” he speaks to the contemporary nature of memory while underlining the notion that memories are actively produced. By focusing on “both agents and sites of memory, and especially on their interaction within specific historical and political contexts of struggle and contestation,” Rothberg encourages his readership to “think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; [inasmuch as] both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction” (4–5). Perhaps the most banal example of this kind of cross-referential borrowing can be seen in the tendency exhibited by

24

Introduction

some scholars and activists to use the word “Holocaust” to refer to instances of genocide or political violence that on the surface would appear to have absolutely no direct connection to the systematic extermination of millions of perceived enemies of the Third Reich. These usages have been the source of no small amount of controversies, yet in formulating his theory of multidirectional memory Rothberg would contend that an institution such as America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM), which was founded in 1988 in Milwaukee by James Cameron,68 benefited from collectively held memories of the Holocaust which in turn were used to emphasize the tragic magnitude of the plight of African Americans.69 Not surprisingly, Mr. Cameron and his wife had visited Yad VaShem in Israel in 1979,70 and this trip had shaped his vision of the function the ABHM could perform and the strategies he should employ to make it an effective educational forum.71 There are dozens of other similar examples one could cite to underscore the flexibility with which the word “Holocaust” has been employed and the “ongoing negotiation” it implies—from the notion of an Armenian genocide (before, during, and after World War I) to the challenge put forth by prolife groups for all individuals born after the year 1972 to consider themselves survivors of a so-called abortion Holocaust. All of these instances could be seen as evidence of a widespread societal movement toward a multidirectional form of memory, yet Rothberg’s volume rightfully takes a more restrictive focus that exclusively engages the Holocaust and European colonialism from a comparative perspective. The theoretical framework he constructs is informed by a radical rereading of Freud’s concept of “screen memories” and a unique understanding of how memories can emerge into the public through triggers that might initially appear less than relevant or even in bad taste. In order to lay the foundational elements of this important volume, which unearths a lesser-known countertradition that links Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies, the author explores the complex history of France during and after the Second World War, up to and including the Algerian struggle for independence: to give a concrete example . . . the practice of torture seems like an unlikely trigger for Holocaust memory—for how could a practice as widespread, if repellant, as torture conjure up the extremity of genocide? But in France during the Algerian War of Independence many observers understood that the French state’s widespread use of extrajudicial violence as just such a reawakening of the past. . . . Some survivors of the Nazi camps, such as the Austrian/ Belgian writer Jean Améry, even cite the discussion of torture as one of the impetuses for their own public articulation of Holocaust memory. But this is not the end of the story. For a practice that triggered memory of Nazism at one moment could later serve in France for memory of the Algerian War itself—a war that had for almost four decades seemed to be blocked from view even as, in its wake, Holocaust consciousness experienced an incredible growth. Thus, the turn of the millennium in France (and elsewhere) has seen



Introduction 25

renewed debates about torture, renewed interest in connections between the Holocaust and the Algerian War, and a sense . . . that post-9/11 policies in the United States echo older histories of imperial and fascist violence. (17)

It is interesting to note that Armando Gnisci and Michael Rothberg, even though they appear to be completely unaware of each other’s work, were exploring the same groundbreaking concept at almost the same moment in time. The enormous difference between their respective volumes and the linguistic divide that separates them suggests that both scholars independently developed an interest in the complex relationship between the memories and aftermaths of colonialism and the Holocaust. Although Gnisci has been a very prolific scholar during the last two decades, he has not, as yet, assimilated Rothberg’s theories into his own work. Nevertheless, his description of the “wound of inhuman deportation” by the hand of the Nazi regime as being the reverse side of the mass deportations carried out during colonial slavery constitutes an ephemeral glimpse of the same line of reasoning that inspired Rothberg’s conceptualization of multidirectional memory. Unfortunately, Gnisci limited himself to scratching the surface. One can only speculate as to what could have been the extensive benefits and repercussions of a more in-depth exploration on his part of the place (to be) held by Holocaust survivors in the scholarly discourse on Italophone literature of migration. The a priori exclusion of these authors urgently requires a retroactive revision and rectification of said discourse to be carried out in Italian and in English, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. An ideal starting point for such an important process could be found in Eric Salerno’s book Uccideteli tutti72 (“Kill them all”), which was published in 2008. This volume relies on historical documents to recreate the seldom-told story of a concentration camp in Giado, in Italian colonial Libya, where numerous Jews and a small number of Arabs were killed in what might have been the southernmost slaughter brought on by Hitler’s final solution. This lesser-known event in Italy’s colonial history brings the study of the Holocaust directly into contact with the Italian postcolonial question in a way that negates the validity of the typically compartmentalized approach to these subjects. It also serves as a forceful reminder of the notion that the disenfranchisement of the Jews in Fascist Italy and the publication of the Racial Manifesto in 1938 was the result of a lengthy (and scientifically absurd) campaign of racial propaganda designed to separate the “Aryan Italians” from any and all supposedly impure ethno-racial influences that were mistakenly deemed inferior. Given his limited, quasi-exclusive focus on the works of North African writers and his prolonged reticence to consider the impact of deportation, exile, and forced migration during World War II as relevant factors in the study of Italophone literature of migration, one might argue that Gnisci’s prominent role in the development of this line of inquiry is indirectly responsible for a delayed reaction of sorts in Italian academia: by the year 1992, when our Rome-based professor published his first work of criticism on the subject of migrant authors

26

Introduction

in Italy,73 Bruck had already published numerous works of prose and poetry. Twenty years later, the lacunae in the discourse he championed are still having an undue impact on the manner in which the likes of Bruck and Pressburger are studied (and, at times, mislabeled) in Italy. In light of some of the taxonomical and methodological issues that have marked the initial formulation of a scholarly narrative on literature of migration in Italy, one might be tempted to avoid engaging the subject altogether. Such a reticence, however, would further impede the development of an important line of inquiry in which the histories of the Holocaust and colonialism can be reevaluated so as to factor in those instances in which they came directly into contact with each other. Futhermore, it would also hinder the exploration of how Italophone literature and cinema have represented the long-term effects of widespread migration both during and after World War II. In his volume on The Holocaust in Italian Culture,74 Robert S. C. Gordon argues for an understanding of the Shoah in Italy that acknowledges the crimes of the Fascists, suggesting that a conversation on the Holocaust must be undertaken in a context that is aware of all the facets of Italian life, identity, and culture that it has impacted: national character, Cold War Politics, the role of the Church, European identity, immigration, multiculturalism and so on. . . . The Holocaust can never be wholly contained at the “national” level, neither in its history of perpetrators, victims and bystanders, of individuals, groups, ethnicities and states; nor in its a posteriori cultural representations. It is and was always a porous, plurilinguistic, transnational phenomenon. (7)

The study of Edith Bruck’s life and works, regardless of the specific approach one might take, by definition consists of a multicultural, multilingual, transnational investigation of the role of women in contemporary European society, but also an inquiry into the role of the artist-witness in the process of passing on personal memories of the concentration camps from one generation to the next, and an opportunity to consider the reality of living with Auschwitz, of living and surviving in spite of its existence. Although the variety of themes, genres, and mediums Bruck has experimented with make it reductive and disingenuous to force her artistic production under the single label of representations of the Shoah, if we consider her life experience as a whole, one could easily describe it in the same terms used by Gordon to stress the interdisciplinarity of Holocaust Studies. An event in Bruck’s life, in fact, regardless of whether or not it has inspired a specific work by the author, can “variously be read as an event in Jewish history, German history, . . . Israeli prehistory, but also Italian history (and . . . other national histories), Italian-Jewish history, European history, global history, human history, and so forth” (Gordon 9). The questions that her presence in the Italian cultural environment inevitably elicit should have little to do with systems of literary and cinematic classifications based solely on national allegiances and shortsighted chronological limitations. Instead, an examination of Bruck’s



Introduction 27

work should allow one to evaluate contemporary Italian culture without being exclusively beholden to it or engulfed by it. From an ideological and psychological perspective, her Italianized narratives of the Holocaust and the vicissitudes of her postwar migrations in Europe and Israel also allow Italophone readers and scholars an opportunity to reflect on some of the most horrifying events in modern history without being faced with any artistic representations of Italian complicity in the persecution and extermination of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. To deny her (acquired) Italian-ness and relegate her to the marginalized, yet important role of Holocaust witness makes as much sense as pretending that a handful of (mostly) African migrants are the only authors who have legitimately contributed to a broader metanarrative on migration in present-day Europe. In its first chapter, this volume will necessarily apply some of the extant theories on migrant authors in Italy to the study of Edith Bruck’s career, stretching them beyond the initial parameters for which they were designed, in an effort to reconsider the reception of our Hungarian-born artist’s production during the last five decades. An examination of her published work will underscore the different ways in which the author has engaged the role of witness and survivor in her career, endeavoring to shift her focus to other themes, and often choosing to use her voice to speak on the aftermath of the Holocaust, as opposed to consistently and directly revisiting the memory of the concentration camps. The second chapter will address her work as a consultant, screenwriter, and director of film and television in particular, which has not enjoyed the same critical and commercial success as her writing, though in many ways it has presented her with a creative vehicle to step away from the limitations and expectations that have been placed on her as an author. In fact, it has allowed her to speak for a number of individuals who have been marginalized in modern society, and to abandon, at least in her efforts as a director, any and all autobiographical modes of expression. The third chapter will focus on Bruck’s works of poetry, which have been mostly neglected by critics and scholars, in order to analyze the author’s approach to the genre, which she has embraced, in part, in an effort to explore a more immediate, more personal, and at times more visceral form of writing. An analysis of Bruck’s work as a translator of poetry will also serve to quantify the influence of Hungarian models on her lyrical expression, such as Jòzsef Attila and Miklos Radnóti. This volume will come to a close with a discussion of the artistic reflections of Edith Bruck’s Jewish identity, in order to situate her unique artistic persona in contemporary Italy. Although one might argue that she has taken on the function that was performed by Primo Levi before her, bearing the weight and responsibility of being a primary point of reference among Italianspeaking Holocaust survivors, her stature among Jewish artists in Italy warrants a more inclusive study of the relationship between her body of work and that of her contemporaries. In fact, although she does not practice the Jewish faith, Bruck has become known for discussing and engaging Jewish culture and traditions openly in some of her publications, and this tendency has set her apart from many Italian

28

Introduction

Jewish writers whose lives have been defined by secularism and assimilation into the mainstream gentile society. It has also inspired European scholars like Hanna Serkowska and Raniero Speelman to highlight some of the elements in Bruck’s writing that underscore her Jewish heritage, in order to bring the study of her craft to bear on a broader discourse on Jewish artists in modern Italy.

Notes 1. Philip Balma, “Intervista a Edith Bruck.” Italian Quarterly 44, nos. 171–72 (2007): 75–88. 2. Prem Poddar, Rajeev Shridhar Patke, and Lars Jensen, eds. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 293. 3. The adjective “Italophone” is a loanword from French, used by linguists to describe all Italian-speaking individuals. I was initially inspired to employ this term after reading Graziella Parati’s work. In particular, her introductory text, entitled “Italophone Voices,” was the first to use the term in reference to migrant (African) writers publishing in Italian. See Studi di Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa 8, no. 2 (1995): 1–15. In her anthology entitled Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), Parati admits that the notion of Italophone literature “lends itself to many interpretations,” and she was understandably reluctant to “limit its definitions” (14). With the publication of Mediterranean Crossroads in 1999 Parati had come to include a broader spectrum of works under the heading of “Italophone texts,” such as the writings of Albanian poets Gezim Hadjari (winner of the Montale prize in 1997) and Visar Zhiti (awarded the Ada Negri prize in the same year), but also authors from Brazil (Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque and Christiana de Caldas Brito) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Jadranka Hodzic) who write in Italian: “the metaphor of the crossroad is helpful in the context of Italophone literature: Italian as the language in which testimonies of migration are expressed occupies the center of the crossing as it becomes both the instrument of visibility and the object of appropriation. This temporary center, reshaped by the immigrant writers themselves, allows for the possibility of expanding their efforts in different directions that expand beyond national boundaries. Italy and Italian become, therefore, one of the many centers of cultural crossroads in Europe” (14–15). 4. Bruck’s prose publications significantly outweigh the number of cinematic and poetic works she has produced over the years. Due to the fact that a selection of her prose writings engage the film industry directly and critically, I have devoted a chapter to analyzing how she has brought the intricate connections between the two mediums to bear on the printed page and the silver screen. 5. This village, which owes its name to the Berczeli family who owned the territory before the sixteenth century, still to this day consists of a few roads and a series of long plots of land. Its current population is approximately 2,000 people, residing in a space that is equivalent to thirty-two square kilometers within the county of Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, which borders Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Romania. 6. Edith Bruck, Chi ti ama così (Milano: Lerici, 1959), 13–15. All translations in this volume are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Introduction 29

Elena Mortara Di Veroli, “Ricordi yiddish e scrittura: Intervista a Edith Bruck,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 62, nos. 1–2 (1996): 392–412. Roberto Della Rocca, “Roberto Della Rocca Incontra Edith Bruck,” Per amore della lingua. Incontri con scrittori ebrei, ed. Laura Quercioli-Mincer (Rome: Lithos, 2005), 23–43. On this subject, see Maria Cristina Mauceri, “Edith Bruck, a Translingual Writer Who Found a Home in Italy: An Interview by Maria Cristina Mauceri,” Italica 84, nos. 2–3 (2007): 608. “Among other things, when my sister and I returned from the concentration camps to our village, we were literally rejected.” Di Veroli, “Ricordi,” 408–09. A fictionalized rendition of these events appeared in the novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo (2009). The short text “Tra noi,” from the collection Due stanze vuote (1974), tells the story of a young married couple traveling to Israel on their honeymoon, while also pondering the notion of relocating there permanently. The author also drew from her experiences in Israel in the short story “Signor Goldberg,” published in the collection Andremo in città. Although it is primarily concerned with the period that precedes the publication of the author’s first book, one of the most precise biographical entries on Edith Bruck appears in the Italian Women Writers database hosted by the library at the University of Chicago. One detail, however, is worth correcting. The database identifies one the author’s sisters as “Marta,” as opposed to “Margo.” The permanent URL for the entry in question is http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0082.html. Mauceri, “Edith Bruck,” 607. Brenda Webster, “An Interview With Edith Bruck,” 13th Moon 11, nos. 1–2 (1993): 170–75. Nelo Risi, Introduction, Who Loves You Like This, by Edith Bruck, translated by Thomas Kelso (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001), vii–ix. The ancient Jewish community who use the Italian rite. Andrea Peto, “Women Are Stronger: Edith Bruck Talked to Andrea Peto,” Hungaricum 1 (2007): 52–58. Ibid., 53. A fictional narrative inspired by her frustrating interactions with the Claims Conference appears in her epistolary novel Lettera da Francoforte (Milano: Mondadori, 2004). Edith Bruck, Personal Interview, 28 June 2010. The complete text of this interview is included in the appendices for this volume. Her work in television includes a number of documentaries for RAI, the public television system in Italy. Bruck is not especially known for her work in the theater, which has been very sporadic and has gone virtually unnoticed. She has written a total of three works for the stage. Bruck’s theatrical debut was a short comedy entitled “Sulla porta” (“At the door”). It was performed in Rome in 1971 by the Teatro-Insieme group, and it received a negative critique in the pages of L’Unità, Italy’s leading communist newspaper. See “Parodia dei luogi comuni sulla crisi degli intellettuali,” L’Unità, 29 May 1971, 9. In 1973 she coauthored a performance for the “Centro Culturale Maddalena,” a feminist theater collective based in Rome. The work in question, entitled “Maria, Maria, Marianna,” consisted of seven character portraits in the form of short

30

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

Introduction monologues, written by Maricla Boggio, Edith Bruck, and Dacia Maraini. “Maria, Maria, Marianna,” which must be understood as a collective effort resulting from the input of multiple artists, was not particularly successful with audiences, and it received a lukewarm review by Liliana Madeo in the right-leaning newspaper La Stampa (“Un teatro di donne per il femminismo,” La Stampa, 9 Dec. 1973, 8). It’s worth noting, however, that one might describe Madeo as a conservative journalist who was openly and vocally antifeminist during the 1970s (see, for example: “Attrici, casalinghe e cantanti si sono unite contro l’uomo,” La Stampa, 31 Oct. 1973, 11). In the early 90s Bruck penned an adaptation of her critically acclaimed novel Lettera alla madre. There are no extant copies of this adaptation, which was produced in 1992 in Tuscany (starring Alessandra Bedino) by a theater company called Occupazioni farsesche (located in Barberino di Mugello, in the province of Florence). Bruck has informed me in our exchanges that she was incredibly dissatisfied with the result, citing disagreements with the director Ricardo Sottili and last-minute modifications to the script that she had not approved. Given the relative unavailability of her theatrical writings, the present volume does not include a detailed analysis of Bruck’s infrequent work for the stage. Bruck addressed the troubling nature of her professional experiences in Belgrade when I first interviewed her in 2006. These events, which cast a troubling light on a small number of Italians working in the film industry as well as the forces of law and order in Belgrade, are addressed in detail in the second chapter of this book. The interview in question is reproduced in its entirety, in English translation, in the appendices of this volume. See Mauceri, “Edith Bruck,” 612: “Let us say that I participated in the feminist movement of the Seventies for two or three years, then I left it because I had some discussions with women who spoke as though Auschwitz had been a joke, and one of my friends was called a Jew. I do not think that women are better than men.” The title of this book at first could appear to be grammatically incorrect (the correct form would require the plural “quante stelle ci sono nel cielo”), yet this is done intentionally. In fact, it is a quote that pays homage to the famous Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi. On page 73 of the novel Bruck included the first four lines from a popular ballad by Petőfi. Her translation of these lines higlights the profound linguistic differences between Hungarian and Italian, which are such that rendering one language through the other does not necessarily guarantee a clear and satisfactory level of comprehension of the originally intended meaning: “Quanta goccia c’è nell’oceano? / Quanta stella c’è nel cielo? / Quanto capello sulla testa dell’uomo? / E quanto male nel cuore?” (“How much drop in the ocean? / How much star in the sky? How much hair on the head of man? / And how much evil in his heart?”). The novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo won multiple awards in 2009: the Premio Letterario Città di Bari, the Premio Viareggio-Rèpaci, the Premio Letterario FeniceEuropa, and the Premio Letterario di Lettaratura Religiosa. The author has publicly stated that she was somewhat surprised to have been considered for an award designed to recognize religious literature, especially one funded by a Catholic organization. Her theory is that she was selected for this prize based on the fact that the novel deals with a young woman who is able to resist family pressures to have an abortion. See the introduction to the volume Itinerario: Útirány (Roma: Quasar, 1998), in which Bruck recalls this difficult process: “When my friend Mario Quattrocchi asked me for a selection of my lyrics for the series he was editing for Quasar, which



28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Introduction 31

I was to translate from Italian to Hungarian, I said yes, convinced that I would be embarking on a pleasant journey. Alas, the illusion faded quickly and the journey turned into the climbing of a mountain with frequent tumbles into doubt. Due to the language itself and its musicality and rhythm, the lyrics had progressively revealed themselves to me naked and defenseless with respect to their original Italian form in which I had written, lived, felt, and matured them. For a while I struggled bouncing from doubts to dictionaries, then in a moment of panic I phoned a dear friend in Budapest who translated some of my novels, Éva Székely, and eventually sent all the materials to her (5). Louise O. Vasvári, “Emigrée Central European Jewish Women’s Holocaust Life Writing,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11, no. 1 (2009), http://docs.lib .purdue.edu/clcweb/vol11/iss1/7. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–96. Elizabeth Trahan, “Writing a Holocaust Memoir in Two Languages: A Balancing Act,” Metamorphoses 8, no. 2 (2000): 256–63. Edith Bruck, Letter to My Mother, trans. Brenda Wester e Gabriella Romani (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006). The short story in question is entitled “Silvia.” See Edith Bruck, Andremo in città (Milano: Lerici, 1962), 133: “Robert Lewy—Silvia said smiling. Then turning towards me she said in German:—You’re my little brother, aren’t you?” See Edith Bruck, Herr Goldberg; Erzählungen, trans. Susanne Hurni-Maehler (Hamburg, Claassen Verlag, 1965). This is only German edition of the text, and its table of contents includes only ten short stories. The last one, “Il Signor Goldberg,” gives the German version of the collection its title: Andremo in città (1962)

Herr Goldberg; Erzählungen (1965)

Il cavallo In fondo ai piedi Cappuccetto rosso La sentenza Una sorpresa Andremo in città Il ghiaccio sul fiume Silvia Villon Il pane azzimo Signor Goldberg

Das Pferd Am Fußende Rotkäppchen Der Urteilsspruch Eine Überraschung Wir werden in die Stadt gehen Eis auf dem Fluß ? Villon Mazzenbrot Herr Goldberg

34. See, for example, the writings of Stefania Lucamante and Cristina Villa in Raniero Speelman, Monica Jansen, and Silvia Gaiga, eds. Contemporary Jewish Writers in Italy: A Generational Approach (Utrecht: Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services, 2007), 77–105. 35. See Adalgisa Giorgio, “Strategies for Remembering: Auchwitz, Mother, and Writing in Edith Bruck,” European Memories of the Second World War, ed. Helmut Peisch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 247–57. Giorgio’s scholarship will be addressed in more detail in ch. 1.

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36. This focus dates back to her research for the PhD in Romance Languages. See Gabriella Romani, Women of Letters: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Epistolary Novels in Italy, Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2000. DAI 61 (2001): DA9989646. 37. Gabriella Romani, “Scrittrice italiana per caso,” Afterword, Privato, by Edith Bruck (Milano: Garzanti, 2010), 175–85. 38. This essay appears in Andrea Ciccarelli and Peter Bondanella, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), 197–213. 39. Even a superficial reading of Ciccarelli’s essay is sufficient to clarify the extent to which his research overlaps with Gnisci’s in his efforts to expand on this line of inquiry by making it more inclusive. In fact, aside from referencing Gnisci’s pioneering 1998 volume La letteratura italiana della migrazione (Roma: Lilith, 1998), he tends to lean on a number of the same texts that Gnisci has consulted over the years, for example, Jean-Jacques Marchand, ed., La letteratura dell’emigrazione. Gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel mondo (Torino: Edizioni della Fondazione Agnelli, 1991); Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Laura E. Ruberto, “Immigrants Speak: Italian Literature from the Border,” Forum Italicum 1 (1997): 127–44. 40. For the sake of simplicity, unless otherwise indicated, these four works will always be cited reflecting the pagination from Creolizzare l’Europa. 41. For a definition of “migrant writers” and the often controversial cultural notions that surround this concept, see Russell King, John Connell, and Paul White, eds. Writing across Worlds. Literature and Migration (London: Routledge, 1997). 42. Methnani is a Tunisian-born writer who first gained the attention of the public for coauthoring the book Immigrato with Mario Fortunato. 43. Moroccan-born, francophone writer Ben Jelloun released a collection of stories in Italian in 1991 (Dove lo stato non c’è. Racconti italiani [Torino: Einaudi]), which he coauthored with Egi Volterrani. 44. He cites a passage which symbolically refers to all migrants with the adjective “clandestine” (42). 45. This type of fluctuation has also appeared in the writings of other scholars. Its most noteworthy repercussion has possibly been the fact that the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture published in 2000 included entries on both “literature of immigration” and “literature of emigration,” in spite of the fact that Gnisci had called for a single, more inclusive terminology in 1998. 46. See the aforementioned text entitled “Italophone Voices” (1995); but also “Strangers in Paradise: Foreigners and Shadows in Italian Literature,” Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Beverly Allen and Mary J. Russo, 169–90 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). This essay, which was actually completed in 1994, suggests there were no texts available written by immigrants from Eastern Europe at the time it was written. Although Bruck’s first book, the autobiographical account of her deportation to Auschwitz and her subsequent migration to Czechoslovakia and Israel, could easily have escaped Parati’s attention, it is worth noting that none of our Hungarian-born, Italophone novelist’s works released before 1994 had made it onto her radar, even though many of them engage the theme of migration and its repercussions on a multicultural European society: Chi ti ama così. Milano: Lerici Editori, 1959. Andremo in città. Milano: Lerici Editori, 1962. Le sacre nozze. Milano: Longanesi, 1969.



Introduction 33

Due stanze vuote. 1974. Venezia: Marsilio, 1991. Transit. Milano: Bompiani, 1978. Mio splendido disastro. Milano: Bompiani, 1979. Lettera alla madre. Milano: Garzanti, 1988. Nuda proprietà. Venezia: Marsilio, 1993. 47. Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 13. 48. With Migration Italy Parati moves beyond the potential restrictions imposed by the term Italophone, adopting the expression “destination culture” instead. 49. Cinzia Sartini Blum, Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 336. 50. Eveljn Ferraro, “Italianization of Emigration to Canada; Or, What is the Role of the Italies outside Italy?” The Cultures of Italian Migration, ed. Graziella Parati and Anthony Tamburri, 95–108 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011). 51. See, for example, Dionýz Ďurišin, “Le comunità interletterarie: una categoria fondamentale del processo interletterario,” trans. Pavol Koprda, Comparare i comparatismi. La comparatistica letteraria oggi in Europa e nel mondo, ed. Armando Gnisci and Franca Sinopoli, 67–81 (Roma: Lithos, 1995). On page 67 Ďurišin states the following: “Until now the national history of literature has determined the character and the direction of literary historiography. In recent times, however, the hegemony of national history has weakened thanks to the presence of methods and categories which are more appropriate for generalizing the development of literature which, in turn, draws progressively closer to the concept of world literature, as a central perspective of contemporary literary historiography. . . . Hence, not only are the interpretational criteria of a given work, group or literary movement subject to change, but also those of complex concepts which until now have been unclear, or considered integral parts of the national-literary process. . . . These categories prove themselves to be the weak point in our organization of the various components of literary history.” 52. My revised definition is informed by Ciccarelli’s distinction between “Italian writers” and “authors who write in Italian,” presented in a seminal article on (what he also formerly referred to as) “literature of emigration” (“letteratura dell’emigrazione,” 106). See Andrea Ciccarelli, “La letteratura dell’emigrazione oggi in Italia: definizioni e correnti,” Intersezioni 19, no. 1 (1999): 105–24. This article, which precedes his aforementioned essay in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel by four years, elaborates on the need to properly define and categorize the phenomenon of Italophone literature of migration, offering readers a detailed description of its complex, multifaceted (and, in previous years, tentatively delineated) features. Ciccarelli proposes five different categories in which migrant writers can be placed: 1. Authors of literature which is produced in an adopted language, due to either an aesthetic choice or an inability to produce a literary text in one’s native tongue. 2 Authors who emigrate and discover (or confirm) their literary talents in Italian thanks to their twofold biographical and cultural experience. 3. Authors who have recently immigrated to Italy and adopted the Italian language in writing, many of which debuted with the aid of a translator or transcriber, or perhaps simply a good editor. (This highly specific category has been the principal initial focus of Gnisci’s research.)

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4. Authors who, according to a banal classification, could be termed foreigners as opposed to immigrants. A portion of their formation has taken place outside of Italy (and in a different language), yet they have chosen to express themselves in Italian, sometimes exclusively. This is the category in which Edith Bruck is placed (as well as Pressburger, Jaeggy, and others). 5. Authors who live and operate in a “border situation,” who are bilingual, bicultural, and exposed to different cultural realities which are expressed in different languages—for example: Tomizza, Magris, and Bettiza (117–23). This fifth and final category, which later went on to become the fulcrum of his observations on “literature of frontier,” (2003) speaks to the inherent limitations of Gnisci’s theoretical model. Ciccarelli freely admits that some of these categories overlap and run into each other. In fact, he uses the metaphor of “periferie e frontiere liquide” (“liquid peripheries and frontiers,” 124) to underscore the need for a more flexible and inclusive critical framework. 53. See Francesco Cosenza, “In giro per mappamondi tra scrittori migranti e generazione che sale,” El Ghibli 5, no. 22 (2008): par. 20, http://www.el-ghibli.provincia .bologna.it/id_1-issue_05_22-section_6-index_pos_3.htmlQ1. This article is followed by an elaborate series of appendices which include the names of the twenty authors in question: Somalia: Sherazad, Kaha Mohamed Aden, Ali Mumin Ahad, Mohamed Ahmed Faiza, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Garane Garane, Alia Sharif Aghil, Hassan Sirad Salad, Nino Raddi Farxaan, Abdulcadir Omar Hussen. Eritrea: T. F. Brhan, Barole Abdu Hamid, Abraha Hewan, Elisa Kidanè, Ribka Sibhatu, Habte Weldemariam, Erminia Dell’Oro. Ethiopia: Mohamed Ali, Hana Demoz, Gabriella Ghermandi. 54. Masslo’s murder was discussed in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Dove lo stato non c’è: Racconti italiani, which was published by Einaudi (in Turin) in 1991. See Armando Gnisci, La letteratura italiana della migrazione. Rpt., Creolizzare l’europa: Letteratura e migrazione (Roma: Meltemi, 2003), 84–85. 55. BASILI allows users to search for authors based on their mother tongue (lingua madre) as well as their colonial language (lingua coloniale). 56. See http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/basili2001/. 57. See “Immigrants Speak.” 58. See, for example, Il dito in bocca (1968); L’angelo custode (1971); Le statue d’acqua (1980); I beati anni del castigo (1989, awarded the Bagutta Prize in 1990); La paura del cielo (1994); Proleterka (2001). 59. His second book, the novel La legge degli spazi bianchi (Marietti: Genova, 1989), won both the Premio Selezione Campiello and the Premio Basilicata in 1989 (and was a finalist for the Premio Viareggio in the same year). 60. Armando Gnisci, ed., Nuovo Planetario Italiano. Geografia e antologia della letteratura della migrazione in Italia e in Europa (Troina: Città Aperta, 2006). 61. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, La grande migrazione. trans. Paola Sorge (Torino: Einaudi, 1993). 62. Roma: Sinnos Editrice, 2009. 63. Franca Sinopoli, “Scrivere in uno spazio mediano: su alcuni casi della diaspora letteraria italiana in Europa nella seconda metà del ‘900,’” Studi (e testi) italiani 23 (2009): 137–51.



Introduction 35

64. This tendency is mirrored by Davide Bregola in Da qui verso casa. Bregola’s volume offers up eleven interviews with Italophone (foreign-born) authors under the pretense of appreciating literature as the only truly democratic form of communication which functions among all cultures and is a source of solidarity among all the people of the world (“unica forma di comunicazione democratica . . . che funziona fra tutte le culture ed è fonte di solidarietà fra tutte le persone del mondo,” 8). On the surface Bregola’s introduction appears to negate the validity of forcing authors into generic classifications, claiming instead that the criteria for selecting the writers he interviewed was arbitrary in nature, and that he could have just as easily chosen a number of left-handed authors to speak with instead. One might be tempted to accept his rhetoric at face value, if it wasn’t for the fact that even the title he chose for this volume (“From Here towards Home”) underlines the “foreignness” he supposedly considers irrelevant. In other words, Bregola fails to grant Helga Schneider and Helena Janeczek (among others) the right to “feel Italian” and to use such a sense of belonging as the starting point for their literary production. Furthermore, he fails to take into account the international/migratory experiences of authors whose “Italianness” has never been called into question, even those who, like Giuseppe Ungaretti, have written famous works of poetry on the subject of their own ubiquitous sense of self. 65. Qtd. in Maria Cristina Mauceri, “Dove abito è il mio villaggio. A colloquio con Edith Bruck,” Kúmá 11 (April 2006): 3, http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/kuma/poetica /kuma11bruck.html. 66. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 67. See Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 68. Prior to his death in 2006, James Cameron was America’s last living survivor of a lynching. 69. Although the museum has been closed since 2008, it is remembered as an educational environment which welcomed visitors of all races and backgrounds and encouraged community understanding of the nation’s history of racism, prejudice, social change, and cross-cultural understanding. 70. See Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, “James Cameron; Survived Lynching, Founded Museum,” The Washington Post, June 13, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201594.html. 71. In particular, he felt that it would be more effective to highlight the personal histories of individuals as opposed to a statistical focus on numbers and processes. 72. Eric Salerno, Uccideteli tutti. Libia 1943: gli ebrei nel campo di concentramento fascista di Giado. Una storia italiana (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2008). In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that some of Salerno’s publications dealing with Mossad and Italian-Israeli interactions have been a source of controversy among Italy’s Jewish population. 73. Armando Gnisci, Il rovescio del gioco (Roma: Carucci, 1992). 74. Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). In this volume Gordon describes Bruck’s work as a “survivor-writer” in Italy to be “second only to Levi in stature” (175).

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Chapter one

Fictional Transitions: Blurring the Boundaries between Life and Art In every uniform of every customs agent in every soldier or well-dressed gentleman that wandered around the waiting room in the airport I saw the potential enemy, he who could prevent my departure. Even the insisting looks of the children made me suspicious. I feared everyone, white and dark, old and young, departing or arriving. Burdened by the weight of my belongings and breathing heavily, I allowed myself to be pushed around here and there by hurried travelers that moved in groups. —Edith Bruck, Transit1

Hungarian-born Auschwitz survivor Edith Bruck is widely considered to be the most important author engaging the Holocaust in present-day Italy. Known mostly for her award-winning works of fiction, Bruck has published exclusively in Italian since her arrival in Rome in the 1950s. The displacement and migrations that shaped her life during the postwar period are strongly reflected in her body of work, which includes some of the earliest exemplars of a phenomenon that has come to be known as Italophone literature of migration.2 Bruck has published as many as twenty books since the release of her autobiographical debut in 1959, and she has also worked in film, television, theater, and radio, but is recognized primarily as a novelist. Her translingual writings operate in a multicultural, hybrid literary environment that defies rigid nationalistic boundaries in favor of a more fluid conception of art. 37

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The principal deficiencies that defined the study of Italophone literature of migration as it developed in Italian academia since the early 1990s are directly connected to Edith Bruck’s belated “insertion” in this particular vein of literature. The very concept of literature of migration, in fact, has given rise to much debate in the scholarly community.3 A number of insightful theoretical considerations put forth by Rome-based professor of comparative literature Armando Gnisci, while clearly relevant to the study of all migrant artists, were initially formulated with a specific subgroup of francophone and Arab-speaking authors in mind, and have never before been applied to the study of a magyarophone Holocaust survivor like Edith Bruck. This is the case for Gnisci’s conceptualization of “the curve of transit” and the “house of after,” two notions that lie at the heart of much of his research on migrant writers:4 Migrant writers don’t belong to one, or to multiple nations, but, those from the generation of the first wave who migrated and wrote in the curve of transit, belong to the network of relations formed by trans-world migration and to a new form of culture. . . . This network, however, is only visible and appreciable in the national language in which the writer decides to construct the “house of after.” (9)

By analyzing Bruck’s body of work through the prism of Gnisci’s concepts (the “curve of transit” and the “house of after”) this chapter will examine the as yet unacknowledged repercussions of Mauceri, Parati, and Ciccarelli’s efforts to revise the critical discourse on literature of migration in Italy. These precepts will be applied to an examination of Bruck’s lengthy narrative production, to show that they provide a useful set of schematic theoretical parameters which are relevant to the study of any author who experiences a geographical migration in his or her lifetime. In this context, Bruck’s efforts to move away from the themes that have come to define the expectations of her readers will also be brought to bear on the study of her prose. Inasmuch as a significant number of Bruck’s protagonists happen to be living or traveling somewhere other than their place of origin, her novels and short stories often tend to describe a state of transit, alienation, and vulnerability. Beyond the specific plot devices used in her individual writings, however, one can also delineate a series of transitions in her body of work as a whole, which represent important milestones in the growth and development of the author’s craft. Although they are not mere reflections of the twists and turns that have characterized the writer’s personal life, said milestones (which shall subsequently be identified as “phases” or “shifts”) point to the fact that one must not only think of movement and progress in terms of plot and character development. As in the case of many authors born abroad who have published in Italian during the twentieth century, the concepts of homeland, borders (both physical and psychological), and exile reverberate strongly in her writings. They are constant and inevitable elements that dominate the many works of fiction, poetry,



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and autobiography produced by writers who fit into the category of literature of migration. In his essay entitled “Frontier, Exile, and Migration in the Contemporary Italian Novel,” Ciccarelli suggested that this kind of literature is destined to occupy an increasingly important position in Italian culture of the twentieth century, thanks in part to the current growth of a multicultural population in the Italian territory. He also pointed out that in order to understand the work of authors who produce literature of migration it is necessary to consider the indissoluble relationship between migration and frontier, between the act of leaving a country and the desire to return to it. This is the case for any writer who crosses a border and chooses a language other than his or her own to in which to explore a world that is conceived in a linguistic system other than the one used in writing:5 The contrast between language and culture is also at the core of the literature of frontier, in which an author writes about his or her daily multicultural experiences for an audience that speaks the same language as the writer. But this audience is far removed from such a diverse cultural condition. Despite the common language, the reader learns about an unfamiliar reality that is as familiar to the writer as the language he or she and his or her audience share. (Ciccarelli, “Frontier,” 199)

These considerations might shed light on Bruck’s relationship with the Italian nation and its language, but they also underline her complex ties to her native Hungary, where she has not resided in more than fifty years. The breadth and the prolificity of her writings make her a rather unique artist in the contemporary Italophone literary world, and in recent years she has been able to carve out a space for herself on the bookshelves of anglophone readers for whom the Italian language constitutes an insurmountable barrier. In 2001, in fact, her debut was published in Philadelphia by Paul Dry Books with the title Who Loves You Like This. Before the translation of this volume there was only one short work of prose by Bruck available to an English-speaking audience, specifically, the story “Una Sorpresa,” taken from the collection Andremo in città.6 Although about ten of her poems were translated into English from 1980 to 1993 (in some cases the same lyrics were published in English more than once, by the original translator or sometimes by a different one),7 it was only during the first decade of the new millennium that the author began receiving some recognition in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Oceania. The year 2006, for example, marks the release of the English version of her novel Lettera alla madre, which was published by Brenda Webster and Gabriella Romani8 through the Texts and Translations series funded by the Modern Language Association. Maria Cristina Mauceri’s (English language) interview with Edith Bruck followed in 2007.9 Her study was both a translation and a revision (or addendum) of sorts from an interview previously released in Italian in the electronic journal Kúmá,10 based at the Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza. In both versions11 Mauceri follows Ciccarelli’s lead in associating Edith Bruck’s poetics

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with the category of literature of migration, even if in Mauceri’s work the novelist is inserted into a subgroup of translingual authors who address the subject of the Shoah in Italian: In the Italian literature of migrant writers there is a vein that we could call testimonial in which female authors . . . confront the Nazi past of their countries. . . . I also recall Elisa Springer who published Il Silenzio dei vivi in 1998. I believe Edith Bruck can be considered the progenitor of this group of translingual authors in Italy whose lives, although in different ways, were marked by Nazism.12

In her conversation with Bruck, Mauceri encourages the author to speak about the themes addressed in her books and her many visits to Italian schools to educate children on the Shoah. Edith’s relationship with her country of origin was reexamined on this occasion. Perhaps it is because of the great chronological distance from the moment of deportation that the author expressed herself on the subject with a renewed frankness. Bruck certainly didn’t ever omit essential details in the interviews she has given. Quite the contrary in fact, yet the passing of the years allowed her to reconsider the mixture of nostalgia and frustration she feels when she thinks back to her native village, so much that now she is able to recall her youth and the story of her family in a way that is even more open and explicit than in the past: It’s a very painful story: I am unable, all in all, to make peace with my country of origin, I am unable to make peace with two countries with which I am in conflict for different reasons: Israel and Hungary. As soon as I arrive in Hungary I regress to a frightening extent, as if I were a persecuted and deported child again. I went to Hungary many times, especially during the Communist regime, I was well loved by that regime; I can’t even tell you why they made a film about my life, but each time I would find myself feeling uneasy somehow, the language itself would hurt me, the curses in the streets and the markets. I had heard those curses as a child being directed at me, so they reminded me of my parents, the discrimination, the misery, the gratuitous malice, the fascist period, and it was very difficult for me to feel at home. (Mauceri, Dove abito, n. pag.)

Mauceri was the first scholar to use the term transnational in describing the cultural and artistic environment in which Edith Bruck operates. The author agreed with her use of this term, even citing the attitudes of Italian critics and publishers who after fifty years of residence in the city of Rome still consider her foreign. This unstable and apparently irresolvable situation was explored in an extremely brief text published in the journal Resine shortly before her novel Lettera da Francoforte was released in 2004. On this occasion the author again referenced the indissoluble link between the language used for writing and her sense of belonging to her adoptive country, both in psycholinguistic as well as



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in literary terms. After initially crediting her success in learning the Italian language to a series of readings suggested by her husband Nelo Risi and by some of the most prestigious authors of the twentieth century (i.e., Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Elio Vittorini, Vasco Pratolini, and Italo Calvino); in this short essay she highlights the most distancing characteristics of the language which served as a self-defense mechanism, as a shield that would enable her to dive back into her painful past without directly reliving the suffering it caused her when she would re-elaborate her trials in writing: The adoptive language, a late and belated discovery, due to the translation of some of my verses into Hungarian, was like a shield for me, a defensive wall, a garment, something uprooted from the depths of my being, and only when I was faced with my mother tongue did I feel completely naked and filled with shame. I do not feel the true breadth of this learned language, I perceive it in a lighter way, more liberating than my native tongue that carries within it the culture, the history, the very past of my country of origin and of the collectivity in which I was raised. In the Italian language my mother’s sighs are nowhere to be found, nor are my father’s grumpy complaints, nor my neighbors’ dialect—the language has no bearing on my parents, the smells, the tastes that evoke the most painful memories. . . . From experience I would say that neither language nor citizenship make us truly Italian on the same level as someone who was born in Frascati or Milan. We always remain a little foreign, step-children of a country in which we live by chance or by choice.13

Both Ciccarelli and Mauceri have offered an evaluation of Edith Bruck’s body of work, attempting to consider the totality of her publications and examining some of the themes she has explored, which go well beyond the category of Holocaust literature. As such, the two scholars in question have established that Bruck has much more to offer the increasingly globalized literary world than a mere narration of the traumas she lived through during her youth, even if said narration engages the historical and autobiographical material from a creative, flexible, and innovative approach. Mauceri suggested that our Hungarian-born writer has, in different moments of her career, found herself trapped in a symbolic ghetto that would limit the subjects addressed in her books. In particular, she alluded to two completed manuscripts which were rejected by the same Italian publishing houses that usually tended to accept her work.14 If it is appropriate to speak of a “thematic ghetto” with respect to Edith Bruck’s production (which could be related to the testimonial function suggested by Mauceri, but in a broader sense should be expanded to include those concerns that the author herself describes as “Jewish questions”), one still needs to examine the themes she has addressed in an attempt to free herself from these restrictions, to shed an uncomfortable and restrictive label that constitutes yet another offense to add to

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those that have already been widely documented, including her deportation and the violent discrimination she was subjected to during her youth (Balma 112). In her 1999 essay entitled “Strategies for Remembering: Auchwitz, Mother, and Writing in Edith Bruck,” Adalgisa Giorgio takes into consideration a large number of the author’s publications yet focuses her attention on the novel Lettera alla madre in particular, analyzing it as a representative example of a specific phase in her body of work that was progressively coming to a close.15 Giorgio noticed that Bruck was gradually distancing herself from autobiography and autobiographical modes of composition, citing the novel L’attrice (1995) in which the author produced a third-person narration,16 as opposed to making use of a first-person narrator as she has frequently done in the past. In all likelihood this essay by Giorgio was written in 1997 (and hence published as many as two years later), inasmuch as it bears no reference to what would have been the most recent publication by Edith Bruck at the time her study was released: the novel Il Silenzio degli amanti (1997), which marked the author’s return to the usage of an autodiegetic narrator. Aside from this small lacuna in the narratological analysis proposed by Giorgio, the remainder of her conclusions are as rigorous as they are perspicacious. She was the first to identify in Lettera alla madre a critical turning point in Bruck’s craft, as she subsequently transitioned from a semifrequent thematic concentration on the Shoah to more consistently addressing the long-term effects of deportation and exile on the individual, but also their repercussions on the same modern society that had allowed for the creation of concentration camps and was now hosting both their survivors and a significant number of the culprits who made their horrific conditions a reality (Giorgio 248). The concepts of journey, movement, and of a physical and geographical transition are reflected in many of Bruck’s works. Even a simple reading of the titles of her texts makes this quite evident: it is sufficient to think of Andremo in città (“We’ll go to the city,” 1962), Transit (1978), and Itinerario (1998). This last book is a selection of poems taken from various volumes, Il tatuaggio (“The tatoo,” 1974), In difesa del padre (“In defense of the father,” 1980), Monologo (“Monologue,” 1990). The choice of the word Itinerario (“Itinerary”) for the title would appear to also insert her poetic production into the category of literature of migration, though many of her poems actually do not fit this description. If one considers the need to communicate with people who are (chronologically or physically) distant, Lettera alla madre, Lettera a Francoforte, and Privato can also be read by applying this interpretational key. The characters constructed by Bruck rarely enjoy a sense of geographical or emotional stability: they often find themselves in transit and at times are involved in difficult personal struggles that are related to the place they occupy in this world and in a society in which they feel alienated. An analysis of her works of prose and poetry confirms exactly how traumatic and decisive a moment it was for Bruck when she was torn from her family



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home. In fact, one can identify three different thematic phases in the evolution of her narrative expression during the last five decades and they have all been marked by an inextricable connection to the exile that changed the course of her life forever. Further, if in semantic terms the concepts of exile and migration present in many of her publications do not necessarily imply the trauma of deportation, the long-term effects of these events are undeniably similar in nature. In other words, in the case of Edith Bruck, we are faced with an artist who has suffered a forced migration that was imposed through the use of violence and intimidation. Although one could argue that her biography does not permit us to speak of exile in the traditional sense of the word,17 the fact that Bruck no longer has a home or a family to return to in Hungary is equally relevant when considering her prolonged absence from her homeland. The three thematic phases that characterize a significant portion of Bruck’s prose are hence directly relatable to some of her life experiences. Any form of exile or migration (forced or chosen as the case may be) leaves an indelible trace in the psyche of an author, especially in the case of an artist who often endeavors to obfuscate the distinction between life and art, mixing them at her leisure and in a way that is anything but predictable. Ciccarelli has had occasion to examine the notions of exile and migration even in the works of other artists who cross symbolic, cultural, and national boundaries by way of the written word, including Claudio Magris and Giorgio Pressburger. In an article published in 2004 in the journal Intersezioni the scholar observed, “The wounds caused by emigration almost never heal, they leave marks that are deep like scars. . . . An expatriate author lives in a condition of exile in which the border he has crossed is a door that was not closed properly behind him, a door through which currents of images and thoughts continually filter in mixing with the present.”18 It’s important to point out that the thematic subdivisions proposed in this chapter do not constitute clear, precise cuts in Bruck’s bibliography; but rather, they are gradual and sometimes tentative, staggered transitions that can rarely be identified by considering a single text or a specific moment in her career. The first thematic phase in which one can subdivide Bruck’s writings is characterized by a strong autobiographical focus, which dominates her first collection of short stories published in 1962 and can be easily identified both in the Andremo in città and the brief narrative È Natale, vado a vedere (“It’s Christmas, I’m going to see”) that was released in a rare miniature edition the same year. After her autobiographical debut Chi ti ama così (1959), in these first fictional works Bruck not only continued to explore the period that includes her youth in Hungary (1932–1944) in a vivacious and nostalgic fashion, but she also documented (paying homage to it) a familial environment that was broken and permanently destroyed by the Nazi machine of war and hatred. Generally speaking, we can identify this first leg of her literary journey as the exploration of that which has been lost.

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The second phase that characterizes Bruck’s growth and narrative evolution is uncertain and temporary by definition. It is a transitional period which Armando Gnisci considers inevitable. Gnisci observed that, in a vast selection of authors who are émigré(e)s or exiles, there is a tendency (or a need) to write “in the curve of transit,” as if this were a sentence to be served in a symbolic state of Purgatory.19 Said phase is marked by a frequent textual insistence on the notions of physical and geographical movement or displacement that afflict all exiles, and hence also many of the characters and protagonists crafted by Edith Bruck. In particular, I am referring to a series of novels published between 1969 and 1988,20 including the collection Due stanze vuote (1974) and the novel Transit (1978). Due stanze vuote implies a precise effort toward the literary reconstruction of a symbolic childhood home, a place where one could house and conserve memories instead of fearing their loss with the passing of time. Transit, on the other hand, although it is partially inspired by experiences lived on the set of a film shot in Belgrade toward the end of the 1950s, is a difficult novel to dissect from a historical and autobiographical perspective. The title of this work seems to place it right in the middle of Gnisci’s “curve of transit,” but the conclusion of the text offers the image of a protagonist who is running toward the Italian territory in order to evade an uncertain and transitory condition. In other words, in light of this short novel, the thematic phases identified in this chapter cannot be outlined in purely chronological terms; or rather, one cannot speak of a clear, delineated continuity in Bruck’s publications. Shifting from one thematic concern to another with the frequent release of new works, the author tends to open certain doors without ever closing them, exploring narrative paths that she ends up revisiting on multiple occasions, even at a distance of many years. A case in point is her fairly recent novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo, which tells the story of a young girl named Anita, in the postwar period, who is forced to clandestinely cross the border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia in order to find refuge in the home of an aunt. After a rather tumultuous and isolated stay in the city of Zvìkovec, the fifteen-year-old girl must flee once again, this time without the aid of her relatives and without knowing exactly how she will support herself and survive when she reaches her next destination—which will inevitably only offer a brief respite, much like her point of departure: “Without the engine running, the vehicle moved slowly downhill, always downhill, in the darkness.”21 The seemingly unstoppable downhill movement of the vehicle in which the protagonist is traveling is aggravated by the darkness which surrounds this precarious and poorly planned departure. It is the beginning of a journey that is both inevitable and unpredictable. Anita is surrounded by strangers who, like her, hope to finally reach the Promised Land, which they refer to as Palestine. The novel closes with the singing of a song that is described as a prayer of sorts, one that underlines the uncertainties of those who leave a country looking for a better life:



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We have ascended to the Earth, we have ascended to the Earth we have already plowed it we have even sowed it but we have not yet had our harvest. (196)

With this book the author was able to create a hybridized linguistic environment which reflects the difficulties that afflict individuals who do not speak a common language, while continuing to filter the dialogues of her characters through an Italophone matrix. The following verbal exchange takes place when the Hungarian narrator tries to talk to her aunt’s brother-in-law, who was raised in Slovakia: “Where were you during the war?” . . . “Not far from where we going, in . . . Heidenau, Germany. Forced labor. Not talk. You don’t tell I not told. Now life, live, understood?” (Bruck 12)

Looking back to the epigraph that opens this chapter, one can find evidence in this citation of the disorienting and asphyxiating effects of a sojourn in a foreign or unfamiliar place, especially for those who have lost all ties to their native country. Transit is a work that brought this problem to the forefront by creating a geographical location that constitutes a nonplace: the plot unfolds in an unknown country (never identified by name), one where the language spoken by the locals is only referred to as slava (“Slavic”), and which appears to be at the mercy of a political and legal system that barely functions (Bruck 6). The intense desire to flee her surroundings and the feeling of bewilderment suffered by the protagonist are further aggravated by the absence of clear chronological or historical references. The reader is only able to understand that the events in the novel should be dated sometime after WWII. In this text Bruck made use of various languages besides Italian: English, German, Yiddish, and a single word in Hungarian (kurva, which means “whore”). This word is rendered ambiguous by its graphic and phonic properties, since they match those used for the same term in many other European languages (Bruck 10). In discussing the works of other translingual authors who share some affinity with Bruck’s literary production, Carmine Chiellino made use of the expression latenze linguistiche (“linguistic latencies,” 9).22 This usage, at the time of its neologization in 2001, represented the most innovative aspect of his research on literary interculturality: By linguistic latency I mean the emergence of the language of one’s cultural provenance in a text that is obviously written in another language. To be clear I consider a linguistic latency the emergence of Yiddish in Homage to the Eighth District (1986) by Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger as well as the emergence of German in the novel The Sweet Days of Discipline (1989) by Fleur Jaeggy. I should remind you that German, somehow, was Fleur Jaeggy’s native language, while Italian was certainly not the native language of Giorgio and Nicola Pressuburger. (15)

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The concept of linguistic latencies is clearly relevant to an informed analysis of Bruck’s literary production, and it certainly can be applied to a long list of other authors. Nevertheless, Chiellino’s volume does not sufficiently explore its ramifications with respect to Italophone literature and the considerable number of works that speak to the experience of migration in postwar Europe. In fact, his passing references to Jaeggy and Pressburger merely serve the purpose of introducing his Italian-speaking readership to the neologism in question by using authors who are fairly well-known in Italy as examples, only to transition to a linguistic examination of Mario Puzo’s best-selling mafia exploitation novel, The Godfather. His desire to highlight Puzo’s supposed Italianness in glottological terms influenced the particular phrasing he used to define linguistic latencies (e.g., he refers to “cultural provenance” as opposed to “national provenance”).23 In spite of the fact that the adjective “cultural” has a broader significance than “national,” Chiellino’s definition is insufficient in Edith Bruck’s case: the multilingual passages in Transit are indicative of her transnational experiences, including her time in Auschwitz, but they also go well beyond her specific cultural provenance. On multiple occasions in Transit the author included entire sentences in foreign (non-Italian) languages without translating what the characters were saying. This strategy made it possible for her to immerse her audience in the same Babelic and frustrating chaos in which the protagonist finds herself, which relates to many experiences lived by the author in first person. While it highlights the physical and psychological disorientation suffered by an individual in a foreign land, Transit also constitutes an important step for a writer who often finds new ways to confuse and blur the line between real life and artistic expression.24 With respect to this distinction, which is difficult to apply to many of her works, Edith Bruck has claimed that often the people who read her novels believe (mistakenly) that they are well acquainted with her biography: “I live my books and my characters to the point that readers think what I write is true, even the stories that were almost entirely fabricated.”25 The third thematic shift in Edith Bruck’s fiction takes place within the pages of her aforementioned 1993 novel Nuda proprietà. The protagonist in this book, a Jewish woman named Anna, is in a crisis because she has received a notice of eviction instructing her to vacate her apartment and leave it libero di persone e cose (“devoid of persons and objects”). Forced to face the thought of having to leave what for her had become a casa-paese (“house-nation”), she feels herself to be the victim of a form of micro-exile that inevitably reminds her of her volatile situation as a foreign emigrée after WWII (Bruck, 7–8). The protagonist hence decides to pursue an unlikely and uncomfortable relationship with an elderly woman whose husband had been as SS officer—in order to gain her favor, and eventually, upon her death, take legal possession of her residence. Anna is not entirely dissimilar from other characters created by Bruck: she is a concentration camp survivor who has made a life for herself in Europe. Given her tumultuous history, which includes deportation and a subsequent



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forced migration from her homeland during the postwar period, it should come as no surprise that Anna feels a strong, almost obsessive attachment to her place of residence. Her initial reaction to receiving an eviction notice is a feeling of loss and desperate disorientation: Suddenly I felt myself being deprived of the ground beneath my feet, paralyzed in the middle of the hallway with an expression that was already taking leave of everything, of my many belongings that were born here, among these silent and crooked spaces, these smoky walls, these broken floors, in this house-nation with many windows. (Bruck, 8)

The expression “house-nation” clearly illustrates the value that the protagonist attributes to her apartment, which symbolizes the constancy she has come to depend on after the experience of displacement. Striving to achieve a legitimate sense of belonging within the borders of an adoptive country, she has come to equate the limited space in which she lives with a miniature homeland, a place where she not only belongs, but actually has come to think of as her own. Anna only attempts to discuss her painful past with the old woman (referred to as Frau Kremer) toward the end of the novel. It is important to note that the word “Holocaust” never appears in this text, and Anna only refers to the concentration camps in one specific, climactic instance. Nevertheless, these elements of history are the single strongest source of conflict and tension between the two main characters: She entered. She drew near and stayed in the threshold, to repeat to me that I should not damage the walls any further. —You see?—I began saying sweetly,—they’re the only ones I hung up—I pointed to my dead loved ones. Her gaze, instead of following what I was showing her, fell upon a small antique desk where I had set down some flowers temporarily. —Beautiful—she said, and I showed her my relatives one by one, pretending that we were talking about them, saying:—Oh, my father was very handsome. He died of privation in Dachau. My mother was the most beautiful girl in town, she was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. My little brother too. You see, that’s me after the liberation, in Bergen-Belsen. Having unburdened myself of what I should have told her ages ago, I dared to turn around. Look at her. Was she still there? She was there. But it was as if she were not. As my dead relatives were not there. She was looking at underwear which was already neatly placed in the open closet. Suddenly enlightened, I realized that she never would have looked where I wanted her to and she never would have heard me. (Bruck, 150–51)

Nuda proprietà is a work of fiction that exemplifies how the author has tried to find some form of creative distance from the Shoah, without necessarily

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going as far as removing it from the consciousness of her characters. The focal point of this novel is clearly the protagonist’s attachment to her home in Italy, which offers her a sense of stability and belonging to a society in which she had inserted herself as an immigrant. It is possible to draw a clear parallel between the importance that Anna attributes to her residence and the feeling of attachment the author felt for the niche she has found in Rome: For me, my country is between Piazza di Spagna and Piazza del Popolo, where I live is my village. When I leave Italy, when I am not in my socalled “homeland,” I miss Rome, I miss my home, I can’t wait to get back because anywhere else I feel lost, rootless. This home, which is not mine, is my country. I like it here inside and out, it’s Bruck’s bunker as they say. A home that is not mine that I love so much I could eat the walls! (Mauceri, Dove abito, n. pag.)

Nuda proprietà allows Bruck’s audience to compare the tribulations faced by the autodiegetic narrator with the real-life struggles that inspired the structure and the plot of the novel itself, while avoiding the suggestion that all the protagonists created by the author are to be considered reflections of her reallife persona. In a very recent (and previously unpublished) interview the author mentioned an extremely unusual (and coincidental) set of circumstances that she became aware of when Nuda proprietà was released, one that relates directly to the content of said novel and further complicates her readers’ tendency to automatically make tenuous associations between Bruck and the female protagonists she constructs on the written page: Nuda proprietà is a book that was born from a letter. A letter of a few lines inspired me, but the entire book is made up. And the most interesting thing, instead—which nobody knows—has to do with a German woman, who I had never seen, who recognized herself in the character of the old German lady, the former Nazi. Her neighbors called to tell me about this woman, saying [she wanted] to meet me. I went to her house, and she was afraid that I would denounce her. This woman really existed, she had an Italian husband, but she’s dead now. She said she would have sold me the future ownership rights to the property if she had known me. She asked me: “Is it true that you will not do me harm?” and I did not even know she existed. Her neighbors . . . invited me over to reassure this German woman, so she would understand that I did not want to denounce her. But it’s something incredible . . . and I went over there. So, it’s a kind of intuition; even her initials were the same. It’s a very strange thing that only happened after the book was published. . . . She wanted assurances—that’s why the neighbors threw a party for me. I never would have imagined, I never would have known that such a woman existed in Rome. There are some very strange coincidences in life, huh? (Bruck, personal interview, 28 June 2010)



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Returning to the terminology used by Armando Gnisci in Creolizzare l’Europa, the “curve of transit” he posits comes to and end when an author reaches the so-called casa del dopo; or rather, the “house of after.” This is an achievement that cannot only be understood from a physical or geographical perspective, but must also and perhaps more so be considered in a psychological and cultural sense. With the volume Nuda proprietà Bruck shows definitive signs of having reached the house of after. From a historical and biobibliographical point of view, it was written in the years that followed the critical success of the epistolary novel Lettera alla madre (1988). Released only a year after the untimely death of Primo Levi,26 a fellow author and Auschwitz survivor who was a friend and father figure of sorts for Bruck, the composition of Lettera alla madre was in part motivated and inspired by what Romani27 terms “the specter of parental loss,” or rather the ghost of a loss (a maternal loss, but also a paternal one if we think back to Levi’s death) that the author was only able to exorcize through the process of writing. While Bruck’s novel was designed to bring her late mother’s voice back to life, it also provided her with a space to explore the void left by Primo’s death, which she has described in the following terms: What is missing is his voice, which became ever more important. At least, in some way, people listened to him. For us, the survivors, it’s important that someone be heard, and published. It’s not that I have the pomposity to say, “Oh, it’s important that they publish me.” It’s important that they publish at least the books of Primo Levi, because at least a testimony survives us. Of the man, of the friend, I have an unhappy, sad memory. He lived sort of like a stowaway in the world, absorbed, attentive to his books; he was a real writer. And he tried very hard to be one. I would never have made him out to be—and I even wrote this—a saint;28 because they turned him into a bit of a myth. I believe that he had flaws like all men, but he had a great sensitivity, talent, and shrewdness. In my opinion, he was a real writer, important beyond his testimony. He once told me that if his first book had been accepted [Se questo è un uomo], he wouldn’t have continued to work at the paint factory, as a chemist, he actually would have only been writing. But his first book was refused by Natalia Ginzburg, who worked for Einaudi. I had an enormous affection for him, an enormous esteem. What’s missing is his clear, democratic, civil, and vigilant voice. I’m sorry that he was not happier and more understood, that people didn’t listen to him more. A survivor’s family doesn’t listen very much either; if he doesn’t write, maybe he’ll go crazy. It’s not that they all came back writers. I believe that the ones who became writers were the ones who already had the potential. Auschwitz could certainly help because it was such an extreme experience and was irrepressible. At the same time, it’s impossible to tell its story. You can write even ten, a hundred books, but you will never tell absolutely, all the way, what you lived, what you suffered. It is a black hole at once personal and

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The death of Primo Levi is not the only “paternal loss” addressed in Lettera alla madre. It is perhaps due to the impact of the brutal honesty used in the first part of this text (the more experimental of the two sections it contains) if many critics have failed to acknowledge that Letter to My Mother is actually a dyptich. The second narrative contained in this volume is entitled Tracce (“Traces”). While Lettera looks to the memory of the past in order to breathe new life into a conversation that was interrupted by the violence of Auschwitz, “Traces” includes a fictional account of a woman who has written a book about a survivor of the Shoah. Although the narrator’s father did perish in the concentration camps, she has authored a fictional manuscript about a Hungarian man who survived the Holocaust and moved to the United States. In his old age this man eventually forgot how to speak English, so his daughter decided to take him on a trip back to Hungary. While both of the fictions present in Lettera alla madre allow a deceased parental figure of their respective protagonists to symbolically live again in some fashion,29 “Traces” presents readers with an additional narrative layer by framing one fiction inside another—and it is only within the framed narrative that the finality of the violence of the Holocaust has been removed from the equation: The figure of the father, though fictional and imaginative (Bruck’s father did not survive the Holocaust), is infused with strong autobiographical elements—based on two main characteristics ascribed by the author to her father: silence and marginality. The story within the story of this second section of the book exemplifies the difficult process of remembering and representing a trauma of the past. It further points to the solitude of the survivor who is left alone to carry the burden of memory against a pervasive and collective disposition to forget. (Romani, Introduction, xix–xx)

Much like Bruck, the father figure and Holocaust survivor in the framed story contained in “Traces” has an unusual relationship with the Hungarian language. Having lost his entire family in the camps, including his first wife and two children, Alex had remarried after the war. In order to receive the blessing of his (second) bride’s father, he had been forced to promise never to speak Hungarian again, and to keep his painful memories to himself. Alex’s medical and mental condition have compromised his memory and caused him to seemingly forget the English language, leaving Hungarian as the only language he has with which to attempt communication with his bewildered children and grandchildren (who he no longer recognizes). He seems to have forgotten most if not all of his experiences that took place after deportation to the concentration camps. The use of his mother tongue, in his state of utter confusion, triggers a heartwarming memory of a conversation he had with his (deceased) daughter Livia, which Alex relives out loud:



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“I’ve told you not to cry,” the old man continued, always in Hungarian. “For a red ribbon . . . your hair isn’t undone. How can I find your ribbon in this car. Don’t you see that it’s impossible? Is it my fault if I can’t find it?” The old man’s voice got louder, and everyone listened with bated breath, as if hypnotized by something they didn’t understand. For the first time Olga would have given anything to understand what her father was saying. (Bruck, 224)

The character of Alex in the “story within the story” in “Traces” had been forced to promise to conceal his magyarophone speech patterns for years, and to avoid discussing the loss of his family in the Shoah. Although his mental state and level of competence are questionable, Alex’s use of Hungarian, coupled with the way he cherishes the photographs of his murdered family members, draw a clear connection between the loss he suffered and the language that defined that loss; the sounds of a family that was destroyed. In his disoriented state, he revisits the memories of his dead children, thinking back to specific instances in their lives and the words he spoke to them. This section of “Traces” stands out among all of Bruck’s writings for one reason in particular. In these pages Alex does what Bruck could never bring herself to do: he publicly shares his recollections of a loved one who died in the Holocaust by using Hungarian; or rather, he pays homage to the memory of Livia by recounting the same exact words he said to her four decades prior. Bruck’s italophone filter is, in essence, a protective barrier through which her reminiscences must pass on their way to the reader; a screen between the storyteller and her audience. It allows her to shelter and conceal the linguistic authenticity of her memories of loved ones, to preserve some aspect of her cherished childhood recollections, which is to remain hers and only hers. In very simplistic terms, one might say that while Edith Bruck’s italophone literary production does tend to lean on some of the most traumatic events she has ever endured, it’s also true that the most personal elements of her life to be transposed in her writing are those that could be directly adapted and reproduced in visual terms, but not auditorily. Borrowing an expression from the world of film, one might argue that Bruck’s translingual filtrations are somewhat parallel to a movie that was shot in an actor’s first language and subsequently dubbed into another idiom prior to its release. The difference is that actors tend to be dubbed in the interest of distributing a film internationally, while the translingual nature of Bruck’s artistic production enables her first and foremost to achieve some small degree of privacy during and after the writing process. As far as the theme of borders and frontiers is concerned, which is often elaborated in Bruck’s writings, it’s important to note that in Lettera alla madre the author crosses the most imposing border in the history of Italian literature, the one that marks the entrance into the world of the dead. If we wanted to try, however cautiously, to draw parallels between Bruck’s life and the evolution of her craft in thematic terms, one might be tempted to suggest that the moment

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in which Bruck began to attract a significant amount of critical attention in Italy represents the equivalent of attaining the “house of after” hypothesized by Gnisci. The attainment of this symbolic objective both in textual terms and in her everyday life has motivated the author to explore new narrative territories, addressing the small and great injustices in our modern world while drawing progressively less inspiration from her personal experiences. This is the case for three of her novels released toward the end of the second millennium: Nuda proprietà (1993), L’attrice (1995), and Il silenzio degli amanti (1997, her first book with a male protagonist). Although the plot of Nuda proprietà was initially inspired by a real event this work consists of a purely fictionalized account. Nevertheless, given its source of inspiration and the parallels that one could draw between the worldview of the protagonist and Edith Bruck’s outlook on her own life, it is not entirely surprising that many readers have taken the liberty of assuming that this work was highly autobiographical in nature. Even though the Holocaust is a central element in L’attrice, it is the first novel written by Bruck that propels the reader into a world that was entirely fabricated, down to the last detail. One can certainly argue that an Auschwitz survivor would be in a unique position to create a believable character who had endured discrimination, deportation, and enslavement during WWII, yet the protagonist in this case could not be more removed from the author’s real-life persona. L’attrice is the story of an American actress named Linda Stone whose lengthy career in the film industry has progressively dwindled. Her chosen profession has made it necessary for her to identify with a myriad of fictional characters in order to portray them in a believable fashion on the silver screen. She leads a lonely, isolated existence due to the barriers she has erected between herself and the world around her. Her isolation is not physical though; in fact, she interacts with a number of people on a daily basis. She has alienated her true self from the people in her life by concealing it in the depths of her tragic, unshared memories. The face she presents to the world is as fictitious as the characters she brings to life in front of the camera: her fabricated persona is believable and has been consistent over the span of many years, but it is nothing more than an elaborate production designed to hide her deep psychological scars from anyone with whom she comes into contact. Even her name is fictional, but that is not to say that she makes use of a stage name for professional reasons—which is commonplace in the world of cinema. Her housekeeper (Kate), her agent (Frank), and her young producer (Mr. Braun) at first only know her as Linda Stone, and her real name is revealed to them at a moment in time when the exceedingly fictional nature of her identity becomes too heavy a burden for her to bear. After spending seven years trying to regain the level of success and fame that had once made her a star, Linda confesses to her housekeeper that she will die if she cannot act (“se non recito muoio,” 8). Paradoxically, after a mediocre film she starred in flops at the box office, her Italian-American agent and would-be lover actually complains that her acting is exceedingly realistic: “When you act you are



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able to live any crappy old film to the point that people get tired, they don’t feel the pretence anymore, they don’t dream anymore, they don’t imagine anything anymore because you are too real” (Bruck, 11). Once Frank is informed (in confidence) that Linda Stone is actually a Slovakian-born Holocaust survivor named Judith Adler, his desire to help revitalize her career sets off a chain reaction of events that culminates in a media frenzy. Despite her feelings of fear and ambivalence, Linda’s agent and her new producer pressure her into traveling to Dachau to shoot a revealing documentary of a survivor’s journey back to the concentration camps. They intend to exploit her past for monetary gain, convinced that moviegoers would flock to see a consummate actress experiencing real pain on film, especially the pain of a trauma so profound and unspeakable. Although Linda is inclined to go along with this project, she is also terrified of being herself, of letting anyone get close to Judith Adler, especially in front of a camera (Bruck, 27–42). After traveling to Germany with a film troupe and spending a night in a hotel, Linda awakes early the next morning and takes a taxi to the Dachau memorial before anyone notices her absence. As the shell of her false identity begins to crumble, she walks on the same ground where her parents took their last steps. Once her agent and the film troupe track her down, their efforts to document her experiences fail miserably: they ask her to retrace her steps so they can shoot some footage of her arrival in Dachau, but at this point they are no longer dealing with the experienced actress they knew. Our protagonist is both unwilling and unable to put on any kind of performance, nor can she follow directions or offer any level of cooperation that might result in a marketable film product. In a state of absolute bewilderment, she stops in front of a map that lists the names of all 1634 concentration camps erected by the Nazis and proceeds to read each name out loud. While the cameras are rolling, the now former actress is unaware of their presence and entirely unresponsive to verbal promptings, to the point that eventually everyone becomes frustrated with her behavior and completely uninterested in what she is doing. The final ten pages of L’attrice include the names of 800 death camps.30 While initially the author alternates between listing these locations and describing the behavior of the characters, the last five-and-a-half pages are devoted exclusively to the names of hundreds of concentration camps. This segment of the novel is introduced by one last reference to our protagonist and the shattered persona she formerly inhabited: “The survivor Judith Adler, never again Linda Stone, . . . as if she were the only person in the world, neither seen nor listened to by anyone, continues to list off: Abteroda, Hamburg-Finkenwerder” (Bruck 156). The actress reads off the lengthy list of names mechanically, without stopping to catch her breath or slowing down. The final twelve lines of the novel clearly illustrate the rupture that has occurred in her mind, plunging her into her real, original identity as she is faced with a textual reminder of a blind hatred strong enough to engulf millions of innocent lives. She loses herself in her own vortex of confusion, nostalgia,

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and unbearable pain, to the extent that she is eventually no longer able to even pronounce a single word in its entirety, as she begins to stammer and repeat individual syllables that in and of themselves carry no meaning whatsoever: Niemegk, Rabenstein, Quesendorf, Rostalt, Königstein, Laoküla, Langendiebach, Malken, Mariahütte, Malchow, Alt . . . dorf, Beer . . . fel . . . de, Bi . . . rn . . . , ba . . . , u . . . mel . . . , Enns, Fi . . . fi . . . sch . . . ho . . . ho . . . rn, Fü . . . fü . . . r . . . sten . . . stein . . . , Heili . . . gen . . . be . . . be . . . il . . . il . . . il . . . , Kla . . . gen . . . furt, Leonburg, Mit . . . t . . . we . . . we . . . ida, Neu . . . neu . . . burg . . . brg . . . burg, Rot . . . roth . . . en . . . bu . . . bu . . . rg, Ros . . . ros . . . tock . . . tock . . . tock, Son . . . n . . . sonn . . . e . . . e . . . berg, Tra . . . tra . . . tru . . . tu . . . u . . . Oh . . . , Oh . . ., A . . . Bi . . . Ba . . . Wi . . . Wi . . . Wi . . . Za . . . Ha . . . ha . . . A . . . Zi . . . Zi . . . Zi, Ze . . . Ze . . . Ze . . . Za . . . Za . . . Za . . . A...A...A...A......A......H......H...........................

Instead of attempting to narrate or analyze that which is beyond comprehension, this novel simply and directly exemplifies the notion that certain traumas defy our human capacity to describe emotions and relate events in a meaningful way. The conclusion of L’attrice takes the reader by the hand, accompanying him or her during the ultimate leg of a journey undertaken unwillingly by an actress who is no longer able to act, to hide her true self, or even to communicate with others. Linda Stone is no more; it is Judith Adler’s psychological breakdown that brings this text to a close. The author does not offer any elaborate, meaningful commentary to her audience in this conclusive segment of the book: she limits herself to suggesting, to those who can read between the lines, that Judith’s link to the world around her has been temporarily severed in this moment of intense emotionality. Without attempting to explain why, Bruck makes it abundantly clear that this link might never be repaired. The first-person narrative Il silenzio degli amanti (“The silence of the lovers”) is the only work by Bruck to be authored from the perspective of a male narrator-protagonist, as well as her only novel populated by characters that have no connection to the Shoah. Its publication came two years after the release of L’attrice, and it marks an additional step away from a type of fictional prose that is inspired by autobiographical elements. One could argue that in L’attrice the author was laying the necessary groundwork to step farther away from a literary environment that brought readers and critics alike to assume that all of her protagonists were merely masks designed to conceal a single voice. Il silenzio degli amanti is the story of an unusual relationship between a gay man named Roberto and his best (and perhaps only) friend Irma. Irma is a divorced mother of two who is engaged in an extramarital affair with a senator named Paolo. Roberto acts as a shield of sorts for Irma and Paolo, accompanying them on numerous dates in order to give their encounters a more casual, platonic appearance, but also driving them around town and allowing them to use his apartment as a private place to have sex. Paolo’s personal life is no less complicated than Irma’s: he



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has never openly discussed his sexuality with his elderly mother, and although he occasionally visits clubs that cater to young gay men, he seems to always fall for married men who refuse to come out of the closet, and instead prefer to keep him at a distance, using him to satisfy their sexual needs without offering any kind of legitimate companionship in return. Roberto is a less than typical narrator when compared to the rest of Bruck’s prose, and his construction presented the author with a unique set of challenges, including the exploration of the impact of a harmful and unsupportive dynamic between the protagonist and his parents throughout the course of his life. On multiple occasions, for example, the text refers to the difficult and violent nature of the relationship between Roberto’s mother and his late father, suggesting that the unhealthy model of manhood provided by his father resulted in his rejection of a heterosexual male role: A louder noise—a moan by Irma?—coming from my room made me recall a gesture I would make as a child in order not to hear mom saying “no, no!” to my father. She would even cry, and dad would yell that he was within his rights and he would take her by force. (Bruck, 14)

Another possible cause that the text offers for Roberto’s homosexuality is that before his birth, his mother had suffered a miscarriage in which she had lost a baby girl. On multiple occasions the loss of a female child is referenced as a factor which motivated Roberto’s mother to treat him like a girl, even bestowing upon him a plethora of clothes and toys that were intended for a female. The suggestion that the protagonist’s homosexuality is merely a result of his upbringing (as opposed to an innate characteristic) is proffered by Roberto’s bigoted father: “You’re the one who ruined him, who treated him like one of your damn dolls!” (18). As the plot unfolds Roberto is mistreated by a number of people. His married lover Andrea, for example, lies to him repeatedly about his sex life and treats him like an object that can be used and discarded. Although Irma truly does care for him, she also uses him to facilitate and conceal her illicit affair without any consideration for his feelings. When Andrea is murdered in an apparent robbery the policemen who question Roberto treat him with condescension and disrespect, suggesting that culi (“asses”) are his only area of expertise, and that he should leave the investigation to them (Bruck, 88). Aside from his mother, throughout the novel Roberto struggles to find a single person who is willing to consistently treat him with dignity. In interviews Edith Bruck has traced this novel back to a broader authorial intent, an intent which one could associate with all of her works: the desire to use her art to expose different forms of injustice that plague our modern world, and hence to be a voice for any oppressed group that cannot speak for itself (Balma, Intervista, 82–83). Although issues related to antisemitism are frequently treated in her works (fictional or otherwise),31 she has always felt a need

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to look beyond herself and her personal history in an effort to stand up for any and all victims of prejudice. With the exception of Il silenzio degli amanti, the Shoah is referenced, in one form or another, in the majority of Bruck’s publications. In some cases, we can see evidence of her using the Holocaust as an implied element in the lives and experiences of her protagonists, instead of making it the central motivation and source of inspiration behind her works. Hence, Adalgisa Giorgio was correct in saying that Bruck has taken to exploring the long-term repercussions of the Holocaust on the individual and at the societal level. The extant bibliography on the effects of exile on memory is immense to say the least, and, due to limitations of time and space, only one text will be brought to bear in this case, the memoire Out of Place by Eward Said, in which the late scholar observes, Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.32

Writing novels and short stories that reflect the consequences and the often tragic implications of exile in the lives of her characters is certainly not a casual choice for Bruck, especially not in the context of an italophone literary panorama that for centuries has been dominated by the untouchable figure of an exiled poet who is known as the father of the entire Italian literary production. One has only to think of the fact that Dante himself, in the Divina Commedia, describes hell with the words etterno esilio (“eternal exile”).33 It’s also worth reiterating that Bruck is very well acquainted with the works of her friend and colleague Primo Levi, who did not hesitate to compare the hell of deportation to Dante’s Inferno. This is only one of many possible examples of how Edith Bruck has worked hard to absorb and process the Italian literary environment in which she has slowly inserted herself during her lengthy career as an author. The majority of Bruck’s publications cause the reader to ask if her narrative production might be an imitation of her life, or if the reverse is true. The answer to this question depends strongly on which text (or which series of texts) are taken into account. The author has managed, in a playful and often indecipherable way, to draw a deceptively simple line of separation between her fiction and her life. For example, even though a significant portion of the novel Transit (1978) was inspired by a series of true experiences, one cannot make the same observation with respect to the collection entitled Due stanze vuote (1974). In the short story that gives this collection its name, Bruck describes a Hungarian ex-deportee making the journey back to her native village many years after the



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Holocaust. The journey in question is qualified by many vivid and convincing details that strongly impact the reader’s sensibility. Nevertheless, this description is not based on reality. The author truly did experience the same kind of journey that is narrated in the text, and it is easy to be seduced into believing that she chose to share its bitter nostalgia in her prose. Only through a meticulous biographical investigation can one confirm that Edith Bruck was only able to visit her village in Hungary nine years after the publication of Due stanze vuote.34 In other words, it was thanks to an artistic exploration of her desires and fears that she was able to prepare for this trip, which, incidentally, also inspired the production of a documentary for Hungarian television. The fusion between memory, fantasy, and narrative exploration present in the pages of this volume was a focus of the critical apparatus which precedes Gabriella Romani’s cotranslation of Lettera alla madre. In drafting this insightful introductory prose, our Roman-born scholar correctly underlined the novelist’s frequent concentration on the theme of travel, especially in the case of Due stanze vuote: “[The text] comprises three travel narratives, set respectively in Hungary, America, and Israel, all of which portray a story of disillusionment and ultimate failure to reconnect to the past. Judith, for instance, returns to her village in Hungary only to realize that time and events have thwarted any possible reconciliation with the villagers, who, now as before her deportation, perceive her as fundamentally different from them” (Romani, Introduction, xxi). It’s worth noting that the release of this collection brought on a specific effort by the Marsilio publishing company in Venice to frame this text under the heading of Holocaust literature; a label that is both reductive and ill equipped to describe its content. In a foreword by Primo Levi, in fact, all three of the texts from Due stanze vuote are perceived as having been written “under the sign of the Holocaust,” and he describes them as “clearly autobiographical,” an assumption we know to be false in the case of the first story.35 Prior to the publication of Quanta stella c’è nel cielo in 2009 and the multitude of awards it received, Bruck’s most successful novel had certainly been Lettera alla madre. In this epistolary work, which was written in a style with which the author had not previously experimented, the reader had been granted access to a posthumous dialogue between a fictionalized narrator and her deceased mother. This unique approach to the writing process allowed Bruck to hide (inefficiently, perhaps) behind the guise of fiction in an attempt to recuperate something she had been deprived of: a chance to speak to her mother as an adult, to revisit the joys of childhood and face the pain of maternal loss with a dignity that its circumstances did not allow for. Aside from her autobiographical debut, at the time of its release Lettera alla madre must have been the book that made our author feel most exposed and vulnerable. Although writing this text in Italian may have provided Bruck with the kind of symbolic, defensive shield that the process of linguistic transposition has afforded her on many other occasions, it is difficult to imagine a more personal work of literature or a more private subject for her to treat in her literary endeavors.

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For obvious reasons, Lettera alla madre is a work that could only exist as fiction: not only was a real dialogue with the novelist’s mother a physical impossibility in the late 1980s, but one should also consider the fact that exploring different modes of writing and producing a variety of different media allowed an artist like Bruck to recuperate some of her own subjectivity without being burdened by the need to adhere to strict historical accuracy. Twenty years after the success of Lettera alla madre she decided to refamiliarize herself with the expressive potential of the epistolary novel. Shortly after the death of her older brother in São Paulo in 2008, the author began working on a book entitled Privato. Much like she had in 1988, in this text (released in the summer of 2010) Edith Bruck decided to delve into the memories of her interactions with family members without attempting to organize them in any kind of predictable, chronological order. In the case of Privato, the reader is privy to an impossible conversation between a female narrator and a deceased relative, specifically her late brother. In her incisive afterword Gabriella Romani addresses the meaning of the book’s title: The title, Privato,36 would almost seem to be a contradiction, if it were not intended as the announcement of a story that narrates a world that is marked by an absence (deprived, hence, in the sense of robbed, mutilated), which can be recuperated, in part, in the pretence of a posthumous dialogue. If, finally, the universe evoked by the writer is private . . . her indignation towards the horrors of the Holocaust is public. . . . Yearning for a public dimension of memory in this way, the apparently intimate language of Bruck’s writing is transformed into an expression which is instrumentally formative in favor of a “post-memory,” or rather, the archive of memories that we entrust to posterity.37

Like Lettera alla madre before it, Privato is a text that exposes the chaotic, cyclical, and potentially unreliable nature of human memory by presenting readers with a series of scattered recollections, which in turn become the subject of conversation in a dialogue with a dead sibling. Although one could never know for sure where the line between true memories and fictional productions might lie, this recent work by Bruck clearly invites her audience to ignore such a distinction as an irrelevant detail. Romani’s reference to “posterity” is to be understood as an allusion to anyone and everyone who reads the novel. The text initially resembles a long letter, but soon morphs into an unpredictable itinerary of associations that bounce back and forth in time, recalling events that took place in three different continents. After an opening line that addresses a caro caro amato fratello (“dear dear beloved brother,” 13), the narrator pretends to forget that “Edy” (as he is affectionately referred to throughout most of this volume) is one of a handful of people mentioned in Privato who will never actually be able to read the text. By associating people with occurrences that involved them directly and relating them to specific members of the narrator’s family, Bruck’s



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novel constitutes a journey into an individual’s memory that reflects the erratic, and often potentially tentative, repetitive, and unreliable process of remembering the past. For example, on two separate occasions, Edy states that he misses his deceased parents more and more as he grows older (15, 32). The same could be said for a reference to a journey by sea from Genoa to Argentina, which recurs more than once in the novel (20, 56). The personality of Edy’s wife Sara, which resembles that of his late mother, becomes a textual link that facilitates frequent, sudden shifts from discussing one family member to remembering the other, much like the sound of Edy’s voice happens to remind the narrator of their father. Perhaps the most interesting elements present in this narrative are those that concern a flawed human capacity for recollection and its effect on the artistic process. Privato provides the author with a fictionalized environment that acts as a sort of refuge, granting her a considerable amount of creative freedom without raising the question of the legitimacy of memory. As Romani observes in her afterword, this book allows Bruck to use the written word as a weapon with which to combat the finality of silence, which in turn must be interpreted as the author’s most feared repercussion of human mortality (178). Interestingly enough, Privato goes a long way toward explaining why she feels the need to write in the first place. While it is of fundamental importance for Bruck to continue the testimonial efforts of the late Primo Levi (the most widely read italophone author to document the Holocaust in his writings), this work suggests that her family was reluctant to read any of her publications, and that they experienced a profound distaste for any literary or purely documentary representations of the Shoah (22, 24, 27, 30). In what might seem like the ultimate literary paradox, Edith Bruck has frequently used her talent to pay homage to relatives who died in the concentration camps, only to find that her loved ones who survived preferred to spend the rest of their lives shying away from testimony, whether personal or more broadly historical. Although Privato is certainly not a work that can be blindly inserted in the category of literature of migration, it does happen to offer an extremely plausible reason for why ex-deportees might be fearful of any and all forms of travel. As assumptive and problematic as it might be to freely equate the female narrator in the novel with the author herself, this work does underline a particularly valid reason why someone like Edith Bruck might, at one point, have desperately clung to her “house-nation,” hesitating to leave her new nest unless it was absolutely necessary: For me a departure was truly death. . . . I took my first trip to the ghetto in our region’s capital and the second one to Auschwitz. (30–31)

If Edith Bruck’s art and her life have been profoundly marked by exile, migration, and also, regrettably, by her time spent as a prisoner and slave in the Nazi concentration camp system, more than sixty years after her deportation the only kind of forced movement or obligatory transition in her life takes shape

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in her narrative. And it is, in part, the author who imposes this movement on herself, in the form of an unstoppable drive that pushes her to look beyond the themes that many readers and editors consider her purview, as well as the socalled Jewish questions she has often chosen to tackle in the past, particularly in journalistic writings.38 Nevertheless, she freely acknowledges that she has (perhaps inadvertently) contributed to the formation of the thematic ghetto alluded to by Mauceri: Balma: How do you interpret the behavior of those who want to limit and control the themes in your books? Bruck: It even happens to me now: this book on the Albanian prostitute, on prostitution, was refused by my editor at Marsilio, where I’ve always published . . . because the editors, I think, ghettoized me definitively in my themes—which is yet another persecution, yet another tattoo, yet another mark. It’s unpleasant enough, and this happened to me precisely with the last book, the last one, which I had barely finished when it was refused with this comment: “From Mrs. Bruck, we expect something else. We’re not used to these themes, but to YOUR themes, and so it’s not an issue of whether or not the book is good. . . . It’s not a work by Bruck. For us, it’s as if it were a new launch, and we cannot invest in launching a new writer who is already known as a writer-witness, who in some way always goes back to these subjects, her subjects,” from which they will not let me escape, because—except for Il Silenzio degli Amanti, which my editor did publish. . . . But that’s different, it’s already so close to what I am, so it was easier—to completely get away from that and deal with Albanian prostitutes, or with the prostitution of women from Eastern Europe, is something that they don’t allow me. . . . In the literary world, I can never succeed in getting away from my themes. And I’m so disappointed because I wanted, in some way, to liberate myself—to really take away these fences that, maybe, I have constructed around me on my own. Because I wrote fifteen books that all concerned, in some way, in some form, the same identical theme. . . . I can’t succeed [in liberating myself] because something else is expected of me, and the booksellers now know that “Edith Bruck writes those things.” (Balma, Intervista, 82–83) 





For Bruck, the release of Nuda proprietà (1993), in which the Shoah remains an unstated and unexplored factor until the final pages, could be viewed as an important step toward a kind of writing that sets the Holocaust aside, so to speak, in order to explore different concerns and expose other kinds of injustices and prejudices in society. Although she has worked with a number of different presses since her debut, she has singled out her editor at Marsilio



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specifically for having declined to publish her unreleased manuscript on the subject of Albanian women and the sex trade in Italy. Except for the novel Il silenzio degli amanti (1997), none of the author’s attempts to move away from her focus on the Shoah have met the approval of Italian editors. Given the specific marketing strategy used by Marsilio with the publication of Due stanze vuote in 197439 (and again, upon the release of a second edition in 1996), it’s clear that this particular publishing house sees Edith Bruck’s marketability in terms of her willingness to engage the Shoah in her works. The release of Due stanze vuote in 1974, in fact, also coincided with the printing of a second edition of her autobiographical Holocaust narrative Chi ti ama così by Marsilio. Edith Bruck’s first large-scale critical and commercial success, however, the experimental epistolary text Lettera alla madre, was actually published by Garzanti in Milan. After the exposure Bruck received from the release of Lettera alla madre (with one of their competitors) in 1988, Marsilio invested heavily in her writing in the 1990s: aside from reprinting Due stanze vuote in 1996, they published a third edition of Chi ti ama così in 1994, and a second edition of Transit in 1995. Furthermore, Marsilio published a total of four new books by Bruck in the same decade: Nuda proprietà (1993), L’attrice (1995), Il silenzio degli amanti (1997), Signora Auschwitz: il dono della parola (1999). Given the small number of authors who survived the Shoah and are still actively writing to this day, it seems natural that one might associate a real sense of urgency with the writings of a figure like Edith Bruck. It is regrettable, however, that such a sense of urgency would also come at the expense of the author’s freedom of creative expression. It is tempting to trace all of these considerations back to Primo Levi’s foreword to the original edition of Due stanze vuote in 1974: as of the very first book she published with Marsilio, Bruck’s work was symbolically equated with Holocaust literature even when this label was incorrect.40 The same could be said, of course, for Levi’s suggestion that Due stanze vuote is a “purely autobiographical” work.41 Beyond the strategies employed by individual publishers to target the broadest readership possible for the books they print, such as the creation of a specific (and potentially reductive) narrative that might come to be associated with an author’s writings for the sake of publicity, there is another factor that has weighed heavily on how Bruck is perceived and categorized as an artist in Italy. Given the lack of critical studies of her writing, in fact, the average Italian is much more likely to have first read about her work in the papers than anywhere else. Although many articles and reviews of her work have appeared in Italian newspapers during the last five decades,42 these sources show no real evidence of the formation of a unified and accurate narrative on her artistic production. Given its success, there are too many journalistic sources available that bear some discussion of Lettera alla madre to summarize them all. Not only was this work awarded the Rapallo-Carige prize in 1989, it was so popular with readers that Garzanti sold every last copy they printed of the first edition. It was also

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Bruck’s first book of fiction to be translated into English. Given its content, any and all reviews of this text contributed to a general association of the author with Holocaust literature and autobiographical modes of fiction. Beyond the acclaim enjoyed by Lettera alla madre and the numerous awards her more recent publications have received, there are perhaps three works by Bruck that were received more favorably and vocally by the press: Due stanze vuote, Transit, and Nuda proprietà. The collection Due stanze vuote was praised so highly in L’Unità that the three stories it contains were described as perfetti (“perfect”). Mario Lunetta saw a rare capacity for honesty in Bruck’s prose,43 and he identified the presence (in the background) of the Holocaust in the first story for what it was: a single, yet tragically unforgettable event that shapes the perspective of the first narrator—and not the principal impetus behind the entire volume. Transit was not a large-scale success, but it did attract the interest of the editors of La Stampa, who published as many as three reviews of the novel in the two months that followed its release. Two of them correctly identified the short novel as a work that looks beyond the Shoah at other types of discrimination in society.44 Although it is decidedly a post-Holocaust narrative, Transit explores the specter of nationalistic violence in postwar Europe, but also focuses on the ramifications of attempting to reproduce the tangible reality of Auschwitz through cinematic artifice. Furthermore, it was notably Bruck’s first novel to address the psychological cost of having to draw from one’s experiences during the Shoah in order to seek out professional opportunities and monetary gain. When Nuda proprietà was released in 1993 it was shortsightedly described as a novel “on the memory of the Holocaust” in the Corriere della Sera.45 Though the spark that gave birth to this first-person narrative was an eviction notice the author received in real life, aside from this minute detail it is an entirely fictional work. The Shoah is an important element in the novel as it relates to the tension that builds up between the two main characters, but it remains an unstated and unexplored concern until the final pages. More than a novel “on the memory of the Holocaust,” Nuda proprietà is a work informed by the need to remember the Holocaust, one that seeks to counter the efforts of Holocaust deniers the world over in the interest of speaking out against antisemitism in modern Europe. “There is always an Auschwitz somewhere,” Bruck points out to the author of the article, and the threat of eviction evokes the fear of a symbolic “new deportation” in the protagonist (Anna), who perceives this loss as a forceful thrust into a state of exile. Although none of these fears would have ever manifested themselves without the wound of the “old” (or “first”) deportation, Bruck clearly states, “Mine is not a book on the concentration camps, it is a book on the new Nazis of today and the anti-Semitism of today” (27). In a subsequent review that appeared in March in Tuttolibri,46 the weekly cultural supplement published by the editors of La Stampa, the notion of home was shortsightedly equated with a concentration camp in the title of the piece (“Bruck: The Home as a Concentration Camp,” 2). Not only did the title misrepresent one of the central themes in



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Nuda proprietà, in which the home is a treasured, safe, and stable environment, but it also contradicted the novelist’s claim that the book was not to be read as a piece of Holocaust literature. Although Barberi Squarotti’s review in Tuttolibri misinterpreted the significance of the memory of the Shoah in this narrative, it also offered an interesting conclusion regarding the authorial intent behind Nuda proprietà, one that would seem to place this work squarely in the category of literature of migration in spite of its climactic allusion to the Shoah in the last pages: “and it’s in the ability to bring the quotidian fact up to the level of the allegory of the inevitable condition of the foreigner in the world that the real meaning of Nuda proprietà actually lies.” To borrow Gnisci’s terminology, with Nuda proprietà Bruck shows us what it means for an immigrant to lose the “house of after,” even if they are naturalized citizens of the country they live in. It’s interesting to note that Il silenzio degli amanti (1997) was an exception to the general marketing strategy that tends to be applied to Bruck’s writings. Most of the other books she has published include some combination of the same key terms in the author’s bio: ungherese (Hungarian), ebrea (Jewish), povera/poverissima (“poor/extremely poor”), and either a reference to Auschwitz or a generic allusion to deportation to Nazi concentration camps.47 When an Italian publisher (Marsilio) allowed her, for once, to step completely outside of her thematic ghetto with the release of this novel, the dominant narrative that typically accompanied her work was temporarily, but entirely shed. The words “Jewish” and “Auschwitz,” in fact, are not mentioned anywhere in (or on) the book,48 and there is no reference to Bruck’s impoverished childhood. For the purpose of this one novel, Bruck was allowed to simply present herself as a Hungarian-born, italophone author. This chapter has been exclusively devoted to the analysis of Bruck’s narrative production, and it now comes to a close citing a poem that was published in the volume Il tatuaggio in 1975. In this short poem the author touches on many of the concepts discussed in this volume: antisemitism, the Holocaust, the past, memory, migration, the sense of belonging to a place, the need for stability, and the attainment of a new house-nation. Although our writer is primarily known for her works of prose, the relationship between her poetry and the many novels she has written is fertile ground that has yet to be explored by academics.49 The same could be said, of course, for her work in the field of cinema, which has provided her with a precious opportunity to step outside the thematic ghetto discussed by Mauceri. The next chapter will address Bruck’s filmic production in its entirety, in order to offer a more comprehensive picture of her artistic pursuits. It will also inevitably underscore the extent to which the symbolic ghetto in question is tied to the written word. As a screenwriter, in fact, Bruck started working in the film industry by lending her name to projects on the Holocaust. It was only when she finally sat in the director’s chair that she was able to shed the limitations that have been placed on her literary endeavors.

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chapter one Only only only All that I have All that I have wanted is here: a small room the yellow sheets a color like another not the star to sew on my coat. The image of the past is rich with itineraries and leads one to discover that life is life even alone and there will be some bread in a world where you now have a place without betraying yourself with vindictive acts that cause injuries like a boomerang. (Bruck 65)

Notes 1. Edith Bruck, Transit, 1978 (Venezia: Marsilio, 1995), 101. 2. For a detailed history of the usage of this terminology and its significance, see the introduction to this volume. 3. The meaning and usage of this definition is both hotly contested and subject to frequent modifications by researchers in Italy, as well as in the English-speaking world. Some Italian-based scholars (Gnisci, Sinopoli) initially adhered to a more restrictive paradigm in their study of migrant authors operating in Italy by limiting their scope primarily to a specific group of North African authors, hence failing to engage a significant number of artists hailing from European countries, some of whom had been displaced during World War II. It wasn’t until well into the twenty-first century (in 2006, with the publication of the volume Nuovo planetario italiano) that they endeavored to amplify their focus so as to reflect the true diversity that exists among Italy’s migrant artists. This important revision of the critical discourse on Italophone literature of migration has far-reaching ramifications that remain unexplored. 4. Gnisci, “Introduzione: Prima ondata,” Creolizzare l’Europa, 9. 5. Ciccarelli underlines the difference between “literature of migration” and “literature of immigration.” The latter includes texts on the subject of immigration composed by authors who have not experienced it personally during their lifetime, while the former incorporates works by authors who have immigrated even when they do not address this occurrence (197–99).

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

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Edith Bruck, “A Surprise,” trans. Ruth Feldman, Fiction 7, no. 3 (1985): 22–32. “Childhood”; “Let’s Talk, Mother”; “Equality, Father!”; “Sister Zahava”; “Go, Then”; “Why Would I Have Survived?” trans. Anita Barrows, Voices Within The Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets, ed. Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, 1021–27 (New York: Avon Books, 1980); “Equality, Father,” trans. Ruth Feldman, Milkweed Chronicle 3, no. 2 (1982). Rpt., Editor’s Choice II: Fiction, Poetry, & Art from the U.S. Small Press, ed. Morty Sklar and Mary Biggs, 164–65 (Iowa City: The Spirit That Moves Us Press, 1987); “Birth”; “You Hide,” trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, ed. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, 311– 12 (New York: Schoken Books, 1992); “Childhood”; “Pretty Soon”; “Equality, Father,” trans. Ruth Feldman, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, ed. Carolyn Forche, 388–91 (New York: Norton, 1993); “Survivors”; “Impression,” trans. Anita Barrows, 13th Moon 11 (1993): 206–07. Edith Bruck, Letter to My Mother, trans. Brenda Wester and Gabriella Romani (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006). Mauceri, “Edith Bruck,” 607–13. Maria Cristina Mauceri, “Dove abito è il mio villaggio. A colloquio con Edith Bruck,” Kúmá 11, www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/kuma/poetica/kuma11bruck.html. This chapter will refer primarily to the first version of the interview in Italian. There are a few differences to point out between the two versions: some questions appear to have been discussed in separate instances, and included in (or omitted from) the different versions. In Kúmá, for example, the following questions appear that are not part of the subsequent interview in English: “When you started writing did you used to translate into Italian, or would you conceive your writing directly in said language? If you thought in Italian was this not still a translation of sorts since you had to express images and emotions in Italian that you had lived in another language?” “In the introduction to your collection of poems, Itinerario, you claim that you experienced some difficulty in translating your own work, a challenge that has also posed problems for other authors who write in a language that differs from their mother tongue. You allude to the rhythm and the musicality of the lyrics that appeared to you naked and defenceless with respect to the original Italian. What do you mean?” “Is there a strong autobiographical matrix to your work?” “And how was the novel L’attrice born?” The interview published in Italica includes five questions that are not present in Kúmá, and they address, respectively, the following subjects: the language Bruck spoke at home as a child (608), the home as a maternal symbol (608), the theme of the Holocaust in her writings (609), the need to discuss the Holocaust with the young (611), and her latest book of poetry, entitled Specchi, released in 2005 (612). Aside from Elisa Springer and Edith Bruck, Mauceri references two other migrant authors to be inserted in the same group: Schneider and Janeczek. Edith Bruck, “Restiamo sempre un po’ stranieri / Il risarcimento,” Resine 98 (2003): 71–73. I must give credit to Mauceri for being the first to tackle this question in her interview with Bruck. Her research inspired me to meet with Bruck personally to examine the issue more in-depth. Mauceri’s initiative also had an impact on an article of mine published in 2007. See Philip Balma, “Edith Bruck’s Experience in Italy: Publishing, Cinema, and the Thematic Ghetto,” Italianistica Ultraiectina 2 (2007): 108–13.

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“The manuscripts she has been unable to place with Italian publishers tackle some very current and important issues, such as the abduction and sexual exploitation of young Albanian girls, and the plight of a woman whose lover is . . . younger than her, crushed by the impossible standards of perennial beauty imposed by society” (110). 15. Giorgio, Strategies for Remembering, 247–57. 16. When asked why she put forth a heterodiegetic narration in L’attrice Bruck offered the following response: “First of all because I wanted to change things up a bit. I did not come up with the idea for the book thinking about third-person narration—besides, the third person is a bit more complicated for me. In spite of this usage of the third person I had identified with the protagonist a bit. Maybe I wanted more distance. Aside from a minimal amount of self-identification, a character like that does not belong to me. I never would have denied what I lived through, I never would have concealed it. So I thought I might achieve a greater sense of detachment writing in the third person.” Edith Bruck, personal interview (audiotape), 28 Jun. 2010. 17. Since the author writes only in Italian, an Italian dictionary was consulted in seeking the standard, accepted meaning of the word esilio. The (translated) definition offered by the online edition of the Dizionario Garzanti is the following: “a temporary or permanent distancing from one’s homeland, as a punishment inflicted on a citizen guilty of common crimes or political ones.” See “Esilio,” Dizionario Garzanti Italiano. 2009. Dizionario Garzanti Italiano Online, http://www.garzantilinguistica.it/. 18. Andrea Ciccarelli, “Esilio, migrazione, frontiera, nell’opera di Magris e Pressburger,” Intersezioni 24, no. 3 (2004): 423. 19. Gnisci, Creolizzare l’Europa, 9. 20. Le sacre nozze (1969), Due stanze vuote (1974), Transit (1978), Mio splendido disastro (1979), and Lettera alla madre (1988). Although this last novel constitutes a return to a direct treatment of theme of the Shoah, it is undertaken in a context that emphasizes the chronological and physical distance between the author’s exploration of the memory of the Holocaust and the events that characterize this dark period of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, after Lettera alla madre Bruck wrote Nuda proprietà, a narrative in which the author puts forth a new sense of geographical and cultural stability, in the form of an attachment to Italy and a new (physical) home she had finally acquired. 21. Bruck, Quanta stella c’è nel cielo, 196. 22. Carmine Chiellino, Parole Erranti: Emigrazione, letteratura e interculturalità. Saggi 1995–2000 (Isernia: Cosmo Iannone Editore, 2001). 23. Pressburger’s use of Yiddish does not identify him as a magyarophone, yet it does speak to his Jewish heritage. 24. The novel Transit will be explored in more detail in ch. 2. 25. Mauceri, Dove abito, n. pag. 26. Bruck has discussed her relationship with Primo Levi in writing more than once. See “Omaggio a Primo Levi,” Il portavoce: rassegna Adei-Wizo 3 (1990): 10–11; “L’amico, il parente, il fratello,” Primo Levi: il presente del passato, ed. Alberto Cavaglion (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1991); “Io e Primo. La bambina e l’intellettuale,” L’Unità, 11 April 1997, 3. 27. Gabriella Romani, Introduction, Lettera alla madre, by Edith Bruck (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006), xv. 28. Bruck, Io e Primo, 3: “Transforming him into a saint of sorts would be the final offense, what he never would have wanted because he considered himself a witness, not only of his own life but also the misdeeds of present and past history.”



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29. Although both of the protagonists (in Lettera and “Traces”) in this case bear some resemblance to Bruck, it’s important to point out that the author intended them to be two different narrative voices, two distinct fictional creations, and not a single character around whom both works revolve. “Katia,” the narrator-protagonist in “Traces,” in fact, is married to a man named “Michael.” The unnamed speaker in Lettera on the other hand refers to a husband named “Gabriele” on more than one occasion. 30. This idea came from a conversation with Primo Levi: “One day my friend Primo Levi said to me, ‘You know, I would like one day, I don’t know when or how, to mention all of the concentration camps in one book, all 1,634 of them.’ And I said, ‘Well, be my guest, I would go crazy.’ Then when we lost Primo, somehow, writing L’attrice, I thought, ‘Here is the occasion, I can do something,’ and I mentioned 800 of them, not more, because I thought I really would go crazy if I were to mention all of them there. I wrote to the archive in Berlin, and I received all of the names of the concentration camps, they sent them to me, and I copied this infinite list, really infinite—800 names—then I stopped because I couldn’t do it anymore.” See Balma, Intervista, 79–80. 31. See part 2 of the next chapter for an in-depth analysis of the relationship between Bruck’s directorial endeavors and her efforts to break free from the literary mold that encases her. 32. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Out of Place (New York: Knopf, 1999), 173. 33. Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Charles Hall Grandgent (Boston, New York, Chicago: Heath, 1933),189. 34. See Romani, Introduction, xxi: “Bruck’s narrative of her return to Hungary anticipates the journey that she actually made in 1983 and that became a film, titled The Visit, produced by Hungarian Public Television and directed by Lazlo Rèvèsz.” 35. “Sotto il segno dell’olocausto, . . . palesemente autobiografici,” n. pag. 36. In Italian the word privato means both “private” and “deprived.” 37. Romani, Scrittrice italiana per caso, 176. 38. Even a cursory examination of the digital archives for Italy’s principal daily newspapers is sufficient to underscore the frequency with which the author has been called upon to speak, first and foremost, as an expert on issues and concerns that are of interest to the Jewish community. Bruck has either written or given interviews on the following subjects over the years: the life, death, and works of Primo Levi; the quality of Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful; yearly events in memory of the Holocaust in January; the release of a new edition of Anne Frank’s diary in Italian; the writing of pro-Nazi slogans on banners used at soccer matches, acts of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries and synagogues; Israeli politics and their military engagements; the Palestinian question (and the list could go on seemingly ad infinitum). 39. Levi’s aforementioned foreword frames this collection as a work of Holocaust fiction and assumes it to be exclusively autobiographical in its inspiration, while in reality one could only associate the first of three stories in this volume with the Shoah, but it is an entirely fictional description of a Holocaust survivor’s visit to her native village in Hungary. The aforementioned story, “Due stanze vuote,” more than a Holocaust narrative, is an exploration of the long-term impact of the Holocaust on survivors, but also a sober and detached meditation on the guilt and responsibilities of those people who sat by and did nothing while thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported to the camps in 1944.

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40. A highly positive review published by Mario Lunetta in L’Unità described it as a book focused on memories of cowardice and betrayal by others. Lunetta acknowledges the Holocaust as an element which is central to our understanding of the context of the first story in Due stanze vuote, but his critique is clear on the fact the this collection cannot be defined merely as a work on the Shoah. See Mario Lunetta, “Bruck: memoria di molte viltà e tradimenti,” L’Unità, 1 Aug 1974, 7. 41. Paradoxically, in a review printed in La Stampa, the collection Due stanze vuote was identified as a text that does not belong to the category of literature written by a person who survived the Holocaust, but rather, by an individual who had somehow lived this experience indirectly. See “Edith Bruck: ‘Due stanze vuote,’” La Stampa, 9 Jul. 1974, 2. 42. My examination of journalistic writings on the subject of Edith Bruck’s fiction includes four of the major national Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, L’Unità, and La Repubblica) as well as some of their weekly supplements. For the sake of brevity I will only discuss a selection of the vast amount of available news articles that address Bruck’s work. 43. Lunetta 7: “rarely do we read, around these parts, a book with the same purity and the same honesty.” 44. See Giulia Massari, “Edith e gli aguzzini,” Tuttolibri, 23 Sept. 1978, 6; Giovanni Raboni, “La scampata dai lager con i nuovi aguzzini,” Tuttolibri, 7 Oct. 1978, 9. The third review, while recognizing some of the subtle innovations in Transit, concluded with a generic evaluation of the book that reduced its authorial intent to a desire to share one’s testimony of the Shoah. See Angela Bianchini, “Edith Bruck la testimone,” La Stampa, 29 Sept. 1978, 13. 45. Stajano Corrado, “Quella casa in condominio con gli spettri di un terribile passato,” Corriere della Sera, 21 Feb. 1993, 27. 46. Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, “Bruck: la casa come un lager,” Tuttolibri, 6 Mar. 1993, 2. 47. These notions were mentioned in the bios for Bruck’s first two books, which were released by the Lerici publishing house in Milan. Her novels published with both Bompiani and Garzanti (also in Milan) reflect this language as well, and the same can be said for her first book published with Marsilio in 1974, the collection Due stanze vuote. Starting with the 1990s, however, in all of her works that were either published or reprinted by Marsilio the reference to the poverty she endured in her youth has been excised. 48. This same calculated use (or rather, nonuse,) of language was reflected in a rather positive review by Luce D’Eramo. See “Protagonista per caso. La storia di Roberto ‘diverso’ e sognatore,” L’Unità2, 16 Apr. 1997, n. pag. 49. This subject will be examined in ch. 3.

Chapter two

Reciprocal Influences between Literature and Cinema Having delineated the principal features of Edith’s Bruck’s prose writings in the previous chapter, this study now shifts its focus to the link between the author’s narrative production and her as yet (mostly) unstudied contributions to the Italian film industry, first as a screenwriter and eventually as the director of documentaries and fictional films. She first came into contact with the world of cinema when she was hired as a consultant for a film on the Shoah in the late 1950s. The adaptation of one of her short stories for the screen brought her even closer to the center of the creative process that drives the filmic medium. Having directed a handful of feature-length pictures and collaborated on a number of screenplays and adaptations, to date the author has actually been more prolific as a filmmaker than she has as a poet. In spite of the intricate relationship between Bruck’s publications and her cinematic efforts, her filmic production (in all of its facets) has been ignored by most critics. With the notable exception of the Oscar-nominated feature Kapò by Gillo Pontecorvo,1 the present chapter is primarily concerned with a small number of lesser-known, understudied films and documentaries produced during the second half of the twentieth century. In the interest of elucidating on these works with clarity and specificity, the plot of each film will be briefly summarized. A comprehensive analysis of Bruck’s involvement in the Italian film industry will necessarily call for a discussion of those writings that are connected to her cinematic activities, be they works of prose adapted for the screen, novels that were influenced by films she has worked on, or screenplays written for other filmmakers, including her husband Nelo Risi.

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This chapter is not intended as a critical analysis of Italian Holocaust films, which have inspired a number of insightful studies, especially in recent years. It is also not meant to be a comprehensive discussion of Jewish-themed films produced in Italy. Nevertheless, these issues, and in particular the very definition of what constitutes “Jewish cinema” and “Holocaust cinema” in an Italian context, must be brought to bear on Edith Bruck’s filmic works, using her as a case study for considerations that could theoretically be applied to all Jewish filmmakers in Italy, but also to all Italian films tackling issues that are dear to the Italkim, and to Italian-speaking Jews in general.

Filmic Representations of the Holocaust To describe the Holocaust as something unfathomable, unthinkable, and unspeakable has become commonplace in scholarly publications. A recent volume by Carlo De Matteis on the subject of literary representations of the Shoah actually referenced this notion in its title, Dire l’indicibile,2 or rather, to say that which is unspeakable. As readers, film viewers, and scholars, most of us enjoy the privilege of being third-party observers who can approach Holocaust literature and film from a safe, detached perspective. The magnitude of the brutality of the concentration camps can make the average viewer or reader of these works feel unable to fully understand them, and potentially incapable of explaining them to others or exploring their content from an academic perspective. The consensus in Italy, which can be traced back to the early 1960s, has been for almost everyone involved in the process of shaping the response to a work of cinema (audiences, reviewers, and critics alike) to insist that the Shoah is a topic that must be treated with deference, caution, respect, and fear. Furthermore, one of the most frequently (and perhaps, automatically) uttered statements on the subject concerns the need to always document the Holocaust in a way that is historically and factually accurate, down to the last detail.3 Without a doubt Primo Levi is the first name most Italians think of when they are presented with a memory of the Shoah.4 Emiliano Perra, who recently authored a study of how Holocaust films and TV programs have been received in Italy,5 rightfully describes Primo Levi as having been “the single most important cultural mediator of the Holocaust for the Italian context” (9). In a foreword he wrote for the first edition of Bruck’s collection of short stories Due stanze vuote,6 Primo acknowledged that even back in 1974 Edith Bruck was one of a very small number of Holocaust survivors who had scampati per narrare (“escaped in order to narrate”). Levi recognized the fact that the three stories contained in Due stanze vuote were written sotto il segno (“under the sign”) of the Holocaust,7 and he claimed that they were clearly autobiographical in nature: “They are obviously autobiographical, and this is a necessity, because the subject of the slaughter does not lend itself to re-elaboration and fiction: the few novels

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published on this subject are detestable, one reads them with repugnance.” In his foreword Levi praises the first story in particular, unaware that it was a completely fictional piece, and he does so immediately after specifying that autobiographical narratives of the Holocaust are the only works on the subject that are worth reading. Levi’s lack of knowledge of the creative process behind Due stanze vuote, which would actually seem to drain his foreword of any real meaning beyond his instinctually positive reaction to the literary production of a fellow Auschwitz survivor, points to an oxymoronic standard which has taken hold in Italy, one that has had a profound effect on how artistic representations of the Shoah are received. If we applied Levi’s admonishment to Italian Holocaust cinema in particular, rejecting all works that were not wholly and directly inspired by reallife traumas, there might have only been one feature film on the Shoah made in the history of Italian cinema. There are, in fact, only three Jewish directors in twentieth-century Italy who have been involved in making a feature-length fictional film about the Holocaust: the aforementioned (now world-famous) Pontecorvo, Edith Bruck, who cowrote the screenplay for Nelo Risi’s Andremo in città (1966) years before she ever sat in the director’s chair, and Roberto Faenza, who directed Jona che visse nella balena in 1993.8 Let us be more specific: if Bruck had ever personally directed a work of cinematic fiction based in a concentration camp, said film would have been the only one of its kind in the history of Italian cinema—the only one to have been directed by a survivor. Pontecorvo, on the other hand, who was the first Italian-born Jew9 to make a fictional picture about the camps, also happens to be a secular Jew with no personal (familial) connection to the Shoah. In short, if the preferred standard (purported by Levi, but also embraced by some critics of literature and cinema) for artistic representations of the concentration camps is for survivors to be the driving creative force behind them, and for historical veracity to supercede all other considerations, the Italian film industry might never have explored this dark time in modern history. Instead, we know, of course, that there have been a quite a few such films made in Italy since the end of World War II. Scholars disagree on the exact numbers, and whether to include documentaries, made-for-TV movies, and other television programs in their filmographies, but the steady growth of Italian filmic depictions of the Shoah during the last two decades has already drawn the interest of academic figures on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Virginia Picchietti’s 2006 article, entitled “A Semiotics of Judaism,” identified the 1990s and the first few years of the twenty-first century as a period that saw a marked increase in the number of Italian films depicting Jewish life. She identified the early 90s as a key period in which Italian filmmakers engaged social and political issues on screen with a renewed level of energy, yet she failed to explore the broader political climate in Europe as a relevant factor.10 In the volume Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz, on the other hand, Millicent Marcus discusses a different theory, one “that links such a development to the end of the Cold War, whose ideological polarization had prevented any serious engagement with Holocaust history,

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and to the consequent loosening of the stranglehold that Left-Right oppositional thought had on historiography.” Marcus acknowledges that the suffering of Italian Jews during the ventennio threatened the “Resistance master narrative” that had installed itself in the postwar period, causing the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah to be overlooked; sacrificing them on the altar of political dominance in a war-ravaged country (18). Both Marcus and Perra, in fact, attribute the scarcity of filmic representations of the Holocaust in postwar Italy at least in part to the “myth of the good Italian,” which has been greatly fueled by historical remembrances of the brave antifascist resistance as well as by statistical considerations on the high survival rate of Italian Jews when compared to their European counterparts (Perra 3–6). In numerical terms, as Marcus points out, 8529 Italian Jews died during World War II as a direct result of Nazi-Fascist racist hatred. This number, which “amounts to 26.24 percent of the Italian Jewish population of 1943,” included deportees but also suicides, unsuccessful escape attempts, and people who simply went missing and were never heard from again (Marcus 9). 

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There are three issues concerning Italian cinematic depictions of Jewish life that are uniquely problematic. Aside from Gillo Pontecorvo and Edith Bruck, it would appear that the only other Italian-Italophone Jews who have directed a feature-length fictional film (on any subject) are Marco Pontecorvo (Gillo’s son), Daniele Segre, Roberto Faenza, Giorgio Treves, Ruggero Gabbai, Joseph Rochliz, and the late Carlo Campogalliani. The dearth of Jewish filmmakers in Italy is almost absolute,11 and it is the root cause of the absence of self-portraits of Italian Jews in film. Bruck and Pontecorvo’s lack of religious beliefs, and their relative lack of contact with the (practicing) Italian Jewish community, might have contributed to the fact that the Italian film industry has yet to produce a feature on the Holocaust that is legitimately informed by a first-hand Italian-Jewish perspective in both cultural and ethno-religious terms. Pontecorvo’s film, for example, was made from the point of view of an outsider looking in on the plight of European Jews.12 Even Lizzani’s L’oro di Roma, released in 1961 and shot almost entirely in the ghetto in Rome in the presence of the local Jewish population, had to rely on the inclusion of customary symbols (the Star of David, the menorah) and the somewhat predictable depiction of religious traditions (prayers in Hebrew, services held on the Sabbath) to denote Jewish identity. The second (and perhaps more troubling) issue for us to contend with is the fact that, with rare exceptions, Italian films have always depicted Jews as victims of injustice, violence, and discrimination. As Virginia Picchietti observed: The Italian film industry has included depictions of the Jewish experience in World War II, but very few of Judaism, much less of Jewish life outside the ventennio. This absence is problematic, not the least because it obfuscates the presence of a group of Italians whose contributions to Italian culture,

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society and politics are significant and well known, and yet have suffered persecution for their identities as Jews. . . . Jewish culture in Italy has been and continues to be overshadowed by the dominant culture, which in the past was Catholic and today is increasingly secular, and Italian mainstream cinema has tended to reproduce the dominant culture. . . . The overshadowing of Jewish culture was in large part due to the fact that Catholicism played a role as official religion even before the Lateran Accords sanctioned it as the official faith. Equally important was the role played by nineteenth-century Emancipation, after which Jews lived highly assimilated lives until the publication of the Fascist Manifesto della Razza in 1938.13

If one complicates this equation by considering that in some cases the rare Italian film depicting Jews outside of the ventennio also tends to highlight their status as victims in an intolerant, monotheistic society, the narrative put forth by the Italian film industry is incendiary in its implications.14 With the exception of an essay authored in 1999 by Guido Fink,15 and the recent scholarship produced by Asher Salah (an Israeli historian who was born in Italy), most published studies of Italian representations of Jews on film (and, quite often, in literature) tend to focus almost exclusively on the Shoah, World War II, and the state-sanctioned antisemitism under fascism.16 In recent years Salah has come to lead the way in this particular field of study by reviewing and cataloguing more than two hundred works of Italian film and television, creating a body of scholarship that, while still in progress, distinguishes itself for the author’s willingness to both thoroughly examine and look beyond the ventennio with an inclusive approach that considers any and all Jewish characters who have appeared on Italian screens. Salah’s quantitative research,17 in fact, is uniquely informed by a statistical analysis of data gathered from cinematic depictions which come to incorporate biblical themes, but also historically inspired fictional films based in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although his work does not align itself with that of Marcus, Perra, or Picchietti in its interpretation of the social and political factors contributing to the recent increase in Italian films focusing on Jewish themes, it does nevertheless offer a more complete picture of the extant filmic representations of Italophone Jews by discussing an unprecedentedly comprehensive filmography. 

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The seventh art in Italy, thus far, has had little or nothing to offer in terms of representations of Jewish life beyond images of pain and ridicule, as if to suggest that Italian Jews spend their time suffering and praying, but have nothing else to look forward to in life. Picchietti’s 2006 article acknowledges the fact that, after their country was unified in the nineteenth century, Italian-speaking Jews who had an interest in cinema enjoyed a very short window of time during which they could have pursued training and professional experiences in the film industry.

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What is missing in her study, and has been seemingly ignored by almost all scholars in the field, is an exploration of the undeniable role played by antisemitism in curtailing and minimizing the involvement of Jews in Italian film history in the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s. Inasmuch as the fascist ventennio constituted a key period of growth in this industry, the bigoted legislation that prevented Jews from openly partaking in its development cannot be ignored as a root cause of their historically documented absence from the annals of Italian cinema. In short, the third and most pressing issue to contend with when speaking of how Italian Jews are represented on screen is the dark cloud of antisemitism in Italy, within and outside the ventennio. The postwar years, which marked the birth of the neorealist style of filmmaking, brought on a renewed interest in Italian cinema on an international level. Although the majority of neorealist films were not particularly successful in commercial terms, they did enjoy a remarkable amount of critical acclaim. It would be foolish, however, to assume that neorealism was born in a vacuum, to ignore the link between the cinema produced under the fascist regime and those influential works that followed the end of World War II. In fact, a number of the directors we now admire for contributing to the popularization of the neorealist style were already active before the death of Mussolini and the end of the war. Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), for example, produced under the rigors of fascist censorship, was considered by some critics to be the first Italian neorealist film, and in many respects De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (1944) “represents the key to [his] postwar works.” Rossellini’s work in service of the fascist regime also constituted “an important step towards the realism of the postwar decade,” although “its contribution was primarily a stylistic one which uncovered the dramatic possibilities of combining documentary with fictional narratives” as well as the unexplored potential of nonprofessional actors.18 Even though neorealist directors benefited from the creation of a discourse that sought to emphasize the ideological gap that separated their postwar films from previous works, from a technical standpoint Mussolini’s efforts at boosting the prestige and the productivity of the Italian film industry had a direct impact on the advent of neorealism. Il Duce sought to “Italianize” his own film industry by attempting to restrict international collaborations and limiting the number of foreign films that could be shown in Italian theaters, yet his enthusiasm and financial support of this medium also paved the way for future successes. Let us not forget that the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italian National Film School) was founded during the fascist ventennio, specifically in 1935. Furthermore, Italy’s principal film studios, known to this day as Cinecittà, were founded by Mussolini himself in 1937. Shortly after these important additions to Italy’s cinematic infrastructure were put in place, the infamous Racial Laws of 1938–1939 disenfranchised the Italian Jewish population, barring them from practicing most professions and making it extremely difficult for young Jews to get a quality education.

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The long-lasting effects of the unconscionable restrictions and humanrights violations that affected the lives of Jews under Mussolini from 1938 to 1945 can be tentatively traced by analyzing the history of Jewish filmmaking in Italy. This line of inquiry presents unique challenges: a number of scholars have studied the extant representations of Jews in Italian cinema, and there are certainly countless texts available chronicling the complex evolution of the Italian film industry. What is lacking, however, in these volumes, is any attempt to describe and quantify the impact of fascist antisemitism on the role of Jewish artists in the development of Italian cinema. Pontecorvo’s tendency to refer to himself as a “late son of neorealism,” for example, takes on a new meaning if we consider that his decision to relocate to France in 1938 was instigated by the political climate of the time as well as the restrictions placed on Jews by the Race Laws. Although his interest in cinema came after the end of the war, the fact that he never would have been allowed to study filmmaking at the CSC in the late 1930s is certainly relevant to the chronology of his awakening to the cinematic medium. In other words, Pontecorvo was not born too late to participate in some fashion in the advent of neorealism, he was simply born a Jew. If we compare his career to that of one of Italy’s most prolific living directors—the aforementioned Carlo Lizzani— the discrimination fueled by the Racial Manifesto on 25 July 1938 can be seen in an entirely new light. After all, Lizzani was born almost three years after Pontecorvo, yet his formation as a filmmaker included prestigious, award-winning collaborations with such neorealist masters as De Santis and Rossellini.19 Even the first feature-length film Lizzani directed, the 1951 partisan resistance narrative entitled Achtung! Banditi!, can easily be categorized as a neorealist effort.20 The obstacles one must face in studying the effects of antisemitism on the careers of Jewish artists and their cinematic endeavors are significant to say the least. The most insurmountable of these obstacles is possibly the reticence on the part of most Italian scholars and film historians to focus their research on such a painful and shameful moment in the history of their country.21 An investigation of this kind is also necessarily complicated by the fact that it forces us to look for lacunae in the way the history of Italian cinema has been studied and recorded for posterity. In essence, to understand why there are only a handful of Italian Jewish directors to speak of,22 one must focus on a combination of missed opportunities, uncredited work, and often unexplored historical and political factors as they relate to the so-called seventh art. Four months after the publication of the Racial Manifesto, Il Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini, published an article entitled “Un momento critico” (“A critical moment”) in the journal Cinema. As Editor-in-Chief of this important periodical, Vittorio shared his approval of his father’s decision to prevent American-made films from “poisoning” Italian audiences:23 “Personally and politically I am glad that American films, produced in that Jewish-Communist center that is Hollywood, will no longer be coming to Italy.” Although his words are directed specifically at American Jews in Hollywood, they are also characteristic of a general

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atmosphere of antisemitism that had taken hold in Italy. The fact that Mussolini’s son felt the need to voice such a racist and politically charged opinion in the pages of one of the most important film journals in Italy comes as no surprise. What is troubling, however, is the fact that a measured response to this kind of rhetoric was never published in the seven decades that followed.24 Even the scholarship of one of Italy’s most prolific and influential film historians does not manage to right this wrong. The seminal volume by Gian Piero Brunetta (1942–) entitled The History of Italian Cinema describes Cinecittà in the 1930s as a seemingly idyllic environment in which Jews of different nationalities were able to come together and work closely in a spirit of brotherhood and tolerance: More so than postwar republican Italy and the years of democratic government, the 1930s showed how Cinecittà and Italian cinema in general were able to create a free zone, an open city that gave refuge, protected, and valued the work of Italian Jewish directors and intellectuals and émigrés from Germany and Austria following the advent of Nazism. Rudolph Arnheim, Max Neufeld, and Hans Hinrich intravenously infused the blood of autarchic invention with Central European culture and atmosphere.25

In spite of the text’s considerable scope and Brunetta’s virtually unchallenged primacy among scholars of Italian cinema, this monumental history of Italy’s film industry appears to leave at least one stone unturned. The facile assertion that Cinecittà could be seen as a place of refuge for Jewish filmmakers in the 1930s is not qualified with statistical data. The volume in question limits itself to identifying a handful of artists who fled to Italy during this decade without including any specifics regarding the number (and nature) of Italian films they worked on between 1938 and 1945.26 Furthermore, the supposedly sheltered and protected “Italian Jewish directors” referenced by Brunetta are not identified by name. In fact, the word “Jewish” appears only twice in this important book, which bears no reference of any kind to the notion of antisemitism. The only volume that has made any kind of significant contribution to the process of documenting the persecution of Jewish screenwriters and directors in Italy is a historical text on the subject of Ovra, the fascist political police, and their presence (direct or indirect, through a complex network of spies) at Cinecittà. The book in question, entitled L’Ovra a Cinecittà, benefited greatly from the opening of the fascist archives to the public in the 1960s, a development that allowed historians to access documents that had been produced by Mussolini’s regime. Authored by Natalina and Emanuele Valerio Marino in 2005, this text speaks to the valorization of cinema by the fascists, both as a form of escapism and in terms of the pedagogical conditioning of public opinion in Italy. Furthermore, it provides readers with a numerically informed notion of how many spies were working for Ovra in the vicinity of Rome.27 It also sheds light on the reasons that compelled people to spy on one another within the confines of Italy’s principal film studios. A minuscule minority of these informants were motivated

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primarily by a sense of duty to their country. In fact, not all of Ovra’s informants stood to gain anything in professional terms by spying on their coworkers and fellow citizens. In some cases specific informants were actually not interested in receiving financial compensations for their efforts, which made it possible for them to remain anonymous, ensuring that their efforts could not be traced back to them in any form of documentation. Among the hundreds of paid informants that filed reports with Il Duce’s political police, most of them were nevertheless mixing business with pleasure, so to speak: it was not uncommon for actors, producers, and film technicians to spy on their colleagues hoping to damage the careers of their competitors: “It’s difficult to find someone who [was] a spy by vocation or for an ideology, an heroic combatant against the enemies of the regime. The enemy was almost always a competitor for a position one aspired to” (viii). The difficulties experienced by Giacomo Debenedetti under the Race Laws can serve as a representative example. Marino’s book includes quotes from multiple secret reports regarding this late author and scholar who nowadays is remembered primarily for his contribution to twentieth-century literary and cinematic criticism in Italy. In the context of this chapter, however, the limitations placed on his work as a screenwriter are most relevant to the discussion at hand. Although he was initially reported on for being an avid listener (and suspected disseminator) of news items broadcast by British radio stations, it’s interesting to note that Ovra’s spy who informed on Debenedetti was mostly concerned with (and infuriated by) the fact that a Jewish man had been a close collaborator of Vittorio Mussolini, and one of the former editors of the journal Cinema. In addition to these professional activities, which were supposed to be out of reach for Jews residing in Italy as of 1938, the informant in question made a point to mention that Debenedetti had previously penned a number of articles on Benito’s Mussolini’s efforts as a writer, and that these same articles had won him the praises of the Duce himself (218). From 1938 to 1944 Giacomo Debenedetti collaborated on the writing of 17 different screenplays, yet his contributions to these projects were only formally acknowledged in four cases.28 His situation was particular in light of his association with Mussolini’s son, yet he was certainly not the only Jewish artist being paid under the table for work he had done in secret. László Vajda,29 for example, a Hungarian-born editor, screenwriter, and director, was also identified in Marino’s text as someone who had been able to earn a meager living in Italy by writing screenplays under an assumed name. As further confirmation of the fact that nobody was immune from the fascist antisemitic campaign, Marino referenced Alessandro Pavolini, Mussolini’s Minister of Popular Culture, who had been placed under surveillance after rumors surfaced that his father was not an academic named Paolo Emilio, but rather a Jewish man, Guido Uzielli (218–19).30 With respect to a known author like Alberto Moravia, the (now) famous case in which his work on the screenplay for Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) went unacknowledged was also not a one-time occurrence: between 1940 and

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1945, in fact, he collaborated on six screenplays, of which only the first two were credited to his name.31 Perhaps the most prolific screenwriter to suffer as a result of the Race Laws was Aldo De Benedetti (no relation to Giacomo), whose career as a writer for the big screen dates back to his script for Amore stanco, directed by Eugenio Fontana in 1920. Although this Roman-born artist worked on as many as 128 screenplays during his lifetime, from 1940 to 1943 his contributions to 17 different films were kept secret.32 Given the personal and professional struggles endured by a figure like Giacomo Debenedetti, who may have enjoyed both good fortune and (possibly) some degree of special treatment in light of the four films he was able to work on “out in the open” during the timeframe in question, it should come as no surprise that many (in fact, most) Jewish artists in Italy were unable to continue making a living in the world of cinema after July of 1938 until the end of the war. These documented instances in which antisemitic discrimination had an impact on the careers of Italian filmmakers unfortunately and inevitably leave many unanswered questions, most of which cannot be properly addressed without engaging in rampant speculation. After all, there is no scientific method that one can apply to the study of circumstances that have limited the number of Italian films that benefited from the collaboration of Jews. A discussion of professional endeavors that “could have been” is of no value, and would consist exclusively of conjecture. These factors, while not lending themselves to any sort of rigorous academic investigation, point to the urgent need for an exhaustive analysis of the works of an artist like Edith Bruck, inasmuch as she is one of the only two Italophone Jews to have participated in the production of multiple pictures that, to use an expression coined by Salah, constitute works of Jewish interest.33 Gillo Pontecorvo: Kapò (1959) Kapò is the story of a young French Jewish girl named Edith whose family is deported to Auschwitz. Her parents are killed shortly after their arrival by train, while Edith is fortunate enough to receive some help from other prisoners, which is instrumental in saving her life. A doctor in Auschwitz, who also happens to be an inmate, cuts her hair and tattoos the number of a dead girl (named Nicole) on her arm, allowing Edith to pass for a “black triangle” instead of being identified as a Jew. After enduring the sexual abuse of German soldiers in hopes of receiving food, “Nicole” steadily rises through the ranks in the concentration camp, eventually landing the powerful position of kapo. The protagonist develops an attachment to a German soldier named Karl, and eventually falls in love with Sasha, a Russian soldier and prisoner of war. Sasha and his comrades plan a very risky escape that will only work if Edith, who has revealed her Jewish origins to Sasha, puts her own life in jeopardy by switching off the power to the

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electric barbwire fence. In the closing segment of the film Edith utters a prayer in Hebrew while she is dying of a gunshot wound, reclaiming her Jewish origins with her final breath.34 Edith Bruck has chosen to walk a fine line between life and art, weaving a complex web of artistic production and veiled discussion of real life events in many of her works. The novel Transit is no exception to this rule. While it would be unreasonable for a reader to assume that this work of fiction was inspired only by true events in the author’s life, Bruck’s experiences working as a consultant, writer, and director for both film and television have been well documented. In Transit, the protagonist Melinda is hired as a consultant for a film based in Auschwitz that is being shot in Belgrade. The film referenced in the novel chronicles the female concentration camp experience through the eyes of a young girl who is deported during the 1940s, and it highlights the gradual process which transforms her into a kapo: a prisoner who receives special privileges for helping the Nazis keep the other inmates in line. Any scholar or critic of postwar Italian cinema would be able to recognize the many references to Gillo Pontecorvo and the filming of Kapò within the novel Transit. Although only a few scenes from the (real) film are discussed directly in Bruck’s text, a careful review of the information the author provides makes it clear beyond any doubt that the shooting of Pontecorvo’s picture in Belgrade in the late 1950s was a specific source of inspiration behind the narrative in question. Even a cursory examination of these two works is sufficient for one to notice the parallels that can be drawn between Pontecorvo’s feature film and the untitled Holocaust film project in the novel: Kapò (1959)

Motion picture in Transit

Director:

Gillo Pontecorvo

Unnamed Jewish Italian male

Producer:

Franco Cristaldi

Unnamed Italian male

Shooting location:

Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Unnamed town in Yugoslavia

Protagonist:

Susan Strasberg (USA)

Unnamed Jewish actress (USA)

Supp. Actress:

Emmanuelle Riva (France)

Unnamed French actress

Even a masterpiece of international renown such as Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) offers us an example of an artist whose work was not acknowledged in the film’s credits. The particularly noteworthy (aforementioned) example is that of Alberto Moravia, who collaborated on the original screenplay for Visconti’s film without being formally credited for his efforts. Given the historical circumstances in which Ossessione was released this omission can only be blamed on the antisemitic laws promulgated in Mussolini’s Italy as of 1938. Ossessione also constitutes a famous case of plagiarism, inasmuch as the plot of this motion picture was largely inspired by Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, a text that

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Visconti had read in a French translation before shooting his first feature film. Visconti was not allowed to screen his filmic debut in the United States prior to the 1970s because he had failed to obtain Cain’s permission to adapt his novel for the silver screen.35 Nowadays Cain’s work is frequently associated with Ossessione in academic circles and Visconti’s debt to him is well-known. Pontecorvo’s Kapò is yet another case in which a professional collaboration on the making of a film failed to be properly recognized. Shortly after she completed her autobiographical debut, in which she shared her personal narrative of the Holocaust with an italophone audience for the first time, Edith Bruck was hired by Pontecorvo to travel with him to Belgrade and assist the cast and troupe in her capacity as an expert consultant on the female experience in Auschwitz. Pontecorvo and Bruck had in fact met for the first time in the 1950s in Rome, before he shot his excruciating rendition of the harsh reality of the lives of females in the concentration camps. Pontecorvo (1919–2006) is known for his documentary approach to filmmaking. After the Race Laws forced him to interrupt his studies at the University of Pisa in 1938 he traveled to Paris, where he participated in numerous tennis tournaments and came into contact with many famous artists and intellectuals, including Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre, who encouraged him to return to Italy and combat Fascism head on.36 After his wartime experiences as one of the leaders in the partisan movement, he began working as a photojournalist for La Repubblica and Paese Sera. His career as a filmmaker began during the early 1950s as a director of documentaries. In 1955 he shot his fictional cinematic debut, the medium-length feature Giovanna, and two years later he directed his first feature-length film, La grande strada azzurra. He considered himself to be a “late son of neorealism,” and was initially attracted to the world of film after seeing Paisà by Rossellini in Paris.37 Pontecorvo always considered himself a realist,38 and claimed to have always tried to adhere to the “dictatorship of truth”: Once you pick the dictatorship of truth, it’s like climbing a staircase in the darkness but having a banister to guide you. You always have to feel that this is fiction, and this is truth, and you throw away what is not truth. . . . What is important is that . . . the audience . . . doesn’t feel that there is an interruption in the stylistic continuity of the film. 39

From a technical standpoint, Pontecorvo tried to imitate the visual features of some of the neorealist masterpieces in filming Kapò. One of the strategies he employed was the use of a “dupe negative,” that is, the process of creating a duplicate negative from a positive copy of the film. This expedient allowed him to produce a film with a grainy visual effect and an unrefined high contrast. Pontecorvo used the same technique for his most critically acclaimed picture, The Battle of Algiers (1966). In both cases, he preferred to make a film that resembled old newsreel footage, assigning a pseudo-documentary tone to the material in

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question.40 One could make the same observation about his decision to shoot Kapò in black and white, in spite of the fact that it was released seven years after the first Italian film in color, the comedy Totò a colori (1952). Given his profound admiration for the great neorealist directors that preceded his entry into the world of cinema, Pontecorvo attempted to pay homage to them but also to follow in their footsteps during his early experiences as a filmmaker. In many ways he was attached to a series of technical and stylistic choices the popularity of which had been steadily declining after the first half of the 1950s. One of these choices was a preference for the frequent use of nonprofessional actors, even in leading roles. The thirty-sevenminute feature Giovanna filmed in 1955, which was reduced in length and dubbed in German for its inclusion in Joris Iven’s episodic work Die Windrose a year later, offered Pontecorvo the opportunity to work with a cast made up almost entirely of nonprofessionals. This project presented him with a trying ground to bring his cinematic abilities to light as well as a platform for his personal and political ideologies. It was a heartfelt depiction of the proletarian struggle personified by a young Tuscan mother who becomes politically active for the first time by participating in the occupation of the textile plant in the city of Prato. After a very positive experience during the filming of his debut, and once he transitioned to his first feature length motion picture (La grande strada azzurra), the director had some difficulty maintaining the proper dose of creative control over his projects. From this moment on, many of his works suffered from a process that could be generically defined as hollywoodization,41 in part due to the demands of producers whose financial backing was indispensable.42 This situation repeated itself during the filming of Kapò, an Italian-Yugoslavian coproduction. The only nonprofessional actors that Pontecorvo was able to hire on this occasion were a number of extras playing female prisoners in crowded outdoor scenes. In spite of his efforts to find a significant number of thin actresses to play these minor parts, all of the speaking roles in the film were given to professionally trained actresses who in some cases were too beautiful and too physically robust to fit the part of a concentration camp prisoner. If one considers that the lead role for the film (that of a fourteen-year-old girl named Edith) was given to a twenty-one-year-old Susan Strasberg, the extent to which this feature film by Pontecorvo had been hollywoodized starts to become clear.43 In an interview published in Cineaste, in fact, the director personally admitted that the ill-advised inclusion of a love story between the female protagonist and a Russian prisoner had occurred, in part, as a result of the pressures he felt to conform to Hollywood-esque storylines and plot devices: Q: You also said that one of the reasons you would eliminate the love story was that you would want Nicole’s moral descent to be complete. Does this reflect a change in your view of human character?

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chapter two A: No, nothing like that, just a desire to portray the reality of the situation, with a greater detachment from a certain narrative schema. One of the worst weaknesses of movies, generally, is to follow certain patterns of representation in which one does not attempt to portray the world in its reality but make it look nicer. . . . There was also a lack of faith in the public on our part. Now I think we have discovered that the public can accept more than the Hollywood patterns but at that time, surprising as it may seem today, the official cinema of the world believed in those ironclad patterns.44

It’s worth noting that, although he came from a Jewish family, Pontecorvo did not direct Kapò because of a religious or cultural impetus: Gillo . . . up to a certain point of his life had never “felt” Jewish. The assimilation of the Pontecorvos was normal and absolute. His grandparents did not remember that they were Jewish, his father didn’t think about it. The fact they were secular people certainly contributed to this. Not even the Diaspora, which necessarily scattered the Pontecorvo family to the four winds, even the youngest, not even the dramatic adventure of his parents’ escape to Switzerland had been able to reconnect Gillo with the Jewish world. He knew very few Jews. . . . Now Gillo dates his so-called confused but affectionate interest in the Jewish world to a period which came after the release of Kapo, not before.45

Although he felt a responsibility to document the injustices of the Holocaust in his film (the feature was, in fact, the first Italian movie on the subject to achieve recognition on an international level),46 his aversion to Fascism and Nazism was fundamentally a political position which motivated him to join the anti-Fascist resistance during World War II.47 Film critics have noted that the personal and professional development of this former member of the Italian Communist party was influenced by three currents in different moments of his biography, namely, leftist politics, journalism, and cinema.48 His frequent collaborations with novelist and screenwriter Franco Solinas were characterized by long periods of time devoted to research and documentation in an effort to produce works of cinema that achieved the highest possible degree of historical accuracy: “At the outset of their project, Pontecorvo and Solinas [would] advance their initial ideas with a vast series of records and documents and then interviews with participants in the particular historical event. The themes that [attracted] these two Marxists individuals—Nazism, imperialism, colonialism, terrorism— [came] right from crucial moments of recent history.”49 Given Pontecorvo and Solinas’s efforts to create a realistic representation of the Shoah which treated the delicate subject of the film with precision, they agreed on the need to hire an expert who could comment on the historical veracity of the sequences they were shooting. This is how Edith Bruck’s participation became fundamental to

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the success of the movie: having survived the concentration camps after being deported as a young girl, the Hungarian-born author served as a direct source of firsthand information on the trials of young female prisoners in Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen.50 Her duties as a consultant included advising the actors, in particular Susan Strasberg, and offering them specific guidance on how to legitimately convey the physical and psychological effects of the camps in their performance on screen. In the “Special Features” that accompany the 2003 DVD release of Kapò the director included a commentary track related to a dozen scenes taken primarily from the first half of the film. In these ancillary materials he identified Primo Levi’s literary debut, Se questo è un uomo, as an important source of inspiration behind this project.51 Even though Levi’s text certainly served as a hypothetical point of departure for illustrating the process of degradation and brutalization that afflicted most prisoners in the camps, it would be disingenuous to presume that learning about the experiences of an adult male prisoner might be sufficient to clarify the situation of a young girl who was imprisoned in Auschwitz in her early teens—one who lost both her parents shortly after their arrival by train. In short, Edith Bruck’s experiences were much closer to those depicted in Kapò than any rendition offered by Levi. The first-person narrative of her deportation and imprisonment was published shortly before she joined Pontecorvo on set in Belgrade. In an interview given in 2010 Bruck confirmed that Pontecorvo had been able to read a copy of Chi ti ama così: “It is absolutely not a film based on my book (Chi ti ama così), but he had surely read it.”52 Her contributions to this feature were significant but regrettably they went unacknowledged: they were never recognized publicly by the director, and they do not appear in the credits in any form.53 Let us consider, for example, the scene in which the protagonist (who is also named Edith) is violently separated from her parents by a Nazi soldier, and is still unaware of the fact that she will never see them again. The reality of this tragic event is described minutely in Bruck’s autobiographical debut. Though the passage in question does not match every detail from the corresponding scene in Kapò, there is a marked similarity between them. Bruck’s duties as a consultant included shadowing Susan Strasberg to advise her on the psychological and emotional aspects of her performance. This particular scene was of primary importance in the film since it marked the starting point of the progressive degradation that would soon motivate the protagonist to become a kapo in an effort to improve her chances of survival. Another detail that relates to the impact of Bruck’s autobiography on the plot of the film pertains to the figure of a kapo who first approached the protagonist to gauge her interest in taking on a similar role in the camp. The name of this character is Alice, played by Graziella Galvani. In Bruck’s debut there is also a reference to a kapo named Alice, the woman who first informed the author of the death of her parents. She is first mentioned in a textual description of the chaos surrounding the distribution of food in the camps, which often consisted of an herb-based soup of little

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nutritional value. This section of the book contains the first of multiple allusions to prisoners stealing food from one another (potatoes, for example), and it highlights the fact that some women embraced the role of kapo in a desperate attempt to survive: “They distributed soup in [an] aluminum container. What they would give us were just slops since the girls charged with this task had already stolen the potatoes. These girls were prisoners like us, Alice had chosen them as her helpers.”54 This passage underlines the brutal hierarchy that existed in the concentration camps: the soldiers would select prisoners who were especially obedient to serve as collaborators and adjutants to the guards. In female camps the women (and girls) chosen for this role were also often sexually exploited. They worked directly above another group of women who acted as their helpers. These helpers were most likely interested in becoming the next kapo, since the authority and power this position granted them came with advantages like warmer clothing and access to more food. Although Bruck never personally became a kapo, her first book shows evidence of a profound understanding of the circumstances that might lead a prisoner to this kind of choice. In fact, the volume suggests her tendency to look back on these women with compassion and understanding, especially in light of the sexual abuse to which they were vulnerable: “The head of our camp switched Eliz and I with two other girls because they had messed around with the soldiers. My sister said they were whores and they were nasty. I answered:—Who cares if they’re nasty. In the meantime we will die here in the camp.”55 There are only a handful of instances in which film critics and reviewers have recognized Bruck’s unique contributions to Pontecorvo’s film. In fact, if it were not for a review penned by Ugo Casiraghi for the national Communist newspaper L’Unità in 1960,56 and an anonymous article published in the same year in L’Espresso,57 a definitive, third-party confirmation of her collaboration and presence on set might have been nearly impossibble to find. Casiraghi was the first to reference her role as a consultant for Pontecorvo’s second featurelength film: The camp was reconstructed with painstaking attention to detail in the vicinity of Belgrade, with Edith Bruck as a consultant, a Jewish woman who was deported as a young girl, like the protagonist in the film, and who narrated her autobiography in the disturbing text Chi ti ama così. (Casiraghi 3) . . . for his film “Kapò” Gillo Pontecorvo asked for the supervision of Edith Bruck, the author of the book “Chi ti ama così,” which told of her experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. Edith Bruck’s role did not only consist of offering advice to the director with respect to the set and the costumes, or helping him avoid certain inaccuracies, her job was first and foremost to offer comments of a psychological nature. (“Monique,” 25)

In an interview given in 2006 Bruck openly discussed her difficult working relationship with Pontecorvo in Belgrade.58 Even though a well-informed reader

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who is familiar with her publications might have easily identified the numerous allusions to the filming of Kapò in her novel Transit, this was the first occasion in which the author spoke of this intertextual connection freely, without sparing any details, aware of the fact that the interview would eventually be published in the original Italian: [In] Yugoslavia, . . . I was working as a consultant for Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, Kapò, with Susan Strasberg. I lived through two episodes, two different experiences in the same identical place, at different times. Both were bad: whether it was the film Andremo in Città shot by my husband . . . or Pontecorvo’s film where Pontecorvo himself became a sort of commanderdirector of a camp and was scaring me with fake corpses. He is usually very serious, but he treated the whole thing in a very facetious, somewhat cruel, manner, maybe to diffuse the situation. When I told him, “No, they didn’t eat that way,” he responded, “I am the commander of the camp now.” After a month I left [the job], in fact the first half in my opinion is much better than the second. . . . I left the job because I have to say that I suffered like a dog, it was an intolerable torture. And after a few years, I wrote Transit, and Gillo didn’t speak to me for ten years. . . . Pontecorvo behaved improperly, not like a friend, moreover because he was in fact a friend, I thought it right to denounce it all. Transit, as many of my other books, is a testimony against abuses of power, oppression. (76–77)

Like many of her other publications, Transit is a novel that inserts historically documented events into a fictional framework. Speaking with the author in person was literally the only way to confirm that the Italian filmmaker she described (whose name is never mentioned in Transit) was in fact intended as a narrative representation of Pontecorvo. The behavior of the director described in Bruck’s fictional text was based, however loosely, on her recollections of his attitude on the set of Kapò. This kind of revelation opens the doors to a completely new line of inquiry for scholars who focus on the intricate relationship between literature and cinema. Regrettably it also runs the risk of putting the late Pontecorvo in a negative light. Consider, for example, the possibility that his approach to this film and the atmosphere on set might have been unsettling and offensive to a survivor. The most famous, divisive, and often-cited critique of Kapò was published in the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma in 1961. In his article entitled “De l’abjection,” Jacques Rivette expressed his severe disapproval for a tracking shot which gave Pontecorvo’s audience a close look at a detainee committing suicide: Look . . . in Kapo, at the scene in which Riva commits suicide, throwing herself on the electrified barbwire fence; the man who decides, in this moment, to do a forward tracking shot to frame the cadaver at a low angle, taking care to exactly inscribe her raised hand in the corner of her final shot, this man

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chapter two deserves only our most profound contempt. . . . There are things that must only be approached with fear and tremors; death is one of them, without a doubt, and how can one not feel like an impostor when filming something so mysterious? It would be better to ask oneself the question, to include this interrogation, in some fashion, in what we are filming; but doubts are what Pontecorvo and others like him are most lacking.59

Years later the director offered a response to this criticism, suggesting that the scene in question was necessary to achieve one of his primary objectives, that is, to show the concentration camps as a place in which prisoners could become accustomed to the sight of death.60 Aside from Rivette’s provocative reaction to the scene in which the character named Terèse ends her life, the film’s release was only acknowledged in a handful of European periodicals in 1960. These initial reviews, which preceded Rivette’s inflammatory critique, shared common ground but made no specific reference to the scene of the suicide. They tended, instead, to divide the film into two parts, praising the first one for its documentary qualities and criticizing the second for its forced inclusion of a love story in the harsh context known to the French as l’univers concentrationnaire. The plot in Kapò unfolds on two different levels, one is documentary in nature and the other one is dramatic. . . . The weakness of Kapò lies in the dramatic part. . . . The love story between the Kapò and the Russian prisoner . . . is too fast.61 In the last part which is the least convincing, the film also analyzes Sascia’s struggles with his conscience, according to the rules of a romantic but also a rhetorical cinema.62 In Kapò there are two clearly differentiated films. One, the documentary one, is perfect. . . . Shortly after [Terèse’s] suicide, the film takes a turn and enters into a melodramatic context.63

As he stated in a (previously cited) interview with Gary Crowdus, Pontecorvo eventually came to regret the insertion of this love story between Edith/ Nicole and the Russian prisoner played by Laurent Terzieff. In the interview contained on the DVD release of Kapò the director alluded to a heated argument that broke out between him and Solinas concerning the value of weaving this subplot into the film. Pontecorvo was apparently concerned that the subject of the concentration camps would have been too depressing to be enjoyable to a vast audience of moviegoers:64 The crisis came when we were working on the screenplay and we were faced with the idea that the film was too hard, that we needed to put a love story in there. Initially I was convinced that it would cause a rupture in the stylistic unity of the film. But when, later on, our conversations had brought Solinas to the same conclusion, I had already changed my mind, I felt that it worked, the

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sentimental interlude did not bother me so much anymore. Once we had finished the editing process, the love story struck me again as indigestible: but by then it was too late. In spite of this, the film still has its grit, it is rather modern, I think.

The responses offered by Moravia, Casiraghi, and Taylor can be seen in a new light if one considers that Bruck left the set of Kapò early, before the end of principal photography, after multiple disagreements with the director. There is no way to legitimately quantify how different the film might have been if Bruck had remained in Belgrade and continued her duties as a consultant until the end of her contract, yet the author’s firsthand knowledge of the imbalance of power between male guards and female prisoners, and her understanding of the sexual exploitation the women could easily be subjected to, might have motivated her to advise Pontecorvo against incorporating an unlikely romantic interlude in the plot. In fact, the rare allusions to sexual activity in her autobiography are never made in a loving or passionate tone. On the contrary, these moments are described as desperate acts that could make the difference between life and death: “The women were messing around and gossip started in the camp. Life now depended on having or not having a protector, each one of us wanted to obtain a position in the camp; everything became violence among us as well.”65 Pontecorvo’s name does not appear in the novel Transit, but there are a number of easily identifiable correspondences between Bruck’s volume and Kapò. Both works present us with a context in which a film on the concentration camps is shot and produced by Italians who have hired a young Jewish actress of some note for the lead role. A French actress who gives a particularly dramatic performance presents us with another intersection between these two radically different, yet uniquely connected works of art, but the tragic scene of her death depicted in Kapò is never mentioned in Transit. The protagonist in Transit, the first-person narrator Linda, is clearly a mask for our Hungarianborn author which enables her to revisit part of her experiences in Belgrade under the guise of fiction. Linda suffers from some of the same doubts that have plagued Bruck for years, especially with respect to her work in the film industry. With the exception of an uncredited cameo she played in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (1958, her first and only acting job), whether she was employed as a consultant, as a screenwriter, or as the director of a movie, Edith Bruck’s first steps in her cinematic career were connected to her experiences during the Holocaust and her willingness to apply this knowledge to the making of a film. Linda also questions the wisdom of this career choice, feeling that she has betrayed the memory of those who were lost in the camps for the purpose of financial gain.66 There is a key scene in Kapò in which character played by Strasberg avidly devours a potato after stealing it from another prisoner. Pontecorvo’s commentary track on the DVD highlights this scene as the moment in which the protagonist shows the first tangible signs of an unstoppable process of corruption, the first step

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on the road to becoming a kapo. The character of the director in Transit, which can now be seen as a loosely fictionalized mask for Pontecorvo, discusses the same scene: We shot the scene with the potato. . . . The American was looking for you and still is. She had an attack of Jewish hysteria, she ran off into her dressing room, go calm her down, and quickly. Tell her not to be a bitch, teach her that reality was quite different.67

This very scene (in Kapò) was also referenced in an article published in the magazine L’Espresso in 1960. Emphasizing the influence of Bruck’s presence on set, it is described as an episode which she had “truly lived,” and subsequently suggested to Pontecorvo for inclusion in the screenplay: “Edith Bruck agreed to go to Yugoslavia and at one point even took to suggesting, to the directors and actresses . . . certain scenes she had truly lived through, like the one with the potato or those intensely dramatic sequences of detainees fleeing from the trains.”68 If one considers the impact of her contributions to this film, and the level of historical accuracy her collaboration could help to achieve, it is truly astounding that her name was never acknowledged in the credits. The tumultuous nature of her working relationship with the director and their repeated arguments on and off set were enough to keep Bruck’s name out of the annals of Italian cinema until 1966, when she coauthored the screenplay for a cinematic adaptation of her short story Andremo in città. Beyond the literary representation offered in Transit, there are very few sources one might consult to gain an understanding of the working environment in which Kapò was shot in the late 1950s. Even Irene Bignardi’s eye-opening authorized biography, published in 1999, leaves a lot of unanswered questions. While she provides readers with an in-depth look at Pontecorvo’s personal and professional life, Bignardi at times limits herself to repeating the director’s words, presenting them in the form of a third-person narrative: Gillo has a very sweet memory of those months. He liked the group he worked with. . . . “The advantage,” he says, “of making such s small number of films is that each production gives birth to a series of warm memories that stay with you forever. And those from Kapò are some of the warmest.” . . . Others don’t have such idyllic memories. On set, or rather, while he was preparing to shoot, the witnesses say, Gillo was picky to the point of being almost obsessive, enough to push “some colleagues to kill themselves,” or simply to fall into a depression. He was Mister Hyde—in the sense that he exhibited an unforeseen harshness—while remaining permanently dubious and self-critical—as he did all his life.69

Setting aside any useless judgments of a personal nature concerning the atmosphere in which the shooting of Pontecorvo’s film took place, what we are left

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with is a tentatively drawn triangular relationship between an autobiographical text (Chi ti ama così) and a film (Kapò) which were both released in 1959, and an atypical novel (Transit, 1978) which intermixes a fictional narrative with lesserknown elements from film history. In attempting to properly dissect this rare case in the world of literature and cinema, it’s difficult not to be struck by how blurry the distinction between autobiography, film, and fiction can be. While reading Chi ti ama così might provide precious little insight to the story of the young French Jewish girl depicted in Kapò, Pontecorvo’s film can be viewed as an ancillary component to the novel Transit. In fact, a familiarity with the cast and crew of Kapò and some of the debates that accompanied the release of this film can shed light on specific passages from the book. Considering the frequent use of purposefully vague descriptions of places, events, and characters in Transit, there are certain excerpts in the novel that can be clarified (visually and auditorily) by comparing them to scenes from Pontecorvo’s movie. For example, when the American actress speaks to Melinda about a scene in which she “was playing,” the instrument is not specified. Just as it occurred in life, in Bruck’s novel the filmmaker was concerned about the age of his leading lady, who was supposed to pass for a girl in her early teens in the beginning, only to be transformed into a mature-looking, hardened kapo. The following conversation between the two main female characters in Transit can only be understood by relating it back to the opening scene in Pontecorvo’s project, in which Susan Strasberg is playing the piano for her music instructor: “Did I play well, in the first scenes, when I’m at home? Could you tell that I’m not that young? How old are you? Your eyes are so mature and your mouth is that of a child. Really. Even your teeth. I have Jewish eyes too, they make you look older, don’t they?”70 

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There is another, lesser-known occurrence in the history of Italian cinema that has made its way into the plot of the novel Transit. The elements that concern the filming of Kapò are playfully intermixed with a series of events that also took place in the general vicinity of Belgrade, approximately six years after the shooting of Pontecorvo’s film. In the mid-1960s Edith’s husband Nelo Risi directed a filmic version of her short story Andremo in città, which consisted of a significant amplification of the material present in her narrative. Although the original story was based in a small Hungarian village reminiscent of her place of birth, the plot of the film in question was transposed to Yugoslavia. During the shooting of Andremo in città Edith was assaulted by the manager of a clothing store after an argument stemming from her desire to return some merchandise. This frightening assault, described in the opening pages of Transit, supposedly took place because the owner hated Hungarians (whom he assumed to be fascists). Upon being roughed up and violently ejected from the store she immediately sought

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the help of the authorities, ignorant of the fact that her Hungarian origins made her a target for discrimination even at an institutional level. The policeman she turned to for assistance, in fact, proceeded to escort her on foot to a scarcely populated area, only to deliberately abandon her in a dark wood. After finally receiving medical attention, her arm was put in a cast as a result of her injuries. Following a meeting with a high-ranking officer in the police force to file charges against her aggressor, she found that the local newspaper had published an anonymous article in which she was accused of instigating her own assault and described as an hysterical ex-deportee.71 While any and all allusions in Transit to the shooting of a film are clearly related to Kapò, the attack that is described in the beginning of the text, which actually took place in 1965, is nevertheless an important element of this work of fiction. The temptation to untangle and deconstruct this novel into two separate pseudo-fictional, quasi-autobiographical accounts is strong, yet this strategy would resolve nothing and be counter to the author’s intent. Bruck clearly chose to exorcise two demons at once in Transit; namely the frustration she felt toward Pontecorvo for the way he treated her on set and the injustices she suffered when she returned to Yugoslavia to work on a different film. Let us not forget, after all, that Transit was written and marketed as a work of fiction. The author deliberately mixed artistic expression with real-life accounts in her efforts to produce this uniquely cinematic narrative. Both of the experiences that were merged together in this case relate to the shooting of an Italian Holocaust film in Belgrade, so it should come as no surprise that Bruck came to associate one with the other, however symbolically or tentatively, in the process of writing this novel. Transit is a mélange of different realities separated (unbeknownst to most readers) by their distinct chronological contexts. Its plotline is held together by a series of points in the narrative where these separate contexts come into contact in ways that could not have taken place in real life. For example, in one instance the character Melinda takes a bath with the American actress, the star of the film based in Auschwitz, in part because the cast on her arm prevented her from being able to thoroughly wash her own back. On another occasion, the director makes sexual advances toward her shortly after she has been physically and emotionally traumatized, a detail that was certainly designed to make this character less than likable to the readers. Later on, when Melinda meets the doctor who cared for her in the hospital for tea, the director appears at random and becomes overly enthusiastic about the possibility of casting him in the role of the concentration camp doctor, a suggestion that makes the poor man quite uncomfortable in light of the fact that he had performed this very function during the time he had spent as a prisoner in a camp. These and other sequences in Transit are key components of the narrative that contribute to the author’s efforts at characterization, yet they also constitute the most genuinely fictionalized portions of the text. Susan Strasberg and Gillo Pontecorvo, in fact, were not present in Belgrade when Edith Bruck’s wrist was broken in the attack, and any reactions to this event by their fictional counterparts in the novel

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were fabricated by the author. The real fiction (for lack of a better expression,) in Transit is the narrative glue that made it possible to attach and meld two different moments in the author’s life, weaving together a work of prose that gives readers the false impression of constituting a true story, one in which the names of wellknown figures in the film industry had simply been omitted. The book Andremo in città consists of a collection of eleven short stories, mostly set in Hungary. In this selection, the warmth of the domestic environment from which the Steinschreiber family (Bruck’s maiden name) was uprooted by the Nazi-Fascist regime in 1944 shines through in a clear and exemplary way in the description of the tender, hopeful relationships the characters maintain with the people around them, despite their extreme level of poverty. The main themes in these stories include the conflict between Jewish culture and a society that wants to repress it, antisemitic discrimination of the 1930s and 1940s (and its impact on the world of children), the sacrifices of a family that relies solely on its own limited resources to survive and the shadow of the violence and deportation that looms over the Jewish community. The story which lends its title to the book (adapted for the big screen in 1966) represents all these themes in just a few pages, all within the confines of the small house in which the two main characters live: Lenke, an eleven year old girl, and her seven year old brother, Beni. It is hard not to notice, reading the story and watching its cinematic counterpart, how Bruck anticipated by more than thirty years the artistic context that brought Roberto Benigni such a strong audience response with La vita è bella. Lenke chooses to lie to her brother, who is blind, in order to hide both the atrocious reality of antisemitism and the inevitable consequences of the fatal moment of deportation at the hands of the Nazis. In spite of this undeniable connection between the two cinematic products, many film scholars completely ignore Benigni’s debt to Bruck. Until now Millicent Marcus has been the only Italianist to affirm the debt Benigni owes to our Hungarian-born writer. Analyzing the film Andremo in città, she observes that “[by] superimposing an imaginary superstructure on the horrific reality of the Shoah to maintain the morale of a mercifully benighted young boy, the film offers clear intimations of Benigni’s game plan in Life is Beautiful” (45). The story, published in 1962, takes place in the vicinity of the home where Lenke and Beni live. It is a tiny house, made up of two rooms with a dirt floor and a small yard where Beni usually sits on an old chair, waiting for his sister to come home from school. The blind child depends entirely on Lenke, as he would have no contact with the outside world without her. At the beginning of Bruck’s story, the two siblings live with their parents, a Christian mother and a father of Jewish origins. This detail is briefly alluded to and clarified shortly before the moment of deportation. The protagonist looks out the window and notices two policemen and a foreign soldier who greet each other, saying “Heil Hitler.” Having always gone to mass with their mother, Lenke and Beni do not consider themselves Jewish, but when the soldiers in question generically declare

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that ne restano soltanto quattro (“there are only four of them left”), the young girl remembers her father’s relatives: “in our family, there were also Jews, two of my father’s cousins, who we only saw on certain occasions. They went to temple, just like we went to church.”72 One of the main events referenced in the story is the father’s departure after he is called to active duty during the war. His probable death is announced by the arrival of a package containing his lice-ridden undergarments. The mother immediately suffers a physical and psychological breakdown, lying down on the bed never to get up again. In the span of 24 hours, the two children become orphans and they find themselves forced to live in conditions of extreme poverty. One of the details that clearly illustrates their desperate situation is the fact that they must burn the few pieces of wooden furniture they have to survive the cold of winter. Choosing which chair to burn first gives way to a series of necessary sacrifices for survival; nevertheless, this selection assumes the form of a game between the children: they decide to throw the first chair over which Beni tripped into the fire: “It’s the chair where Mother used to sit and sew, but it’s also the one with the least varnish and so it won’t smell as much when it burns.” That winter was the longest of my life. I slowly burned everything, along with my memories.73

Edith Bruck’s husband Nelo Risi directed the film based on the short story Andremo in città. The initial treatment was written by Fabio Carpi and famed novelist Vasco Pratolini, while the screenplay is the result of a collaboration between Risi, Bruck, Jerzy Stawinski, and one of De Sica’s most respected screenwriters from the neorealist period, Cesare Zavattini.74 Shot and set entirely in Yugoslavia, rather than in Hungary, the film Andremo in città distances itself from the geographical and cultural reality of its written source. In a brief interview for the online magazine Persinsala, the director alluded to the difficulties they encountered in their search for a location to make the film: Both Hungary and Poland, after various location scouting trips, rejected the story of a blind, Jewish child because at that time those countries did not want to touch the subject of Judaism. The deportation of millions of people to German concentration camps left a sense of guilt among the Communist leaders of the time, who did not want to touch those hot topics. . . . We thought we would be able to find fertile ground there, where these atrocities had taken place, this enormous Holocaust; instead, we found the road blocked politically. In the end, the only possible neutral ground was Tito’s Yugoslavia, which in fact opened the doors for us.75

Nelo Risi: Andremo in città (1966) Lenka lives with her younger brother Miscia, a five-year-old blind boy, in a small provincial town in Yugoslavia. Their mother, a woman

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of Orthodox faith, has died. Their father, a Jewish elementary school teacher, was arrested after the German occupation, interned in a concentration camp, and officially considered dead. But Ratko Vitas, Lenka and Miscia’s father, is actually still alive. He suddenly and unexpectedly returns home, and is forced to remain in hiding. Ivan, a young student Lenka is in love with, lives with the partisan rebels in the woods and fights for their cause. One day he comes to bring Ratko a set of forged identity papers, but he is unfortunately tracked by German soldiers. Ratko, in order to save Ivan’s life, runs out of the house, drawing the attention of the enemy troops who quickly surround him and kill him in a dramatic hail of gunfire. While Ivan, who is now wounded, hides in Lenka’s attic, the SS come to seize the two siblings and deport them. Lenka meekly gathers a few personal belongings and accompanies her brother to the local train station at gunpoint. On the train, which Lenka realizes is destined for a concentration camp, she hides the brutal reality of their situation from her brother, opting instead to offer him a sugar-coated version of reality. In the final sequence of the film, she tells him that the train they are riding is headed to a nearby city where Miscia will finally benefit from the care of a doctor who specializes in optometry, who will finally be able to restore his eyesight.76 In Nelo Risi’s feature the blind child is played by Federico Scrobogna, who at the time of filming was approximately the same age as the character in the book. The same cannot be said of Lenka, the older sister played by the beautiful Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of the renowned actor Charlie Chaplin. Geraldine was over twenty years old when she played this role, but in Bruck’s story the girl in question was much younger, and this complicated significantly her need to act as a surrogate mother figure for young Beni. The choice of Geraldine Chaplin as the protagonist is potentially one of the most problematic aspects of this film. The creative process that transformed Bruck’s story into its cinematographic version brought a series of preferences that Hollywoodized, so to speak, the material offered by the literary source of the screenplay. Regarding the British actress, Millicent Marcus has argued: Featuring the young and willowy Geraldine Chaplin in the role of the film’s protagonist, Lenka, Andremo in città functions as a star vehicle for a fledgeling actress whose image becomes a visual obsession for Risi’s infatuated camerawork. To offset the unseemly focus on Lenka as icon, the film offers the unglamorous austerity of its black-and-white photography and the intrinsic interest of its quaint, Middle European village environment. (65)

Lenka’s adult age made her realistically much more capable of caring for her younger brother than a child between the ages of eleven and thirteen could

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have been. On the other hand, it also made her more vulnerable to lurid sexual advances by characters who want to take advantage of her poverty and the absence of adult male relatives at home to protect her. The inclusion of a love story in a screenplay that deals with the tragic subject of the Holocaust should also be considered. To find an example of how difficult and risky it is to insert elements of a romantic nature into a cinematographic project aimed at exposing the brutal treatment of Jewish people in Europe in the 1940s, one need not look further than Kapò. In the case of Andremo in città, the love story between Lenka and Ivan, a young Yugoslav partisan, is also a source of extreme variations in tone that fluctuate from a sad, painful context to one full of hope for the young couple’s future. Nevertheless, the two are seemingly able to ignore (or temporarily set aside) the obvious concerns related to Miscia and his particular needs. Furthermore, the narrative strategies used to develop this amorous relationship have the unwanted effect of putting the protagonist in a bad light. During the opening credits, in fact, Miscia is tied to a wooden fence in the middle of the countryside and left alone, allowing Lenka to leave and spend a few minutes in Ivan’s company. It is in this sequence that the German soldiers appear for the first time: they attempt to approach the child before being called back by an officer. On another occasion, the protagonist decides to leave her brother at the home of a doctor in her village to go off in search of her boyfriend, risking her own life (and Miscia’s well-being) multiple times. Another element that highlights the hollywoodization of this film is the figure of the father. Contrary to the plot of Bruck’s short story, the character in question (Ratko Vitas) undergoes an ambiguous and almost miraculous process of pseudo-resurrection. From the moment the father leaves for the war in 1940, Lenka and Miscia receive no news of him for a number of years. To allay her brother’s worries, in one of the first scenes of the film, Lenka pretends to read an affectionate letter from their father. Later on, when Lenka is summoned by the police for a routine inspection, she is told that her father died of typhus in a prison camp, a notion which she does not want to believe and therefore chooses not to share with her brother. When their father surprisingly returns home one rainy day, Miscia has a premonition, announcing (perceiving) his arrival before it actually happens.77 Only when she sees him bare-chested and recognizes the scar on his shoulder do we see Lenka burst into tears, recognizing her father, emaciated from his time in prison and the long illness that had afflicted him. This Jewish widower was an ex-schoolteacher whose pension was denied to his children in his absence. His unexpected return carves out some space for the love story between Lenka and Ivan, who are able to see each other with much greater ease now that Ratko can look after Miscia. The function of the character of the father in the plot of this film goes well beyond the freedom it affords Lenka, however. Ratko brings with him a glimmer of hope for a stable future that disappears almost immediately. When Ivan comes to their home, injured and limping, to deliver a set of forged identity papers,

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Ratko takes Ivan’s pistol and flees from his home in a hurry. His intention is to distract the Nazi soldiers who were going from house to house in search of the partisans responsible for the explosion of a train. At this point, the slow, somber, extra-diegetic music intensifies to accompany the only action scene in the film. The foot pursuit through the streets of the small town ends in a field where Ratko can no longer hide. A shootout ensues, in which Ratko dies, displaying his courage in a sacrifice aimed at facilitating the survival of Ivan and his children. Unfortunately, his martyrdom is not enough to prevent the deportation of Lenka and Miscia, as the only character to survive, the wounded young partisan Ivan, must hide in the attic of the Vitas residence. This tragic, emotional action scene suggests a pursuit of the sensational in Risi’s film that does not correspond with Bruck’s short story. If we think of other Italian films on the Holocaust that draw from a literary or historical source, the function performed by Ratko is not dissimilar from that of young Davide in L’Oro di Roma by Lizzani, played by Gérard Blain. If we compare the screenplay used by Lizzani to the book that inspired it, 16 Ottobre 1943 by Giacomo DeBenedetti, we find that the figure of young Davide does not appear in the original text. We are dealing, therefore, with directors who have decided to insert moments of action, tension and violence in their cinematic productions, perhaps to satisfy the expectations of an audience used to similar sequences on the big screen. In the case of Risi’s Andremo in città, the violence surrounding the father’s death substitutes the pain that was inflicted on the protagonist at the end of Bruck’s story: I was shoved and kicked many times. . . . With my body, I protected Beni, but with one hand I put pressure on my side, where I had received a terrible blow. The fear and the pain entered into my bones along with the cold, and I was desperate to find lies big enough to conceal what was happening from Beni. (67)

The two instances in which the cinematographic version of Andremo in città closely mirrors the plot of the short story involve a train in which dozens (if not hundreds) of Jews are being transported to concentration camps; or rather, the first scene of the film and its tragic conclusion. In both cases, the girl chooses to hide the atrocious truth she is forced to contend with, so as not to scare her younger brother. Considered in its entirety, Risi’s film implies the creation of a vast series of characters in order to develop the plot in a way that departs considerably from the simple and restrictive environment offered by Bruck’s text, and it allows for the insertion of various scenes filmed outdoors, in town and in the surrounding countryside. When a literary text is adapted for the big screen it often undergoes a process of reduction, especially when we are dealing with a novel. In the case of a short story like Andremo in città, however, we are faced instead with a notable expansion designed to produce sufficient material for a screenplay. It would make little sense to criticize the choices of the director and the screenwriters

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simply because they depart from the original source material. For viewers and critics who prefer to see Bruck’s writings represented on the big screen in absolute adherence to literary purism, as the author would herself, perhaps the adaptation of Andremo in città leaves something to be desired. On the other hand, for those who aim to explore the efforts of all directors who have tried to engage the difficult subject of the Shoah with humility and respect, Risi’s film should be considered an understudied gem, worthy of much more attention in the future.

Beyond a Thematic Ghetto: Edith Bruck in the Director’s Chair Improvviso (1979) Michele is a young and immature teenager who is too old to be considered a child, yet not yet old enough to be a man. He lives with his mother Anna and his aunt Luisa in the outskirts of the city of l’Acquila, the capital of the region of Abruzzo. His mother, who works as a nurse in a local hospital, became pregnant with him during a relationship that did not lead to marriage (due to the disapproval of her family). She now lives a life of relative loneliness and celibacy, much like her older sister Luisa. Michele Nardi is raised in an atmosphere marked by the absence of a father figure and the overzealous, protective, and affectionate attentions of the two women. These overbearing presences are compounded by the behavior of his private cello teacher, a woman whose life is primarily devoted to the care of her sick, elderly father. The teacher, much like his mother and aunt, tends to equivocally expose young Michele to her own sexual frustrations. Michele has a handful of friends, but they do not provide him with any kind of worthwhile stimulus. Instead, they frequently and exuberantly mock and denigrate him in public. A young girl eventually strikes up a friendly dialogue with him, but the shy and introverted boy is unable to experience any kind of mature relationship with the opposite sex. With this type of psychological baggage, which makes him quite unprepared for the challenges and surprises that life has to offer, Michele travels to Rome alone for an audition at a prestigious conservatory. When he reaches the home of his uncle Luigi in Rome (an older brother to his mother and aunt), a female cousin takes the time to fill him in on some of the family secrets concerning his mother. Eventually the boy is shown sitting in a station waiting for a train, and upon the request of some of the people around him he puts on a beautiful impromptu musical performance. Shortly thereafter he finds himself alone with a beautiful German woman who is also waiting for a train to arrive, perhaps the same one he planned to take. Feeling confident and euphoric

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(perhaps for the first time) as a result of the applause that his music had recently elicited, Michele awkwardly and instinctively reaches for the leg of the German tourist. The woman reacts by screaming at the top of her lungs. In a moment of panic Michele kills the woman to prevent her from screaming and flees the scene of the crime. Once he is found and arrested by the police, he bounces from one juvenile detention facility to another, undergoing a rapid and unstoppable process of psychological deterioration.78 In considering the filmic output of an artist like Edith Bruck, it’s important to remember the context in which she came to work as a director of feature-length films and documentaries for RAI. Looking beyond the specific impact of Jewish filmmakers in Italy, or the frequency with which depictions of Jewish life have appeared on screen, her cinematic production should also be viewed in terms of the role played by female directors in an italophone environment.79 Annette Kuhn’s volume entitled The Women’s Companion to International Film identifies the sixties as a time in which Italian women auteurs finally began to emerge, after decades of strictly male-dominated cinema, first under Fascism, and again with the advent of neorealism. Her text rightfully credits feminism for helping to create a “space for female voices” to be heard, and acknowledges the (perhaps limited) benefits of “Articolo 28,” a law that allowed state funds to finance part of the cost of auteur films in an effort to support new talents.80 Aside from the well-known filmographies of Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmuller, Kuhn references a handful of other filmmakers whose works were produced by RAI: In the 1970s, with the disappearance of the adventurous producers of the 1960s, Italian television (RAI) has taken over the role of financing auteur cinema. Among women’s films, RAI produced Maternale (1975), a landmark film on maternal love directed by Giovanna Gagliardo, screenwriter for Miklós Jancsó. Improvviso, made by Edith Bruck in 1979, was also produced by RAI. Like Loredana Dordi (Fratelli [1985]), a number of women filmmakers, many of them feminists, have found shelter (but also difficulties) within RAI’s system. As for TV programs, between 1977 and 1981 feminist editor Tilde Capomazza and a female editorial team made Si dice donna, a weekly women’s news program broadcast on RAI in prime time. (223)

Bruck’s directorial debut, the feature film Improvviso, was loosely inspired by the murder of a schoolteacher in September of 1969. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, Gianna Bo Pianella was stabbed to death on a train headed to Turin.81 The murder was carried out by Claudio Fantino, a boy who had clumsily placed his hand on the woman’s knee in an attempt to proposition her. The schoolteacher reacted by smacking him and screaming loudly, and Claudio stabbed her in an effort to silence her. Known as a shy, anxious individual who suffered from a number of sociosexual issues, Claudio had difficulty relating to

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his peers, males and females alike. People who knew his family blamed the absence of a father figure in his life for many of the boy’s problems, and there were speculations in the press as to the unstructured, corrupting nature of the home life a single mother could provide. Some looked outside the home to identify societal influences on Claudio’s upbringing, citing pornography, violence, and the commercialization of the female body as relevant factors to be weighed.82 Eight years after this killing Edith Bruck was quoted in a national newspaper discussing her preparations to shoot a movie inspired by the controversial story of Claudio Fantino, the young cello student who killed a woman virtually for no reason. When asked about her decision to direct a film that was financed by a public TV station, she alluded to the creative freedom it afforded her: Television finally allows auteurs to express themselves without condition. And it is very important in my opinion for this opportunity to be extended to women. In any case, mine will not be a feminist film because through the story of this unfortunate young man I propose to tackle a number of problems; the institution of the family, the prison system, society in general.83

These statements, published in November of 1977 by Roberto Meale, highlighted the director’s desire to explore the repressive nature of the institutions that failed to steer the formation of a troubled young man in the right direction, including the schools, the Church, and his family. In December of the same year Reale penned a follow-up piece in which he gave voice to more than three hundred letters of protest his newspaper had received, all of which were opposed to the making of the film. The citizens of Asti, where Fantino’s family lived, had even pooled their resources to hire legal representation for the boy’s mother, who was adamantly against any filmic representation of her son’s misdeed, however paraphrased or modified it might be on screen. On this occasion, the first-time filmmaker had to admit to making a rookie mistake by openly discussing the subject of a film that was bound to encounter some public disapproval: I am demoralized, because I wanted to make a monument to that boy. I drew inspiration from his story because Claudio can represent a symbol, to denounce the hardships of many young people who can’t find a place in the world. If I had not stupidly announced that I was drawing from that news story all of this could have been avoided.84

Screened for the first time at the Venice Film Festival in September of 1979, Bruck’s filmic debut was presented to the public with a title that did little to evoke the somber subject matter that inspired it: Improvviso (“Sudden”)—an adjective that best describes the unexpected nature of the murder that took place in 1969. On this occasion Mrs. Fantino’s lawyer, Giovanni Goria, speculated that perhaps the title had been changed deliberately in an effort to minimize public outcry. Although his efforts were unsuccessful, Goria had appealed to the city government offices to prevent the film from being screened in Asti, while pursuing a parallel

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effort to block the distribution of the movie on a national level.85 Dr. Bozzolo, a magistrate authorized to comment on this case to the press, cited the highly poetic content of the film as one of the principal reasons why the judiciary had opted to allow it to be screened in theaters in all major Italian cities.86 Bozzoli announced the court’s decision as a victory for freedom of expression, whose important function in society had to be weighed against the rights of individuals who suffered a grave personal loss. Much to her dismay, Bruck’s first feature was such a contentious topic of discussion in the press that when it was finally televised on Rai 2, four years after its theatrical release, Sergio Miravalle felt the need to comment on the absence of polemics surrounding the broadcast debut of Improvviso. His article published in La Stampa looked back on the lukewarm reception the film enjoyed upon hitting the theaters in 1979, citing the two most frequent complaints heard from the audience: some saw the film as being generally too difficult, others felt it was too politically conscious.87 The version of Improvviso screened (in two parts) in 1983 was briefly introduced to TV audiences by the late Tullio Kezich, an important film critic, screenwriter, and playwright known especially for his writings on Federico Fellini. Kezich prefaced the feature by underlining the significant differences between Italy in the 1970s and the social and historical climate that gave birth to the director’s literary debut, adding that this very personal movie was nevertheless a product of the same sensibility that defined Chi ti ama così. He then proceeded to read a short text prepared by Bruck, in which she addressed her reasons for making the film: “As far as I’m concerned, I wrote and shot this film thinking of my brother who was lost during the war. He, so defenseless when faced with violence. But I am personally in this story too, or at least that part of me that is defenseless and fearful of humanity in general.”88 Improvviso begins with a shot of the protagonist, Michele (played by newcomer Giacomo Rosselli,) holding his mother Anna (played by Andrea Ferreol) by the hand as they spin happily in circles in front of a church. The seemingly cheerful tone of this brief opening scene is contrasted by the eerie sound of an organ intermixed with effects produced by a synthesizer, playing a mildly offkey, sinister-sounding, extradiegetic melody. The camera then cuts to a shot of Michele sitting in a prison cell at night. A guard informs him that he is being transferred. Michele is troubled, he complains about being relocated over and over to different facilities, and inquires as to where he might be taken and why. He receives no response. On his way out, he gives a stone with flowers painted on it to a cellmate as a parting gift. The intermittent chronological shifts between Michele’s calvary in the juvenile prison system and his life before incarceration are the most frequently used devices in this feature. In the first few minutes of Improvviso Bruck thus clarifies the fate of her protagonist, creating an omnipresent level of tension for the viewers that inevitably builds up to the scene of the murder and the subsequent arrest. After the first scene based behind bars, Bruck transitions to a depiction of Michele’s family and his social life: after riding a bus

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home carrying his cello in a large case, our protagonist enters into an apartment and greets his aunt Luisa, a seamstress played by Valeria Moriconi. She immediately rushes to set the table, asking the boy if he’s hungry, and making sure he washes his hands. While Michele sits down to eat, Luisa does not join him. Instead, she starts fussing about his tendency to chew his nails, and begins to file them obsessively while her nephew eats his dinner using one hand at a time. After eating quickly he withdraws into his bedroom and smokes a cigarrette in secret before his mother comes home and checks on him. Michele is in high school, and his mother is clearly under the age of forty. If one did not know better, it would be easy to mistake his aunt for his mother, and vice versa. He jokes and giggles with Anna, loudly enough to make aunt Luisa jealous, as she calls for them to join her at the table. The following afternoon Michele visits a sewing goods store to purchase some items for his aunt. He tentatively strikes up a conversation with a girl named Annabella, and they agree to meet up the next day. In order to keep this encounter a secret from his overbearing mother and aunt, Michele asks his cello instructor (a woman named Lidia) if he can cut out early and leave his instrument at her house. Annabella arrives at the park late and catches him looking at a pornographic picture he picked up off the ground. The young girl apologizes, blaming an appointment at the hairdresser for her tardiness. Michele, who seems to have trouble making even the most casual of gestures in front of a girl, throws himself at her unexpectedly, forcing her into a kiss she did not see coming. Annabella pushes him away, protests, and tries to talk some sense into him, but Michele is simply unable to carry on a meaningful conversation with a female, especially one he finds attractive. At this point the audience is again thrust into Michele’s prison cell. Bruck makes no effort to smoothen the transitions between life in jail and his existence before the killing. The sudden shifts from images of a difficult adolescence in the past to the grim reality of juvenile detention in the present are deliberately jarring, and with one exception (the first scene shot indoors) they all precede the repeated appearance of a specific still shot on screen. On four occasions in this film the director follows footage shot in prison with the partial view of the close-up of a terrified woman’s face, apparently in the act of screaming. The still in question, which consists of the only use of black and white in this color feature, is only visible for a handful of seconds each time it is shown on screen, and as it is revisited throughout the movie, with slight variations in camera angles, it becomes progressively more clear to the audience, as if it had slowly been brought into focus. The view of the frightened woman cross-fades to a detail of Michele’s eyes behind bars. This particular succession of images, in the exact order described above (a. freedom, b. detention, c. face of a terrified woman, d. Michele in jail looking hopeless), occurs a total of three times in Improvviso. Aside from these considerations on how the picture is edited, from a technical standpoint the director’s filmic debut is a rather conventional endeavor. One might argue that, as

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a first-time cineaste known primarily for her literary prowess, Bruck naturally tended to place more emphasis on narrative devices and character arc, and less on lighting, angles, and camera movements. There are only a few scenes in Improvviso depicting Michele’s relationships with boys his age. The first time he is shown spending time with a group of male peers he is sitting at a bar discussing which erotic film they want to see at the movie theater. His friends behave disrespectfully toward a group of elderly men who ask them to keep their voices down, and then proceed to mock a youthfullooking waiter by suggesting he go home to his mother. The waiter replies that he does not have a mother, which prompts the boys to begin picking on Michele: “te la presta Michele, lui ne ha una, due, anche tre!” (“Michele will loan you one, he’s got one, two, even three of them!”). The three boys end up going to see a pornographic film without Michele, who opts to return home and enters at the exact moment when one of his aunt’s customers is standing around in a brassiere. The third of five sequences set in jail presents further evidence of psychological deterioration on Michele’s part. Upon receiving a bowl of soup and a piece of bread for dinner, our protagonist sits on his bed staring at his food with a blank expression. A guard informs him that he is soon to be transferred again, but these words seem to fall on deaf ears. Our protagonist remains motionless while his concerned cellmates spoonfeed his dinner to him. At this point there is another cross-fade, transitioning to a slightly different version of the aforementioned black and white still shot: this time the image is more in focus, and a portion of the woman’s right hand can be made out, lifted upwards in self defense. The still fades out of view, and the audience is again presented with footage of Michele’s eyes, this time framed by a small opening in the door to his shared cell. Aside from injecting the film with a quasi-constant dosage of sensuality, Bruck made every effort to illustrate the failed trajectory of Michele’s formation as a man-to-be. In terms of his sexual development, aside from the titillating behavior of women in his life, most of what this young man knows (or, as it turns out, what he thinks he knows) about the opposite sex comes from images of pornography and violence he is exposed to in his daily life. One specific scene, in fact, serves no purpose other than to illustrate the decay of Italian society in the 1970s in terms of sexual violence: Michele walks through a park, sets his cello case down and looks for a place to urinate. While he is relieving himself he witnesses two men taking turns raping a woman. The assailants then proceed to steal their victim’s watch and threaten to kill her if she contacts the police. The impact of this occurrence on the protagonist is not overtly explored, but rather incorporated into the broader imagery of corruption and immorality in all facets of society. The next time Michele goes out with Annabella ends up being the last. Taking a page from his condescending friends’ playbook, he convinces her to go to the movies with him and then takes her to see a pornographic feature. The sound of sexual gratification can be overheard as the camera focuses on Michele’s hand

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in a dark theater, touching Annabella’s right leg. Surprisingly, the man seated to her left then begins rubbing on her other leg, which makes her very uncomfortable. Annabella immediately demands that they leave the theater. Michele, who has never been on a date before in his life, does not know how to react. He expresses concern because he does not want to leave his classmates who were also viewing the same film. Annabella understandably disapproves of his decision, and storms off never to be seen or heard from again. Michele’s disappointing encounter with Annabella gives way to the penultimate sequence shot behind bars. Two young inmates are playing soccer under the supervision of a guard. Michele sits alone, off to the side, wrapped in a blanket. He refuses an invitation to join them,89 simply looking away, unresponsive to the point of appearing catatonic. For the third time, Bruck presents us with a still shot of a woman screaming in fear.90 On this occasion, the image is clear enough to make out the woman’s surroundings. She is horizontal, with her back to the floor. The left side of her face is darkened by the shadow of an unseen individual, potentially the shadow cast by an aggressor’s raised arm. After the scene of Michele’s sixteenth birthday party, which offers some insight into his mother’s most recent romantic entanglements with a married older man, he has one more cello lesson before traveling to Rome for an audition at a highly reputable conservatory. He is greeted at the train station by a female cousin, who notices him looking at dirty posters and staring at bums. Michele is a guest at the home of his uncle Luigi (his aunt and mother’s older brother), who speaks somewhat cryptically about Anna and Luisa at the dinnertable. In the next sequence Michele speaks with a female cousin in her bedroom, discussing long-hidden family secrets that his mother and aunt have deliberately concealed from him: much to his surprise, he finds out that his biological father, whom he has never met, had actually spent a number of years engaged to his aunt before getting his mother pregnant. To the displeasure of her family, Anna had categorically refused to marry this man, preferring life as a lonely, single mother to a forced marriage with her sister’s former fiancé. After Michele’s audition, we flash forward to a scene depicting his interactions with a Catholic parishioner in prison, who believes prayer to be the answer to all of life’s problems. The priest wants the boy to take communion, but he refuses. Upon hearing that he is going to be transferred yet another time, Michele immediately starts complaining about his health. Tossing and turning in his bed at night, the intense disorientation he experiences is reflected in visual terms with a tracking shot of a hallway, moving forward in a dizzying spiraling motion. This formalistic sequence then cross-fades into the black and white still the audience has come to expect at this point in the movie. By using slightly different versions of the image in question each time it is presented on screen, Bruck was able to slowly and carefully elucidate its value within the economy of the film. The fourth and final use of this image offers viewers a female face that is only

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visible from the nose up. The rest of her visage is carefully framed by the blurred image of a man’s head, neck, and right shoulder. In writing and shooting the scene of the murder the director made a conscious effort to differentiate some of the details in her script from the shocking, and well-documented, circumstances of Gianna Bo Pianella’s death. First of all, Michele’s family does not reside in Asti. Furthermore, instead of having her protagonist kill a woman on a moving train, Bruck opted instead to set this gruesome sequence in a small, provincial train station. The on-screen rendition of this crime was also perpetrated on a German tourist, as opposed to an Italian teacher, and this element significantly increases the potential role played by linguistic barriers in this violent occurrence. The final sequences of Improvviso depict the protagonist returning home after the stabbing and his subsequent arrest by the police. Anna and Luisa drown him in attention and (unanswered) questions as soon as he steps through the door: Luisa: Where did you leave your things? You came back naked and without your stuff. Did you get robbed? In Rome? Who jumped you? They sure scratched you up. Michele, we don’t deserve this. What did they tell you in Rome? What did they say to you? Tell us! What did we ever do to you? Why do you repay our love like this, our dedication, our sacrifices? Why this terrible silence, Michele? Anna: Don’t worry about the cello, we will get you a new one as a gift. Got it? But who spoke to you? My sister-in-law? The cousins? But you’re shaking, are you cold?

It is immediately evident that these women are worried about their reputation and Michele’s opinion of them; as their concern for his health rapidly transitions to an interrogation of sorts, in which they accuse the teenager of punishing them deliberately with his silence. Anna and Luisa’s behavior was carefully scripted by Bruck in an attempt to garner sympathy for the protagonist. The same could be said for the laissez faire attitude displayed by prison guards in the juvenile detention system and also by members of the clergy who minister to young prisoners. With the exception of Annabella, all the women in his life have contributed to injecting warped notions of love and sexuality into his worldview, and his friends from school, who were of no help with the fairer sex, were actually some of the most cruel and uncaring individuals with whom he interacted. If we add exposure to pornography and public displays of sexual violence into the mix, we are in a position to consider the complete picture of this young cellist as Bruck had envisioned it. In her efforts to explore the psychological and social factors that shaped Michele’s heartbreaking downfall,91 she had in fact come to see him as a victim in his own right:

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chapter two Getting to the film itself, the generosity of the director seems undeniable. She avoided insisting on violent details and justified the deviation of the protagonist. She shows him having been educated with a greedy possessiveness by a nurse mother and a seamstress aunt, both victims of the same romantic delusion with a man who holds no meaning and does not ever appear in the plot. She depicts him as a victim of the false liberty of our times, in which new taboos are being bootlegged through pornography and hypocrisy. Lastly, she calls him the sad model of a past and present reality.92

In Improvviso, although Michele is shown to be in possession of a pocketknife at one point in the film, he does not use it to hurt anyone. During the struggle with the beautiful, reserved German woman, a knife happens to fall out of the tourist’s purse. This is the weapon Michele uses to commit murder, a blade that he only came upon by chance. This detail is initially not clarified during the murder scene. Only after he has made it home, and managed to fall asleep in his own bed, does Michele’s subconscious revisit the scene of the crime. Upon waking, Michele retrieves the photograph of a naked blonde he had been looking at in a previous scene, and proceeds to destroy the picture by burning it. Perhaps this gesture is meant to imply that the protagonist has learned a difficult lesson in the worst way possible, a strategy that would be in keeping with Bruck’s vision for the main role in Improvviso. Giacomo Rosselli’s performance as Michele was not particularly wellreceived in the press. In his first on-screen appearance, at the age of 18, his role was described as conventional and robotic, although Ferreol and Marconi were praised for their professionalism.93 One particularly negative review actually credited Marconi for attempting to salvage the role of the aunt, while offering strong words of criticism for Bruck’s directorial efforts: Edith Bruck, dealing with an extremely delicate theme, with multiple and also ambiguous facets, requiring a flexible, yet firm direction of the actors, was unable to withstand the impact with the filmic image, which is quite different from its literary counterpart. . . . The film is uncertain in its syntax, green and predictable in its narrative nodes, and fragile in its delination of the psychology of the characters.94

Generally speaking, the most sensible critique of Improvviso came from Lietta Tornabuoni, who succinctly observed: “C’è tutto, troppo” (“There’s everything in it, too much”).95 The only review of Bruck’s first motion picture to be published in an academic volume, however, constituted a significant departure from the mostly negative evaluations that appeared in multiple issues of La Stampa: the film is . . . a call to meditate on the poor sentimental education we have received and continue to pass on. . . . Due to the sobriety of its motions and

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the humility of its tones, Bruck’s style is admirably simple, and hence one could almost not notice it. Guided by a clear vision that penetrates things down to their secret vibrations, she grasps their tender solitudes and their most tragic obstacles, as well as certain grotesque aspects. Bruck’s Hungarian realism is not Italian-made, hence those who confuse this film with our current production are mistaken.96

With respect to the controversies that surrounded Improvviso even before its release, there is one issue—that lies at the core of the protestations leveled by the citizens of Asti—which has yet to be properly addressed. More than one journalist speculated on the legitimacy of a film that draws from the personal tragedies of private citizens, implying that Bruck should have shied away from the material at hand. The deliberately scripted points of divergence between the Fantino killing and Bruck’s screenplay were apparently insufficient to placate the public outcry that preceded and followed the director’s first official appearance at the Venice Film Festival. What the extant literature on this motion picture has failed to consider is the very function of fictional cinema in our society, and the different pressures that accompany the act of filmmaking depending on the nature of the movie one makes and the source of the story being narrated in cinematic form. When Andremo in città was released in 1966, for example, no one dared question the verisimilitude of the film’s screenplay inasmuch as Bruck, a survivor of the concentration camps, had participated in the process of adapting her own short for the big screen. More recently though, a film by Carlo Lizzani entitled Hotel Meina, chronicling the earliest instance in which Jews were killed by Nazi soldiers in Italy, was harshly criticized in the press for deviating from the strictest form of realism. The contrast between the treatment reserved for Hotel Meina and the reception of Improvviso points to two distinct double standards that have been applied to Italian films in the past: first of all, depictions of the Holocaust must strive for an idealized, unattainable standard of historical accuracy, especially when the director is a gentile, even when the movie is intended as a work of fiction. Second, if the private misfortune of others results in death, it should not be used as the subject of a fictional film, unless we are dealing with “private misfortunes” on a very large scale (e.g., genocide, war, political violence).97 Quale Sardegna? (1983) Starring David Lewis and Karin Mai, Quale Sardegna? (“Which Sardinia?”) was financed by the regional branch of RAI in Sardinia. Broadcast as an installment of the TV series Lettera da . . . (“Letter from . . .”), this 60-minute feature focuses on two characters who are never identified by name. From a technical standpoint, the production values resemble some of the director’s later work as a documentarian for public television: the entirety of this movie is shot with a standard lens using fast stock and natural lighting, exclusively outdoors, on location in Sardinia.98

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Neither one of the actors could speak Italian fluently, and the entirety of the voice track is postsynchronous. It would be imprecise, however, to speak of a dubbing process in Bruck’s second film, at least in the conventional sense of the term. Lewis and Mai’s characters have speaking parts in Quale Sardegna?, but they are never actually shown speaking. Their conversations can be heard by the audience as they interact, but the footage does not reflect their utterances: it is, rather, defined, clarified, and accompanied by them. During their shared journey through Sardinia these young tourists explore different landscapes together, and they engage each other in a discussion of the human condition, wanderlust, and the subtleties of masculine and feminine identities. The standardized conventions of narrative cinema are mostly ignored in this work, as there is no principal conflict to speak of in the plot, which is loosely structured. Viewers are not presented with a climax, as there is no emphasis on closure or formal resolution beyond the notion that the man and woman in this film conclude their trip to Sardinia, and will possibly never see each other again. Quale Sardegna? opens with a literary epigraph. The first three lines of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Terra Nuova” appear on screen, in Italian, in a way that differs slightly from the layout of the original text in English. The translator is uncredited: And so I cross into another world, shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespass on.99

David Lewis’s character is introduced with a full shot. His wardrobe, hairstyle, and physical characteristics identify him as a tourist and a foreigner. He is traveling with a large backpack, and in the first few minutes of this motion picture he is shown sitting alone, reading a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia.100 While the relationship between the film’s poetic epigraph and its subject matter can be easily discerned, Quale Sardegna? certainly does not constitute a filmic adaptation of Lawrence’s Sardinian travel narrative.101 Instead, it is a film whose male protagonist is informed by a personal reading of the text, in his efforts to retrace the late poet’s itinerary. David begins his journey in the port city of Civitavecchia, and is initially immersed in the movements and sounds of traffic: mopeds, motorcycles, cars, and ships. He walks around casually looking at his surroundings, and sits down near a woman who is making a sculpture in the shape of a man’s face. The camera focuses briefly on a sign, announcing the departure of a ship headed to Olbia. The long-haired tourist and the artist exchange glances, and he proceeds to read from a copy of Sea and Sardinia. This gesture precedes the first of multiple voiceovers used in the film. The voice is that of an adult male speaking Italian (in the first person) with a nondistinct foreign accent, which could be that of an anglophone: “vorrei trovare una terra che mi facesse pensare alle origini del

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mondo” (“I would like to find a land that would make me think of the origins of the world”). This statement is followed by an extreme long shot of the port, set to extradiegetic music:102 a female vocalist performs a song written in one of Sardinia’s dialects. The same (male) voiceover can be heard again: The farmer leaves his land, becomes a factory worker, what a change. He sells himself as a slave to the machine, his life has no purpose other than to make money. His mind and body wither, and he loses all contact with nature.

Our blond traveler walks along a beach, without his heavy bag. The wind blows in his face as he sees a woman near the treeline who walks out of sight, and then returns. It’s the same tall, dark-skinned woman he had exchanged glances with in the opening scene, before taking a ferry to Sardinia. At this point, there is an abrupt cut to a long shot of the woman sitting on top of a large pile of salt. David walks away, their paths cross again, and they walk together hand in hand. This formalistic sequence gives way to a series of shots in which our male protagonist is sightseeing alone. He finds a plaque dedicated to Lawrence’s home in Sardinia and reads its content aloud. After watching Italian military planes taking off in the distance, he hitches a ride in a blue VW van, to the sound of another Sardinian folk song. While passing through a tunnel he notices the same woman he met earlier, this time dressed in white. David and Karin playfully chase each other around the arches of an aqueduct, and exchange their first words. Her voice is that of a foreign woman, perhaps a francophone: Her: Are you scared? Him: Yes, I’m afraid so. . . . Come on, come on.

The two characters spend time together on a beach: first they sunbathe in the nude, then, wearing towels around their waists, they splash water at one another with a bucket. Him: I have to have a life that is totally mine. Her: Me too, but it’s not easy. Him: As a partner, I would be a wild cat in a cage; who misses a free life, with no laws, an existence without rules, without a specific will. Her: Without responsibilities. Him: Maybe, yes. Her: Let’s go. Him: Alright.

They walk together on a dirt road, among a flock of sheep. They cut a flower from a cactus-like plant, selecting one for its red color. The sound of a moving train ushers in a shot of our protagonists resting in one of its compartments, with

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his head on her shoulder. He hypothesizes an ideal partnership with a woman. Given Bruck’s particular (combined) use of voiceover narration and postsynchronous dialogues in this film, viewers have no way of knowing whether David actually describes this concept out loud to his companion or simply ponders it in silence: “Se il rapporto fra uomo e donna fosse solo tenerezza e poche parole, sarebbe un riposo stare insieme” (“If the relationship between a man and a woman were only tenderness and few words, staying together would be a breeze”). The two blow bubbles at each other on the train, then juggle peaches. The director transitions to a shot of them sitting on rocks, playing and speaking with turtles. Karin washes her white dress in a lake while her friend engages her again in conversation: Him: We’ve lost our authentic gestures, machines have rendered us invalid. Her: Not all progress is bad. What do you know about how heavy it is to wash a blanket? Him: Certainly the mines and the factories are pleasant places. Her: To hell with it, enough. Him: Let’s go, I need to always see new things. I’m attracted by everything. Her: So you can leave right away, huh? Him: You and your female wisdom. Her: We’re so restless. Him: You’re a wild one, like these islanders who don’t see me, who look at me. Her: They’re being defensive, you’re a bit racist, what do we know about them? Him: You’ve got more practical spirit than soul. Her: La la la . . . la la la . . . Him: Maybe it would be simpler to be a woman. Her: You’d like that, huh? Him: Sometimes. [Pauses] Women are so terribly alive, so beautiful. When will they stop with their foolish rashness?

They enter a small, old chapel at her request. It looks unkempt, possibly abandoned. She removes her shirt and makes her companion touch her body: her breasts, arms, neck, and face. They retrace their steps, and run into more sheep while walking along a dirt road. Once they make it to a town, they observe a procession of women passing by, wearing traditional red dresses with long white sleeves, their heads covered. After a series of head shots of local women, all dressed in similar clothing, some in black instead of red, the director cuts to a panoramic view of the mountains. This idyllic image precedes a brief succession of shots depicting life in Sardinia: men drinking at a bar, passersby, the outside of a church, a smokestack, an individual who hops off his donkey in a parking lot and ties it to a pole, and finally a group of young people dancing to the sound of disco music. The two travelers resume their existential dialogue:

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Him: More than anything I would like to be a man. Her: I am a cat! Meow! Meow! Him: [Pauses] Women are the enticers, the witches, mothers, that’s why they’re attractive like the good, like evil.

The sound of men and women singing acapella interrupts their conversation momentarily, as they watch another procession of women file by. Their dark outfits are covered in bells on their backside. The women dance in the street, making sudden, jolting movements causing the bells to ring in synchronicity with each step. The music continues while the camera cuts to a horse race, speeding up its pace. When we catch up with our travelers they are seated outside, on the ground, having a bite to eat: Him: You know, there was a time when Sardinian men had learned to speak to rocks, rivers, animals, plants. They had assimilated the power of nature, its beauty, its cruelty. Courage, violence, in the beginning they were a matter of survival. Her: And what about today? Him: Even here everything is turning into something hybrid. Her: Either you can live anywhere, or nowhere at all. I could even stay here. Him: I have to go, to migrate. I don’t want homes, families, exclusive ties, social duties. I want to be on my own. Her: And free. In a world of slaves you always risk being enslaved. Him: Well put. You’re like the oracle.

She walks among the stone ruins of an ancient settlement, entering the roofless remains of what was once a room. He does the same, and they stand apart in separate structures. As one of their final sequences together comes to a close, the two walk naked in a small wood in the early evening, as the sun is beginning to set. Him: I no longer know how to live well in any part of the world, with anyone, not even with myself. Her: We don’t know how to join our fatigue, our loneliness, our social malaise. We have to try, to start over. Him: How do we do it? Her: Start over.

They walk along the side of a road, (fully clothed). The next handful of statements made by David temporarily become the sole focus of the film’s soundtrack. I wish this place had stayed like it was in the beginning. As it was, and how I used to dream about it. Here the land has no more sounds. The sea is without fish. Nature remains silent, profaned. [Pauses—diegetic sounds return] Machines are destroying all original natural life, all forms of beauty, peace,

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Bruck concludes her second fictional feature by returning briefly to a view of the cover of Lawrence’s book, before presenting us with an image that is identical to the footage of our travelers’ initial encounter in Civitavecchia, before they set off for Sardinia. The young woman walks away, but turns to smile at her new friend, looking back more than once. We see another shot of the cover of Sea and Sardinia. He stares blankly at a departing ship, then at the blue sea. Had it all been a daydream? Had they really shared these moments? The entire film appears to have been a trip though David’s imagination: Only at the end of this itinerary . . . will we discover that David has never moved from his pier, and his journey with the beautiful [woman] and the island have been lived in his imagination. But the ship is about to leave. She looks at him, inviting maybe. . . . Which Sardinia will our heroes find? And it is precisely the mechanism of fantasy, of the dream, that makes Quale Sardegna a respectful and witty film, the admission of the impossibility to decipher a complete world in evolution like Sardinia’s.103

Un altare per la madre (1986) A middle-aged schoolteacher returns to his rural hometown to attend his mother’s funeral. This somber occasion forces him to confront a difficult truth. He must come to terms with how he has spent his life, with the nature of his own identity. He comes to the tragic realization that, when all is said and done, he never actually “gave” anything to his mother, he never showed his appreciation for the decades of hard work she put in to raise him and to provide for him. Furthermore, he also faces the fact that his mother never truly got anything out of life. His father decides to construct an altar to honor the memory of his beloved wife, a project he works tirelessly to complete. The altar is to be placed in a small chapel erected in the same location where the mother, many years before during World War II, had saved a man’s life. Hindered by fatigue, the father is unable to complete the altar in time for the procession, which would have allowed his priest to bless the altar. He begs the local parishioner to bless it anyway after the fact. The priest knows that such a request falls outside the boundaries of his authority as a member of the clergy, as it is in direct violation of Catholic doctrine. He eventually gives in to the father’s desperate demands. The benediction makes the priest an accomplice in this violation of religious tenets, but he begrudgingly acquiesces nevertheless. This course of action constitutes

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an extremely humane and compassionate choice, one that allows the protagonist’s selfless mother to live on in the memory of her loved ones.104 Un altare per la madre is an adaptation of Ferdinando Camon’s awardwinning novel by the same name, which was originally released in 1978.105 Camon’s touching narrative of maternal loss unfolds in an impoverished rural environment that has much in common with Bruck’s early autobiographical prose, especially the short stories from the collection Andremo in città.106 Beyond its focus on the hardships of life in the countryside, both during and after World War II, Un altare per la madre spoke to the director on a personal level, as it lovingly and humbly evokes the image of a simple, pious, and hardworking mother in an attempt to honor her memory.107 Camon’s volume, in fact, engages the notion of written remembrance and testimony in ways that are not dissimilar from Bruck’s body of work: “She was truly the last creature on earth, the poorest of them all. I think that’s why I write about her, because if the fate of deserving immortality touched her, it can touch anyone, they just have to be humble enough” (63). The novel describes the mother’s courage and altruism during the war (which is rendered in identical terms on screen): she offers a partisan rebel a place to hide from the Nazis during the German occupation, and the man she saves revisits the exact spot of their encounter after her death, in the company of her husband and sons. What is lacking in the filmic adaptation, however, is an emphasis on an oral tradition that Camon describes as a typical part of the mourning process. The grateful partisan had contributed to this tradition in person: He heard the woman had died and had come to offer his testimony. That’s how it’s always been done around here, for days we speak of no one but the deceased, who hence has never been so alive. Everyone has their monument of words and remembrances, but here people can’t write and unwritten words are already erased and they die with the passing of those who remember: the death of a man, in this part of the world where there is no written tradition, is not only the death of that man, but also of all the dead relatives he held in his mind. (64)

The urgency that surrounds the act of writing for Camon is exemplified in a wartime anecdote concerning the narrator’s father, who had witnessed the slow death of an enemy soldier on the front lines: “When others kill, you have to save as many as possible. When others die, you have to invent some form of immortality” (67).108 Aside from any potential thematic intersections between the novel Un altare per la madre and Bruck’s narrative production, perhaps the most unique connection between these two artists concerns their singular relationship with the written word and the language they make use of in their publications— specifically the notion that neither one of their mothers could read Italian. More

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than once Camon alludes to his own use of Italian as a form of betrayal toward his mother, who spoke primarily in dialect: “I write these things in Italian, or rather, I translate them into another language.” It needs some words above the door, remembering the woman’s name, her life. But my father is against it: no words. Because if we were to write any words we would have to write them in Italian, and this would be a betrayal. (82)

The text opens with a description of the mother’s funeral, focusing on the coffin’s physical journey to the cemetery and the behavior of pallbearers and bereaved relatives. The narrator speaks of a moment spent in the shade of a tree, to catch one’s breath, during which all of the deceased’s family members place a hand on the wooden coffin, to ensure that she is never left alone. In his brief, heartbreaking rendition of the funeral’s conclusion, Camon alludes to a feeling of closure that derives from rituals surrounding death. The significance of this passage in the novel was certainly not lost on Edith Bruck, inasmuch as she was robbed of the opportunity to properly mourn the moment of her own mother’s passing in Auschwitz: The priest uttered a few words, very sweet, speaking with the deceased and the Lord. We all had the impression that mother and the Lord were together, and that this was right. We walked up to the coffin one at a time, us relatives, and we kissed it. I felt the wood, it was very warm, as if it were human. Then the coffin was moved on top of the gravesite and lowered in, until it hit the bottom. Each one of us threw a handful on dirt on it, then the gravedigger covered it up with his shovel. (13)

The film opens with a shot of a man in his forties (the son and narrator in the text, played by Francesco Capitano) driving his car, cutting rapidly to a sequence that is drawn from his memory: a young boy running in a field shouting for his mother (played by Angela Winkler). She is looking at her hair in a small mirror, as the boy continues running and calling for her. His voice is quickly overpowered by the sound of tense extradiegetic music as the director crosscuts between footage of the moving car and the funeral procession. Images of a coffin being lowered into the ground are marked by the sound of a church bell, and the Latin utterances of a priest are overheard as the driver arrives at the cemetary: “requiescat in pace, amen.” After the funeral the man walks away from the burial site, filmed in a panning shot from right to left, accompanied by the sound of a howling dog. The prayer in Latin, the bells, and the howling sounds are all elements incorporated by the filmmaker in her adaptation. In her efforts to visualize and pay homege to Camon’s work, Bruck inserted a handful of new scenes in the movie, which is nevertheless very faithful to its textual source. These scenes are designed primarily to offer a more complete picture of the protagonist’s mother. One of these new segments, however, is clearly intended to recognize the author of Un altare per la madre: after the funeral the novel’s

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narrator receives a handful of photographs from his brother, who asks him to have them blown up to obtain a larger picture of their mother. He agrees to take them to a photo shop upon his return to the city.109 Before he accomplishes this task, he is shown working at a typewriter in his apartment, documenting and exorcizing his grief. This literary allusion, which is not reflected in the book, underscores the importance of the character of the grieving son, whose active participation in the process of remembering his mother is otherwise overshadowed by the father’s tireless efforts to build an altar in her memory. Another sequence that was created for the screen depicts Marco (the bereft writer) going through his mother’s belongings, opening her drawers and holding her clothes up to his face. The smell of his late mother brings him to tears, and he returns to an image of her in his mind’s eye, the same image shown in the opening of the film, in the fields. There are two specific segments created by Bruck that serve the practical purpose of clarifying the chronological context of the plot: the moments that precede the end of the first half of the film include footage of villagers running through the fields announcing the impending arrival of Nazi troops, bent on destroying everything in their path. Immediately after the “Secondo Tempo” begins, the same villagers are running around cheerfully proclaiming the end of the war. Beyond these historical specifications, there are actually very few moments in which Bruck and Murgia’s screenplay diverges completely from the path laid out by Camon. One such instance, which humanizes the figure of the mother, occurs when the parents leave the children temporarily unattended so they can make love. Camon expressed his disapproval of this scene to the press during the shooting of the film: It seems . . . the author of the novel has decided to dissociate himself from the film after learning, during a visit to the set, that among the scenes they had shot there was a love scene with the husband and wife which is not reflected in the book. Edith Bruck is perplexed: “The written page is one thing, the cinematic image is another. The moment a novel becomes a screenplay, and this screenplay has been read and approved with all the things I added and all the ones I cut, I must be free to express myself in full autonomy.”110

During the course of the movie Marco’s father (played by Franco Nero) nearly works himself to death to make an altar in remembrance of his late spouse. Both the film and the novel include depictions of the endless hours he devotes to its construction and decoration. Often working alone, the father eventually ends up talking out loud, speaking to himself as if his wife could hear him. One of Bruck’s most extensive modifications to Camon’s material, which fortunately did not incite any additional controversies in the newspapers, is a monologue uttered by Franco Nero as he feverishly sculpts a piece of copper for the altar. The admissions he makes coincide with a slow, lengthy zoom transitioning from a medium shot to a close-up of his face. They elucidate the widower’s perspective, but they also perform an expository function, by allowing the screenwriter-director to

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reference concepts from the novel (such as the implications of using the Italian language) that she otherwise might not have been able to include in the film: .

I don’t know how to talk. People like us don’t say certain things. What’s it worth? I never told you anything even when we got married young. . . . I tell you now . . . I am ashamed to be in this world without you. I feel out of place even in my own home. Why did I not die before you? You would not have gotten lost without me. You always looked like you were in the right place. Even in the damned coffin, what the hell! . . . You only lived for others and for what you needed to do. And even you never talked. Maybe poor people don’t know how to talk about anything. Maybe they never taught them, they never learned. Those who studied like Marco think and speak differently. But you and I were the same. You shouldn’t have abandoned me, you shouldn’t have. It’s not worthy of you. Give me the strength to finish this one thing for you, then I will die in peace. I love you . . . I love you.

Un altare per la madre comes to a close with a voiceover. Marco’s voice reads a few lines of script that were loosely adapted from Camon’s text, alluding to the fact that he represents a different culture: the learned, urban intellectual who has lost his connections to the earth and his mother’s rural way of life. Unlike Bruck’s film, Camon’s version of this meditation recalls the significance of the altar, comparing the father’s manual labor to the act of producing a written monument, an “altar of words” as it were.111 Bruck’s third (and, as of yet, last) fictional film was released two years before the publication of one of her most successful novels, Lettera alla madre. Although she has never spoken of Ferdinando Camon as one of her literary models, it’s worth noting that in many respects with Lettera she ventures in a direction that is analogous to Un altare per la madre: by exploring a conversation with her mother that was interrupted by the violence of the Third Reich, Bruck constructs her own altar for her mother, her own “bridge,” as Camon refers to it: “The altar is a voice, it’s a bridge, it’s a closeness” (104). The series Storie vere by Anna Amendola After making three fictional features financed by RAI, starting in the late 1980s Bruck directed a number of documentaries for the series Storie vere (“True stories”), produced by Anna Amendola for RAITRE (Rai 3), which at the time was one of three state-funded public television stations in Italy.112 In 2006 the author described her work as a documentarian in terms of the freedom it allowed her to explore different themes—some of the same themes that she had, at different moments in her career, been steered away from by editors who had worked with her for years. Beyond the need to explore the intertextual connections between Bruck’s writing and her work for the screen, the projects she directed for RAI can be viewed as an outlet for the desire to give a voice to any and all minorities in contemporary Italy—those who are exploited, oppressed, and misunderstood:

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[To] deal with Albanian prostitutes, or with the prostitution of women from Eastern Europe, is something that they don’t allow me. But that’s also a kind of oppression, that’s also a prison. I found the forced prostitution of Eastern European women to be close to my themes; because I had tackled these kinds of themes for television, for instance: in the short televised films that I did, in the televised reports, I talked about the blind, dwarves, prostitutes, gigolos, the Russian women who come here and marry old men in order to obtain citizenship, and then end up on the street. I have always been concerned with a minority, whether exploited for some reason, or oppressed, or even misunderstood, misconstrued. With television, I managed to fight for the representation of those subjects that matter to me: like defending the rights of dwarves, who can’t find work, who are rejected even in their own families. For the first time, they told me, in their lives, someone had let them speak. They had never opened their mouths; they had never spoken for themselves, of their problems, of the persecution that they endure, of the derision. I was the first person who approached this subject, the desperation that they live through, even within their families. . . . I approached it from an emotional, social, and economic point of view, and finally they could speak. They thanked me. I learned a lot from them, I have to say, it’s very interesting. It was marvelous work, in my opinion, like that one about blind people, for instance. Instead, in the literary world, I can never succeed in getting away from my themes. And I’m so disappointed because I wanted, in some way, to liberate myself—to really take away these fences that, maybe, I have constructed around me on my own. (Balma, Intervista a Edith Bruck, 83)

Her first contribution to this series, entitled Nani come noi (“Dwarves like us”), was aired on 18 October 1989.113 Nani come noi (1989) Bruck’s 65-minute report114 on little people living in the vicinity of Rome was described as sconcertante (“disconcerting”) in the pages of La Repubblica two days after it was broadcast: BUT LET’S GET BACK TO THE DWARVES. Who prefer to be called little people; numbering about 50,000 in Italy: suffering from incurable achondroplasia. Incurable and unpredictable. You can be born little, even from two normal parents. You can be very little, on the other hand, and have a normal son. Edith Bruck got some of these unfortunate traveling companions of ours talking. They are resentful: some more, some less; but intensely resentful towards us. They accuse us of being contemptuous and indifferent. And of making our own children indifferent towards them too, if not actually contemptuous.115

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Nani come noi begins by showing us a little person named Rosaria in the act of shopping, then answering the phone at work. She’s held the same office job for 18 years running. Rosaria has had a number of odd jobs over the years, working as a seamstress, a drugstore clerk, and, at one point—a job she could do from home—typing addresses for an office in the city. Her brother used to pick up the lists of addresses for her on a regular basis, with the exception of one time when she had no choice but to do so in person. On said occasion, she was told there was no more work for her. The process of finding stable employment was extremely difficult (“difficilissimo”) for Rosaria, and it’s an accomplishment that makes her feel equal to those around her. The same kinds of difficulties also arose when she began the process of obtaining a drivers license. She was told, in fact, that she would not be able to get a license before her driving test had even started. She has always dreamed of being an actress, and would have given anything to achieve this goal, even a few years of her life, but it simply was not possible. Bruck inserted casual footage from her daily life to help personalize her subject, showing her viewers how Rosaria used a set of stools to get around in the kitchen, cooking on the stove and prepping different ingredients on the countertop. Originally from Gallipoli, a town in the southern province of Lecce, she lived in Milan as a child. It was there that, at the age of 11, she first discovered that she would not grow up to look like her classmates. Rosaria shows some reticence to speak of how people have treated her in life. When Bruck tries to return to this topic Rosaria mentions a fruit vendor who used to stare at her, whose sarcastic reply to her complaints was to suggest she should stay home if she didn’t want people looking at her. She speaks of a long-lost boyfriend who died when she was younger, adding that she never had children because she was afraid they would be derided like her: Rosaria: Let’s leave people out of it. Edith: No, no, let’s talk about other people, about when you were little. Rosaria: People always point at you . . . like you were a martian, an animal, a cockroach, . . . what the hell is there to laugh about!? . . . Edith: When did you have your first love problems? . . . Talk to me about your adolescence. Rosaria: I’ve never had any love problems. . . . I can hold my own against any woman.

Rosaria’s confident claim that she could compete with anyone in matters of love opens the door to a brief conversation about relationships, shifting the tone of the interview, however briefly, to an expression of personal strength and a desire to share life with the people we love, first and foremost our families. Her final, accusatory words to the audience, however, come from a place of anger and resentment, matured over the span of a lifetime.

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Don’t look at us like animals. We, the marginalized . . . all of us. . . . And don’t call them dwarves because they’re not dwarves, DAMNIT! . . . The children are worse than you are because you have not taught them right. . . . You’re the ones who are ignorant, who are handicapped . . . not us.

The second subject interviewed in Nani come noi is a man named Guido,116 the sixth of nine children, three of which were girls. He is the only one of his siblings who did not grow to be tall and get married (“tutti alti, tutti sposati”). “I want to be free like a bird” (“voglio essere libero come gli uccelli”), he says, finding the humor in his condition. Guido worked with a traveling circus from ages 16 to 36. He recalls this period in his life as a sad, lonely time during which he lacked affection. Now he prefers the calm and quiet countryside to the hustle and bustle of city life, and admits having a fondness for children, whom he considers to be the most honest people of all: “Children tell the truth,” he says, “grownups don’t.”117 Guido feels more accepted in a small town, where most people know each other, adding that it also makes him feel more safe. He’s always been lucky with women and with friendships. Once a timid schoolboy who didn’t like going to class, Guido needs a lot of affection in his life, and he prefers the attentions of tall women. The one thing his stature prevented him from achieving in life was military service to his country. Asked if he would submit to an operation to become taller, he calmly replies: “Così sono nato e così rimango” (“This is how I was born, and this is how I will stay.”) The subject of the sexuality of little people is discussed again, unabashedly, when Bruck shifts her attention to Annamaria, a woman in her early twenties who is dressed quite elegantly. She talks frankly about a past relationship with a lover who initially had come on to her merely out of curiosity. Although they were very intimate in private, this former love interest had been absolutely unwilling to be seen with her in public. In fact, she’s certain that he would have never introduced her to his parents under any circumstances. Annamaria wants to marry and have children, though she admits being afraid of giving birth to a child who would suffer the same difficulties that marred her life. Her family, she says, always made her feel loved and protected. The only complaint she makes about her childhood was that her mother clearly treated her sister differently, whom she considered better suited for marriage. Having confronted her mother about this behavior, the young woman had been told to “face the truth” about life as a dwarf. The last of four little people to appear in Nani come noi is a middle-aged man who goes by the name Gigi. Gigi owns and operates a store that specializes in women’s underwear, but when Bruck asks him what he does for a living, his reply encompasses the totality of his experience, and indeed that of many other little people, instead of simply describing his chosen profession. He states “Io lotto contro i giganti” (“I fight with the giants”). The grandiose, poetic terms he uses to describe his existence are indicative of this man’s strong

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sense of confidence in his self-worth. “Io sono meglio degli altri” (“I’m better than the others”) he says comparing himself to the general population, specifying that he has met good people in this world. The most troubling statement made by Gigi in the short window of time this documentary dedicates to him concerns his feelings of frustration toward his fellow man. He claims, in fact, that when people “screw up” it makes him wish he owned an assault rifle so he could kill them in a hail of gunfire. Although he offers no examples as to what exactly might constitute “screwing up,” the context in which he voices his frustrations is an element that repeats itself consistently throughout this documentary. Being born different, and being marginalized through no fault of one’s own, is a heavy burden for people of all shapes and sizes: “La mia vita è una tragedia in conseguenza di essere così.”118 Looking beyond his personal struggles, Gigi reminisces about the birth of his son, and the fears and anxieties he experienced as he prepared for fatherhood. One of the worst moments came shortly after his child was born, however, when the doctors actively tried to conceal the fact that his baby boy also suffered from achondroplasia. Unlike the other little people Bruck spoke to on the subject, Gigi has no problem with medical treatments designed to boost one’s height, but not for himself. In the hopes of improving the quality of his son’s life, he’s had him on a steady regiment of growth hormones for fifteen years running. Watching his son grow is the best that life has to offer him, he says with tears in his eyes. The boy’s well-being is the only thing he truly cares about. Dedicato a Franz Drago (1991) Originally entitled119 Lord Franz Drago,120 Bruck’s forty-five minute interview with actor, dancer, and stage-performer Franz Drago was broadcast on RAITRE on Friday, 11 January 1991. Drago, who measures 27 inches in height, is the son of a Spaniard and a Sicilian woman who worked in showbiz for many years. One of his many talents is the ability to mimic the style of dance of internationally famous popular singers whose music he would sometimes lip-sync to with the accompaniment of a live band. In spite of his confident presence on stage, however, Drago’s audiences are often more entertained by his size than by his imitations. His performances tend to exploit the politically incorrect nature of his audience’s perspective (e.g., the belief that little people are funny, and that what they do is made humorous by their size), incorporating, for example, a moment in which a “miniaturized Louis Prima” would have to temporarily stop dancing and singing the words to “Just a Gigolo” upon realizing that his pants had fallen down to his ankles.121 The first few minutes of the interview are shot in a dressing room after a live show, while Franz is removing his makeup and changing out of his costume. The timing and location of these initial shots has a jarring effect on the viewers, who are presented initially with the image of a cross-dressing little person in the act of winding down after a live show. After putting on a yellow tank top, a

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gold chain, and a watch, he stands on a stool in front of the mirror combing his hair while answering Bruck’s first questions. He speaks of a diverse career that included appearances on television, film, and the stage, adding that the acting world has not always allowed him to express himself the way he wanted, since it is a field that has always been dominated by the “grandi” (“big people”). In spite of this considerable disadvantage Mr. Drago claims he never felt exploited in his work, even early on in his career when he was only working as an extra. He proudly informs his interlocutor that the first film he worked on was a feature starring the great Brigitte Bardot, and that after playing small parts (his words) in a number of movies, including some bad ones, he was eventually able to put together his own live act in which he sings and dances for fans all over the world. When asked if there is any degree of solidarity among little people who work as actors, he scoffs and replies “no comment” (in English), adding that he always felt one step above his peers due to his education.122 After admitting that he is not a great actor, but rather “uno di tanti,” (“one of many”), he alludes to the fact that he only likes to do work for TV if it involves a live broadcast, and that he enjoys working in the film industry in light of the fact that one can repeat and reinterpret a specific scene multiple times. As such, he feels that cinema can provide a more complete, and more satisfying professional experience. The majority of this interview was shot after the initial encounter in the dressing room described above.123 The camera cuts to a view of Franz Drago’s kitchen table, the following afternoon. He makes Bruck an espresso and pours himself a glass of scotch, ready to continue their conversation. Drago, who lives with his daughter and his sister, wishes he were more of an authoritarian father figure, since he cannot, in his opinion, simply be a friend to his seventeen-yearold daughter. He’s been married to two different women, but refuses to answer a question concerning their height (“no comment”). He reminisces briefly about the most beautiful moments in his life, traveling with his daughter, working abroad, seeing and learning new things in an attempt to shed old ways of thinking. His best experiences took place outside of Italy. When asked about the darkest moments in his life, he pauses solemnly before saying “bevo” (“I drink”) and sipping on his glass of scotch. Instead of offering a response, Drago merely insists that he will not comment on his family. Bruck inquires as to how people behave around him, individually and with respect to society as a whole. This question upsets Drago: Mrs. Bruck, there’s a lot of ignorance in the world. . . . I’m the one who has to show that I am equal to other people. . . . I have my own strength. I love, I enjoy humiliating people . . . because they don’t understand jack.

He offers an example of casual mistreatment by a stranger: a mother and child walk past him on the street. The child asks his mother why Franz is so small, and instead of telling him the scientific, medical truth of his condition

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she jokingly replies: “non ha mangiato la pappa” (“he did not eat his din-din”).124 At this point Drago becomes angry, and the interview takes a turn for the worse. He raises his voice, shouting that his condition is not a problem, and that he is the same as any other person. He then proceeds to look directly into the camera, his words slurring: “Io non mi adatto. Per me la gente può andare a cacare!” (“I won’t adapt. People can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!”). Bruck tries to keep things civil but Drago makes less and less sense as things progress, and he continues to drink and shout. “Scema!” (“dumb!”) is how he describes people who have a problem with him. “Cazzate” (“bullshit”) is his reply to Bruck’s question about the possibility of becoming taller through surgery. Drago tears up, his voice cracks with frustration: “Questa qui la tagliamo, vero?” (“We’re cutting this one, right?”). The final words of this interview, regrettably, became the last words Drago shared with the general public. Polemically, brazenly, angrily, Drago affirmed: “Io non sono un handicappato. Chi lo pensa è handicappato.” (“I’m not handicapped. Those who think so are handicapped”). Drago’s death, which came only a few days after Bruck’s visit, was the result of a heart attack. The title of this work was hence changed from Lord Franz Drago to the commemorative Dedicato a Franz Drago prior to its broadcast. Thinking for a moment of the technical logistics of this documentary, in which the camera was placed at eye-level with the interviewer to the side of Drago’s kitchen table, one has to wonder if it might have been wiser, given the theme of this conversation and the obvious struggles experienced by the late actor, to shoot it from his height at an upward angle. Dietro il buio (1994) Bruck’s report on the psychological and social conditions of the blind was completed in June of 1993, but sat on a shelf for seventeen months before finally airing in November of the following year.125 The director, perhaps understandably, expressed her frustration concerning this delay in the pages of La Repubblica, on the very day this 55-minute segment was broadcast:126 In spite of repeated promises to broadcast it . . . until today they had not found the space to air it. If this is not a detriment to the author and marginalization on top of marginalization then what is it? . . . Should a public service, independently of the networks, not feel a duty to inform, to stimulate, to educate the community with a greater attention to minorities? Those who watch the show around midnight will hear the voices of the blind in a world where even the “politically conscious” RaiTre harbors blindness, and moral and civil insensibility.

During the same period in which she shot a number of documentaries for Amendola’s series Storie vere Bruck also directed Dietro il buio (“Behind the Darkness”). The allusion to the notion of marginalization in her brief j’accuse

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against the producers of one of Italy’s most viewed public television stations happens to mirror the language used by Anna Amendola to describe the series in 1989: “Storie vere are real reports in which the protagonists of a marginal reality tell their own stories in the first person, we’re simply a means to an end” (Fumarola 35). Although there is no evidence to suggest that Dietro il buio had originally been intended as a further installment of Storie vere, our filmmaker’s approach to the subject of blindness closely resembles that of Nani come noi and Dedicato a Franz Drago, at least from a technical standpoint. She tends to present her audience with medium shots and long shots of the subjects she interviews (seated or standing), occasionally preceded by (or intermixed with) footage from their daily lives. Occasionally, depending on the location of the shooting, she inserts herself into the footage as well, asking questions and guiding the discussion at hand. On this occasion she visited a special institute for the blind in Rome, speaking to a number of its residents at length. Dietro il buio opens with the credits superimposed over a view of human hands writing in Braille. Bruck first interacts with two people named with Rosa and Canio, a couple, both blind since birth. Rosa is 21 years of age. She is taking a course to become a telephone operator, in an effort to find steady employment and more independence. She spent her first few years living with her parents in a small town, but has resided at the institute since she was a little girl. Rosa has spent the majority of her life without her parents, and she has very few memories of her childhood. Her boyfriend Canio comes from a rural town in the vicinity of Potenza (in Basilicata), and he was raised on a farm by his mother and father. Rosa claims she has no idea what the word “darkness” means. It’s a difference she cannot discern, a sensibility she does not possess.127 Rosa thinks back to her early childhood, when the people in her town were actually afraid to speak with her. On the day she was brought to the institute, she remembers her parents leaving without even bothering to say goodbye. As Rosa and Canio hold hands, he mentions his own family, who had only spent one hour with him on the day he came to stay at the institute. Bruck cuts for a moment to an unnamed guitarist who expresses his anger for the things he can’t do in life. He thinks that people who don’t understand him are a “nullity” (“nullità”), and he describes the lowest moments in his life as those when he feels a bitterness he cannot properly convey, when he becomes aware of things he cannot accomplish, like driving a car or being truly self-reliant. He spent part of his disability payments to buy a car, which he is not legally allowed to drive. Bringing our focus back to Rosa and Canio, Bruck takes the time to get to know them on a personal level. Rosa discusses a feeling of emptiness she experienced at home, where she lead a friendless existence, compared to her life in the institute where she can be close to Canio every day. When asked to speak about how they first met, Rosa admits having been the one who pursued Canio. They had sat next to each other in school, but at first she found him to be invasive and unpleasant. As to why she fell in love with him, Rosa claims that her fondness

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for Canio goes beyond physicality. Although blind people naturally tend to take notice of a person’s voice before any other feature, Rosa attributes her attraction to her partner to an “X” factor which is hard to pin down: it is somehow related to physical beauty, but she is certain that she felt drawn to him before she ever felt his face with her hands. The young couple enjoy going to concerts together as well as the movies. Although they have been together for three years, she has yet to tell her family about their relationship. They have a very close-minded view of what is means to live as a blind adult, and she is certain that they would consider any kind of romantic involvement a very serious problem.128 Rosa enjoys having friends as well, since it makes her happy to have contact with different types of people, as her world is more complete. Shifting briefly to a more somber estimation of her reality, she reminds the audience that she has never seen a color in her life, not even in a dream. The worst part of being blind, from Rosa’s perspective, is the barrier that comes to exist between people like herself and the sighted. The camera cuts to a man who is learning to light the burner on his stove (unattended), and proceeds to place a pot of water on top of the flame. This unnamed individual is a doctoral student doing research on Vittorio Alfieri, the great eighteenth-century dramatist known as the founder of Italian tragedy. Having studied at the University of Cairo in Egypt, this budding scholar speaks Arabic, Italian, and English, and is currently learning French and German. His goal is to find work as a teacher and translator. The last person interviewed for Dietro il buio is a psychoanalyst named Lena, who is married with three children. She claims that society prevented her from pursuing almost any and all interests she had in life. Turning to the subject of motherhood and procreation, she points out that she never would have had children if blindness were a hereditary trait: “Ho partorito la luce . . . ; ho messo al mondo degli occhi veri. Che meraviglia che questi occhi vedano!” (“I gave birth to light . . . ; I brought real eyes into this world. What a wonderful thing for these eyes to see!”). The final shots of this documentary linger on blind people playing music on a keyboard, and also an electric guitar, followed by others reading poetry in public for a crowd of family and friends. Rosa sings for her friends, then Canio plays a few notes on the trumpet. The camera cuts to a view of the institute from outside, where the gate is being closed and locked up for the evening. Attilio Bertolucci: La camera da letto (1996) The first installment of Storie vere to be broadcast in 1996 offered Bruck an opportunity to bring her knowledge and passion for the written word to bear on her work as a documentary filmmaker.129 The format of the show was fairly standard: men and women were asked to speak of their daily lives simply but intensely. On 9 December Amendola’s well-proven formula was applied to a noteworthy

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encounter between two authors. Attilio Bertolucci: la camera da letto (“Attilio Bertolucci: The bedroom”) consists of a conversation between an elderly poet and our interviewer-director, who appears on camera during the majority of this 42-minute segment. It’s worth noting that this tendency was not reflected in other episodes of Storie vere. Other directors who worked on this series opted to remain off camera: They’re cheerful stories, at time desperate ones. . . . The season premiere, however, is different from the other episodes: the focus is the poet Attilio Bertolucci and it shows the encounter between the older poet and author Edith Bruck, the interviewer-director, who is almost always on camera. Since 1989, with “Storie vere” we have seen many life stories unfold on screen, happy, sad, full of emotion and anxiety, . . . men and women talking about themselves to an unseen interviewer who questions and prods them. For tomorrow’s installment, however, Bruck will sit next to the poet and his wife Ninetta, accompanying words and images with her vocal presence.130

In light of her literary accomplishments, Bruck’s presence on screen makes this particular exchange stand out from her previous contributions to the show. It shapes the context of this encounter, which can only be seen as a dialogue between two artists who share an ability to define and describe the world around them in writing. It’s not merely because she is taking an active role in the conversation that this episode differs from others, including some of her own work for Amendola’s program. What is lacking in Attilio Bertolucci: la camera da letto is the sense of urgency that accompanied Nani come noi or Dietro il buio. By documenting the real-life struggles of people who belong to disadvantaged and ostracized minorities, Bruck had found a way use her position to fight for justice, to advocate for human rights and equal treatment for all. Her interview with Bertolucci,131 while it is relevant to a broader conversation on the role of the artist in contemporary Italy, does not contribute to her efforts to speak for the marginalized. Bruck’s aforementioned investigation of the lives of gigolos and prostitutes from Eastern Europe for Storie vere, on the other hand, adheres to the existing formula for the show and also coincides with the authorial intent of Bruck’s other episodes.132 Thematically speaking, it also represents her most direct and pro-active response to the limitations that have, at times, tended to box her narrative production into an editorial corner. By exploring a different medium and stepping outside of the genre that has brought her both commercial and critical success, our novelist-turned-director has followed a complex and variable artistic itinerary in her active pursuit of creative freedom of expression. Not surprisingly, when asked about the process of directing a film (in reference to her first picture Improvviso), Bruck compared her newly acquired role as a director to her literary production in the following terms:

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Aside from the works that have already been addressed in this chapter, Edith Bruck also coauthored the screenplay for Nelo Risi’s 1991 made-for-TV film entitled Per odio per amore, starring Serena Grandi (known primarily for her sex appeal) in the main role of Aida. Although a small number of reviews of this film were published in Italian newspapers,133 it was never widely distributed and it is not available on VHS or DVD.134 The same can be said for the cinematic versions of the three short stories by Bruck that were made for television. These include adaptations of the following stories from Andremo in città: “Silvia” (directed by Giandomenico Giagni for RAI), “Ghiaccio sul fiume” (“Ice on the river”), and “Il cavallo” (“The horse”). The story “La traversata” (“The crossing”) from the collection Due stanze vuote was made into a film starring Eleonora Giorgi and directed by Nelo Risi.135 Looking back on the timing and chronology of Bruck’s work for the screen, and considering that only her initial exposure (with Kapò in 1959 and Andremo in città in 1966) to the cinematic world was uniquely connected to her function as a Holocaust witness, the extent to which the filmic medium has provided her with an outlet to grow as an artist and to explore a variety of important themes can begin to come into focus. More than forty years have passed since she collaborated on a film that addresses the Holocaust. Although her production as a screenwriter has been highly sporadic, she has directed several works for television and the big screen, none of which have any evident connection to the subject of the concentration camps. In other words, for Edith, the moving image has primarily been a form of expression that allowed her to operate beyond a thematic ghetto, to ignore its existence, to “escape,” as she so aptly put it herself. Although Improvviso, her directorial debut, was an interesting attempt to decipher the meaninglessness of an unexplainable murder by exploring the psychology of a youthful killer, the film offers more questions than answers and relies too heavily on its inexperienced male lead. The use of multiple flashbacks and flash-forward to break down the story of Michele, while building a sense of impending doom, also placed an aura of culpability and fatalism over the figure of a teenaged boy, brought to life by an actor whose (first) performance on screen was tentative at best. In spite of its documentary-like production values, Quale Sardegna? is easily Bruck’s most formalistic film, yet it fails to truly capture the viewer’s attention with any sort of urgency. Its medidative, and, at times, anthropological tone, coupled with the use of a detached, impersonal voiceover

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in lieu of traditional dialogues and character development, makes it an unlikely vehicle for any significant impact on its viewers, with the exception of those who have a personal attachment to (or interest in) the island of Sardinia. Bruck’s most successful directorial effort is undoubtedly Un altare per la madre, her third and last fictional motion picture. Inspired by the work of a novelist she admires, this feature tackles the theme of maternal loss head on, from a humble and dignifying perspective. In this film Bruck showed more creativity and dynamism with the use of camera movements, and a skillful use of sound effects, special effects (explosions), and costumes designed to reinforce the geographical and historical veracity of the project. In Franco Nero Bruck found a prolific, award-winning actor whose performance carried the rest of the cast. His quiet, stubborn, restrained portrayal of the grieving widower dominates this picture even more than the corresponding paternal figure in Camon’s novel, since the visual presence of the mother in Un altare per la madre was reduced to a minimum, and the role of the protagonist effectively shifted from the son (the book’s first-person narrator) to the father. Edith Bruck’s work as a documentarian, while limited in its technical features by the format of the program Storie vere, can certainly be viewed in terms of the freedom it allowed her to tackle new subjects. In light of her desire to speak for other marginalized groups, and given the fact that she had already produced a documentary for RAI on the topic of male and female prostitution, the refusal by Italian editors to publish a novel that engages the same topic should be viewed as nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction. Based solely on the number of prestigious awards that her prose writings have won, it’s hard to resist the temptation to speculate on the potential success of her two unpublished book-length manuscripts. Moreover, given the limited circulation of her poetic works, which have typically been published by smaller presses and have enjoyed a very limited circulation and almost no critical attention by scholars, it is truly surprising that the author has felt compelled to completely suspend her search for an editor who might be interested in her as yet unreleased works of fiction. One has to wonder if the difficulties experiences by Primo Levi with respect to his volume Storie naturali have had any impact on this decision. In 1967, when Levi sought to publish his first collection of stories that did not fit into the category of literary representations of the Holocaust, he felt pressure (from editors, but also on a personal level) to make use of a pseudonym (Damiano Malabaila), due to the fear that his readers would never accept a different kind of literature from a survivor of the camps. History has shown these fears to be unfounded and irrational, yet to this day Edith Bruck’s ability to communicate with her audience may continue, on some level, to be shaped by them. Perhaps her infrequent poetic compositions, which have, at times, been a venue for a more direct, visceral, and playful kind of writing, constitute the only other creative space in which the author can freely explore new subjects at her leisure. Although it has received even less critical attention than her films, Bruck’s poetry cannot merely be seen as an ancillary component to her fiction;

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but rather, to borrow an expression from Vasvári, it should be viewed as an equally integral component of our artist’s “post-modern mosaic,” as it will in the next chapter, which focuses on the author’s poetic production in its entirety.

Notes 1. Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 33rd Academy Awards in 1961. The Oscar went to a Swedish film, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. 2. Carlo De Matteis, Dire l’indicibile: la memoria letteraria della Shoah (Palermo: Sellerio, 2009). 3. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the three Latin terms for “witness” in his text Remnants of Auschwitz: “If testis designates the witness insofar as he intervenes as a third party in a suit between two subjects, and if superstes indicates the one who has fully lived through an experience and can therefore relate it to others, auctor signifies the witness insofar as his testimony always presupposes something—a fact, a thing, a word—that preexists him and whose reality and force must be validated or certified.” Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 130–40. 4. Primo Levi and Edith Bruck enjoyed a long friendship before his untimely death in 1997. They first met on a movie set in 1972, where a film based on one of her stories was being shot. She remembers their initial encounter with affection and nostalgia. See Bruck, Io e Primo, 3. 5. Emiliano Perra, Conflicts of Memory. The Reception of Holocaust Films and TV Programmes in Italy, 1945 to the Present (New York, Peter Lang, 2010). 6. Levi, Foreword, n. pag. 7. As I have already noted in the previous chapter, the story “Due stanze vuote,” which gives the collections its name, is not autobiographical, but rather, it was deliberately written to give that impression. 8. This film tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of a young Jewish Dutch boy from Amsterdam. 9. The first of only two, as of yet. 10. Virginia Picchietti, “A Semiotics of Judaism: Representations of Judaism and the Jewish Experience in Italian Cinema, 1992–2004,” Italica 83, nos. 3–4 (2006): 563–82. 11. On this subject, see also Asher Salah, “Maschere Giudaiche: gli ebrei al cinema italiano,” Italia Ebraica: oltre duemila anni di incontro tra la cultura italiana e l’ebraismo (Torino: Allemandi, 2007), 221: “From a creative and artistic point of view the directors of Jewish origin can be counted on one hand. With the exception of Gillo Pontecorvo the other names most frequently cited belong to the generation of artists born after the Second World War, like Giorgio Treves, Daniele Segre, Joseph Rochliz, or Ruggero Gabbai, the last three having gained attention in the world of experimental and documentary cinema in particular. Even the actors are rare, mostly coming from the theater and known on film primarily for their supporting roles, like Cesare Polacco, Franca Valeri (née Alma Norsa), Arnoldo Foà, Leopoldo Trieste, Carlo Croccolo, Silvia Coen.” 12. Pontecorvo’s Kapò focuses on the deportation of a young French girl, while Risi’s film Andremo in città is based in the former Yugoslavia. In other words, both of these films addressed the Holocaust without referring to the role played by the Italian people in persecuting and deporting Jews.

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13. Picchietti, A Semiotics of Judaism, 564. 14. See, for example, Nell’anno del Signore (1969, dir. Luigi Magni); Confortorio (1992, dir. Paolo Benvenuti), and the made-for-TV movie La notte di Pasquino (2003, dir. Luigi Magni). 15. Guido Fink, “Semo tuti cristiani? Ebrei visibili ed invisibili nel cinema Italiano,” Il Ponte, August 1999, 83–102. 16. See also Giacomo Lichtner, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (Edgware, UK: Valentine Mitchell, 2008); Lawrence Baron, ed., The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), in particular the essays by Lichtner and Millicent Marcus. 17. See Salah, 221–35. 18. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1990), 53, 24. 19. Lizzani coauthored the screenplay for Rossellini’s Germania anno zero, which won him the award for best original script at the Locarno International Festival in 1948. His collaboration on the script for De Santis’ Riso amaro, on the other hand, earned him a nomination for best screenplay at the Academy Awards in 1951. 20. Vito Zagarrio, ed., Carlo Lizzani: Un lungo viaggio nel cinema (Venezia: Marsilio, 2010), 24–26. 21. I am indebted to Dr. Michele Sarfatti, the director of the CDEC (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Milan, for his willingness to engage me in a conversation on these issues. When asked to comment on the lack of Jewish directors operating in Italy, Dr. Sarfatti referenced the hostile climate of the 1940s, in which Michelangelo Antonioni praised one of the most antisemitic films of all time, Veit Harlan’s work of Nazi propaganda Jud Süß (produced in 1940). With respect to the quasi-absolute absence of Italian films depicting the everyday lives of Jews, as opposed to consistently relegating them to the status of victims, Sarfatti alluded to the monotheistic nature of the Italian people, who were identified as almost 90% Catholic in a poll taken in 2006 by Eurispes (the Italian Institute for Political, Economic, and Social Studies). 22. On this subject, see also Salah, 221: “The Italian Jewish community’s contribution to the cinema has certainly been inferior to that in other areas of national culture, not only for the low numbers of Italian Jews but also because from the moment of emancipation on they have primarily devoted themselves to liberal professions of a greater social and intellectual prestige than the cinema, which until the 1950s was considered a minor art form and little more than popular entertainment.” 23. Vittorio Mussolini, “Un momento critico,” Cinema 58 (Nov. 25, 1938): 307. 24. Having consulted a myriad of texts devoted to Italian cinema I have struggled to find any published evidence of a serious analysis of the impact of antisemitism on Italy’s film industry. Due to limitations of time and space I will reference only a selection of said works. Words like ebreo (“Jew”) and (especially) antisemitismo either do not appear or are referenced only in passing in the following volumes: Riccardo Redi, ed. Cinecittà 1: Industria e mercato nel cinema italiano tra le due guerre (Venezia: Marsilio, 1985); Cinecittà 50 (Roma: Cinecittà S.p.a., 1986); Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano. Il cinema del regime 1929–1945, vol. 2 (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1993); Manuela Lodigliani, ed., La città del cinema: i primo cento anni del cinema italiano (Milano: Skira, 1995); Franco Montini and Enzo Natta, Una poltrona per due: Cinecittà tra pubblico e privato (Cantalupa, Torino: Effatà, 2007).

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25. Gian Piero Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema. A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 83–84. 26. Much to my dismay, the single best source of information on uncredited work carried out by Italian Jewish filmmakers is not a published work of film history; but rather, a website known as the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com). 27. A French actress named Andrée Smaine, for example, is identified as informant number 761. See Natalina Marino and Emanuele Valerio Marino, L’Ovra a Cinecittà. Polizia politica e spie in camicia nera (Torino: Bollati Boringheri, 2005), ix. 28. His name appeared in the credits for the following films: Amicizia (1938, dir. Oreste Biancoli), La mazurka di papà (1940, dir. Biancoli); Le due madri (1940, dir. Amleto Palermi); Il prigioniero di Santa Cruz (1941, dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia); and Gelosia (1942, dir. Ferdinando Maria Poggioli). The films he worked on without being credited for his efforts were Cose dell’altro mondo (1939, dir. Nunzio Malasomma); Addio, giovinezza! (1940, dir. Poggioli); La fanciulla di Portici (1940, dir. Mario Bonnard); Capitan Fracassa (1940, dir. Duilio Coletti); L’ultimo ballo (1941, dir. Camillo Mastrocinque); Regina di Navarra (1942, dir. Carmine Gallone); Gioco pericoloso (1942, dir. Malasomma); La bisbetica domata (1942, dir. Poggioli); Don Cesare di Bazan (1942, dir. Riccardo Freda); Harlem (1943, dir. Gallone); Tristi amori (1943, dir. Gallone); and Il cappello da prete (1944, dir. Poggioli). 29. Paradoxically, Vajda is one of the artists who, according to Brunetta, was attracted to Italy because of the “margin for tolerance” in the industry, which “was no small achievement and Italian cinema can be proud of this fact.” Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema, 84. 30. Said rumors also damaged the career of Alessandro’s older brother, Corrado Pavolini, who had worked in both theater and cinema. 31. The films in question are Il peccato di Rogelia Sanchez (1940, dir. Carlo Borghesio); Santa Rogelia (1940, dir. Roberto de Ribon); Un colpo di pistola (1942, dir. Renato Castellani); Ossessione (1943); Zazà (1944, dir. Castellani) and La freccia nel fianco (1945, dir. Alberto Lattuada). 32. La granduchessa si diverte (1940, dir. Giacomo Gentilomo); Maddalena . . . zero in condotta (1940, dir. Vittorio De Sica); Una famiglia impossibile (1941, dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia); Ore 9 lezione di chimica (1941, dir. Mario Mattoli); Teresa Venerdì (1941, dir. De Sica); Se io fossi onesto (1942, dir. Bragaglia); Catene invisibili (1942, dir. Mattoli); La guardia del corpo (1942, dir. Bragaglia); Giorno di nozze (1942, dir. Raffaello Matarazzo); Labbra serrate (1942, dir. Mattoli); 4 passi fra le nuvole (1942, dir. Alessandro Blasetti); Stasera niente di nuovo (1942, dir. Mattoli); Gente dell’aria (1943, dir. Esodo Pratelli); La vita è bella (1942, dir. Bragaglia); Non sono superstizioso . . . ma! (1943, dir. Bragaglia); Il fidanzato di mia moglie (1943, dir. Bragaglia); Apparizione (1943, dir. Jean de Limur). 33. The other filmmaker is Roberto Faenza. Aside from his 1996 Holocaust feature Jona che visse nella balena, the Turinese director is also working on an adaptation of Bruck’s novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo. 34. Kapò, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, perf. Susan Strasberg, Laurent Terzieff, and Emmanuelle Riva, 1959, DVD, Cristaldifilm, 2003. 35. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 26–27. 36. The Dictatorship of Truth, dir. Oliver Curtis, perf. Gillo Pontecorvo, Edward Said, and Ennio Morricone, VHS, Cinema Guild, 1992. In this documentary Pontecorvo

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admits to having arrived in Paris without possessing any knowledge of the political reality in Europe. It was only thanks to the friendships he made in the French capital that he was eventually able to understand the importance of the partisan resistance in Italy and the need to participate in it personally. 37. John J. Michalczyk, The Italian Political Filmmakers (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), 187. 38. Massimo Ghirelli, Gillo Pontecorvo (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1978), 3. 39. Edward Said, “The Dictatorship of Truth: An Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo,” Cineaste 25, no. 2 (2000): 25. The comments cited above were made in reference to The Battle of Algiers, yet they are certainly relevant to a broader dicussion of the poetics of Pontecorvo’s films. 40. Michalczyk, The Italian Political Filmmakers, 189. 41. The process of adapting to the norms and ideals of Hollywood. 42. Michalczyk, The Italian Political Filmmakers, 186–87. The exception to this rule was the freedom he enjoyed in filming The Battle of Algiers (1966), in which he employed many nonprofessional actors, to the point that he avoided identifying one of them as a protagonist, preferring instead to emphasize the chorality of the Algerian desires for freedom. 43. See, for example, Zimmerman’s description of Kapò as having been “somewhat Hollywoodized.” Joshua Zimmerman, The Jews in Italy Under Fascist and Nazi Rule. 1922–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 321. 44. Gary Crowdus, “Using the Contradictions of the System. An interview with Gillo Pontecorvo,” Cineaste 6, no. 2 (1974): 3. 45. Irene Bignardi, Memorie estorte a uno smemorato (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999), 106. 46. Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 37. “Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò . . . marks the first of the Italian Holocaust films to win widespread acclaim, thanks to the lustre of its international cast—led by Susan Strasberg.”) 47. Michalczyk, The Italian Political Filmmakers, 182. 48. Ibid., 184. 49. Ibid. 50. Bruck, personal interview, 28 Jun. 2010: “I was very attentive, trying in some way to get as close as possible to reality—even though it is impossible to represent reality. It is impossible to make a ‘real’ film about concentration camps, let that be clear. One cannot narrate it or describe it. It is possible to come close reality in some way, and I tried to get him as close to it as as possible.”] 51. Gillo Pontecorvo, commentary, Kapò, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, perf. Susan Strasberg, Laurent Terzieff, e Emmanuelle Riva, 1959, DVD, Cristaldifilm, 2003. 52. Bruck, personal interview (audiotape). 53. On Pontecorvo’s sources, see also Guido Aristarco, “La lunga notte. Zurlini, Vancini, Pontecorvo,” Cinema nuovo 9, no. 147 (1960): 454. “Because other people forget, and so they will not forget: this is the point of departure and arrival of Kapò. Gillo Pontecorvo referred to the memories, to the copious amount of diaries on the subject that were released in Italy as well: from those of Anne Frank and Bruno Piazza to Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi and Chi ti ama così by Edith Bruck. In fact the film has more than a few analogies with the first part of the autobiography of this “Anne Frank who survived”; and perhaps it is not a coincidence if the protagonist is also named Edith.”

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54. Bruck, Chi ti ama così, 28. 55. Ibid., 34. 56. Ugo Casiraghi, “Vergognoso epilogo dell’operazione Lonero,” L’Unità, 8 Sept. 1960, 3. 57. “Monique spiega l’amore a Rossellini,” L’Espresso, 30 Oct. 1960, 25. 58. Balma, Intervista a Edith Bruck, 75–87. 59. Jacques Rivette, “De l’abjection,” Cahiers du Cinéma 120 (1961): 54–55. 60. Pontecorvo, Interview (DVD). 61. Alberto Moravia, “Personaggi ingiustificati,” L’Espresso, 16 Oct. 1960, 23. 62. Carisaghi, Vergognoso epilogo, 3. 63. Manuel Rabanal Taylor, “Testimonios cinematográficos sobre el nacismo,” Insula 175 (1961): 13. 64. Ghirelli, Gillo Pontecorvo, 14. 65. Bruck, Chi ti ama così, 35. 66. See Bruck’s aforementioned novel L’Attrice for another, more complex exploration of the difficult link between Holocaust memory and show business. 67. Bruck, Transit, 75. 68. “Edith Bruck ha troppi cognomi,” L’Espresso, 16 Oct. 1960, 21. 69. Bignardi, Memorie estorte, 114. 70. Bruck, Transit, 77. 71. Due to my own linguistic limitations I was unable to find a copy of the article in question, yet there is at least one article, published in a right-wing Italian newspaper, which briefly details the attack. See “La Bruck aggredita a Belgrado,” La Stampa 23 Sept. 1965, 9: “Edith Bruck, wife of Italian director Nelo Risi, who is filming the exterior shots of the film Andremo in città, whose protagonist is Geraldine Chaplin, was assaulted and struck by the manager of a store in Novi Sad, where she had gone to return certain items she had ordered which did not correspond to the specifics of her order. The woman was forced to seek the care of medical professionals in the capital of Vojvodina, who estimated that she would heal in a few days.” 72. Edith Bruck, Andremo in città (Milano: Lerici, 1962). Rpt., Andremo in città (Roma: L’ancora del mediterraneo, 2007), 66. 73. Ibid., 65. 74. On the subject of adapting her work for the screen, Bruck has lamented that in general “everything [she] writes in a screenplay can be changed, modified, transfigured, deformed and mystified later by a director. There is no guarantee that the film will correspond to what you write in the screenplay or what you wrote in the novel.” Personal interview (audiotape). 75. “Incontro con Nelo Risi,” Persinsala.it, Persinsala, 27 Apr. 2009, http://www.persinsala .it/web/news/incontro-con-nelo-risi.html. 76. Andremo in città, screenplay by Edith Bruck, Nelo Risi, Jerzy Stawinski, and Cesare Zavattini, dir. Nelo Risi, perf. Geraldine Chaplin, Nino Castelnuovo, and Aca Gavric, Mondadori Video, Il Grande Cinema, 1966. 77. In June of 2009, I met with Bruck to elicit more information about the filmic rendition of Andremo in città, specifically, the transmediatic resurrection of the father figure and the love story between Ivan and the protagonist. She referred to the process of adapting this story for the screen as difficile (“difficult”), admitting that she was opposed to the creation of the character of the young partisan, as well as the decision to cast a twenty-something Geraldine Chaplin in a role that was initially envisioned for a girl who had yet to become a teenager. The author felt that Ratko’s return briefly

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allowed for a fairytale-like atmosphere to take over the plot. She made a point to praise Aca Gavric for his professionalism and the quality of his acting in the role of Ratko Vitas, adding that she drew from her experiences with her own father in the formation of this character. 78. Improvviso, dir. Edith Bruck, perf. Andrea Ferreol, Giacomo Rosselli, and Valeria Moriconi, VHS, Rai, 1979. 79. With the exception of Kapò and Big Deal on Madonna Street, none of Bruck’s efforts in the world of cinema have been subtitled in English for international distribution. 80. Annette Kuhn, The Women’s Companion to International Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 223. 81. Some journalistic sources date this murder on September 23. 82. For more details on this killing and the public response that followed, see Luisa Melograni, “Un delitto per la minigonna?,” L’Unità, 28 Sept. 1969, 3. 83. Roberto Reale, “Un film racconterà il delitto del violoncello,” La Stampa, 1 Nov. 1977, 5. 84. Reale, Roberto. “Lecito girare un film televisivo su un tragico fatto di cronaca?,” La Stampa, 18 Dec. 1977, 6. 85. Vittorio Marchisio, “Asti: le proteste per il film sul ‘delitto del violoncello,’” La Stampa, 10 Sept. 1979, 6. On this subject, see also V. M., “Il film della Bruck non si vedrà ad Asti?,” La Stampa, 18 Sept. 1979, 17; Vincenzo Tessandori, “Chiesto il sequestro di ‘Improvviso’ che rievoca il delitto di un ragazzo,” La Stampa, 29 Sept. 1979, 6. 86. Vincenzo Tessandori, “‘Improvviso’ sarà proiettato per l’alto contenuto poetico,” La Stampa, 10 Oct. 1979, 6. 87. Sergio Miravalle, “‘Improvviso’ senza polemiche,” La Stampa, 23 Oct. 1983, 19. 88. In the first few seconds of the film the dedication, A mio fratello Laci (“To my brother Laci”) appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. 89. Much like the depiction of Michele as the child of a single mother who plays the cello, this detail about his reticence to play with his peers also happens to be an accurate reflection of the social struggles experienced by Claudio Fantino (See Melograni, 3). 90. This still brings the first half of the film to a close. The second half of the movie, which was televised a few days after the first part described above, begins by repeating the initial scene in which Michele spins happily in circles with his mother, followed by yet another view of the black and white still shot of the unknown woman. 91. On the perception of Michele as a victim, see also Giulia Massari, “Bruck: nella violenza di oggi i giovani non hanno scampo,” La Stampa, 18 Apr. 1979, 7. 92. “Asti: aspre polemiche per ‘Improvviso’ il film sul ragazzo che uccise in treno,” La Stampa, 18 Sept. 1979, 19. 93. Ibid. 94. Nedo Ivaldi, “Turbamenti del giovane Michele,” La Stampa, 3 Sept. 1979, 17. 95. Lietta Tornabuoni, “È finito in 35 mm l’assurdo delitto del violoncellista,” La Stampa, 3 Sept. 1979, 6. 96. Giovanni Grazzini, Cinema ’79 (Bari: Laterza, 1979), n. pag. Qtd. in http://www .fondazionecsc.it/news.jsp?ID_NEWS=190&areaNews=10>emplate=news.jsp. 97. For a more in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, see my recent essay, “L’olocausto nel cinema di Carlo Lizzani: il caso controverso di Hotel Meina,” L’Italia letteraria e

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cinematografica dal secondo Novecento ai giorni nostri, ed. Philip Balma and Giovanni Spani (Cuneo: Nerosubianco, 2012), 123–32. 98. Quale Sardegna?, dir. Edith Bruck, perf. David Lewis and Karin Mai, VHS (Rai, 1983). 99. David H. Lawrence, “Terra Nuova,” Some Imagist Poetry: 1917. An Annual Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 69. This poem was published four years before Lawrence visited Sardinia. 100. David H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921). 101. See “D. H. Lawrence e la Natura, che viaggio meraviglioso!,” La Repubblica, 16 Jan. 1984, n. pag. Qtd. in http://karinmai.com/html/scritta3.html. “It’s neither . . . a literal nor a faithful transcription of Lawrence’s travel book, nor is it a reconstruction of the journey Lawrence himself made through Sardinia.” 102. Most of the traditional Sardinian songs in the soundtrack were performed by Maria Carta. 103. “D. H. Lawrence e la Natura,” n. pag. 104. Un altare per la madre, dir. Edith Bruck, perf. Franco Nero, Angela Winkler, and Francesco Capitano, VHS, Rai, 1986. 105. Ferdinando Camon, Un altare per la madre (Milano: Garzanti, 1978). This novel is part of a trilogy of fictional memoirs called Il ciclo dei ultimi (“The cycle of the last”). It was preceded by Il quinto stato (“The fifth estate,” 1970) and La vita eterna (“Eternal life,” 1972). Un altare per la madre (entitled Memorial in its anglophone rendition) was awarded the Premio Strega. Camon also won the Premio Viareggio for his collection of poetry entitled Liberare l’animale (1973). 106. A similar depiction of a frugal, selfless, loving mother can also be found in Bruck’s poems “Il tuo grembiule” (“Your apron”) and “Mia madre era una santa” (“My mother was a saint”), both of which were published in the volume In difesa del padre (Milano: Guanda, 1980), 12, 63. 107. On Bruck’s approach to the material in question, see Alberto Crespi, “Edith, la grande madre,” L’Unità, 7 Oct. 1986, 16: “It reminded me of my mother, it was almost inevitabile. I was born in a very poor family in the countryside, and I think that the culture of farmers is something eternal. Similar mothers, so tied to the earth, so serene and full of life even in the most extreme poverty, do exist in Russia and in Hungary as they do in Italy.” 108. “Quando gli altri uccidono, bisogna salvare il più possible. Quando gli altri muoiono, bisogna inventare una forma di immortalità.” 109. The novel contains multiple allusions to the value of the photographic medium and its role in documenting and commemorating personal and collective histories. With respect to the filmic medium, the narrator recalls only one motion picture that his mother ever saw, during a family outing to a movie theater. The narrator’s cinematic anecdote, which comes in the form of a flashback, is not reflected in Bruck’s film. 110. See Rino Alessi, “La memoria è il coraggio di una madre contadina,” La Repubblica, 7 Oct. 1986, 25. 111. Camon 121: “un altare di parole.” 112. In addition to her formation as a director, Bruck’s contacts in the world of television and film resulted in a number of collaborations and “minor” projects over the years. In 1984, for example, she coauthored the screenplay for Samperi’s Fotografando Patrizia, a commercially successful erotic film exploring the taboo subject of an incestuous attraction between a teenaged boy and his sexually experienced older sister. (See Fotografando Patrizia, dir. Salvatore Samperi, screenplay by Edith Bruck, Salvatore Samperi, and Riccardo Ghione, 1984, DVD, Mondo Home Entertainment,

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2005. The film’s awkwardly playful, sensual dialogues were harshly criticized by Michele Anselmi, who asked himself, polemically, why an artist of Bruck’s caliber bothered to work on this project (“chi glielo ha fatto fare?” [“who made her do it?”]). See Michele Anselmi, “Bentornato fratello guardone,” L’Unità, 4 Dec. 1984, 15. The picture in question, which made Monica Guerritore a sex symbol in the mid-1980s, was a source of controversy even during principal photography. Due to its sexual content and its focus on incest, Fotografando Patrizia was eventually released with the stipulation that it could only be viewed by spectators who were 14 years of age or older. (For a brief description of the plot and a discussion of the difficulties that arose during the production and distribution of this film, see Maria Pia Fusco, “Eccomi Emilio, fratello mio,” La Repubblica, 8 Nov. 1984, 19.) On 1 December 1989 Bruck also appeared in the 39th episode of the weekly cultural program L’Aquilone on Rai 1. On this occasion she took part in an initiative called Poeti in gara II (“Poets in competition II”). This literary contest focused on Italian poets active between 1200 and 1900, and each “contestant” was championed by a living Italian poet who read a selection of their writings aloud. Viewers were subsequently allowed to mail in their votes, choosing their favorite poets at the end of each round. Bruck read Sibilla Aleramo’s work and made it to the next stage of the competition, defeating Delio Tessa (whose lyrics were presented by Franco Loi). Two months later, on 2 February 1990, Bruck represented Sibilla Aleramo in the 47th episode of L’Aquilone, this time squaring off against Guido Gozzano, whose work was selected by poet Attilio Bertolucci. Finally, in 1991 she was hired as a writer for Chi l’ha visto? (“Who has seen him?”), the third-longest running program of the Rai networks. Chi l’ha visto? focuses on missing persons and unsolved mysteries, allowing viewers the opportunity to make phone calls to the show on the air to report sightings and information relevant to open cases. See Beniamino Placido, “È tornata ahi! ahi! Donatella Raffai,” La Repubblica, 21 Oct. 1991, 33. 113. Bruck has had an affinity for little people since childhood. See Balma, Intervista a Edith Bruck, 85: “I nani mi piacevano sempre fin da bambina. Mi piacevano molto, non so perché; ero attratta moltissimo da questa diversità, da questi uomini e donne minuscoli. Non il nano deformato, eh? Non il nano acondroplasico, che è un’altra cosa, ma i lillipuziani—che suonavano, cantavano, facevano spettacoli, venivano a fare spettacoli nel mio villaggio . . . ed ero innamorata dei lillipuziani. Non so perché. Allora, il nano mi piace. Sono rimasta, in qualche maniera, infantile.” (“I always liked dwarves, ever since I was a little girl. I like them a lot, I don’t know why; I was very attracted to this difference, to these miniscule men and women. Not the deformed dwarf, you know? Not the achondroplastic dwarf, which is another thing altogether, but the Lilliputians—they would play music, sing, perform, they would come to perform in my village . . . and I was in love with the Lilliputians. I don’t know why. So I like dwarves. I’ve remained childish in some way.”) 114. Nani come noi, dir. Edith Bruck, VHS, Rai, 1989. 115. Beniamino Placido, “Piccoli arrabbiati e grandi razzisti,” La Repubblica, 20 Oct. 1989, 29. 116. Guido expresses his gratitude to Bruck during the course of the interview: “mai nessuno ha parlato di noi” (“No one has ever talked about us”). 117. “I bambini dicono la verità, I grandi no!” 118. “My life is a tragedy as a result of being this way.” 119. Dedicato a Franz Drago, dir. Edith Bruck, VHS, Rai, 1991.

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120. See Silvia Fumarola, “Così Patrizia, sieropositiva, racconta e difende la sua verità,” La Repubblica, May 31 1989, 35. “La serie, che verrà trasmessa in autunno, affronta i temi più diversi. Lord Franz Drago, con la regia di Edith Bruck, racconta la storia di un attore nano, che nega con rabbia e tenerezza la sua condizione” (“The series, which will be aired in the fall, tackles very different themes. Lord Franz Drago, directed by Edith Bruck, tells the story of a dwarf actor, who denies his own condition with anger and tenderness”). 121. The only footage of Drago available online, in which he performs the song in question, can be viewed at the following URL: http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=wFYDt2IZLb0. 122. In order to clarify how ridiculous he found this particular question to be, Drago offered a deliberately absurd parallel: he commented on the stereotype that all Jews stick together. 123. Not only did Drago and Bruck acknowledge this chronological gap in their conversations, but the transition from nighttime to daylight hours was self-evident. 124. See also “Un attore ‘piccolo piccolo.’” L’Unità, 11 Jan. 1991, 20. “Perché non gli spiega che è la natura? Che esistono i negri, gialli, i bianchi ed i piccoli? È ignorante, insensibile” (“Why don’t you explain to him that this is nature? That there are black people, yellow, white ones and little ones? It’s ignorant, insensitive”). 125. Dietro il buio, dir. Edith Bruck, VHS, Rai, 1994. 126. “Edith Bruck e il mondo dei ciechi,” La Repubblica, 17 Nov. 1994, 31. 127. After this comment the camera briefly cuts away to another woman from the institute discussing the concept of darkness: “Non mi sento al buio. Il buio è assenza. Forse se avessi visto non sarei chi sono adesso, e questo è importante” (“I don’t feel like I’m in the dark. Darkness is absence. Maybe if I had ever been able to see I would not be who I am now, and this is important”). 128. Cross-cutting between short sequences depicting different individuals in the institute, Bruck mixes moments of conversation with Rosa and Canio with a more playful, observational approach to the documentary material at hand. She focuses on the following events: 1) a blind woman giving a tarot card reading to another, waxing philosophically about past loves; 2) a woman who dreams of being an author reading one of her poems aloud; 3) a woman learning to apply makeup for the first time; 4) Rosa going to a store to purchase earrings, accompanied by an older female; 5) various blind people sitting together at a table, eating lunch; 6) Rosa making a phone call and leaving a recorded message; 7) a man named Giovanni learning how to walk up the front steps of the institute on his own. 129. Attilio Bertolucci: la camera da letto, dir. Edith Bruck, VHS, Rai, 1996. 130. “Il poeta Attilio Bertolucci si racconta a ‘Storie vere,’” La Repubblica, 8 Dec. 1996, 37. 131. This interview came about, in part, as a result of the prior acquaintance between Bertolucci and Bruck. Although she has been asked about her literary influences on multiple occasions, Bruck has never cited Bertolucci’s work as a model for her poetic production. 132. Although I was able to examine most of Bruck’s filmography by visiting libraries and film archives in central and northern Italy, to my knowledge there are currently no copies of her documentaries on male and female prostitution in circulation. 133. See Giovanna Grassi, “Anche Serena prende il fucile,” Corriere della Sera, 28 Jan. 1992, 29; Laura Delli Colli, “Donne e mafia per ‘Film Dossier,’” La Repubblica, 11 Mar. 1992, 29.

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134. After years of searching for a copy of this work, I eventually had to accept the fact that, in all likelihood, I would never be able to view it. Even Bruck, in fact, was unable to assist me in this process. 135. See Giulio Baffi, “Traversata nel passato verso la coscienza,” L’Unità, Mar 20 1976, n. pag.; “La traversata,” L’Unità, 7 May 1976, 9; Ugo Buzzolan, “Un viaggio difficile verso Israele,” La Stampa, 8 May 1976, 12.

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Chapter three

Reflections on the “Minor” Poetry of a Successful Novelist: Edith Bruck in the Mirror After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry. —Theodor Adorno, qtd. in Prismes: critique de la culture et société In spite of Adorno, not only can one still write poems after Auschwitz, but one can, and perhaps should, write poems about Auschwitz itself. —A letter by Primo Levi, qtd. in Giancarlo Borri, Le divine impurità: Primo Levi tra scienza e letteratura Given Adorno’s injunction against it, poetry serves an important function . . . for it abrogates narrative coherence and thereby marks discontinuity. By so doing, it facilitates modes of discourse that denote the psychological and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the calamity without laying claim to experiencing or comprehending it in its totality. In an effort to signal the impossibility of a sensible story, the poet provides spurts of vision, moments of truth, baffling but nevertheless powerful pictures of scenes unassimilated into an explanatory plot and thus seizes the past. —Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz

Although a number of successful and influential artists in Italy have endeavored to document the reality of antisemitic violence and human rights violations carried out by the Nazi-Fascist alliance in Europe, it’s worth noting that different mediums and genres have not lent themselves to this process equally. In the Italian context specifically, dozens of films have focused on the experiences of Jews during World War II and the Shoah,1 both within and beyond the national borders of the Bel Paese. The country’s literary production since the end of the war, on the other hand, while being shaped by the contributions of a number of

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important Jewish writers of international renown, has included only a few written works on the subject of antisemitism and the Holocaust. One of the most inclusive studies to date on the subject of Italian Holocaust writing is Risa Sodi’s recent volume entitled Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing (1944–1994).2 In this work the scholar identifies eight prominent Italian-born authors who have written on the Shoah and classifies the various narratives they have produced during the five decades that followed the conclusion of the war accordingly: Nonfiction Survivor memoirs Levi, Millu, Piazza, Tedeschi Fiction Survivor fiction Levi, Millu Holocaust fiction Bassani, Debenedetti, Millu Negotiated fiction Maurensig, Morante (Sodi 9)

Although the scarcity of Italian Holocaust narratives can be attributed, in part, simply to the notion that only a relatively small number of Jews have lived in Italy since the time of the Roman Empire, the numerous revisitations of this subject in filmic form since the end of World War II also call for one to consider the significant increase in the popularity of the cinematic medium during the fascist ventennio, which in turn raised questions concerning the commercial viability of the written word. It was in 1933, in fact, only a few years before the founding of Cinecittà, that journalist Leo Longanesi commented on the superior appeal of cinema, particularly among the young: Today films have replaced novels as source of new models for youth. . . . The situations, gestures, physiognomies and environments they see, like the words they hear, enter into their memories as real, lived experience; they stir up fantasies, stimulate dreams, and can even form characters. Many youth today possess a temperament that might be defined as cinematographic.3

Holocaust Poetry in Italy Without a doubt the three most widely celebrated authors examined by Sodi in Narrative and Imperative are Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, and Elsa Morante—all of whom are published poets who happen to be best known for their awardwinning works of prose. One could make the same observation, of course, about Edith Bruck’s career as well. In spite of the fame he enjoyed as an artist, Primo Levi’s works of poetry (on any subject) have often been neglected by critics and readers alike. Aside from a handful of published studies that focus primarily on the testimonial function of verses, even a world-famous writer like Levi was unable to find a true audience for his poetry in Italy during his lifetime. The factors

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that marred the reception of Levi’s lyrics are also relevant to the study of Bruck’s poetic expression, and the cultural environment her compositions inhabit. The affinity between Levi and Bruck’s respective bodies of work goes much farther, however: they are the two most successful and critically acclaimed Italian-speaking novelists to have survived the Shoah, and both of them have engaged the experience of the concentrations camps, to different extents, in their poetry as well as their prose.4 Primo Levi’s first two books, the seminal autobiographical texts Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) and La tregua (The Reawakening), both contain poetic epigraphs authored in January of 1946. Although Levi’s first collection of poetry was not published until 1975 with the title L’osteria di Brema,5 the poem “Shemá” appeared after the short foreword to the author’s debut, performing a key function in the economy of this text:6 by examining the progressive degradation and dehumanization of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz, Levi calls upon his readers to ask themselves “if this is a man.” The poem puts forth one of the principal concerns of the narrative to follow by echoing its title and instills a sense of urgency in the audience. In light of its prominent position in what is now considered to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century in Italy,7 this piercing, provocative composition may very well be Levi’s best-known piece of writing, in spite of the fact that his poetry has attracted a marginal amount of interest by critics: You who live secure in your warm houses Who find returning at evening Hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man Who labors in the mud Who knows no peace Who fights for a piece a bread Who dies at a yes or a no. (9)

Holocaust poetry, as Susan Gubar reminds us, has gone “largely ignored” throughout Europe and elsewhere, both in terms of its production and with respect to the relatively negligible amount of attention paid to it by readers and scholars alike: Books of testimonials (and scholarly assessments of eyewitness accounts) abound, as do novels (and critical books about fiction). Not only films but also commentaries on them have proliferated. In addition, histories, photographic collections, philosophical treatises, and theological tracts have multiplied. Why no appraisal of verse . . . ? (9)

Her query becomes even more urgent if one considers how seldom Holocaust poetry has been published in Italy, and the fact that a truly comprehensive, in-depth study of Italian poetry on the Shoah, however limited the list of relevant

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authors might be, has yet to be produced, in any language. Although she consulted a number of recent anthologies which include poetic texts, in researching her important volume Poetry After Auschwitz Gubar limited herself to referencing only one Italian artist. Her singular focus on Primo Levi as the principal representative of Holocaust literature in Italy should not come as a surprise in light of the scarcity of available translations of many contemporary works of poetry, including Edith Bruck’s. The same could be said for Hilda Schiff ’s 1995 anthology Holocaust Poetry, in which only three poems in Italian (by Levi) were reproduced in English, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann.8 Considering Italy’s difficult relationship with the history of the Shoah, the highly politicized and commercially driven considerations (outlined in chapters 1 and 2) affecting the production and reception of any and all artistic representations of the Holocaust, and the lack of popularity of the poetic medium in contemporary society when compared to film, television, and works of prose, the relative unavailability of Italian poetry on the subject could appear to be, in part, merely a symptom of the law of supply and demand. Primo Levi’s immense popularity as an authorwitness and the significant critical and commercial success his prose writings enjoyed were not enough to garner interest in his poetry on the part of scholars or of a broader readership. Since the twenty-first century will inevitably bring about the progressive disappearance of all remaining Holocaust survivors, the need to reexamine the impact of Auschwitz on contemporary European poetry could not be more urgent. Susan Gubar, in fact, identifies within the poetic genre a unique potential for the exploration of past traumas, one that she envisions as being superior to the expressive strategies offered by prose: Verse can violate narrative logic as completely as does trauma itself. When psychologists of trauma explain the significance of the flashback in the later lives of the injured, they view it as a form of recall that recovers a past so horrific at the time that it cannot be fully taken into consciousness. What subsequently return, years after the distress, are excruciating experiences so agonizing they could not be integrated into . . . “narrative memory.” . . . Like the flashback unassimilated into a story about the past (and like a photograph from the past), poetry can present images that testify to the truth of an event as well as its incomprehensibility—or its limited comprehensibility as a piece of a larger phenomenon that itself still defies understanding. Like symptoms in the aftermath of a trauma, lyrical utterance often announces itself as an involuntary return to intense feelings about an incomprehensible moment. But recollected in relative safety, if not tranquility, such a moment rendered in writing allows authors and readers to grapple with the consequences of the traumatic pain without being silenced by it. (8)

What is unfortunately lacking in Gubar’s seminal volume is a truly informed discussion of Italian Holocaust poetry. Although her work does make multiple references to Primo Levi, our Turinese artist is only mentioned when

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his writings can facilitate the reader’s understanding of another author’s work by comparing and contrasting the texts in question. Furthermore, Gubar does not cite a single poem written by Levi in her extensive monograph, in spite of the fact that most of his poetry was available in English at the time she carried out her research for that volume.9 Out of hundreds of articles, essays, and volumes authored worldwide on the subject of Levi’s oeuvre, only a small number address his poetic expression, and even fewer discuss those of his lyrics which are not in any way related to the Holocaust (which actually constitute the majority of his poetry).10 Our focus on Levi in this case is designed to offer some form of contextualization for the reception of Bruck’s poetry in Italy, and not to redefine or reshape the complex extant criticism on her late, beloved friend’s poems. In light of the factors (historical or academic, as the case may be) that contributed to the uneven and somewhat delayed reception of Bruck’s writings in Italy (outlined in the introduction and chapter 1), as well as the fact that her work has more frequently attracted the attention of scholars operating outside of the Italian territory, the number of Italian academics who have previously chosen to focus their scholarly inquiry on Bruck’s poetry is pitifully small—so small, in fact, that there is only one.

The Poetry of Edith Bruck In her essay entitled “L’etica del sopravvissuto nell’estetica di Edith Bruck,” Italian scholar Elisa Guida addresses the significance of survivor’s ethics in Bruck’s body of work,11 and puts forth a perceptive analysis of how the impact of said ethics can be tangibly traced in her prose and poetry alike. Bruck’s first book of poetry, the collection Il tatuaggio (The Tattoo) released in 1975,12 contains 49 short poems written in free verse (a constant in her poetry),13 most of which fit on a single page. Her initial reading of the author’s poetic debut focuses primarily on the notion that these verses constitute a visceral expression of pain: “The poetic material is drawn directly from the Shoah and, even in the lyrical transfiguration of this experience, the author does not stray from the criteria of linearity and simplicity that mark her prose” (195). In light of her particular focus on survivor’s ethics, Guida’s propensity to analyze specific texts in Tatuaggio in favor of others is not surprising: the poems in question address, respectively, Bruck’s separation from her father in Auschwitz (“L’uguaglianza, padre!”),14 the death of her mother in the camps (“Quel pensiero”),15 and the significance of her role as a survivor-witness (“Perché sarei sopravvissuta?”).16 Guida stresses the immediacy and frankness of the poet’s work, observing that she tends to avoid hiding behind lofty, metaphorical uses of language in favor of a simpler, more direct, and brutally honest style. In her estimation, the poetic “I” in these lyrics rejects any attempt at achieving an amplifying eloquence, employing poetry as a direct and transparent means of communication (197). The blunt, open nature of Bruck’s verses often leaves little or nothing to the reader’s imagination:

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The three poems from Il Tatuaggio referenced by Guida clearly exemplify the poet’s tendency to bring her family’s personal tragedy into contact with the broader reality of the Holocaust.17 In “L’uguaglianza, padre!,” for example, the speaker references a few individuals who suffered her father’s same fate, including a handful of individuals (real or fictionalized) whose journey to Auschwitz began alongside the Steinschreiber family, on the same train, and in the same cattle car. The “I” in the poem, which a well-informed reader would be tempted to associate with the author’s preadolescent persona, identifies certain members of her own community based on their names and chosen professions (i. e., Klein the shoemaker, Goldberg the butcher, Stein the Hebrew teacher), yet in spite of the specificity of the details she evokes, the context in which she recalls them is wrought with panic and confusion. The speaker, in fact, is desperately trying to locate her father among a myriad of adult men who are made to march in the nude. The frantic pace of the poem (as well as the extreme nature of the trauma it exposes) gives birth to an erratic composition marked by rapid, unexpected shifts in tone: the speaker alternates between loving words of endearment and encouragement to a tender, yet desperate and fatalistic expression of loyalty toward her father: in the interest of remaining by his side until the bitter end, she irrationally suggests they should commit a mortal sin together, so that their deaths, which are arguably seen as impending in this case, might actually be deserved: “Let’s commit a mortal sin / in order to deserve death” (16). In light of the frequency with which Edith Bruck has made the Holocaust a central theme in her writings, it is tempting to embrace Guida’s suggestion that each one of her published works is, in a sense, a continuation of those that preceded it, in spite of the fact that they are all marked by distinct approaches and characteristics (193). In the brief note that precedes the opening poem of Il tatuaggio, Bruck actually makes a similar observation in an effort to draw a connection between her poetic debut and her other works: according to the author, her first collection of poetry may consist of a “summary” (riassunto, ix) of everything else she had written at the time. It is thanks, in part, to the advantage of hindsight if Guida’s assertion actually rings truer than Bruck’s observation of her own work: an analysis of the first four lines of the poem “Parliamo madre” (“Let’s talk, mother”) exemplify this notion quite clearly:

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Let’s talk, mother, your incinerated mouth will no longer tell me neither truths nor lies I have been left alone, beyond my window my clothes flutter, hanging like your rags (41)

This direct address to her late mother in Il tatuaggio precedes the release of the author’s acclaimed epistolary novel Lettera alla madre by thirteen years. While this novel was arguably the author’s first widespread success, her poetry was, in effect, the first mode of writing in which Bruck hypothesized an impossible conversation with her deceased mother. With “Parliamo, madre,” one of her first poems to appear in print, Bruck had symbolically begun the process of exhorting this larger-than-life maternal figure in order to allow for a posthumous dialogue. Bruck’s second collection of poetry In difesa del padre (In Defense of the Father) was published five years after Il tatuaggio in 1980. Guida observes that, in her poetry, Bruck has repeatedly chosen to concentrate on the quotidian (194). Quite a few images from her childhood in Hungary, in fact, are elaborated in her second book of poems, and the same can be said for the simpler, more tranquil nature of some of her life experiences in Italy as of 1954. While Guida is certainly correct in noting that In difesa del padre marks a shift away from the personal, direct, and graphic treatment of the Shoah in favor of a more nostalgic recollection of the author’s homelife during her youth, it’s important to underline the fact that a focus on the warm family environment that was forever lost upon her arrival in Auschwitz is actually not unique to In difesa del padre. Bruck’s first poetic homage to the struggles of her childhood took place, in fact, in the first four poems from Il tatuaggio: “Nascita” (“Birth”), “Adozione” (“Adoption”), “Infanzia” (“Childhood”), and “Amica sorella compagna nemica” (“Friend sister companion enemy”). Unlike her fiction, which at times is marked by a desire to sculpt a hidden truth into different forms of artistic expression, Bruck’s poetry comes straight from the heart. To be more precise: she has identified her stomach as the place where all of her poems are born: Poetry, at least for me, I could say, always comes from my gut, and it has its own style, it has its own form, its own musicality, its own rhythm, and what I have to say is much more brief than what I have to say in a novel—it doesn’t matter if the topic is similar, or if the content is similar. It is a different cry in my opinion, a very brief one, and not a prolonged cry, if we want to call it that, from that of a story, or a novel. I believe that it’s a totally different elaboration, but I really almost never plan, elaborate, or think about any of my books. Let’s say that I always begin, in poetry, from an image that struck me, an image only, while in prose I always start from an event, from a real base, an episode that wounded me deeply, which left me with an indelible mark. (Balma, Intervista a Edith Bruck, 76)

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While the horrors of the concentration camps are not always overtly dealt with in her poems, her verse is clearly shaped and informed by the notion of personal and familial loss and the fear of losing more. The poem titled “Eravamo in otto” (“There were eight of us”) for instance, in spite of its concision and simplicity, speaks volumes about a family unit that was shattered by infant mortality and violence alike, only to be scattered all over the world by the forces of history, politics, and circumstance. There were eight of us two died little one they killed one sells pants in Sao Paulo one, they say she does nothing, she writes. (25)

Poetic texts such as “Ogni inizio è già la fine” (“Every beginning is already the end”), “Che mi vengano pure malattie e sciagure” (“May diseases and disasters afflict me”), and “Conto i giorni” (“I count the days”) focus on the longing one might come to feel for another person.18 Although their impetus would appear to revolve around a longing for romantic love and both physical and emotional intimacy, the poet leaves just enough room for an alternate interpretation. By saying very little, she inevitably highlights that which is unsaid, and places a considerable amount of weight on every word: Every beginning is already the end everything is consumed in a gesture in an embrace in a dinner in an encounter. . . . (26) May diseases and disasters afflict me may the days not be less trying. . . . so long as god who isn’t there (I’m less and less afraid to say it) preserves in me until the end the longing for you. (33) I count the days your white hairs your beautiful wrinkles. (36)

Perhaps the briefest and most noteworthy text to follow this strategy is the poem “Sono con me,” which consists merely of three lines and, in its original version, only eight words (“Sono con me / per la prima volta / parliamo” [I’m with me / for the first time / let’s talk]).19 When the I in the poem (implied in the Italian text) states that she finally has a chance to be alone with her thoughts for

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the first time, the absence of companionship and contact required for this kind of meditation is temporarily transformed into a positive event; one that she has waited all her life to experience. The most striking poem in the collection In difesa del padre is entitled “Sono fragile” (“I am fragile”), and it consists of an examination of the precarious condition of mankind and the intrinsic difficulty of relating to others and learning to trust. There is an insecurity in this piece that is brought to bear on everyday life in the form of a cautious, timid, fearful hesitation. It speaks to the ephemeral nature of social conventions that are designed to prevent anger and aggression from bleeding into our lives. There is an urgent and undeniably abrasive quality to this text and its acknowledgment of the weak set of rules and practices that uphold law and order in modern society. The experiences that marked the hardest moments of Edith Bruck’s childhood (and, indeed, one of the darkest periods of the twentieth century) are still with us beneath the surface of our existence, hidden in history texts as if their relevance were somehow diminished. Without making overt references to the Shoah or drawing from the author’s personal history, “Sono fragile” reminds us all that we are never more than a few steps away from another Hitler, another Pol Pot, and yet another genocide: I am fragile like the last breath don’t look at me like that in your eyes even when they’re kind there’s something of a killer I don’t trust anymore. (51)

Given the universal applicability of its message, the poem “Sono fragile” also anticipates a particular shift in how Bruck perceives the act of writing poetry, its significance, and its desired impact. In fact, in the author’s third book of poems, the volume Monologo,20 Guida identifies a new aesthetic conception being put into play: Bruck’s verses are no longer merely a tool which enables her to express her own trauma and its repercussions. They are now used as a means through which the writer can sanction her own social commitment as an intellectual faced with the crisis and decay of contemporary society (Guida 199). The artist’s broader concern with “the civilization / of man” in “Sono fragile,” which predates Monologo by fifteen years, is later echoed in the form of a harsh poetic judgment against those who seek to make news (and profit) out of the suffering of others. The lyrics in question, which belong to the text “Lo svago,” were correctly identified by Guida as an indication of the author’s willingness and desire to address a number of social ills in her work, looking well beyond any type of autobiographical source of inspiration, much like she was able to do as a filmmaker starting in the 1970s (199–202).

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Although in her first two books of poetry the author had occasion to reflect the simplicity of the quotidian both in her choice of subjects and with respect to the immediacy of the language she employed, in Monologo she also applies the same kind of unadorned language to a series of lyrical meditations on a considerable variety of themes, some of which are unexplored or only marginally addressed in her previous work. The poem that immediately follows “Lo svago,” for example, offers a similarly alarming set of implications concerning the values and mores that, in the author’s view, have defined the twentieth century. “I nuovi comandamenti” (“The new commandments”) is a work that borrows and mimics the rhetorical force of Christian doctrine by putting forth ten new commandments. They are designed as a form of negative psychology for anyone who wishes to blindly pursue a life of fear and materialism. As the poem aptly infers in the final three lines, this type of selfish and empty existence will eventually lead one to be mindful and distrustful of everyone and anyone: The new commandments Say yes to those who count obey those who you should never say what you think get a membership card enter the flock favor your tribe pray to god money don’t give up your seat watch out for everyone don’t ever trust. (57)

Although the first poem in Monologo (“Ditemi,” or “Tell Me”) could also be interpreted as symptomatic of the author’s push for a more universal and socially conscious poetry, any attempt to squeeze all of its 37 poems into a single category would be incredibly reductive, especially if one considers that more than a third of the compositions in this book rotate around the figure of her husband and life partner (and, at times, cotranslator), the poet and director

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Nelo Risi.21 While Monologo touches on contemporary society as well as the Holocaust, it also engages the author’s youth, her parents, and the shock of familial loss. It makes room for numerous romantic compositions dedicated to (and inspired by) her partner, Nelo Risi, a series of four poems dedicated to the author’s cats (“Ai miei gatti”), one playful composition on the subject of psychoanalysis, and four poems that mention God or the concept of religion. One might attribute the lack of scholarly responses to the volume Monologo to the poet’s intense focus on her current interests and the quotidian aspects of life, if it weren’t for the quasi-absolute indifference to Bruck’s prior books of poems and to Holocaust poetry in general. Another factor which cannot be ignored, however, given the considerations on a thematic ghetto which have previously been applied to her prose, is Bruck’s reticence to continue addressing the Shoah in clear and direct terms in her poetry. Only six poems from Monologo, in fact, include a reference to the Holocaust.22 Bruck’s last book of poetry was published in the year 2005. The volume in question, entitled Specchi (Mirrors), is a departure from her previous collections of lyrics.23 This is Bruck’s fourth book of poems and the first to consist of a single, long poetic composition, more accurately described with the Italian term poema. It begins by comparing the familiar streets of Rome to her native village in Hungary—a reminder that the author has grown to feel at home in her adoptive city—before launching into a personal analysis of many items present in her apartment. Each item inspires a flood of images and remembrances that seem to steer the text in an erratically playful direction, yet a close evaluation of the poem reveals a specific strategy behind the content and layout of the book. In fact, Specchi includes fourteen black and white photographs which are not meant to merely accompany the text, but rather, are an integral and inseparable part of this work. Aside from the standard information, the cover bears an image of the author from years past, taken during a vacation at the beach. On top of this photograph, there is a superimposed stylistic image of a seven-pronged menorah. This particular object is a candelabrum symbolizing the seven days of the creation of the world, but it also has come to be considered one of Israel’s national symbols (Feinstein, 184). This is the first of three visual representations of a menorah in this text. In fact, the first and last images within the book are photos of the same menorah, taken inside the author’s apartment. This object-symbol dominates the book both visually and textually, taking on a variety of meanings that are, in part, open to interpretation. Each time the menorah appears in an image it occupies a deliberately centralized position. The I in the poem, clearly identified as the voice of the author, initially refers to her candelabrum in passing, but goes on to mention it on seven separate occasions, primarily as a way to establish the spatial relationships between various objects described in the poem. By following said cues, a reader would expect to be able to draw a picture of Edith Bruck’s living room, knowing that two oriental bottles and her cinematic awards are placed on each side of the menorah, which is on top of the bookshelf bearing

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the Cabbala, and to the right of an antique Chinese vase located in a far corner. Nevertheless, the spatial cues offered in the poem, particularly with respect to the menorah, are not mirrored in the few images that offer a glimpse into the author’s residence. This strategy suggests that the significance of this object-symbol is not to be measured in physical terms. Simply put, it is a material reminder of Edith Bruck’s Jewish origins, her background, and her culture. But it is also much more than that: the menorah is one of many possessions the writer was denied when she was imprisoned in Auschwitz, one that takes on different meanings as the poem progresses. It acts as a point of reference, a source of comfort, and an iconic presence in the text, yet at times it is simply seen as a candelabrum, a special gift from a relative. In a poem that touches on the difficult subject of human frailty and mortality, the menorah represents stability, security, and the courage to explore a new perspective on life. In the opening pages it towers over everything (troneggia, 10), but as the text transitions to the topic of disease and death, the symbol falls temporarily into disuse, as if the poet no longer had any need for it. When, on page 77, Specchi focuses on a cardiac arrest suffered by the author, the menorah returns with undeniable expressive force. Detailing a near-death experience, the poem launches into a vision of the seven-pronged candelabrum lighting up on its own. Immediately following this vision, the author is brought back to (conscious) life by a team of medical professionals. This experience leads her to find a new outlook, to appreciate each day for the beautiful privilege that it is. Before the poem ends, the significance of the menorah has been permanently altered: it is no longer seen as towering over or dominating the visual and textual realities of this book. It has embraced a new role, that of “watching over” (veglia, 87) a room, and those who inhabit it. Considered as a whole, Specchi (Mirrors) calls into question the nature of life and memory. For Edith Bruck, reminiscing and reflecting on our lives is a way of looking at ourselves, of measuring the sum of our experiences and trying to ascertain their value. When faced with an old photograph filled with nostalgic stimuli, the author can’t bare to look at it. This reticence suggests that our memories provide us with a painfully accurate reflection of who we are, a more genuine one than a mirror can offer. All of the images in the book are, to some extent, mirrors of the author’s past. They permit the reader to consider the progression of her life, acting as a map of sorts—a guide to understanding the personal and historical significance of this work. Specchi has a pulsating, unpredictable energy that combines highly poetic language with brief prose-like intervals. The author’s use of mixed media exposes the reader to a specific visual reality, and facilitates the process of weaving together a variety of disparate themes with ease. The text offers a real glimpse into the mindset and feelings of Edith Bruck in a moment when she was forced to reconsider her own mortality from the point of view of an aging writer, sharing a personal history that, at first, follows a natural, intimate progression. Each photograph complements the writing and brings it to life with veracity and

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immediacy. The speaker moves from one object (or subject) to another as if she were in the presence of a guest: describing and discussing her possessions as if the reader were visiting her home for the first time. In this text Bruck allows the reader to glance at some of the more cherished private moments of her life, as if she were showing us a family scrapbook, or describing her experiences by associating them with those items that make each memory concrete and tangible. Specchi is, in effect, a gift from the author to all those who treasure and study her books and the unique story of her life. Her first three collections of poetry, published in 1975 (Il tatuaggio), 1980 (In difesa del padre), and 1990 (Monologo), show a marked preference for the use of a first-person voice, while in her fiction she has at times fluctuated between first-person and third-person narration. This fourth book of verses continues the use of the poetic “I” and the predominance of autobiographical elements, but distinguishes itself from all of her previously published poems because of its length and scope. In fact, it is by far the longest poetic work produced by the author. It exhibits some features that are present in all of her poetry, such as the playful alternation of shorter and longer lines to alter the pace and intensity of the discourse, and the frequent use of alliteration and consonance to phonically associate specific words and lines of verse. It also employs a technique that can be observed in many of her publications, regardless of genre: the association of two nouns, linked by a hyphen. This use of language appears three times in Specchi: scrittrice-testimone (“writer-witness,” 56), corpo-oggetto (“body-object,” 64), and corpo-pacco (“body-package,” 72). What is most interesting about this work is that it consists of a single poetic breath: the only subdivisions in the texts represent shifts in the speaker’s focus. It’s as if she were scanning her living room with her eyes, allowing each item to bring back its own images, surrendering to the chaotic nature of human memory without allowing her recollections to be filtered before committing them to writing. Though her previous poetic endeavors have always produced collections of short poems, typically no longer than one or two pages each, Edith Bruck reinvented herself with Specchi. Her latest book of poetry takes the reader’s hand and refuses to let go, acting as a patient guide in her journey of self-disclosure. With the same honest spirit of her first book, the autobiography Chi ti ama così published in 1959, Edith Bruck communicates some of the joys and pains that life has to offer, addressing the notion of lifethreatening medical problems with a brutal sincerity that defines so much of her work. There are moments when the text reads like a work of prose that uses line breaks in place of punctuation, muddying the distinction between poetry and narrative. The use of mixed media in this case pushes the envelope even further. Since the book makes use of both visual and literary art, it allows one to picture the author’s life in the context of certain mementos from her past. Those who wonder what a young Edith Bruck might have looked like before being deported to Auschwitz, when she still went by the name Edith Steinschreiber, will now have the image of a young, innocent twelve-year-old Edith to put the viciousness

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of the Third Reich into the proper perspective. Young readers and critics who have only recently been made aware of her considerable corpus of work will be able to gaze upon the face of a twenty-something author who would go on to offer some of the most daring, unique, and skillfully crafted works of literature to be published in Europe during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The image in question (which appears on the cover and on page 21) is the true point of departure for the book, preceded only by the title. Being no stranger to the world of film, television, and theater, it comes as no surprise that Bruck has chosen to intertwine visual and textual components so inextricably. The images are a fundamental part of this work that cannot be removed or considered separately without compromising the author’s intent. Specchi stands out among the author’s publications due to its subject matter and style, but more so because it is an experiment. When asked how she might compare Specchi to her first three books of poetry, the author initially stated that she sees it as a monologue. Having been temporarily restricted from traveling by her cardiologist, she found herself stuck in a room, albeit one that was very familiar to her. In order to free herself, she embarked on a literary journey that took her back to many places she had been before in person and to which she had returned in the realm of her memory: There is a difference, in my opinion, even if it doesn’t seem like it, because Specchi, which I wrote during a difficult time for me—because I had a heart attack, with cardiac arrest, and I thought that I would never write again and I didn’t know what to do, it was a very difficult moment in my life. Again, a bit . . . closer to death. I wanted to take a trip inside this room of mine, to tell the memories that the objects around me seem to inspire. Not all of the objects, but the more significant ones. To listen to this room, where I always wrote, which I like, where I feel very safe, very protected. Initially, after the illness, I didn’t travel. So, I wanted to make this circular trip, focusing from the very beginning on the menorah, which is very important; and to finish with the menorah. It was like a monologue with myself, like a trip around my belly, to my origins, around myself. There are things that I did not say in the other books. Maybe I already spoke of my brother who lives in Brazil, but I did not talk about the two candelabras that he gave me as a gift, which he sent me. In the sense that it’s another type of story, because it’s not something that happened to you, that you experience, and so you make poetry of it; it is instead what happens to you around those two candelabras, and so it’s an episode that, in some way, gives an image of Brazil itself. It touches on the poverty, the favelas, it touches on the morality of the she-me who doesn’t want to buy them because they are so expensive, and then on the other hand, there’s this gift from my brother, and she thinks about being able to light a candle for her mother, if only she had the beautiful candelabrum that she saw. These little things subsequently mean many others; she thinks of being able to turn

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to her mother’s faith, through the candle, and so the object goes beyond itself. Like that picture of my brother-in-law, whom I described, who died in Argentina, it has another meaning. There are so many things that I never told, and these objects helped me do it. In the first three books of poetry, I had things that were much more urgent to express. Sure, all of my writings resemble each other because I am who I am, and I speak of the exterior and interior world in which I live. I mean that even Bergman’s films resemble each other, and so do Fellini’s films. It’s possible that the editors are right, maybe I should stay within my own themes. I don’t know: I only know that I want to get out of them, and that I have not succeeded in doing so, but it’s possible that I feel more at ease, more at home, in my own experiences and my own memory; then they can be transferred to the themes of today, or yesterday, or the day before, to different worlds, different oppressions. It’s not that I want to continue circling around my belly, I hope to go further, to things that pertain to others as well—what happened yesterday, what happens today, and what will happen tomorrow. (Balma, Intervista a Edith Bruck, 86)

This long-awaited return to poetic modes of writing is evidence of Bruck’s continued desire to grow and evolve as an author. The choice to include, in Specchi, some of the images and objects that are present in her daily life is both effective and sincere: by relinquishing a certain degree of privacy she has, once again, shown a willingness to submit her story, her identity and her ideals to the scrutiny of others, through the vehicle of single poem—a poem spanning eighty pages in length—which includes 14 black and white images as integral components of this unique work of mixed media. No matter how one reads the speaker in the poem, in fact, there is no way to misinterpret the presence of the items depicted in the photographs in the author’s actual living room, or the fact that the eleventh image in the text (67) is that of Mrs. Bruck’s real-life cardiologist. In other words, the clearly autobiographical nature of the visual elements in this volume can only reinforce the overt link between Specchi and the author’s healthrelated struggles. While Specchi does open up a world of private memories to the author’s readership, many of which involve her loved ones residing in different parts of the world, it is also a book that allowed Bruck to consider what life has offered her since the end of the war. It serves in part as yet another reminder of what she has to lose, of why every day is precious, and what her readers stood to lose if she had not recovered from her heart attack.

Translating Hungary Edith concentrated on writing with a briefcase on her knees, serious and studious as a child transferring her theme from an old notebook to a good copy. It wasn’t as though we lacked a table, but Edith saved the table for me to write my poetry on. She always had an enormous respect for poetry. . . .

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Guida has noted that Bruck considers poets to be heroes, rebels, saints, and cursed by definition. She identifies the author’s cultural background as owing heavily to the modern Hungarian poetic canon, citing Endre (1877–1919) and Jószef as specific influences which preceded her extensive interactions with contemporary Italian poets by at least two decades. Although Bruck has referenced conversations with Calvino, Levi, and many other Italian authors in interviews and articles over the years, Guida’s study makes a point to specifically identify the most celebrated Italian poets she came into contact with: Montale, Quasimodo, Ungaretti,24 Sereni, Raboni (195). Bruck has identified Attila Jószef (1905–1937) and Illyés Gyula (1902– 1983) as two of the poets she admires the most. Her translations of their work in Italian (with the collaboration of Nelo Risi in the case of Gyula) reflect her desire to pay homage to these two great Hungarian poets. When she was asked why she considers it important to bring the work of famous Hungarian poets to the attention of an Italian-speaking audience, Bruck offered the following reponse: First of all because of the poetry in itself, because I love poetry. Secondly, to be sure, it bothers me that the Italian public doesn’t know these beautiful, universal poems, the destinies that the poets had, the society that they lived in. It’s an important part of our history, which belongs to Europe. These are some of the greatest and most important poets of the twentieth century and they are unknown. These poems are not limited in any way to a small country like Hungary, which has ten million people. They are poets on an international level, not just European. It saddened me that people didn’t know their universal verses, because more than anything Attila and Radnóti had very dramatic lives. Attila committed suicide in ’37, at thirty-two years of age. (Bruck, personal interview, 28 Jun. 2010)

The entirety of her efforts as a translator, which in recent years have come to include the work of Miklós Radnóti (1909–1944), have been devoted exclusively

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to the process of making the best Hungarian poetry of the twentieth century available to an Italophone readership. Bruck’s reverence and quasi-divine veneration of the act of writing poetry, which certainly helps clarify the value and priority she assigns to poetic modes of writing, also suggests a uniquely complex vision of the impact that lyrical expression has had on her life and her work. Let us consider, for example, the notion that Primo Levi borrowed language from an actual Jewish prayer in the poem “Shemá” in order to lend more force to his injunction. Having always considered poetry as a form of prayer ever since her childhood in Hungary, Bruck never mirrored Levi’s strategy in her own verses. If one considers that our admittedly secular author does not practice any form of organized religion, Bruck’s transposition of divine significance from the religious context to the poetic should also be understood in terms of the weight and value she assigns to the poets that marked her pre-adolescent years. The lyrics she has translated correspond to some of her first encounters with literary art, in a language that mirrored the phonic and lexical reality of what used to be her daily life in Hungary; during a time that was darkened by the growing antisemitism in Europe and the economic hardships of her family, but still relatively innocent and unspoiled—still years or months away from deportation, imprisonment, and slave labor. Attila’s poetry in particular has been described by Bruck’s husband Risi as her “sole mental baggage during the Nazi plague, nourishing the gift of character which was destined to prove the most valuable for Edith—Hope” (Introduction, xii). In other words, by translating contemporary Hungarian poets into Italian, Bruck is not simply sharing the images, textures, and themes that nourished her youthful hunger for a connection to the world that went beyond the boundaries of familial or religious associations.25 She is also, in effect, repaying a debt to those writers whose words helped keep her alive. Tucked away in her memory, she carried the verses of her favorite poets with her into the hell of Auschwitz, occasionally drawing strength and hope from their beauty and the nostalgia they elicited. While millions undoubtedly prayed for salvation in the death camps, Bruck engaged in her own form of devotions by remembering and reciting the poems she loved from her youth. When the time came for her to tell her story of survival to the world in the form of her autobiographical debut Who Loves You Like This, Bruck turned to Attila’s verses in search of a title: “Looking through his poetry, she found what she was looking for in one of his finest love poems. ‘Do not be afraid, of one who loves you like this.’ She cut the line in half and . . . the second hemistich rang out like an anthem to life” (Risi, Introduction, xii). In 1966 Bruck cotranslated a lengthy poem by Illyés Gyula into Italian with Nelo Risi. The text in question, entitled Két kéz (“Two hands”) in the original Hungarian,26 is a composition dedicated to the hands of the poet’s father. On this occasion, Bruck authored a brief introduction entitled “Un brindisi” (“A toast,”) in which she discussed her second encounter with Gyula, which took place in a tavern in Budapest. Their first meeting in Rome had been brief and very official, yet Bruck felt like she had always known him. Seated at a table with Risi and

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Gyula, while the two men conversed in French, Bruck reminisced on her childhood and her first memories of the meaning and presence of poetry in her life, long before she ever learned the Italian language or made use of it in writing. Although she felt compelled to acknowledge the important voice of nineteenthcentury Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) as unavoidable in her youth, given his presence in the public school curriculum,27 she also recognized that Attila’s poems were as significant as they were hard to come by in the 1930s and early 1940s. The relative unavailability of his writings, coupled with the multiple instances in which Bruck has chosen to highlight the weight his poems have carried in her life, clearly point to Attila as one of Bruck’s principal poetic influences. Not wanting to openly attribute any type of divine or spiritual quality to his writing, Bruck reflects on the work of this late Hungarian poet in terms of the myths that defined her childhood: I was sinking into my memories, which were made up of poets, perhaps because I was sitting in front of Petőfi and Attila’s ideal companion. Myths were limited in my childhood: Petőfi’s voice, the son of poor people, was a legend and when us children, at the end of the school year, had to recite his verses aloud we were invaded by a boiling patriotism, ready to jump into the fire for our Magyar homeland. . . . Attila’s poems, furthermore, were not taught in school and his most significant verses had never even made it to press. I had to wait until the liberation to hear them echo aloud in the Bergen-Belsen survivors’ camp. . . . Maybe it was time to break out of my memories and to speak to Illyés [Gyula], but the violin soloist had set himself between the two of us, dividing us, and he was playing on my head. (“Un brindisi,” 10)

Gyula’s touching composition, entitled “Two Hands,” orbits around images of the poet’s father, his manual labor, and the wear and tear these efforts entail on the human flesh. It evokes many of the images, sounds and scents of rural life in Hungary that also defined Bruck’s childhood. Beyond any parallels one might be inclined to draw between the lives of the poet and his translator, the focus, in “Two Hands,” on the figure of the father brings to mind some of Edith’s first poems from Il Tatuaggio. In fact, the first poem she ever wrote was dedicated to her father (“L’uguaglianza, padre!,” “Equality, father!”): “I wrote my first poem to my father, so I felt like I had betrayed my mother, then I wrote one to my mother, so I felt like I had betrayed my brother, then I wrote one to my brother, and I went on like this and I wrote my first book [of poems]” (Bruck, qtd. in QuercioliMincer, 33). Beyond their particular thematic concentration, Gyula’s verses differ greatly from the majority of Bruck’s poetry in light of the form employed by late Hungarian poet. Két kéz consists of a single work spanning the length of twentyone pages (in its Italian version). The poem is made up of three sections, each of which is divided into quatrains.28 Each one of the ninety-five segments (ninetyfour quatrains and one couplet) that make up “Two Hands” is dedicated to the hands of Gyula’s father, and each one could stand on its own, as an individual

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poetic image that, when combined with the others, make up a poignant portrait of hard work, sacrifice, and love for one’s family. Beyond these cursory observations, it’s worth noting that Gyula tends to make much more frequent use of punctuation and enjambments than Bruck has done in her own poems.29 Bruck’s translations of Attila Jószef ’s collected poems were published in 2002 with the title Poesie (1922–1937).30 Unlike the personalized, self-reflective text she penned in 1966 when she translated Gyula’s poems, which resembled something of a journal entry or a travel diary of sorts, Attila’s work is introduced by a much more traditional bio-bibliographic narrative in this case. Bruck discusses the difficulties in selecting and translating Attila’s lyrics for this volume, and engages the poet’s brief, difficult life in Hungary as well as his tumultuous political and artistic formation. In stating her admiration for his verses and the kinship she feels for him as an artist and as a person, Bruck admits that she loves every single line of Attila’s poetry, as if he had been the greatest love of her entire life—capable of inspiring feelings of brotherhood, pity, beauty, pain, and guilt, as a member of a greater human family we all belong to: My visceral bond with the poet, in a certain sense also a familial bond, that made me understand what poverty is, what hunger and suffering are, it prevents me from achieving that detachment with which I should speak of his poems and the difficulty in translating them. The original language carries with it certain flavors, smells, atmospheres, images, and even minute cultural elements, all of which are not transmittable. With languages as unrelated as Hungarian and Italian I could have fought to remain as faithful as possible to the poems, but how could I make the flavors felt, even of the words themselves? That evocative richness in the language of our origins that is learned with our first steps? (Bruck, Introduzione, v)

Bruck’s appreciation of the need for detachment in order to filter Attila’s work into the Italian language is not simply related to the fact that she holds him in the highest esteem. Her concern, in fact, relates to what Guida’s insightfully termed her “cultural background” in referring to Attila’s early impact on Bruck. Her exposure to Hungarian poetry during her childhood, which was also incorporated in the public school education she received for seven years (before deportation in 1944), have arguably been a reason for Bruck to associate her favorite poems with certain memories of her youth that, still to this day, carry within them a tremendous amount of nostalgia and feelings of personal loss. If we think of Bruck’s background in a way that includes both the cultural and the familial elements of her upbringing, we can come to see the sum total of her experiences from 1932 to 1944 as a part of herself that she has always been able to symbolically conceal and conserve through the process of linguistic filtration. For Bruck to render the lyrics of her Hungarian poetic models in Italian is a way to contribute to that same process. It is, however, also an effort at self-disclosure, no matter how indirectly it occurs. With respect to the writings of Attila Jószef,

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and the historical and political environment they describe, there is one factor that makes this work stand out among the other poets Bruck has translated. Although Bruck has stated that she felt betrayed by his suicide (he died when she was fifteen years old), her introduction to his lyrics recognizes that by dying in 1937 he was also spared any knowledge of the carnage to come (ix). Attila’s poetry can only belong to the chronological reality that preceded the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, and for Bruck his lyrics are bound to evoke that context, that interim, the part of her life that came before the Shoah and was destroyed by it. Bruck’s most recent volume of translations from the Hungarian was devoted to the lyrics of Miklós Radnóti. This bilingual volume was published in 2009, with the title Mi capirebbero le scimmie (Monkeys Would Understand Me).31 In her efforts to properly situate Radnóti among the greatest poets of the twentieth century, Bruck authored a perceptive and well-researched postscript on the poet’s life, his sensibilities, and his literary influences. In her translator’s note (Nota) Bruck also alludes to the high value and intrinsic urgency that Radnóti and Jószef placed on the act of translation (155). By answering the call of these poets that, in many ways, have shaped the artist she has become and contributed to the formulation of her own personal definition of poetry as prayer, Bruck has metaphorically translated her own library of devotional readings for her Italophone audience to consult. While her affinity for the writings of Radnóti was the initial impetus that motivated Bruck to publish the volume Mi capirebbero le scimmie, she also felt the need to set the record straight concerning the circumstances of the poet’s death. While celebrating his talent and sharing his verses with a new audience, in fact, Bruck was also making a point to denounce a false history that had been created around Radnóti’s passing, and the nationality of those who were responsible for killing him. With his murder in 1944 Bruck lost one of her heroes, one of her saints, one of her beloved, cursed rebels. She addressed her love of his lyrics and the great importance of translating and publishing poetry in contemporary society at length during our most recent interview, in which she analyzed her own position as a translator, but also repeatedly denounced Radnóti’s killers as Hungarians. She also recognized a feeling of brotherhood that defines her approach to the lyrics of Attila and Radnóti alike. Both of these Hungarian poets, she feels, can be considered her ‘siblings’ because they have all suffered the same kind of abject poverty. They had also unfortunately both died before the day she was liberated from the concentration camps: Bruck: Radnóti . . . was killed by Hungarian fascists. For forty years, during the communist regime, they let people think that he had been killed by the Germans. I found out only three or four years ago that his killers were still alive, they were never punished, nothing ever happened to them. Later they admitted that it had been the Hungarians, but only recently. Everyone kept quiet. I knew the Hungarian ministers, the government representatives— they ate here at this table—from the Hungarian communist regime. They

Reflections on the "Minor" Poetry of a Successful Novelist were very nice to me, they even made a film about my life, but nobody ever told me the truth about Radnóti. The crime was concealed and mystified, like the deportation: they said it was the Germans who took the Jews from my village, but I never saw a German. They taught kids in school a false history, and this also should be denounced. So when I translated Radnóti I wanted to underline the fact that it was the Hungarians who shot him, not the Germans. Balma: That seems fair. Bruck: Besides this, his poetry has always interested me a lot, it’s fantastic. It is on par with the great French and Italian poets, and I was very happy to work on it, to slave over it, since translation is very difficult. It seems very simple, but it really is a lot of work. You work for months for almost nothing. You only do it for the love of poetry and the poet, and to make them known in some way, considering that poetry does not sell—there is no market. It’s thanks to the editors if poetry has almost been eliminated from the [their] catalogs. They publish at most a dozen books a year, between foreigners and Italians. It’s a tragic thing. I believe that without poetry, without music, the world would be much poorer. It’s a drop in the bucket, if you will, because there are books full of sex, violence, mysteries, all that fiction that doesn’t even come close to reality. . . . Balma: Let’s take a moment to compare your work as a writer to your translations. In your opinion, does your talent as a writer of novels and poetry come from the same place that brings you to translate other people’s poetry in Italian? Bruck: No, no, because the poems that I have written in the end represent a very personal path, they are about my story, my skin, my life and my childhood. When I translate certain poets on the other hand, like Attila and Radnóti, I can identify with their lives and their misery, with the persecutions that they suffered. Attila suffered from the extreme poverty in which he lived, and then—given that he was a communist at first and was later thrown out of the party—he couldn’t find work, he was unemployed and couldn’t even eat. It was a difficult life, really a crazy thing, I felt it and I feel as if he were my brother, a relative. And Radnóti even more so because he was a Jew, and for this reason he was made to do forced labor. He converted to Catholicism in ’42—not for practical reasons, because in ’42 it was futile to convert . . . they would deport you anyway. It seems that it was his wife who convinced him. This is very interesting, because the wife is still alive, and nobody told me. I could have gone to see her in Budapest, but even this was kept quiet. There are certain things, like a conspiracy that revolves around an inconvenient person. In the end he was neither Jewish nor Christian. Perhaps he didn’t even know what he was anymore, because he was very inspired by

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Chapter Three the Bible. At first he wrote a lot about the Old Testament, and then about the New Testament. In my opinion he was quite confused because one can’t convert at his age, it was very difficult since he was born into a Jewish family. Besides this, he was also tied to death in some way from his birth. He was born with a twin brother who died, and even his mother died. He was the only survivor of his own birth, he lost both his mother and his brother. From the beginning he was a sort of Cain who killed his brother. He was a very complex character, very deep, very loveable, and very important. Basically, I fall in love with poets. I have been in love with both Attila and Radnóti all my life. I wouldn’t know which one to choose, for sure. I have a strong bond that makes me identify with both of them, even if they have nothing to do with my life. We are siblings in some way because of the poverty and the suffering [we all endured]. (Bruck, personal interview, 28 Jun. 2010)

Bruck’s pursuit of a kinship (both human and artistic) with these important magyarophone authors, and her desire to know their works as intimately as the process of translation allows, could hypothetically be associated with the same impulse that inspired her to engage and honor the memory of her relatives that were killed in the Shoah. She rightfully and urgently underlined the notion that her story is not theirs, and it is certainly important not to confuse the life experiences of these poets or their literary ramifications. What she didn’t mention, though, was the possibility that their stories, the lives and works of her literary predecessors, were somehow hers as well: a part of who she is today, but also a part of that preadolescent girl who walked through hell and lived to tell the world about its horrors. And without the lyrics of her childhood heroes, as Nelo Risi has pointed out, Edith Bruck might not have survived. While it is certainly (and deliberately) reductive for her husband to claim that Attila Jószef ’s verses were her “sole mental baggage during the Nazi plague,” Bruck did indeed draw from his poetry when choosing a title for her first book (Introduction, xii). In an effort to proclaim her love of life, first and foremost, after all the suffering she endured, the author turned to Attila’s words (“who loves you like this?”), allowing one of his verses to echo through her, but not to speak for her. Bruck’s efforts at Italianizing the work of her idols may certainly be unrelated to her tendency to filter her own childhood memories through an Italophone lens. That being said, in linguistic and cultural terms this process of filtration is one and the same. In other words, some form of translation (cultural, glottological, lexical) is taking place in both cases. These considerations, which could easily be expanded in order to include Bruck’s entire oeuvre, also hold weight with respect to some of her work in the film industry. The film Andremo in città, for example, was made possible by the author’s willingness to translate (adapt) her story for the screen, while also transporting the characters from her native village all the way to war-torn Yugoslavia (near Belgrade, where the film was shot). When it comes to Bruck’s efforts to adapt Camon’s novel Un altare per la madre for the screen, on the other hand,

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we are still dealing with a form of translation, to be sure; but the strategy that so frequently allowed a Magyar reality to be transformed into an Italian cultural product is no longer in play. The same line of reasoning applies, of course, to the poems, books and short stories she penned on the subject of life in contemporary Italy, the life she has shared with her husband since her arrival in Rome in the 1950s. Perhaps more than any other criteria one might apply to her artistic output, identifying the need to translate specific elements from a Hungarian context into an Italian one can be a means to differentiate between her works that express a loss and those that are merely informed by it. One of the things Bruck lost, never to reclaim, on that tragic day in 1944, was a sense of belonging to a Jewish community, however small or marginalized. The specificity of her religious upbringing and the elements of Jewish culture that made up a part of her daily existence in Hungary have found their way into her written work, and it is here that they have survived. In a country like Italy, where the tides of Risorgimento32 in the nineteenth century and the pressure to embody an Italian ideal after the nation was first unified in 1861 brought many Jews to choose the path of assimilation. These factors, coupled with the crushing impact of the Race Laws in 1938, have left Italy a nation of approximately 40,000 Jews, many (or most) of whom are unseen, their Jewish identities concealed, forgotten, or ignored. The next and final segment of this volume, having already delineated Edith Bruck’s stature and role in the Italian literary and cinematic environments, will bring this study to a close by recapitulating and elaborating on its findings and implications, comparing Bruck’s representations of Judaism to those of other Jewish authors who were born and educated in Italy.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Asher Salah for sharing the proofs of his forthcoming essay entitled “Ebrei e Israele nel cinema italiano” with me during the spring of 2012. In this insightful study he precisely quantifies the frequency with which these thematic elements were treated in postwar Italian cinema. Out of the 174 Italian filmic works taken into account that engage the subject of Jewish life and culture, 86 (or slightly less than 50%) fall into this category. 2. Risa Sodi, Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust writing (1944–1994) (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 3. Leo Longanesi, “Il film italiano,” L’italiano 17–18 (1933): n. pag. Qtd. in Ruth BenGhiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71. 4. Aside from Levi and Bruck, the only other noteworthy Italian-speaking author to have written a poem on the Shoah is Nobel-prize winner Salvatore Quasimodo, who was neither Jewish nor a concentration camp survivor. The poem in question is entitled “Auschwitz,” from the volume Il falso è il vero verde (Milano: Mondadori, 1970), 36– 38. Gordon identifies Quasimodo as a controversial figure of sorts “who was by no means always a voice for, or even friend to, the Jews,” alluding to a heated polemical

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6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

Chapter Three exchange he engaged in with Dante Lattes in the early 1960s (118–23). See Dante Lattes, “Tu quoque, Quasimodo?” Rassegna mensile di Israel 1 (1961): 3–5. Primo Levi, L’osteria di Brema (Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1975). All of the 27 poems from this volume were eventually reprinted in the collection Ad ora incerta, 3rd ed. (Milano: Garzanti, 1998), which also includes a significant number of compositions dated between 1978 and 1987. When the first edition of Ad ora incerta appeared in 1984 the author was still alive. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Torino: De Silva, 1947). Rpt., Torino: Einaudi, 1989. On the centrality of Levi’s debut, see also Wiley Feinstein, The Civilization of the Holocaust in Italy: Poets, Artists, Saints, Anti-Semites (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 336: “Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz has been acclaimed as one of the most important books in describing the Holocaust as a crime against humanity, an offense against the inherent worth of all men and women created in the image of God.” Hilda Schiff, ed. Holocaust Poetry (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 117–18, 205. The poems in question were: “Shemà,” “Alzarsi,” and “Il superstite.” See Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988). In particular, if we consider the selection of Levi’s publications examined by Gubar, it becomes evident that she had access to at least two of his poems (“Shemà” and “Alzarsi”) in English translation simply by virtue of having consulted his first two autobiographical books. Furthermore, the recent anthologies of poetry on the Shoah the scholar consulted in preparing to write Poetry After Auschwitz should have made her aware of the existence of at least three of Primo’s compositions in verse: the two poems mentioned above, as well as the chilling piece entitled “Per Adolf Eichmann,” which was originally authored in July of 1960. See Schiff, Holocaust Poetry and also Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder, Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 444, 488.] The more than seventy poems by Levi that are not related to the Shoah constitute an understudied and marginalized subgroup of texts among his published works. Aside from the general lack of popularity of poetry in contemporary society, a frequent fixation by academics on Levi’s Holocaust poetry at the expense of other compositions has given birth to a paradoxical situation in which the verses of Italy’s most famous Jewish artist of all time have been available in English for over two decades, yet strictly speaking the average anglophone reader does not yet have access to all the tools necessary to dissect them. See Elisa Guida, “L’etica del sopravvissuto nell’estetica di Edith Bruck,” Cuadernos de Filologia Italiana 14 (2007): 187–204. Unlike Risa Sodi, who included works by Maurensig and Debenedetti in her volume on Italian Holocaust narratives, Guida takes a more restrictive approach, by limiting the authors whose works she assigns to the category of “literature of the Shoah” to those individuals who survived the concentration camps. Edith Bruck, Il tatuaggio (Parma: Guanda, 1975). Poems in free verse are characterized by “nonmetrical structuring, heavy reliance on grammatical breaks, [and] absence of endrhyme.” See Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 425. “Equality, father!,” 15–16. “That thought,” 17–19.

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16. “Why would have I survived?,” 68–69. 17. There are overt references to the Shoah in a dozen verses published in Il tatuaggio. The poems included in this volume also include other references to war, death, and antisemitism. There are eight compositions devoted to the author’s husband. 18. If one takes the liberty of assuming that “Conto i giorni” is indeed a poem on the subject of Bruck’s partner Nelo Risi, there would appear to be as many as six compositions dedicated to him in In difesa del padre. The collection includes 59 poems in all, five of which touch on the Shoah. 19. The poem appears on 44. 20. Edith Bruck, Monologo (Milano, Garzanti, 1990). 21. Counting a series of five poems written for Risi’s birthday (“Serie compleanno,” 18– 22), out of the 37 verses in Monologo, as many as 15 include some reference to the author’s husband. 22. One of them in particular, entitled “Noi” (“Us”) is an interesting reflection of the role of the survivor, and the burden and responsibility of bearing witness to the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps throughout Europe (Bruck 53–54). The final two lines of the poem eerily evoke the same ghosts that haunted Primo Levi in the poem “The Survivor”: “Lasciateci . . . / Noi non siamo soli.” (“Leave us . . . / We are not alone”). 23. Edith Bruck, Specchi (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005). 24. It’s tempting to associate Bruck’s sparing use of language in a short poem like “Sono con me” from the collection In difesa del padre to some of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s work from the 1919 collection L’Allegria di Naufragi, in particular the poem “Mattina,” which consists of only two short lines—one pronoun, one verb, one preposition, and one noun: “M’illumino / d’immenso.” See Giuseppe Ungaretti, L’Allegria di Naufragi. (Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, 1919). 25. Risi’s introduction to the English translation of Bruck’s debut also considers a specific set of life experiences that, in his view, are shared by a number of Hungarian artists in the twentieth century: “A common trait among the Hungarian artists that I have known is the peasant and proletarian roots of the majority of them. In touch with a village or working class reality, tempered from childhood in the school of suffering, they still have a remarkable faith at their disposal as well as an unconquerable force that is called love of life. Even Edith shared in the depth of faith that often triumphs over personal loneliness and anguish” (ix). 26. Illyés Gyula, Két kéz (due mani), trans. Nelo Risi and Edith Bruck (Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1966). Gyula’s text was originally published in 1950. 27. See ch. 1 for a discussion of the impact Petőfi’s poetry had on the novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo. 28. The three sections consist, respectively, of fifty quatrains, forty-one quatrains, and thirty quatrains accompanied by a single couplet (which precedes the last one). 29. I leave any and all considerations on the quality of Bruck’s translations to the community of Magyarophone scholars of Translation Studies and modern poetry. In light of my own linguistic limitations, I also must refrain from commenting on the rhyme scheme, meter, and diction employed by Bruck’s favorite Hungarian poets, as well as her ability to render these features in Italian. 30. Attila Jószef, Poesie 1922–1937, trans. Edith Bruck (Milano: Mondadori, 2002). 31. Miklós Radnóti, Mi capirebbero le scimmie, trans. Edith Bruck (Roma: Donzelli, 2009). 32. A movement for the unification and independence of Italy.

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Conclusions

Jewish Identity in Italy and “The Two Paths” What does it mean to you to be Jewish? I was made into a Jew—Primo Levi replies in his sweet, persuasive voice.—Before Hitler I was a middle-class Italian kid. The experience of the Race Laws helped me to recognize, amongst the many threads that made up the Jewish Tradition, a few that I liked. For example? . . . That rapprochement with tradition was confirmed by my experience in Auschwitz, by my first contact with a civilization I didn’t know, that of the Ashkenazi Jewry of Eastern Europe. . . . As far as I’m concerned, in spite of my deep attraction for Jewish culture, history, and tradition, I must admit that the foundation of my cultural formation is predominantly Italian. . . . At home, do you observe any Jewish traditions? No, nothing. —Primo Levi interviewed by Edith Bruck in 1976

When Edith Bruck interviewed Primo Levi in 1976 she asked her friend and fellow survivor a handful of pointed questions on his Jewish identity. The Italian title of this piece, “Ebreo fino a un certo punto,” can be translated in English as “Jewish Up to a Certain Point.” Primo Levi’s degree of assimilation into the dominant culture in Italy does not come as a surprise. The story of how he came to recognize his Jewish identity under fascism has been well-documented in multiple interviews and biographies over the years,1 but it was also clearly described in his first book, Se questo è un uomo. Having been captured with a group of partisans by the fascist militia in December of 1943, Levi and his companions were 163

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arrested in the mountains of Northern Italy on suspicion of antifascist resistance activities. After being led into town and subjected to interrogation, Levi feared that admitting to being a partisan would lead to torture and certain death, so he declared himself an “Italian citizen of the Jewish race” instead (cittadino italiano di razza ebraica, 13). Although Primo Levi was and still is arguably the best-known and most widely celebrated Italian Jewish artist from any time period, both in Italy and around the world, it would be shortsighted to assume that his experiences were representative of the average Jewish person’s life in Italy in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, his name is certainly the first that comes to mind when one thinks of the Italian Jewish population. To this day he is the most recognized and recognizable Jewish voice in Italy. It’s hard to imagine what his perspective on Judaism might have been if he hadn’t felt forced to claim his own Jewish identity in an effort to stay alive.2 Upon his capture there was, of course, no way for him to know that being interned at the camp in Fossoli with other Italian Jews from the area would eventually result in deportation to Auschwitz. Levi first came into contact with Ashkenazi traditions in the Lager, by interacting with Jews from Eastern Europe,3 but in spite of his personal interest in Jewish culture and history, he didn’t observe any Jewish traditions at home with his family. Let us consider this statement for a moment: he didn’t observe any Jewish traditions at home with his family, yet there are some scholars (see chapter 3) who treat Primo Levi as if he were the only Italian Jewish artist who’s worth studying. Depending on which selection of English-language texts one chooses to consult, be they anthologies or works of criticism, Levi might come to be (uncritically) viewed as an embodiment of the quintessential (or only) Italian Jew, especially outside of Italy where the lengthy and inconsistent process of translating works of literature leaves a number of authors totally or partially out of the reach of an international readership. The study of Jewish identity and culture in Italy has been the subject of numerous studies, and these resources have increased exponentially since the end of the Cold War.4 Most of these are works that tend to “look at the past,” so to speak, as opposed to operating in the present. While it’s certainly true that there are not many active Jewish artists and intellectuals in Italy today, it’s important to note that the majority of the authors, filmmakers, and important Jewish thinkers in contemporary Italy do not receive the same level of attention as their antecedents. One example of many is that of Antonio Debenedetti. His late father Giacomo, whose career as an academic and a screenwriter was discussed in chapter 2, only wrote a couple of “literary” works, preferring to devote most of his time to scholarly pursuits, specifically textual analysis, literary criticism, and the study of cinema. Although Giacomo Debenedetti’s work on the Holocaust (the text entitled October 16, 1943) has been published in English as well as a handful of other European languages, (such as French, German, and Dutch,) Antonio’s lengthy, award-winning body of work as a novelist and short story writer has yet to be translated. The same could be said for Giacomino, the touching biographical



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homage to his father Antonio published in 1994. As in the case of Italy’s most popular filmic depictions of Jewish life, with minor sporadic exceptions in the literary spectrum, the general public in Italy and abroad is typically only exposed to or aware of representations of Jews in World War II—specifically images of antisemitic discrimination and the Shoah. While this tendency might be one of the reasons for the steady gain in popularity of a writer like Edith Bruck (given her frequent focus on the aftermath of the Shoah in contemporary society), it is also grounds for up-and-coming Jewish artists to view the Holocaust as a subject they cannot afford to avoid engaging in their own work. As such, the current cultural environment in Italy would be complicit in compelling some younger and highly prolific Jewish artists to address the Shoah in some capacity, regardless of whether they feel they can speak with any sort of legitimacy on the subject. The reality of this situation, which goes well beyond Italy’s borders and concerns both the producers and the consumers of various forms of media in the twenty-first century, is that the Holocaust has become an incredibly popular subject both in the arts and in the world of academia. More than anything, one should always keep in mind that careers have been made (and broken) by projects focused on the Holocaust, and this is true for the university environment with respect to research institutions, as well as in the world of literature and cinema. Although in financial terms the stakes in the academic world might not seem very high to the average outsider, the same cannot be said for the film industry. Even a work of literature on the Holocaust, autobiographical or fictionalized, could be worth millions in sales if it were to become a bestseller, at which point its value would be reinterpreted in much larger terms by the movie industry anyway,5 since filmmakers are always on the hunt for a good book to adapt for the screen. These financial stakes are only one part of the equation, however. The degree of assimilation of the average Italian Jew makes the Holocaust an even more important point of reference for those Jewish residents of Italy (citizens and immigrants alike) who have found no other means to pursue some form of contact, some level of engagement, some sense of identification with the broader Jewish community. All of these factors point to the important quasi-documentary function performed by Edith Bruck and other writer-witnesses in Italy, which has the unintended effect of making Holocaust survivors central figures among the Italian-based Jewry—and the central position they occupy, in turn, transforms them into living and breathing iconic examples of Jewishness. To gain access to a clear and brief summary of the existing subdivisions and the variety of backgrounds that define the Jewish population of Italy, one need only consult Rabbi Barbara Aiello’s 2011 essay entitled “The Jews of Sicily and Calabria: The Italian Anusim That Nobody Knows,” which draws from well-known historical texts in offering a simple breakdown of the Italian Jewish population:6 The Jews of Italy fall into four categories historically. . . . The first group, the Jews of Israel, or “Italkim,” are those who trace their ancestry to Rome.

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Conclusions These include those brought by the Romans as slaves and the scouts who were hoping to hire mercenary soldiers to help the Maccabbes in their fight against King Antiochius. The second group, the Sephardim, is sometimes divided into to two subgroups, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who arrived in Italy after the expulsions from Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497, and the Kingdom of Naples in 1533, and the Levantine Sephardim who in the 1500s received permission to live in selected areas, e.g., Florence and Ancona, because of the increased participation of Sephardim in trade with the Balkan countries. The remaining two groups include Ashkenazi Jews, who lived in northern Italy, and finally the Jews found near Asti who were expelled from France at different times during the Middle Ages. (5)

In spite of this cultural and ritualistic divide, which might lead one to expect to find great discord among different Jewish communities in Italy, there is actually a surprising degree of homogeneity, a perceived sense of brotherhood which transcends the historical differences between them. A recent essay by Christoph Miething makes the argument that “Italian Judaism lies outside the distinction made between Ashkenazim and Sephardim: Italian Jews see themselves as the crucible of locally shaped tradition, concerned as they are with a synthesis of Sephardic-Cabbalistic and Ashkenazi-Talmudic Judaism” (142–43).7 While there are certainly noteworthy points of diversion between different Jewish rites, the average Italian Jew has little to no idea how to go about distinguishing between them.8 This paradoxical state of affairs makes it all the more urgent for the study of an author like Edith Bruck (who is conscious and knowledgeable of her own Jewish roots) to be factored into the critical discourse on representations of Jewish life in modern Italy. The need to select an artist who is “sufficiently Jewish” for this purpose (at the expense of others who may nevertheless have something worthwhile to contribute to the process) calls into question the very definition of what it means to be Jewish in Italy—not as a standard designed to compare the Italian Jewish experience with that of other communities in other nations, but rather as an effort to inform and educate the large majority of assimilated Jews on the histories and customs of their ancestors. This conundrum places specific artists in a rarefied category of representatives of Jewishness, making them ambassadors both within and outside their respective communities. It also highlights the fact that a significant number of Italophone Jews have little or no connection to Jewish culture in any of its forms. Let’s consider the case of Alessandro Piperno, a successful living Italian writer and literary critic of Jewish descent. When he was interviewed by Fabio Pierangeli in 2008, Piperno stated that he does not consider himself Jewish, which might be due to the fact that he was Catholic on his mother’s side, since many Jews believe in the law of matrilineage.9 Beyond this personal detail, however, he lamented the need to create more faculty positions in Judaic studies in Italy, and he cited the work of Israeli



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and American programs at the University level as models to be imitated. Given his interest in Jewish culture and the conflicted nature of his own identity, which causes him to reject being labeled Jewish while also seeking to contribute to a literary effort to define and narrate the Italian Jewish experience, one might say that Alessandro Piperno is a perfect living example of the unpredictable longterm effects of nationalism, conformism, and assimilation, which have clearly had an impact on his family. Said impact has trickled down to Piperno from previous generations, but it has not prevented him from being able to observe the rift that exists between Jewish writers in Italy. Piperno speaks of “two lines,” two paths that Italian artists have walked with respect to their Jewishness: My impression is this: it’s that in reality there are two guiding lines . . . two lines even in Judaism of the Diaspora. There’s one part, the one we could call the line of removal; and on the other side . . . there’s identity. [For the] line of removal the names and the texts come to mind immediately: Italo Svevo . . . certainly Alberto Moravia. . . . The case of Elsa Morante, equally fascinating—and they’re those Jews who for different reasons . . . chose not to tackle Jewish themes . . . and to behave as if they were secular authors. On the other hand, instead, I was saying that there are the authors of identity. The founder of this line in Italy . . . is surely Primo Levi, but other writers as well who were active . . . in those same years. . . . There’s another writer, or rather, Bassani, . . . who belongs to the same line, that’s the line of identity.

In his efforts to recognize the most famous Jewish “writers of identity” Piperno references two of the best-known Jews in the twentieth-century Italian literary canon: Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani, both of whom engaged World War II, antisemitism, and the Shoah in their bodies of work. In the interview, Piperno goes on to describe how these two authors take different approaches to the Shoah. Levi, he observes, addresses the experience of the camps from the perspective of a survivor, while Bassani shares the stories of those people who died in the camps before they were deported,10 including the time frame when his city of Ferrara fell within the borders of the newly constituted ultra-fascist Italian Social Republic—Hitler’s puppet regime with Mussolini placed symbolically at the helm from 1943 to 1945. Even though there is some logic behind Piperno’s subdivision of Italian Jewish authors in two lines based on their individual decisions to embrace or neglect their own Jewishness, the evidence from which he draws in making these selections is flawed: the equation between Jewish identity (or a generic adherence to a “Jewish cause”) and the engagement of the Shoah in one’s art is highly problematic at best. European Jews, whether or not they were subjected to deportation and imprisonment by the Third Reich, are not and cannot ever be defined by this experience. Auschwitz does not make one Jewish any more than Primo Levi was “made” Jewish by the fascist regime. The regime forced him to consider his own Jewish ancestry by disenfranchising all Italian Jews, and by no longer considering them Italian at all. This rupture in

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one’s sense of self, this obligation to distinguish between blood, faith, and a feeling of national belonging, is merely the first, most immediate effect of a methodical system of state-sanctioned discrimination. If we think of Jewish culture and Jewish identity in a more sensible fashion, and allow ourselves to set aside the experience of the Holocaust as a horrible anomaly instead of making it the principal, defining characteristic of the Jewish people, a different set of criteria can begin to come into focus. For example, the use of words in Hebrew or Yiddish, mixed in with the Italian, is a clear indicator that the author possesses some knowledge of Jewish culture. Beyond these particular linguistic elements, which can be found, to varying degrees, in both Levi and Bassani’s work (as well as Bruck’s), another factor is an author’s awareness of Jewish customs, from the dietary restrictions and the familial traditions to the lengthy and complex history of the Jewish faith. It is in this context that an investigation of Jewish identity in Italian literature would come to address the works of Bruck and Bassani from a perspective that Primo Levi’s writings seldom allow for: Giorgio Bassani and Edith Bruck can draw from their own experiences in their fictional representations of Jewish life, the quotidian nature of its rituals, the customs, and the religious significance associated with various holidays. For Primo Levi, writing about Jewish customs or employing the use of Yiddish (as he did in the novel Se non ora, quando?) or a Judeo-Italian dialect (in the short story “Argon,” from the collection Il sistema periodico) involves stepping outside of his own comfort zone, and taking on a significant amount of research to achieve the authenticity he strives for.11 None of these cultural elements were mentioned by Piperno in his interview, and we are left to conclude that he may not view them as important indicators of Jewish identity. Instead, aside from his aforementioned concern with the treatment of the Shoah in writing, the only other element of Jewish culture that he acknowledges is a concern for the health and fate of the state of Israel. These two notions, the Shoah and the state of Israel, have apparently taken on the function of a litmus test for Jewishness in Piperno’s mind, to the extent that they are in play in his own prose as well. In talking about his fictional debut Con le peggiori intenzioni,12 which won the Premio Campiello for best first novel, Piperno clearly explains his own vision of Jewish identity: I show some Jews . . . who have chosen the path of removal, of the oblivion of Jewishness. In my novel Jewishness does exist, but it’s something not to give any weight to, something to be removed. My characters are either attracted or disgusted, depending on the character, by the state of Israel or by the memory of the Shoah. . . . In reality I think the only way to engage the Jewish cause, . . . is to . . . ask oneself questions about the problem of Israel. Israel was born on the blood of those who died, so it’s not important to speak of the dead, it’s important to speak of Israel and the children of the dead. A friend of mine, who is much cruder and less scholarly than myself, a friend of the Jewish community, used



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to say to me: “The newspapers only care about the dead Jews, and nobody gives a damn about the Jews who are alive.” Well, I think we should probably start from here.

Levi’s sense of his own Jewishness evolved though a complex mélange of personal experiences (including his time in Auschwitz), interactions with other Jews, and methodical study. In light of his miraculous return from the camps and the force with which his Holocaust testimony impacted the literary scene in modern Italy, his stature among the Jews of Italy is quasi-mythical. More than any other Italian-born author, Levi made the Shoah the central focus of much of his published work, to the point that in Italian culture his name has become synonymous with Auschwitz and antisemitism. Thinking back to Piperno’s description of the “two paths” (identity vs. removal) Italian Jews must choose from, his praise for Primo Levi’s writings makes perfect sense. His final statement from the interview with Pierangeli, however, would seem to suggest an urgent desire to look beyond the memory of the Holocaust in an effort to focus on the current needs and hopes of the Jewish population. If we focus specifically on their depictions of Jewish life in Europe, and their (albeit) limited concentration on a conglomerate of cultural constructs (the use of Hebrew or Yiddish, knowledge and familiarity with Jewish customs and religious traditions), Edith Bruck actually has much more in common with Giorgio Bassani than Primo Levi.13 By focusing briefly on the cultural affinity between Bruck and Bassani, the present volume aims to give a symbolic amount of space to Alessandro Piperno’s chief concern, which he attributes to an uncultured, unnamed friend of his: Italian society seems to only care about the Shoah, at the expense of a true concern and care for the cultural and artistic patrimony of one of Italy’s oldest, most resourceful, and self-reliant ethno-religious minorities. Ironically, the only extant study to compare Bruck and Bassani happens to be entirely focused on literary representations of antisemitism and the Shoah. In her article entitled “Bassani e Bruck: due scrittori (non) comparabili?” (“Bassani and Bruck: Two (in)comparable writers”), Hanna Gierzynska-Zalewska searches for similarities and points of contact between the narratives produced by these two Jewish novelists.14 As is customary when analyzing Italian Holocaust literature, Gierzynska-Zalewska cites from one of Primo Levi’s works in the introductory paragraphs, but beyond Levi’s essay “The Drowned and the Saved” she also addresses two works by Giorgio Bassani15 as well as one by Bruck,16 specifically, her first book. This study makes a point to highlight a shared objective that brings the two authors together, namely, a desire to safeguard and conserve memories. That said, aside from this common intent the article in question does not recognize any particular affinity between the authors: their style of writing, their approach to the delicate subject of the Holocaust, the perspective and experiences of their protagonists, and the national cultures which shape Bruck and Bassani’s prose, respectively, truly don’t present many intersections (Gierzynska-Zalewska, 160).

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Gierzynska-Zalewska rightfully underlines the notion that Bassani focuses primarily on the citizens of Ferrara, without ever penning a single description of a concentration camp. She also cites his tendency to give life to adult characters who can speak to the struggles of life in war-torn Italy, contrasting Bassani’s protagonists with Bruck’s child-like vision of Auschwitz (as presented in the autobiographical work Chi ti ama così). What is lacking in Gierzynska-Zalewska’s article, nevertheless, is a simple recognition of the many doors she has opted to leave unopened. While there is certainly some value in comparing Bruck’s first publication (the first of more than twenty) to two of Bassani’s best-known texts, such an operation is far from exhaustive. If Gierzynska-Zalewska had merely consulted one additional work by Bruck, namely, the collection Andremo in città, she might have come to realize that a significant number of stories from this volume actually resemble Bassani’s work by virtue of their focus on an existence that predates deportation and enslavement in Auschwitz (though it should be noted that her stories are clearly informed by the struggles caused by antisemitism and the fear of a greater impending danger). For example, Gierzynska-Zalewska might have considered a story like “Una sorpresa,” that revolves around a surprise visit by the narrator’s relatives during a Jewish holiday, or “Il pane azzimo,” in which a young Jewish girl is accused of killing Christians in order to make matzah (unleavened bread). With the exception of the text entitled “Signor Goldberg,” which takes place in Israel after the war, and the short story “Silvia,” which is set in Germany during the Holocaust, the remaining nine pieces are all based in rural Hungary between 1932 and 1944. With the exception of “Silvia,” they are also all inspired by events from the author’s life, albeit to varying degrees. Looking past any perceived bibliographic shortcomings in Gierzynska-Zalewska’s article, it’s worth noting that her analysis of the different strategies Bruck and Bassani use to engage the Shoah in their work does not reflect the most important piece of evidence on this topic: Bassani was never deported, and for this reason he did not personally experience the horrible conditions of the camps. He did lose his father in the Lager, however, and also multiple relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Gierzynska-Zalewska and Piperno both chose to highlight the fact that Bassani never takes his readers away from Ferrara, and this is certainly a factor worth exploring, yet it is disingenuous to observe that he tends to write around some of the most violent events of the twentieth century17 without alluding to the fact that he had no first-hand experiences to draw from in this process, only his knowledge of the lives and deaths of his loved ones. In other words, while it’s certainly true that Bruck (like Levi before her) approaches the Shoah from the point of view of a survivor while Bassani keeps the Lager at a distance in his writings, one should also consider that the biographical differences between Bruck and Bassani are to blame for this disparity. Although there are multiple Italian Jewish authors whose publications reflect a knowledge and appreciation for Jewish culture and the use of Jewish languages, Bruck and Bassani are easily the two most famous figures (after Primo



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Levi) to carry out such an operation in Italy. In spite of the obvious differences in their life experiences and their worldviews, Bassani and Bruck’s works imply a cultural kinship that goes beyond a desire to preserve the memory of the Shoah; one that is related to their personal understanding of Jewish traditions and commonplace vocabulary in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bruck’s use of the Yiddish terms nebich and schlimazel to describe the character of Doctor Davidson in Transit are two of many possible examples (49). The same could be said for her repeated symbolic use of the menorah in her poem Specchi (see chapter 3). A focus on Jewish speech patterns, vocabulary, customs, and traditions in selected writings by Bruck and Bassani, as well as the extent to which these artists share a common cultural heritage (which dates back to their childhood) will easily be brought to light. In the interest of brevity, only a few additional works by Bruck will be brought to bear on this discussion, as well as a single (and critically acclaimed) representative sample of Bassani’s oeuvre, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Bruck Bassani Letter to My Mother (1988) Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962) Passover (99) Kippur, judìm (349) Promised Land (124) Passover (356) Kaddish, minyan (126) Fano synagogue, goyishe, tevà Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may ra-bo sefarìm (359) b’ol-mo dee-v’ro hir-u-say, v’yam-leeeh mal-hu mignàn, talèd (360) say, b’ha-yay-hon uv-yo-may-hon, uv-ha-yay haltud (361) d’hol bays yis-ro-ayl, ba-a-go-lo u-viz’man ko- taletòd, berahà / reev, v’im-ru Omayn . . . (128) Jevarehehà Adonài veishmerèha (362) quasi-goy (370) Quanta stella c’è nel cielo (2009) Shalom, Ken (90) kibbutzim (116) medele (Yiddish) (120) Sèder (135) Haggadà, knedl (136) Chaverim / Od paam shalom le kulam (139) Shabbat (157) Privato (2010) Shema’ Yisra’el (15) Tempio (Translation: Temple) (76)

The various indicators of Jewish culture cited above, taken from handpicked works by Edith Bruck and compared to similar cultural and liturgical elements present in Bassani’s undisputed masterpiece (the novel The Garden of the

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Finzi-Continis), point to the fallibility of Alessandro Piperno’s definition of what constitutes proof of a Jewish identity: having a concern for Israel and endeavoring to preserve the memory of the Shoah are clearly not the only possible indicators of Jewishness in modern Italy. Having neglected his Jewish roots, Piperno has not studied the language and history of his father’s religion. As such, he does not consider a knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish, or any of the now defunct JudeoItalian dialects to be germane to what he terms the “Jewish cause.” Unbeknownst to Piperno, however, by calling for the institution of degree programs and endowed chairs in Judaic studies in Italy he is not just advocating a more rigorous, widespread academic investigation into the Shoah and the history of the nation of Israel among Italian scholars. On the contrary, what Piperno is promoting is the methodical study of any and all Jewish communities in the world, regardless of the language they speak at home or the country in which they are located. One of the Italophone scholars who has made very significant contributions to the study of Italian Jews in recent years is a Dutch professor from Utretcht University named Raniero Speelman. His efforts, and those of his colleague Monica Jansen, have made Utrecht’s program in Italian Studies one of the most active and innovative centers for the study of Italian Jewry in recent years. In his volume Se ti dimentico, Gerusalemme: Scrittori italiani ebrei nella Terra Promessa (“If I forget you, Jerusalem: Italian Jewish writers in the Promised Land,”) Speelman focuses on the writings of as many as twenty-seven Italian Jews as they relate to their travels (or migration) to the state of Israel.18 In the case of Edith Bruck, who, incidentally, is clearly identified as an Italian author by Speelman, the journey to Israel came at the end of August in 1948, at age 16, in the most precarious of political and historical circumstances: [O]ne night we embarked clandestinely on an Italian steamer and we set out for our promised land. Everything took place in absolute secrecy and in silence because there was still a war going on in Israel, and the English would often sink the steamships of emigrants and then take them to Cyprus. (86)

After a journey that took place in deplorable conditions, the steamer arrived in Israel and all of its passengers began singing a Zionist song. Bruck and her (then) husband were taken to a temporary refugee camp, where life was incredibly challenging, as they were made to live among thousands of strangers who had also recently migrated to the Promised Land, many of whom were mothers and fathers (or elderly) and were therefore favored by the local bureaucracy over the young, childless couple. Bruck’s time in Israel was difficult to say the least. She was twice divorced and had just remarried for a third time—a marriage of friendship and convenience with a local sailor—when she relocated to Rome, only this time she kept her husband’s name (which she still goes by to this day). Instead of reiterating much of the information contained in her autobiographical debut Chi ti ama così, the present volume will instead come to a close by acknowledging the fact that, given the opportunity to reflect on her experiences in Israel, Bruck



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later stated (in her debut) that she left the Promised Land without any regrets, because her time there had been marked by moments of joy amidst the sadness and suffering, but also because she had come to realize, at a relatively young age, that for her there was nothing unique about life in Israel: la gente era buona, cattiva, ricca e povera come in tutti gli altri paesi del mondo (“the people were good, bad, rich and poor like in every other country in the world,” 109). It is perhaps in part due to her experience living in Israel that Edith Bruck eventually came to embrace a number of political stances throughout her life which were in direct opposition to Israeli foreign policy and the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli authorities and security forces. Maybe a younger writer like Alessandro Piperno, in view of his limited knowledge of Jewish culture and history, came to automatically and uncritically side with Israel as if it were a matter of principle. Since Piperno has clearly stated that, in his opinion, the Holocaust and the formation of the state of Israel are inextricably linked, one might assume that he expects all survivors of the Shoah to be fiercely and blindly loyal toward the Promised Land. The fact that an educated son of an Italian Jewish man could be so out of touch with the pulse of the Jewish population in Italy might not come as a surprise. What is surprising, however, is the notion that Primo Levi, the very first author Piperno mentioned in his discussion of “the path of identity,” was actually very openly opposed to Israeli foreign policy in the early 1980s: “Levi . . . told friends that for the first time since the June War of 1967 he found himself actively loathing the Israeli government” (Thomson 399). Both Bruck and Levi, in fact, signed a letter denouncing Prime Minister Begin’s deployment of the Israeli military at the time. The evidence offered in this volume makes it abundantly clear that Edith Bruck’s presence in Rome has brought an additional degree of diversity to the Jewish context in Italy, at least in a literary sense. Given that three of the most prominent Jewish artists in modern Italy were Sephardim who were born with the same surname (Primo Levi, Carlo Levi, and Natalia Ginzburg, née Levi), Bruck’s magyarophone, poverty-stricken, Hasidic Orthodox upbringing has almost no parallels in the Italian artistic environment. As such, if we take Hanna Serkowska’s perspective that Bruck’s writings, as of 1987, can be considered a form of “continuation of Levi’s oeuvre” (continuazione dell’opera di Primo Levi)19 then we must be willing to also admit that Edith Bruck is currently occupying an incredibly important and complicated position in current day Italy. Regardless of whether the Italian scholarly community will ever come to a consensus on the “Italian-ness” of authors like Bruck, Pressburger, Janeczek, and Springer, these authors will continue to populate the Italian cultural milieu, and their numbers will undoubtedly grow. Eventually, and perhaps inadvertently, the mislabeling of a significant number of migrant authors in Italy will come to an end. For this day to come, however, requires the formulation of a new dominant discourse—one in which the language of artistic expression becomes the only factor taken into account when determining which country an author “belongs” to. More than

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anything, this text hopes to contribute to this important process and to be the first in a long series of monographs devoted to Edith Bruck. In conclusion, and in the interest of full disclosure, I feel it’s important to point out that there is no such thing as a perfect academic text, and this book is certainly no exception to the rule. Although this study has, on multiple occasions, been a forum for the discussion of many doors that were previously left unopened by those scholars whose efforts have preceded and informed my own, it would be naïve to assume that this same type of scrutiny will not eventually be applied to this work as well. With any luck, those scholars who follow in my footsteps will be able to benefit and learn from my failures as well as my triumphs. Furthermore, my sincerest desire is for my detractors to retrace and correct any false turns I might have taken in the process of completing this work. What matters, first and foremost, is for the study of Bruck’s lengthy and prestigious career to be brought into the light. If I have contributed in some small way to facilitating this process, I will consider this project a success.

Notes See Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2003); Carole Angier, The Double Bond. Primo Levi: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002). 2. For a broad, useful overview of the Italian Jewish experience in its various facets, see Barbara Garvin and Bernard Cooperman, eds., The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity (Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2000). For a more focused investigation of Jewish life in postwar Italy, see Michele Sarfatti, ed., Il ritorno alla vita: vicende e diritti degli ebrei dopo la seconda Guerra mondiale (Firenze: Casa Editrice Giuntina, 1998). 3. See Thomson: “Like most northern Italian Jews, the Levis claimed descent from the Sephardim (after Sefarad, Hebrew for “Spain”) who had fled anti-Semitic Castile in the fifteenth century” (6). In writing the novel Se non ora, quando? In the early 1980s Levi came to realize that “his knowledge of Ashkenazic culture was inadequate to the task.” Even Bruck feared that he was “fatally hampered by his dogged search for accuracy and authenticity” (Thomson, 382). 4. Beyond the numerous resources cited in this volume, I will limit myself to only referencing a few additional studies here. The bulk of published works on the subject of Italian Jews in the last two decades alone is simply overwhelming. The following citations, although they cover some important ground, are barely scratching the surface. In their Guide to Jewish Italy (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), Annie Sacerdoti and David Kerr attempt to trace all the sites of significance to the Jewish population in Italy, offering up a fascinating itinerary to any travelers wishing to familiarize themselves with Italian Jewish art, artifacts, or architecture. A good resource on the study of the rabbinate and their role in the Italian Jewish communities of the Renaissance was published by Robert Banfil: Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Elizabeth Schachter’s work provides an indepth investigation of the political and historical elements that weighed on the Jewish communities in nineteenth-century Italy. See “The Consequences of Unification 1.



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for the Italian Jewish Communities,” The Italianist 23 (2003): 245–57; “Perspectives of Nineteenth-Century Italian Jewry,” Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 29–69. Susan Zuccotti, on the other hand, also investigates the realities of Jewish life in the nineteenth century in her research, though her focus includes the birth of fascism and the march on Rome in 1922. Susan Zuccotti, “Italian Jews in Public Life, 1848– 1922: Between Liberalism and Anti-Semitism,” Studia Judaica 15 (2007): 82–90. For a discussion of the Jewish experience in Italy and Germany from the eighteenth century up to and including the advent of fascism in Europe, see also Mario Toscano, Integrazione e identità. L’esperienza ebraica in Italia e in Germania dall’Illuminismo al fascismo (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1998). 5. A fascinating and openly controversial book addressing the exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust was published by Norman G. Finklelstein in 2000 (New York: Verso Books). The volume in question, entitled The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, accuses American Jews in particular of exploiting the Shoah for financial and political motives, but also as a means of furthering the interests of the state of Israel. Finkelstein sees this industry as a problematic and corrupting force in Jewish culture. Considering the amount of money that flows into the coffers of studio executives and high-power producers and directors when films and television shows win internationally coveted awards (e.g., the Oscars, the Golden Globes), the regularity with which many Holocaust-themed products have been praised and recognized over the years is a factor that cannot be overlooked when considering why so many works on the Shoah are released throughout the world on a semi-yearly basis. 6. Barbara Aiello, “The Jews of Sicily and Calabria: The Italian Anusim That Nobody Knows,” Serrastretta, CZ: Italian Jewish Cultural Center of Calabria, 2011, http://rabbibarbara.com/files/The_Jews_of_Sicily_and_Calabria.pdf. 7. Christoph Miething, “Ital’Yah Letteraria: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Italy,” in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide, edited by Vivian Liska and Thomas Nolden, 139–59 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). 8. On the topic of potential subdivisions among Italian Jews adhering to different rites, Bassani’s narrator Giorgio from the Giardino dei Finzi-Contini says the following: “it’s a fact that Jews—Sephardic and Ashkenazic; western and Levantine, Tunisian, Berber, Yemenite, and even Ethiopian—in whatever part of the earth, under whatever sky history has created them, are and always will be Jews, that is to say, close relatives.” See Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, trans. William Weaver, Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Italia, 1999). 9. Fabio Pierangeli, “Interviste a cura di Fabio Pierangeli con gli scrittori: Eraldo Affinati, Alessandro Piperno, Erri de Luca,” DVD, Tra storia e immaginazione: gli scrittori ebrei di lingua italiana si raccontano, ed. Hanna Serkowska (Kraków: RABID, 2008). 10. This strategy is also employed by Bruck in a number of stories from the volume Andremo in città. The difference is that Bruck lived through both experiences. Her life was ripped apart by discrimination and violence (first in her native village and later in the Lager), while Bassani cannot offer firsthand accounts of the horrors of Auschwitz. This takes nothing away from Bassani’s prestigious oeuvre, but it’s a notion that Piperno failed to acknowledge. 11. For an eloquent and lengthy (yet necessarily incomplete) study of the usage of Hebrew and Yiddish by a variety of Italian Jewish writers, see Raniero Speelman’s seminal article from 2004, “La lingua della letteratura italo-ebraica contemporanea

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12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

Conclusions fra prestiti e traduzione,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 70, no. 1 (2004): 47–77. The author takes twenty-two works of literature by nineteen authors into consideration in this study, including the aforementioned novel Se non ora quando? and the short story “Argon” by Primo Levi. Bassani and Bruck’s publications are not vetted in this study, though our Hungarian author’s name does appear: Speelman asks himself an important question, which has yet to be properly addressed by the scholarly community: “Una domanda ulteriore è quella se gli scrittori immigrati in Italia (Pressburger, Bruck, Springer, Janeczek, Silvera, Lago), si differenzino da quelli nati e cresciuti in Italia” (“Another question is if the writers who immigrated to Italy [Pressburger, Bruck, Springer, Janeczek, Silvera, Lago] are any different from those who were born and raised in Italy”), 50 Milano: Mondadori, 2005. In her essay entitled “Dall’Ungheria all’Italia e di ritorno—Edith Bruck tra Imre Kertész e Primo Levi,” in L’Italia e l’Europa centro-orientale. Gli ultimi cento anni, edited by Piotr Salwa, 80–90 (Semper: Warszawa), Hanna Serkowska endeavored to compare and contrast Bruck’s writings to those of Primo Levi. It’s worth noting that this study dates the novel Transit at 1995 (when it was actually rereleased by Marsilio) as opposed to 1978 (the year it was first published by Bompiani in Milan). This chronological confusion at the bibliographical level leads Serkowska to misread Transit as a reply to Primo Levi’s concerns for the growth of the Holocaust denial movement in the 1980s. Aside from this particular issue, however, Serkowska’s essay is a worthwhile read, especially for those seeking a piece of scholarship that engages a significant number of Bruck’s works at once. Hanna Gierzynska-Zalewska, “Bassani e Bruck: due scrittori (non) comparabili?” Tra storia e immaginazione: gli scrittori ebrei di lingua italiana si raccontano, ed. Hanna Serkowska (Kraków: RABID, 2008). The works in question are Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini and Una lapide in via Mazzini. Although this essay has its imperfections, it is also evidence of a certain intuition on the part of its author. In fact, since Levi and Bruck are almost obvious sources of comparison given their status as writer-survivors, Gierzynska-Zalewska should be recognized for being the first scholar to actively measure Bruck’s writing against Bassani’s. This same strategy is used rather effectively, in an attempt to progressively build up more and more tension in the reader as the story progresses, in the case of Bassani’s novella Una notte del ’43. This text is contained in the volume Cinque storie ferraresi. Raniero Speelman, Se ti dimentico, Gerusalemme: Scrittori italiani ebrei nella Terra Promessa (Firenze: Giuntina, 2010). Hanna Serkowska, “Edith Bruck tra commemorazione e ‘liquidazione’,” Tra storia e immaginazione: gli scrittori ebrei di lingua italiana si raccontano, ed. Hanna Serkowska (Kraków: RABID, 2008), 166.

Appendix one

Interview with Edith Bruck Translated by Elizabeth Hellman

The following interview took place in June of 2006. Originally published in Italian Quarterly, it is reproduced here in translation with the permission of the editor, Umberto Mariani of Rutgers University. The brief introductory text below has been modified from its original version to avoid repeating information that has already been cited in this volume. Of Hungarian origin, Edith Bruck moved to Rome in 1954, where she lives to this day. She has been active in the Italian literary scene for more than five decades. The topic of the Shoah often appears in the works of this writer-witness, who has visited thousands of young students in Italian schools to ensure that the horrors of the Second World War are not forgotten. Bruck is a vivacious and generous person in every sense, and she welcomed me into her living room as if we were old friends, putting me immediately at ease and insisting that we speak informally. Those who have read her latest book of poetry, Specchi (“Mirrors”), will not have any trouble imagining the setting in which we spoke for the first time: the photos that accompany the poem in question offer a somewhat accurate representation of the author’s private space, of the objects that adorn the room in which her works are born. Particularly notable is the menorah that dominates the room, placed on a bookshelf in a central position, on top of an impressive collection of texts from the best-known modern authors. Next to the sofa, under a window, there is an old Olivetti, the typewriter used by Bruck to bring her characters to life. In this interview, she alludes in particular to a thematic ghetto in which she feels isolated by the Italian publishing industry, but ultimately she touches on a variety of very different topics. The author discusses her friendship with

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Primo Levi and her cinematographic and literary experiences, but she doesn’t avoid talking about politics, history, and the current state of degradation in mass media. One of the most singular aspects of her way of expressing herself is her frequent use of a typically Roman pronunciation, alternated with some rare moments in which her accent betrays her Hungarian origins. The result is a speech pattern that is, to say the least, unique, which reminds the listener of the importance of appreciating and opening oneself to all of the cultures of the world, to all of the different voices that populate an ever more diverse Europe. This interview with Edith Bruck confirms the importance of her relationship with her readers, to whom she offers herself freely and honestly—as she has, for instance, through her latest poetic composition. Balma: Several anglophone critics have been interested in your writings. Among them, Adalgisa Giorgio, Brenda Webster, and Rita Wilson stand out in particular. These scholars have focused largely on your novels, analyzing them in detail for both style and content. With respect to your poetry, some of which has already been translated into English, critics still need to offer a sufficient response. How do you see the relationship between your poetry and your works of prose? What are the differences and similarities for you between the act of writing a book of poetry and the composition of a novel? Bruck: They are two different things. Even if I talk more or less about the same things, poetry allows you to say so many things in just one verse, while in prose you develop a story quite differently. Poetry, at least for me, I could say, always comes from my gut, and it has its own style, it has its own form, its own musicality, its own rhythm, and what I have to say is much more brief than what I have to say in a novel—it doesn’t matter if the topic is similar, or if the content is similar. It is a different cry in my opinion, a very brief one, and not a prolonged cry, if we want to call it that, from that of a story, or a novel. I believe that it’s a totally different elaboration, but I really almost never plan, elaborate, or think about any of my books. Let’s say that I always begin, in poetry, from an image that struck me, an image only, while in prose I always start from an event, from a real base, an episode that wounded me deeply, which left me with an indelible mark. And so I know, at the moment that I live that experience in real life, that if not today, if not tomorrow, maybe in two years or three it will become a book. Maybe I can offer a brief example, but there are many examples. (Excluding my first autobiographical book, naturally.) As far as Transit is concerned, it happens that I was attacked in Yugoslavia for being Hungarian. Then, again in Yugoslavia, on another occasion, I was working as a consultant for Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, Kapò, with Susan Strasberg. I lived through two episodes, two different experiences in the same identical place, at different times. Both were bad: whether it was the film Andremo in Città shot by my husband (from one of my stories), where they broke my wrist for being Hungarian, or Pontecorvo’s film, where he became a sort of commander-director of a camp and was scaring me with fake corpses.



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He is usually very serious, but he treated the whole thing in a very facetious, somewhat cruel, manner, maybe to diffuse the situation. When I told him, “No, they didn’t eat that way,” he responded, “I am the commander of the camp now.” After a month I left [the job], in fact the first half in my opinion is much better than the second, with the Soviet army gloriously liberating the camp. He was a Communist and sort of did things his own way. The liberation didn’t exactly happen like that. When you direct a film, in my opinion, authenticity interests you up to a certain point, but the director or the artist can change things according to his own ideas. I left the job because I have to say that I suffered like a dog; it was an intolerable torture. And after a few years, I wrote Transit, and Gillo didn’t speak to me for ten years. Then there was the intervention of my husband, who said, “Listen, Gillo. Enough. Why won’t you say hello to Edith?”—but I didn’t write the book out of revenge, this should be very clear. I don’t have a vindictive feeling towards anyone, I don’t hate anyone, not even the Germans; they always ask me this when I go to the schools to talk. Luckily I’m free of this very terrible and negative feeling that poisons life, your life. I feel very blessed for this, my not feeling hatred towards anyone. What I really feel instead is injustice. I figured that, sooner or later, this lament of mine against these injustices that I experienced, because they broke my wrist, or because Pontecorvo behaved wrongly, not like a friend, because he was in fact a friend, I thought it right to denounce it all. Transit, as many of my other books, is a testimony against abuses of power, oppression, the false accusations of a totalitarian regime that changed truth into lie, an offense into an accusation . . . and then, in my opinion, the actions of the newspapers, of the country, of the police also needed to be denounced. Balma: In the book, Signora Auschwitz, where you talk about your numerous visits to schools, the novel Il Silenzio degli Amanti is defined as “a gimmick, a healthy idea” that allowed you to explore a character who was different from the protagonists of your other books, something that also afforded you a brief pause from other, difficult subjects that you tend to address. What difficulties did you encounter while immersing yourself in the character of a male protagonist, moreover, one with homosexual tendencies? Bruck: I don’t believe that any diversity is foreign to me. Signora Auschwitz gives an image, I think, of Italian schools, of teachers, of the whole environment, of this immense task, this continual telling of what I lived, reliving this tearing away of the skin, the wounds, the clothes, and no one realizes how tiring it is, what it means to ultimately be a very discomforting witness for Europe and the West. No one understands the suffering that is relived, and everyone thinks that it’s your obligation to testify, rather than to teach what happened yesterday or what happened five hundred years ago. I believe that Europe—I hope—is still ashamed for what happened, and hasn’t totally faced this tragedy of the twentieth century. For this reason, we survivors, there are very few of us now, go around visiting schools like we’re demented, like the last of the Mohicans, telling

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what they’re already negating, distorting, deforming, and continuing to confuse, putting all war victims together as if they were the same. And the persecuted has to talk about his experiences, not the persecutor! It’s something really paradoxical, crazy even. The victim has to explain how he was tortured, but the torturer doesn’t have to explain why he tortured. Europe has been silent for a long time to the East and to the West because it was either a passive accomplice or an active one; we are the ones who have to yell, because every day we fear more and more that things will be not only distorted, but forgotten. For us, every day is a memory, but we don’t do it for ourselves. I have to say that I don’t do it for me, because what happened to me, what I lived, cannot happen to me anymore, but it can happen to you . . . it can happen to someone else. Because torture happens every day. We are living in such a dangerous time precisely now, when everything can and does happen, if not to you then to someone else. But it’s absurd to think that what happens to another person doesn’t concern you, because what happens does concern you, because you know everything. Today, you can’t say “I don’t know” like you could sixty years ago, because today we see and know everything, we read everything, there’s television, the mass media. If we pretend not to know, we are complicit in what happens, not innocent. We cannot think that we’re innocent simply because we weren’t the ones torturing and oppressing, or committing an injustice against someone because we don’t consider him our equal. I believe that everyone should absolutely have his own dignity, his own right to his own diversity, and be respected for what he is. And I believe that this is taught. By talking about Auschwitz, I am talking about today, about what happens today in Europe and the world, about diversity, and about the culture of the other that we don’t know, and so we fear, and maybe we discriminate and we exploit. I believe instead that multiculturalism is a treasure for us, and we should learn to live together with mutual respect and equal rights. I hope so. I live from hope to hope, man doesn’t live without that—he can’t. And it’s also important to point out that among a hundred, among two hundred, among a thousand Germans I found at least one good one, and this one allowed me to be here now to speak with you. Because these rare examples of human beings, these rare lights in the shadow, in the darkness, are the ones who offered you an old glove, or a potato, or just the potato skin. There was that cook in Dachau, who asked me, “What’s your name?”—these people let me come home, and go forward. I believe that hope is never lost. We need, however, not one in a thousand, but at least ten in a thousand. We can’t say, “There was Ghandi,” or, “There was Martin Luther King.” Do you see what I mean? But they are the ones who keep the flame alive, these few people. So, in a way, even with my books, with my writing, my poetry, my efforts in the schools, I hope to create other people who understand, who bring hope to the best of man. Because you should bring out the best part of man, given that in every man there is a good part, except that various circumstances bring out the worst (and reinforce it), they weaken the



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best part—for personal interests, for exploitation, for corruption, because man is easily corrupted—and thus I believe that you should look for that little positive corner that exists, and favor it. Balma: The novel Transit is associated with some of your other books because of its exploration of the concept of the voyage, and the effect that a state of transit can have on an individual. It differs, however, from a number of your works for its strong presence of specific cinematic elements, with the obvious exception of the novel L’attrice from 1995. How would you compare Transit to your other novels? And what was behind your choice in this case to give the names of only two characters, that is, the protagonist and Doctor Davidson? Bruck: The doctor, his name is Gusman, and not Davidson. Balma: No, no . . . Davidson, in the novel. Bruck: Oh . . . Because his name was, in reality, Gusman. He is a survivor, a defeated man, honest, alone and sort of an orphan in the world. He was weak, he was a character who tore you apart, a shadow, and in that moment when I was taken to the hospital, and I saw his name, (which in the book is Davidson) and which I don’t even remember anymore, because, I confess, I don’t ever reread my books, never, not one. My poetry, yes, in the schools here and there, but my novels, no . . . he was very courageous, because he was insisting on denouncing the assault. Maybe that was the first time he had done something courageous. Because he knew that I was a survivor, the occasion presented itself for him to become a bit of a hero in some way. Even at the cost, at most, of losing his job. He lost his family, his sons, and he was a very sad man who made me think of the Hungarian poet Radnóti, who died in the concentration camps. He was a fairly striking figure. I asked him, “But doesn’t this denunciation hurt you?”—He was silent, and at two in the morning, he called the police, telling them that I had been assaulted. In the morning, the newspapers didn’t come out, only the local ones that didn’t know anything. On a national level, all of the editorial offices of the newspapers were ordered not to publish the news. Then they published it the next day, saying that I was the one who offended the government. So they turned the truth completely on its head; I became the guilty one, and thus Transit was born. The incredible thing was that I fought for three weeks and there was never so much as a line about it in the newspapers. They even threatened to block the film,1 they said that they wouldn’t let the film out of the country. I have to say, without any pretense of being a heroine for this, that I was never ready to accept a compromise of any kind. But you were asking me something about L’attrice? What the two books have in common? I lost my train of thought, that terrible story in Yugoslavia still bothers me.

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Balma: Actually, the comment about L’attrice was only a clarification, since I had said that many of your books don’t talk about cinematic issues, but that L’attrice was another exception because it has, in fact, this influence from the world of cinema. Bruck: Yes, because I worked in film, so I know it well enough; I made three films, I did television for a very long time, so I could also imagine, for instance, in L’attrice, an actress who, changing her name and fleeing her own past, finds refuge in acting, in fiction. It occurred to me many times that, “if you could only flee from this past, if you could forget at least one moment”; so an actress can hide herself in a character. So, I wrote this book called L’attrice, and at the moment when she returns to reality, the novel ends. She will not be able to act or to be another person, and so she turns back into herself, and it finishes there—I mean that the performance is over. And so her entire life passes her by while she is acting and hiding. The moment she comes back to reality, that reality is so hard and so difficult that, what’s more, she almost goes crazy—so that’s how it ends. And then, the reason that I concluded L’attrice in that way is pretty interesting,2 because one day my friend Primo Levi said to me, “You know, I would like one day, I don’t know when or how, to mention all of the concentration camps in one book, all 1,634 of them.” And I said, “Well, be my guest, I would go crazy.” Then when we lost Primo, somehow, writing L’attrice, I thought, “Here is the occasion, I can do something,” and I mentioned 800 of them, not more, because I thought I really would go crazy if I were to mention all of them there. I wrote to the archive in Berlin, and I received all of the names of the concentration camps, they sent them to me, and I copied this infinite list, really infinite—800 names—then I stopped because I couldn’t do it anymore. The setting is in Germany when the protagonist returns; just to continue acting, the poor little thing, she returns to Germany, where her performance finishes. So, in summary, to imagine a cinematographic world, a movie set, having been a director, for me it’s not difficult at all. Then, I always think of my little brother whom I lost, and so I insert this story of my little brother in some way, whether in my poems, or in various books, so, ultimately, it is not difficult to add these things that still hurt me a lot today, and to remember them by sprinkling them throughout my books, these episodes, these little things. I wrote with quite a bit of—I won’t say ease, because it is never easy for me to write, it is never easy to construct a novel, and no one can imagine how hard it is, how difficult it is, and how much effort it takes; but, as Beckett would say, I don’t know how to do anything else. Balma: As you confirmed in your recent letter, an English translation of your book, Lettera alla Madre, is coming out in the United States, edited by Brenda Webster and Gabriella Romani. Are there certain books among those you have written that you would like to see translated first? And what would you like to say to the American public, who is not very familiar with your works and who, until now, could only read a fraction of them?



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Bruck: Unfortunately almost nothing is translated, maybe some poetry and my first book, Chi ti ama così, by a small publisher; however I believe that it was a very limited release. I want to say to the American public exactly what I want to say to the Italian public, to the French public, or to the world. I absolutely want to tell what I have lived through, because not enough is known, so that people don’t forget and so that they don’t deny, so that people don’t distort what happened. I believe that we must—we are absolutely obligated—to let people know what happened, so that it doesn’t happen anymore, as Primo Levi would say—because it is happening, even if it’s happening in a different way or for different reasons, all over the world. I would like to tell, as an innocent person can, what it meant to live such an extreme experience for racial reasons; this is different from political motives. This is an enormous difference, because so many people today—and it’s very convenient—compare Auschwitz to the Soviet gulags. In the Soviet gulags, some horrible things were done, maybe just as horrible, but not in that manner, not in that measure, not for those motives; it was a ferocious but different dictatorship. The attempted elimination of the Jewish people was totally different; it was the elimination of a people and not of a group, whether black, yellow, little, or fat. No, it is an entire people that they tried to eliminate with an industrial system; with the accountants of death. It was a death factory where they threw away nothing; where they were using hair for mattresses, skin for lampshades, fat for soap, and ashes for fertilizer. I mean that no other savagery of this kind exists in modern history. There are many other savageries, terrible injustices, but to first persecute and then try to annihilate an entire people, from the youngest to the oldest, only for racial motives, never happened before. And I absolutely do not believe that Auschwitz can be compared—I use Auschwitz as a symbolic place— compared to any other genocide that has happened in the twentieth century. In Christian European society nothing is comparable to Auschwitz. Balma: I agree. But let’s go back to the English edition of your first book. Bruck: I believe that my books make people uncomfortable: they aren’t very commercial, and so I think that the publisher, whether American, or English, or German, doesn’t readily accept them, and doesn’t want to know about them. Even after all the truth that’s come out, my testimony is received quite poorly, and is even censored. For instance, when they published Andremo in Città in Germany—there are eleven stories, ten were translated, and the one where the German boy becomes Jewish, and the text says, “my brother,” at the end,3 was not translated.4 So, if we’re still at that point, and I’m talking about the sixties, but even now . . . a university professor by the name of Schminke just wrote me saying that he cannot find a publisher for Signora Auschwitz in Germany. As long as we cannot find a publisher in Germany for my books, aside from the two that they have translated, as long as a Jewish editor is not found in America as well—because Calvino once told me: “Your audience is American. You should have lived in America, you should have written in America, you should have

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written in English.” It’s not true! Because even Jewish Americans don’t care about anything, they care about selling books, and they take books that give them a greater guarantee of selling, maybe even a bestseller, they care little or not at all for concentration camps; I don’t believe that a Jewish publisher would be more favorable to this subject than another. Moreover, I say that a non-Jewish editor is more favorable than a Jewish one; even if I’m sorry to say it, it’s true. In Israel it’s the same, because in Israel my books aren’t translated. And they translated Primo Levi’s book when he won four or five awards, and then committed suicide. But he hadn’t been translated before. So these aren’t very popular or very commercial books. Editors are only interested in merchandise. When I was in America, I went to a publisher, I can still see his face now—I was accompanied by an American friend of mine, who said to me: “But, Mrs. Bruck,” and he even wrote it to me, “Why do you always write about the war? For what reason?” I explained, “I hope that two, three, four, five, or six people, in reading these works, can change, learn, and grow in their own morality, in their conscience, etc.” And he just said: “But, on what planet are you living?” Balma: I’m sorry. Bruck: This is what he said to me, this great American publisher I met with, one with two names.5 This banal idea that Jews help other Jews, which isn’t true at all, is part of a daily antisemitism. The Jewish lobby! In terms of critical responses, I had many more—two or three of them I had from Jews in Italy—all the rest always from non-Jews. I have had a thousand more from non-Jews than from Jews. I received no favors from my fellow Jews—among other things, there are very few Jews in important positions in Italy; a couple in television. This isn’t America. But in America, it’s not like I easily find a Jewish editor who says, “Ah! It’s my duty to publish your book!”I don’t delude myself, even if some friends, like Calvino himself, have told me, “But the Jews would make golden statues of you. In America, they would give you a hand. Here in Italy, it’s more difficult,” because there are very few Italian Jews. I think that this opinion is part of the usual prejudice. The solidarity among us can happen, but it isn’t the rule; I am convinced that this is the truth, I’ve lived it myself. Balma: Let’s talk about your relationship with Primo Levi. Almost twenty years after his passing, what memory do you have of him and your friendship? Bruck: Oh, above all, I miss him. What is missing is his voice, which became ever more important. At least, in some way, people listened to him. For us, the survivors, it’s important that someone be heard, and published. It’s not that I have the pomposity to say, “Oh, it’s important that they publish me.” It’s important that they publish at least the books of Primo Levi, because at least a testimony survives us. Of the man, of the friend, I have an unhappy, sad memory. He lived sort of like a stowaway in the world, absorbed, attentive to his books; he was a real writer. And he tried very hard to be one. I would never have made him



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out to be—and I even wrote this—a saint, because they turned him into a bit of a myth.6 I believe that he had flaws like all men, but he had a great sensitivity, talent, and shrewdness. In my opinion, he was a real writer, important beyond his testimony. He once told me that if his first book had been accepted [Se questo è un uomo], he wouldn’t have continued to work at the paint factory as a chemist, he actually would have only been writing. But his first book was refused by Natalia Ginzburg, who worked for Einaudi. I had an enormous affection for him, an enormous esteem. What’s missing is his clear, democratic, civil, and vigilant voice. I’m sorry that he was not happier and more understood, that people didn’t listen to him more. A survivor’s family doesn’t listen very much either; if he doesn’t write, maybe he’ll go crazy. It’s not that they all came back writers. I believe that the ones who became writers were the ones who already had the potential. Auschwitz could certainly help because it was such an extreme experience and was irrepressible. At the same time, it’s impossible to tell its story. You can write even ten, a hundred books, but you will never tell absolutely, all the way, what you lived, what you suffered. It is a black hole at once personal and universal. From Auschwitz, as Moravia said, you don’t escape, even if you write for your whole life. I believe that it is very difficult to make it clear what it means to see a man, or a young boy, in front of whom you are nude, dying, who spits on you. What do you feel? A young boy who could be your brother. It causes such pain to see his deterioration. He made me feel pain. This was my feeling. It is the torturer who causes pain, at least to me who was 12 years old. I looked at him and I said, “How can a man reduce himself to this?” The situation was turned upside down. That may have even saved me, because it was as if he were also a victim, of a blind, inculcated hatred. I lived through the concentration camps in a very strange way. Monsters were causing me pain, and it was an impressive thing, I don’t know how to explain it, a painful feeling for humanity itself. Sure, I was suffering, I was hungry, and I saw horrendous things. But to see a man stripped of his own humanity was incredible. You also do anything not to die, anything; you tear a crust of bread from your mother’s mouth. There is no way out, and there is no credo that lasts. Life exists, and you hope not to die until the very last breath. May someone else die, but not you. You have to live this situation, these circumstances, to understand how man is attached to existence. Balma: On to my next question— Bruck: Perhaps I already answered it . . . Balma: Sort of, yes. Bruck: I just keep going, I mix up everything, I talk, I talk . . . For me everything happened today, yesterday. Balma: In a recent interview, you stated that some publishing houses placed you in a sort of thematic ghetto, refusing your efforts to step away from the role of Holocaust witness. In particular, you mentioned the plots of two books that you

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completed recently, in which you explored important and modern themes like, for instance, the forced prostitution of young Albanian women, and the impossible standards of beauty and eternal youth imposed on society today. Have you since been able to get these works accepted by Italian publishers? How do you interpret the behavior of those who want to limit and control the themes in your books? Bruck: It even happens to me now: this book on the Albanian prostitute, on prostitution, was refused by my editor at Marsilio, where I’ve always published, because the editors, I think, ghettoized me definitively in my themes—which is yet another persecution, yet another tattoo, yet another mark. It’s unpleasant enough, and this happened to me precisely with the last book, the last one, which I had barely finished when it was refused with this comment: “From Mrs. Bruck, we expect something else. We’re not used to these themes, but to your themes, and so it’s not an issue of whether or not the book is good . . . It’s not a work by Bruck. For us, it’s as if it were a new launch, and we cannot invest in launching a new writer who is already known as a writer-witness, who in some way always goes back to these subjects, her subjects,” from which they will not let me escape, because—except for Il Silenzio degli Amanti, which my editor did publish. But that’s different, it’s already so close to what I am, so it was easier—to completely get away from that and deal with Albanian prostitutes, or with the prostitution of women from Eastern Europe, is something that they don’t allow me. But that’s also a kind of oppression, that’s also a prison. And I found the forced prostitution of Eastern European women to be close to my themes; because I had tackled these kinds of themes for television, for instance: in the short televised works that I did, in the televised reports, I talked about the blind, about dwarves, prostitutes, gigolos, the Russian women who come here and marry old men in order to obtain citizenship, and then end up on the street. I have always been concerned with a minority, whether exploited for some reason, or oppressed, or even misunderstood, misconstrued. With television, I managed to fight for the representation of those subjects that matter to me: like defending the rights of dwarves, who can’t find work, who are rejected even in their own families. For the first time, they told me, in their lives, someone had let them speak. They had never opened their mouths; they had never spoken for themselves, of their problems, of the persecution that they endure, of the derision. I was the first person who approached this subject, the desperation that they live through, even within their families—in fact, it went over very well on television too, because they thought that I was confronting the circus dwarf who does acrobatics. Instead, I approached it from an emotional, social, and economic point of view, and finally they could speak. They thanked me. I learned a lot from them, I have to say, it’s very interesting. It was marvelous work, in my opinion, like that documentary about blind people, for instance. Instead, in the literary world, I can never succeed in getting away from my themes. And I’m so disappointed because I wanted, in some way, to



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liberate myself—to really take away these fences that, maybe, I have constructed around me on my own. Because I wrote fifteen books that all addressed, in some way, in some form, the same identical theme: either invented, or starting from a letter, like in Nuda proprietà, where it starts from an eviction notice. Then the rest is all invented. I can’t succeed [in liberating myself] because something else is expected of me, and the booksellers now know that, “Edith Bruck writes those things,” like how on television they knew that, “here we go, Mrs. Bruck has once again suggested something terrible,” like blind people, you know? Balma: Yes. Bruck: In fact, in television, when I went to the head of the department and said that I wanted to do a report on blind people, he responded, “But remember that Buñuel film, which shows a blind man falling into a hole.” And I said, “You’re dreaming if you think I’ll make a blind man fall into a hole,” because by then, even television was asking you to punch people in the stomach, to do cruel, terrible things, which create scandals, which make the newspapers talk. Things however that people talk about; not normality, you can’t . . . You have to shoot your father on his deathbed, your mother turns out to have been sodomized by her son. By now our world itself has become shocking, and so it’s very difficult to make something that interests you, humanely. And everything human still interests me. It’s still difficult for me however because they totally deformed and sickened the taste of the public. It is precisely a sick world. You don’t even see the difference between fiction and truth anymore, you can’t even distinguish between the two. When I turn on the television and I see a gun, I turn it off immediately, because it’s just not possible. I don’t even tolerate fake violence. I would like to see a nice story, but they don’t exist anymore: everyone is killing, shooting, yelling, having sex. There is no more limit to anything. It’s a very impressive thing; it’s a world that, little by little, no longer belongs to you. You feel like an exile, in the very world in which you live. And so you become excluded first by the producers, then, ultimately, by the world of publishing, which is becoming increasingly like television. Even there, just look at the American writers. What we read, even from the great writers, is something that I personally, without being moralistic, I read with a great deal of embarrassment, I have to say. Even some books by Philip Roth: The Dying Animal shocked me, and I quit reading Richler. I’m also very much against the exportation of democracy into Iraq. Balma: Oh!? Bruck: Yes, it’s a crazy thing, with no end, the Americans don’t know how to get out of it. Democracy isn’t Coca-Cola—it’s death. It’s another train wreck like the war in Vietnam. The Americans won’t come out as winners from this disaster, and they didn’t go in there for weapons of mass destruction, only for economic and territorial interests. It’s not that I would die for the Iraqis, they’re more likely to kill themselves on their own. This war has no meaning. None. It’s quite

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a disaster that we’re living, and American soldiers are dying without knowing why. For whom? What does it even matter for a boy from Mississippi? Or from Nassyria? And Abu Graib? The civilian population? Why did America need all of this hatred? It’s a very sad thing. It’s even difficult to hold on to hope, the world that surrounds you is distressing. And it almost makes you sorry to say that it’s distressing. Like when I go to the schools to speak, I’m sorry to have to speak to the children about Auschwitz. I don’t visit the younger students in the elementary schools. I want them to be at least fourteen or fifteen years old. Because they just throw everything at these kids. The teachers tell me, “Go! Tell them!” I go inside and I see children who are six years old, seven or eight years old. I mean, are we crazy? You can’t. There is such an oversight in terms of education, and it’s very dangerous. Why do you need to shock a small child? They tell me, “these kids watch television and they’re used to it.” But it’s different, because they think that it’s all fiction in the end, they don’t really understand; it’s like a game. Even the truth becomes a game for the child, doesn’t it? When I talk about my burnt mother, however, it’s not a game for a child. No, no . . . it’s a crazy world we live in, totally. Balma: What aspects of simple, daily life do you appreciate the most? What do you like to do when you have free time? Bruck: Well, in my spare time, I used to go for walks and browse the shop windows. I would buy some things; now I don’t buy them any more. Desires diminish with time, also because one has more things than he needs. I like flowers a lot, I buy flowers, I go in search of flowers. I like looking at beautiful things, and doing nothing too, thinking. I like silence, and thinking . . . thinking and silence. I like to cook. I like to go shopping, very much. I like to buy bread, and I make everything an enormous pleasure. Everything that I have to do. Normally I cook every day, I set the table, eat, I wash the dishes, I wash them well. Everything that I do, I do wholeheartedly. And then, when I’ve finished taking care of the house, taking care of the kitchen, at about three in the afternoon, I write, and I continue until seven o’clock. When I can, at seven, I watch the news, I watch a bit of television, I watch some shows—they’re always committed to politics, but less and less, because there’s always more . . . crap on television. It’s very difficult to find something to watch, especially during the summer. I take the time to read newspapers, books. I often have guests for lunch, I’m a great cook, and I like to see people eat. I like my friends, I still have a certain human curiosity about people. To see a friend, I’ll even put down my writing. I put down my work if I have to see someone—if someone is in need, because regardless, the person always comes first, then all the rest. Balma: This next question is an attempt to resolve a personal curiosity of mine, to which I have found no response in my research, maybe because of my linguistic limitations. Who is Munzilo Munzila; that is, to whom did you dedicate your story, È Natale, Vado a Vedere, published in 1962? What significance does this dedication have for you?



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Bruck: Munzilo is my husband, and I’m Munzila. That’s what we used to call each other, “Munzilo” and “Munzila.” Now we call each other Nano and Nana.7 We changed our names after a while. I don’t know why, but for many years we would call each other that way, between the two of us. Now, I’m Nana, and he’s Nano . . . Nano . . . Nanetto . . . Nana . . . Nanetta. So, it’s a term of endearment that I use with my husband. Now we do it a bit less, but Nana has stayed, I’m still Nana. And I always liked dwarves, ever since I was a little girl. I like them a lot, I don’t know why; I was very attracted to this difference, to these miniscule men and women. Not the deformed dwarf, you know? Not the achondroplastic dwarf, which is another thing altogether, but the Lilliputians—they would play music, sing, perform, they would come to perform in my village . . . and I was in love with the Lilliputians. I don’t know why. So I like dwarves. I’ve remained childish in some way: in the sense that if I didn’t feel embarrassed to buy myself toys, I would spoil myself and buy the doll that I never had. I would like to experience a childhood, I’m not saying a rich one, but to have what I didn’t have as a child: little cars, dolls, but I don’t do it. At first, I was buying little bottles, which I liked a lot. I tried to hold on to something, but when I met my husband, he tossed everything out. He was cruel. I had a series of dolls, and a series of little bottles, then I had tiny little cups for the dolls and a tiny tray, and I took them everywhere with me, wherever I emigrated, all of these pretty little things—and then he [Nelso Risi] said, “Come on, get rid of these ridiculous things” He didn’t understand that, deep down, I liked them. Maybe that’s what makes me so happy for little things. This childish soul of mine protects me. Balma: I thought Munzilo Munzila was a character from a Hungarian folktale, or something like that. Bruck: No, no [laughing]. It’s not a mask. I’m talking about us. Balma: At this point, I would like to ask a final question: your recent poem, Specchi, signals a return to a strongly autobiographical writing, a tendency also evident in the collections of poetry that you have published in the past. Aside from its length, and the use of visual elements, what are the principal differences between a book like Specchi and your first three poetic texts, Il tatuaggio, In difesa del padre, and Monologo? Bruck: There is a difference, in my opinion, even if it doesn’t seem like it, because Specchi, which I wrote during a difficult time for me—because I had a heart attack, with cardiac arrest, and I thought that I would never write again and I didn’t know what to do, it was very difficult moment in my life. Again, a bit . . . closer to death. I wanted to take a trip inside this room of mine, to tell the memories that the objects around me seem to inspire. Not all of the objects, but the more significant ones. To listen to this room, where I always wrote, which I like, where I feel very safe, very protected. Initially, after the illness, I didn’t travel. So, I wanted to

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make this circular trip, focusing from the very beginning on the menorah, which is very important; and to finish with the menorah. It was like a monologue with myself, like a trip around my belly, to my origins, around myself. There are things that I did not say in the other books. Maybe I already spoke of my brother who lives in Brazil, but I did not talk about the two candelabras that he gave me as a gift, which he sent me. In the sense that it’s another type of story, because it’s not something that happened to you, that you experience, and so you make poetry of it; it is instead what happens to you around those two candelabras, and so it’s an episode that, in some way, gives an image of Brazil itself. It touches on the poverty, the favelas, it touches on the morality of the she-me who doesn’t want to buy them because they are so expensive, and then on the other hand, there’s this gift from my brother, and she thinks about being able to light a candle for her mother, if only she had the beautiful candelabrum that she saw. These little things subsequently mean many others; she thinks of being able to turn to her mother’s faith, through the candle, and so the object goes beyond itself. Like that picture of my brother-in-law, whom I described, who died in Argentina, it has another meaning. There are so many things that I never told, and these objects helped me do it. In the first three books of poetry, I had things that were much more urgent to express. Sure, all of my writings resemble one another because I am who I am, and I speak of the exterior and interior world in which I live. I mean that even Bergman’s films resemble one another, and so do Fellini’s films. It’s possible that the editors are right, maybe I should stay within my own themes. I don’t know: I only know that I want to get out of them, and that I have not succeeded in doing so, but it’s possible that I feel more at ease, more at home, in my own experiences and my own memory; then they can be transferred to the themes of today, or yesterday, or the day before, to different worlds, different oppressions. It’s not that I want to continue circling around my belly, I hope to go further, to things that pertain to others as well—what happened yesterday, what happens today, and what will happen tomorrow . . .

Appendix two

When Art and Life Imitate Each Other: A Conversation with Edith Bruck Translated by Erika Brownlee

Edith Bruck (Tiszabercel, Hungary, 1932–) is a naturalized Italian citizen whose career as a writer began in 1959. A number of her books focus on her memories of the Holocaust, though it would be simplistic and incorrect to apply this single label to all of her works. Jewish identity (intended more in a cultural sense than a religious one), exile and migration (both forced and voluntary) are central themes in Bruck’s body of work. In the following interview, which took place on June 28, 2010 in Rome, the author first of all revisited a number of questions that came up during a conversation of ours which took place in the summer of 2006, elaborating on them in greater detail. After that our discussion touched on a number of diverse topics, such as her relationship with Susan Strasberg, her recent novel Quanta stella c’è nel cielo (2009) and the filmic adaptation that she wrote for director Roberto Faenza, reparations for Holocaust survivors from the Claims Conference, and the subject of a new book. Her most revealing comments concerned those strange cases in which the distinction between art and life becomes blurry, sometimes thanks to unforeseeable and unrepeatable coincidences. At my request, Bruck spoke at length about her work as a translator, and also about her favorite authors—both Italian and otherwise. The portrait of Edith Bruck that one could draw from this interview is surely partial and incomplete. It consists of a single piece of a complex personal and artistic puzzle: reading her work and viewing her contributions to the cinematic world can only help us to trace, in broad strokes, the image of an artist who has been active in Italy for more than fifty years.

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Balma: In 1959 your first book was published, the autobiographical text Chi ti ama così. Shortly after you went to Yugoslavia and worked as a consultant for Pontecorvo’s film Kapò. Both Ugo Casiraghi and Alberto Moravia briefly discussed your collaboration on this film in Italian newspapers in 1960, concentrating their attention on your interactions with the actors on set. What interests me, however, is the screenplay for the film: in what way did you influence the script for Kapò during your stay in Belgrade? Bruck: Many times Gillo Pontecorvo asked me to write some things, and I did it almost every night for as long as I was there, in Yugoslavia, where I only stayed for one month, and each time I wrote two or three pages. The screenplay was already finished, so I didn’t collaborate on the screenplay. He asked me to write little extra things that maybe he would go on to shoot, kind of borrowing a little, in some way, from my story and my book. It is absolutely not a film based on my book (Chi ti ama così), but he had surely read it. He asked me to recount certain episodes, and he asked me to write out these episodes. But he forgot to put my name in the credits as a consultant; therefore I was very offended. I described this experience in my book Transit, and he recognized himself in the character of the director. He was offended. Everyone is very offended, in general, when you tell the truth. Balma: Were any of these scenes that you wrote in the final version of the film? Bruck: No, absolutely not. . . . I didn’t like the film in the end, especially the second part which was shot after my departure. I was very attentive, trying in some way to get as close as possible to reality—even though it is impossible to represent reality. It is impossible to make a “real” film about concentration camps, let that be clear. One cannot narrate it or describe it. It is possible to come close to reality in some way, and I tried to get him as close to it as possible. In fact, I had said to him, for example, “the stove wasn’t there.” When someone managed to procure a potato, we put the thin slices over the only stove there was. We were thirty people, fighting over one potato. Gillo began to yell, in his way, very ironic, joking, throughout the whole month. I was in a state of despair because the experience of the camp was still very fresh, so this shoot brought back a lot of pain for me—but I needed money. For this reason I agreed to go to Yugoslavia when he asked me to. I taught Susan Strasberg the symptoms of hunger, I even taught Emmanuelle Riva what we did in the camp, the work we did—and in fact Gillo shot the construction of the railroad with the wooden ties. I told these things to Susan, while she was in the bath—complaining that Gillo didn’t understand, because they also didn’t get along very well. Susan asked me everything, she absolutely didn’t know how to imagine hunger, didn’t know how a starving person would eat, or why she had to stay in line and not move even five centimeters because they would punish you, they would hit you. She failed to understand suffering. She had no measure for suffering, not even for any small thing in her life.

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Even after, her behavior was very interesting, because in ’63 I went to America and I took my second book (Andremo in città) to Susan. The book had just come out. My sister lived in America, where she still lives today, and her youngest son, who was nine, had drawn some things on the cover of the book. Given that this book was ruined, I didn’t want to give it to Susan with colorful designs all over it. I went to their house and she asked me immediately about the book. I said to her: “Susan, this thing happened,” and she began to cry as if she had lost her mother and her father. For one thing she didn’t read Italian, but the fact that I didn’t have the book for her was such a sorrow and let-down that she burst into an uninterrupted sob. She was consoled by her mother and father; it was a tragedy. It is so relative for each of us, suffering, that we can confuse a small thing for something much larger. For those who haven’t suffered those big traumas, the small ones can seem enormous. I can tell you that I was astounded. For me the incident was nothing, especially because Susan couldn’t read a book in Italian. . . . There I understood that suffering is so individual, so personal that you can’t judge the suffering of others. I have to say that from that moment on I never judged anybody because it was a great lesson for me. For Susan it was a great suffering because she didn’t know real and true suffering. I learned a lot from that incident. Balma: This year you finished writing the screenplay for a film based on your book Quanta stella c’è nel cielo (2009). I know that you inserted some flashbacks in the screenplay that aren’t part of the novel, and so I want to ask you: what are the differences between the novel and the cinematic adaptation you authored? What strategies did you have to employ to translate, so to speak, your work of prose for the big screen? Bruck: From what has been my experience thus far, a book is one thing and an image is another, very different. Even though I narrate a lot through images, everything that I write in a screenplay can be changed, modified, transfigured, deformed and mystified later by a director. There is no guarantee that the film will correspond to what you write in the screenplay or what you wrote in the novel. Right now we have some problems with the director [Roberto Faenza]. Regarding the flashbacks, he had asked me to write them even though they are not in my book. I wrote eight of them if I remember correctly, because he wanted to add some flashbacks of the protagonist’s childhood—and surely some pertaining to the Holocaust. The director then said: “It’s a bit verbose, there’s a bit too much material.” I suggested putting in those that cost the least to shoot, maybe three or four scenes. I don’t know which flashbacks he’ll put in. We don’t have a real working relationship: after the screenplay—which I wrote by myself—he called me to tell me it was beautiful. After that it seems that he had put everything in the hands of one of his assistants, without my knowledge. I will never let him shoot this revision of the screenplay, which I possess a copy of even if he doesn’t know it. As it is the screenplay now does not correspond to the story and is full of things that are a bit racy. The relationship between the boy and the girl was

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completely changed and he also cut all of the flashbacks. There are some things that historically don’t make sense, for example, the idea that the protagonist was deported to the camps for a period of three years, which is impossible because it is not historically accurate—Hungarians were not deported in ’41, but rather in ’44. I don’t know what will happen [with this film project] in the future, so I will withhold any comments, any judgments on anything of which I cannot foresee the final product. If the screenplay remains as is I will fight it until the end to see that the film does not get made. The director is always very kind, very friendly, and then does things that I pretend to be unaware of. It might eventually all turn out well, but I can’t predict anything. If he cuts the relationship with the boy that the protagonist finally opens up to, passing her testimony on to a child—considering that nobody else would listen to her, since we’re talking about 1946 right after the war—then the film does not make any sense. Balma: Lettera da Francoforte distinguishes itself from your other texts, including your epistolary ones, for the inclusion of a number of letters written in multiple languages that make use of a bureaucratic jargon that is very dry, distant, and alienating for the protagonist. Did you encounter any specific challenges during the composition of this book with respect to your other works? Bruck: No, no challenges, absolutely not. I absolutely had to write this book because the world doesn’t know about the kind of reparations that I received, which is something of a pittance. Everyone thinks that the ex-deportees received huge sums as reparations from Germany. All of this money is in the hands of the Jews, not the Germans. I myself believed that it was the Germans. When I began corresponding with this foundation—which is called the Claims Conference, and exists even in America—I believed that I was dealing with the Germans. And I was beside myself, I was furiously angry about this: when I asked for the reparations for the first time in ’54 I had just arrived in Italy and I went to the embassy to get information because I didn’t have a dime. I literally had nothing. The German consul began to yell, saying that to receive reparations I at least needed to have some kind of cancer. I ran away from that place and wrote a letter to L’Espresso. There was a scandal and the consul was made to leave Italy. After that experience I abandoned my request for reparations until 1998, I didn’t want to know anything about it and I didn’t want to ask any questions. Then my brother convinced me to try again, saying: “Everyone has received reparations, why not you? Promise me that you will try.” I started down this bureaucratic path, which would have been better to avoid because it lasted seven years. I went back and forth, I procured at least one hundred documents, and they asked me to send them photographs of the wounds (chilblains)—X-rays of all the marks that deportation left on my body. It became a nightmare. Nobody has even the slightest idea of what I went through. I entered this kind of labyrinth, this hell, even if only to see how it would end. The seventh item on this list of necessary documentations required that I find witnesses to prove that I was deported. They asked me

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things you can’t imagine. I asked [my doctors] if it was possible to photograph the chilblains, because I am full of these little holes all over. They told me it is not possible, that nothing shows up in a photograph. Plus you can’t photograph the pain, the suffering, you can’t photograph the soul and the heart, what you have lost. It is absolute madness. The Claims Conference made me go through all this, so you can’t keep quiet. Whether they are Jews, Germans, Muslims, Japanese, or Americans, it makes no difference. It was such a monstrous and inhuman thing that it had to be denounced. In the end I threatened to go to the tribunal in Strasbourg,8 because at that point I couldn’t hold back any longer. I went back and forth [between Germany and Italy], I spent a lot of money, every document cost something. I spent at least one million eight hundred thousand lire. Then, they wanted the documents to be translated by translators who were officially accredited by the German embassy, so I found this woman who translated them for forty thousand lire per document. I did everything [they asked] until the end [of this process], even turning to the Hungarians. In order to get a document from them it cost seventy thousand (lire) for one, eighty thousand for the other, and then there was the wait. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done. I don’t regret it, though. A book was born thanks to this story. They even continued to deny that I was deported. My status as a survivor was never recognized. It’s not that this book sold well, but I don’t have any other way to denounce something. I can only do it through my articles and the books I write. Balma: Your novel L’attrice, which came out in 1995, was your first book that was written in third person. Those who know you and have read your books know (or presume to know) that L’attrice is not autobiographically inspired. What brought you to experiment with the use of a third person narrative voice in this book? Why haven’t you used it in other novels, for example, in Il silenzio degli amanti from 1997? Bruck: First of all because I wanted to change things up a bit. I did not come up with the idea for the book thinking about third-person narration—besides, the third person is a bit more complicated for me. In spite of this usage of the third person I had identified with the protagonist a bit. Maybe I wanted more distance. Aside from a minimal amount of self-identification, a character like that does not belong to me. I never would have denied what I lived through, I never would have concealed it.9 So I thought that I might achieve a greater sense of detachment writing in the third person. When I write—almost all my books—in the first person, people [think they can] identify me within the story that I produce, even when it’s pure invention. For example, with Nuda proprietà (1999) my readers believed that I didn’t live in this house anymore. They looked for me elsewhere, they didn’t call me, they thought I no longer lived here. I am so successful at getting into the characters that they all seem absolutely real, and entirely autobiographical. So I should have many lives, which of course I don’t. I wanted [to create] this distance because I would have never negated what I

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lived through, I would never negate my lineage or what happened to me. Nuda proprietà is a book that was born from a letter. A letter of a few lines inspired me, but the entire book is made up. And the most interesting thing, instead—which nobody knows—has to do with a German woman, that I had never met, who thought she recognized herself in the character of the old woman, the ex-Nazi. Her neighbors called to tell me about this woman, saying [she wanted] to meet me. I went to her house, and she was afraid that I would denounce her. This woman really existed, she had an Italian husband, but she’s dead now. She said she would have sold me the future ownership rights to the property if she had known me. She asked me: “Is it true that you will not do me harm?” and I didn’t even know she existed. Her neighbors invited me over to reassure this German woman, so she would understand that I did not want to denounce her. But it’s something incredible . . . Balma: Really! Bruck: And I went over there. So, it’s a kind of intuition. It’s a very strange thing that only happened after the book was published. She wanted assurances—that’s why the neighbors threw a party for me. I never would have imagined, I never would have known that such a woman existed in Rome. There are some very strange coincidences in life, huh? Like now, for example, given that we’re talking about coincidences, I can tell you that I was putting a book together—of which I’ve written the first nine pages—where finally [one of] my protagonist[s] has amnesia. After these first ten pages or so I had my stroke, and I was unable to speak. My memory came and went. It’s slowly coming back, and I’m writing the book. I was recovering in a hospital. It was a surreal thing, this hospital, a nightmare, a kind of insane asylum; and I keep working on this book which is a kind of premonition, from a mysterious intuition, because I wanted to write what really happened to me. So it is a feeling. I don’t know exactly what to call it. But it is very strange. I was writing the first pages, sitting here in my study, and I had the stroke. I can’t even explain it myself. Balma: If I remember our last conversation correctly, it’s a book that you intended to divide into three parts. Bruck: Yes, that’s the one. In the beginning she loses her memory, which was the initial idea before it actually happened to me in real life. After that she has an accident, but a car accident, one I invented for the novel. Afterwards, however, the protagonist realizes that without memory a person does not exist, the lack of memory is death. In the end she does everything to get her memory back. First she loses it, and lives happy and carefree, then slowly she realizes that without memory there is no life. So, in the third part she gets it back. All things considered the theme is the same, only that now it has happened to me for real. Balma: For a few years now you have been working on translations. From 1996 to 2009 you published four books of poetry translated into Italian, editing volumes

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that included both the works of celebrated Hungarian authors like Attila, Illyés, and Radnóti, as well as the American poet Ruth Feldman. Why is it important to you to make the writings of the great Hungarian authors available to an Italianspeaking public? Bruck: First of all because of the poetry in itself, because I love poetry. Secondly, to be sure, it bothers me that the Italian public doesn’t know these beautiful, universal poems, the destinies that the poets had, the society that they lived in. It’s an important part of our history, which belongs to Europe. These are some of the greatest and most important poets of the twentieth century and they are unknown. These poems are not limited in any way to a small country like Hungary, which has ten million people. They are poets on an international level, not just European. It saddened me that people didn’t know their universal verses, because more than anything Attila and Radnóti had very dramatic lives. Attila committed suicide in ’37, at thirty-two years of age; Radnóti on the other hand was killed by Hungarian fascists. For forty years, during the Communist regime, they let people think that he had been killed by the Germans. I found out only three or four years ago that his killers were still alive, they were never punished, nothing ever happened to them. Later they admitted that it had been the Hungarians, but only recently. Everyone kept quiet. I knew the Hungarian ministers, the government representatives—they ate here at this table—from the Hungarian Communist regime. They were very nice to me, they even made a film about my life, but nobody ever told me the truth about Radnóti. The crime was concealed and mystified, like the deportation: they said it was the Germans who took the Jews from my village, but I never saw a German. They taught kids in school a false history, and this also should be denounced. So when I translated Radnóti I wanted to underline the fact that it was the Hungarians who shot him, not the Germans. Balma: That seems fair. Bruck: Besides this, his poetry has always interested me a lot, it’s fantastic. It is on par with the great French and Italian poets, and I was very happy to work on it, to slave over it, since translation is very difficult. It seems very simple, but it really is a lot of work. You work for months for almost nothing. You only do it for the love of poetry and the poet, and to make them known in some way, considering that poetry does not sell—there is no market. It’s thanks to the editors if poetry has almost been eliminated from the [their] catalogs. They publish at most a dozen books a year, between foreigners and Italians. It’s a tragic thing. I believe that without poetry, without music, the world would be much poorer. It’s a drop in the bucket, if you will, because there are books full of sex, violence, mysteries, all that fiction that doesn’t even come close to reality. When they talk about the mafia and the camorra, this is very important, but mysteries aren’t really inspired by the reality of the country.

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Balma: Let’s take a moment to compare your work as a writer to your translations. In your opinion, does your talent as a writer of novels and poetry come from the same place that brings you to translate other people’s poetry in Italian? Bruck: No, no, because the poems that I have written in the end represent a very personal path, they are about my story, my skin, my life, and my childhood. When I translate certain poets on the other hand, like Attila and Radnóti, I can identify with their lives and their misery, with the persecutions that they suffered. Attila suffered from the extreme poverty in which he lived, and then— given that he was a Communist at first and was later thrown out of the party—he couldn’t find work, he was unemployed and couldn’t even eat. It was a difficult life, really a crazy thing, I felt it and I feel as if he were my brother, a relative. And Radnóti even more so because he was a Jew, and for this reason he was made to do forced labor. He converted to Catholicism in ’42—not for practical reasons, because in ’42 it was futile to convert; they would deport you anyway. It seems that it was his wife who convinced him. This is very interesting, because the wife is still alive, and nobody told me. I could have gone to see her in Budapest, but even this was kept quiet. There are certain things, like a conspiracy that revolves around an inconvenient person. In the end he was neither Jewish nor Christian. Perhaps he didn’t even know what he was anymore, because he was very inspired by the Bible. At first he wrote a lot about the Old Testament, and then about the New Testament. In my opinion he was quite confused because one can’t convert at his age, it was very difficult since he was born into a Jewish family. Besides this, he was also tied to death in some way from his birth. He was born with a twin brother who died, and even his mother died. He was the only survivor of his own birth, he lost both his mother and his brother. From the beginning he was a sort of Cain who killed his brother. He was a very complex character, very deep, very loveable, and very important. Basically, I fall in love with poets. I have been in love with both Attila and Radnóti all my life. I wouldn’t know which one to choose, for sure. I have a strong bond that makes me identify with both of them, even if they have nothing to do with my life. We are siblings in some way because of the poverty and the suffering [we all endured]. Balma: Last week your latest book was formally presented at the Casa delle Letterature in Rome. On this occasion Gabriella Romani observed that in Privato you use words against silence. To this observation I would add that one of the most interesting aspects of your writings is exactly the exploration of the narrative and poetic potential of silence. In Privato and Lettera alla madre silence is an obstacle to overcome, while a text like Il silenzio degli amanti culminates with a moment of joy that cannot be expressed, where words are too much; even if negative references to silence abound in your novels, when you keep quiet about a pain or an uncomfortable thing. Bruck: You keep quiet about a truth. It’s the story of a homosexual that I identified with, because even homosexuals lived poorly until a few years ago, in a

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very hidden way, derided. Even today they are looked down upon, and they are beaten. Even they were deported, and there isn’t a survivor who can recount what happened. So I identified with this gay man,10 I understood—even if it’s all completely made up—that I can identify very well with anyone who is different: if it’s a Roma, if it’s a black person, a gay man that has suffered for his nature, his place of origin, or for his religion, or for his skin color, I can easily put myself in their shoes. In Il silenzio degli amanti they pretend that this man is involved with a woman. Words are all that we can use to denounce things, to shout some things out loud, and I don’t think there is even a voice that is loud enough to denounce what we are seeing and living every day in this country, as in others. We have arrived at a level of corruption, a level of dishonesty and moral decrepitude that it is something scandalous. I spoke with a woman who is a type of nurse here in Italy but also washes the stairs in order to earn money. She said to me, “If I were twenty years old I would leave because Italy is no longer livable.” We truly live in an era that ruins our everyday life. The situation today in Italy is very difficult, because there isn’t anybody that doesn’t steal. There is such thievery at every level that they steal golden teeth in cemeteries from the dead. They come up with a new scam every day. There isn’t anything that man doesn’t sully, doesn’t ruin. The only thing that is important is to profit, and this makes you feel a terrible evil. In this collective, in this society—not to say this country, given that in other countries they are corrupt people too, and I don’t want to suggest that only angels live in other countries—we don’t realize what has happened to our fellow man; that he is only motivated by his own interest, by power, by success. Or, instead, he carries inside something like a sense of original guilt. You can’t figure out why he is so easily manipulated, corruptible, to the point of becoming a killer, a criminal, a scoundrel—because evil has developed in the world, even in the little things. If they can steal twenty grams of ham from you, they steal it. So you have to have forty thousand eyes. This bad habit, this lack of conscience, you don’t understand that it’s the fault of the collective, but now it’s also the fault of the individual, that follows this bad habit. It is also very difficult to remain honest, because the honest one is a fool. He who doesn’t rob is an idiot. There is no answer to these problems, even I ask myself every day. I don’t understand what has happened, what has ruined mankind to this point. Balma: Other than Primo Levi, Montale, and Leopardi, who are the writers that you admire the most, whether they be Italian or from other countries? Bruck: Do you want to talk about poets or writers of prose? Balma: Let’s focus on poets first, or rather, female poets. Bruck: Let’s see. Great female poets: Amelia Rosselli, then I have very much appreciated [the work of] Ingeborg Bachmann—we even met and read poetry together—I consider both of them very important. Then there is Nelly Sachs, who I have loved very much. I am talking about female poets that I know deeply,

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not ones that I have read casually. Nowadays, we don’t have a great female poet around. There are more examples of prose writers than poets; I don’t see great female poets today. There was Sylvia Plath, but let’s not talk about great poets that everybody knows, whether they be men or women. The female writer is different from the male writer: the woman is more sincere, more open, more from the gut—while a man is more stuck in his mind, in thought, colder and more distant from what he is saying, he operates more from inside. The woman gives her soul, her body, her blood, while the man has a fear of crying, of making people think he is weak. Instead men should cry more, it would be good for them; because maybe they let off the frustration and the pain by shooting [someone]. It would be better if they cried. Balma: And what about fiction? Bruck: I like Rosetta Loy a lot. Maraini has also written some beautiful books, some like La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa, for one. Then she wrote a beautiful book of poems about age, which I have here at home. In general I read a bit of everything. I read Potok, I read Roth, all the American writers. I don’t love all of Roth’s work, a few things even make me pull away. Then there are very important Israeli writers, like Oz, like Grossman. Yehoshua I know too well, and so as a person I don’t love him, but he is a great writer. I believe you have to separate the writer from the man. It’s better not to know him. After seeing the great directors, the great authors, the great poets up close, rarely have I found that they correspond personally to their books. Moravia I knew very well personally, I was on a jury for an award with him; he was a very hot-tempered person, he wasn’t a lovable man, but he wrote a few very beautiful books. Balma: Certainly. And if you read Israeli authors, you read them only in translation, right? Bruck: Yes, of course, in Italian. I find them to be very gifted, the women too, it’s just that only in the last few years have they discovered the Holocaust, while before they never talked about it. They have never translated one of my books in Israel. They have returned to the Holocaust, though, even them, which was not permitted to us for many years. I understood very late why this is the case: in my opinion Israel needed to allow a healthy generation to grow; without complexes, not inculcated with this ghost of the ghetto, this bowing of the head and sliding along the walls. So, surely they wanted a strong generation with a straight spine. Balma: And so, for linguistic reasons, the only texts that you read that are not in Italian are books in Hungarian? Bruck: Yes. I like Eszter Nagy very much, and there is another author now, a very good writer, who apparently is a candidate for the Nobel Prize. His name is Nadas. There are several. Like I said, Hungarian writers are very good, whether they are poets or prose writers. They have always been very creative, both from

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the musical point of view and from the poetic and narrative perspective. They are quite sensitive and full of talent these Hungarians, but I don’t defend the country, and I don’t defend the people. You can never defend the people as a group, while at the same time you can never accuse them as a group. There is a passive antisemitism in Hungary today that is scary. Balma: Is it very strong? Bruck: Yes, truly. Balma: Getting back for a moment to Ruth Feldman, I have often pondered how the translation of her verses from English to Italian played out. How did you proceed? Bruck: Ah, I worked a lot with dictionaries. Then when Ruth came to Italy we had a meeting and she checked everything. We made a very nice book. Balma: It was a true collaboration, then, between the writer and the translator. Bruck: Of course, also because I do not know English perfectly. I can’t even read it well. There are things I don’t understand, almost every third word escapes me. I don’t really push myself because everything that I want to read I find in Italian. I even like the South Americans very much: I appreciate Vallejo and Machado a lot, I love their books, but also Borges. The literature that comes from there, where there is a lot of suffering, is very interesting—[it comes from] where there is tyranny, where people are suffering from hunger.

Notes In this case the author is referring to the film Andremo in città by her husband Nelo Risi, based on her homonymous short story, directed in the 1960s. 2. The novel ends with the protagonist being filmed while reading a very long list of names of concentration camps aloud. 3. The short story in question is entitled “Silvia.” See Edith Bruck, Andremo in città (Milano: Lerici, 1962), 133: “—Robert Lewy—disse Silvia sorridendo. Poi rivolgendosi a me disse in tedesco:—Sei il mio fratellino, vero?” (“—Robert Lewy—Silvia said smiling. Then turning towards me she said in German:—You’re my little brother, aren’t you?”) 4. See Edith Bruck, Herr Goldberg; Erzählungen, trans. Susanne Hurni-Maehler (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1965). This is only German edition of the text, and its table of contents includes only ten short stories. The last one, originally titled “Il Signor Goldberg,” gives the collection its title: 1.

Andremo in città (1962)

Herr Goldberg; Erzählungen (1965)

Il cavallo

Das Pferd

In fondo ai piedi

Am Fußende

Cappuccetto rosso

Rotkäppchen

La sentenza

Der Urteilsspruch

202

5. 6.

appendix two Una sorpresa

Eine Überraschung

Andremo in città

Wir werden in die Stadt gehen

Il ghiaccio sul fiume

Eis auf dem Fluß

Silvia

n/a

Villon

Villon

Il pane azzimo

Mazzenbrot

Signor Goldberg

Herr Goldberg

I believe she was referring to the New York-based publishing house, Simon & Schuster. See Edith Bruck, “Io e Primo. La bambina e l’intellettuale,” l’Unità, April 11, 1997, 3. “Tramutarlo in una sorta di santo sarebbe l’ultima offesa, ciò che non avrebbe mai voluto diventare proprio perché si riteneva un testimone, non solo del suo vissuto ma dei misfatti della storia passata e presente.” (“Turning him into a saint of sorts would be the ultimate offense, what he never would have wanted, precisely because he considered himself a witness, not only of his life but of the misdeeds of past and present history.”) 7. Nano in Italian refers to a dwarf, Nana is the feminine equivalent. 8. She is referring to the European Court of Human Rights, which was instituted as a permanent entity on November 1, 1998. 9. In the novel L’attrice, the protagonist has hidden the fact that she is a Holocaust survivor from everyone around her. She is an American actress whose agent forces her to share the painful experiences of deportation as part of an elaborate publicity stunt. This unfortunate turn of events causes a profound rupture in her identity, bringing her most private fears out into the light of day, for all her fans and critics to see (and speculate on). 10. Speaking in Italian, the author used the somewhat typical expression diverso (“different”) to refer to this homosexual character.

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Index

abortion, 3, 24 Achtung! Banditi!, 75 Adorno, Theodor, 137 “Adozione,” 143 African Americans, 23–24, 35n68 Agamben, Giorgio, 126n3 Aiello, Barbara, 165 Algeria, 24–25 Amendola, Anna, 114, 120, 122, 123 America’s Black Holocaust Museum, 24 “Amica sorella compagna nemica,” 143 Amore stanco, 78 Andremo in città, 2, 7, 9, 39, 42, 43, 71, 88, 105, 111, 124, 158 film production, 92–96, 130–31n77, 130n71 plot and setting of, 89–92 antisemitism, 2, 5, 91. See also Holocaust, the in Italian cinema, 73–78, 127n21, 127n24 literary documentation of, 137–38 Racial Laws of 1938–1939 and, 74, 77–78, 159 Argentina, 4 Armenian genocide, 24 Attila, Jòzsef, 27

Attilio Bertolucci: la camera da letto, 122–26 Auschwitz, 3, 9, 20, 49–50, 83, 153 L’attrice and, 52 Un altare per la madre and, 112 autobiographical works by Edith Bruck, 43, 57 awards for Edith Bruck’s writing, 18, 62 Bardot, Brigitte, 119 BASILI (Banca Dati Scrittori Immigrati in Lingua Italiana), 18 Bassani, Giorgio, 138, 169–70 use of Yiddish, 171 “Bassani e Bruck: due scrittori (non) comparabili?”, 169–70 Battle of Algiers, The, 80 Bedino, Alessandra, 30n22 Begin, Menachim, 173 Benigni, Roberto, 91 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 16 Bergen-Belsen, 3 Bertolucci, Attlio, 122–26 Bignardi, Irene, 88 Blain, Gérard, 95 Bochane, Mohamed, 17 Boggio, Maricla, 30n22

213

214

index

Bo Pianella, Gianna, 97, 103 Borri, Giancarlo, 137 Brega, Davide, 35n64 Bruck, Edith assault of, 89–91 birth and youth of, 2–3 on choice and reasons for writing, 4 directorial debut, 97–98 friendship with Primo Levi, 126n4, 163–64 on German reparations to Holocaust survivors, 5–6 on how she learned the Italian language, 41 literary debut of, 2, 4–5 moves around Europe after World War II, 3 move to Israel, 3–4, 172 move to Italy, 4 siblings of, 3 time in concentration camps, 3, 9 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 76 Cahiers du Cinéma, 85 Cain, James M., 79–80 Cameron, James, 24, 35n68 Camon, Ferdinando, 111–14, 158 Campogalliani, Carlo, 72 Capitano, Francesco, 112 Carpi, Fabio, 92 Casiraghi, Ugo, 84 Cavani, Liliana, 97 Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 74 Chaplin, Charlie, 93 Chaplin, Geraldine, 93, 130–31n77, 130n71 Chiellino, Carmine, 45, 46 Chi ti ama così, 43, 89, 99, 149, 172–73 child-like vision of Auschwitz presented in, 170 as Edith Bruck’s literary debut, 2 Pontecorvo and, 83, 84 second edition printing of, 61

translation into English, 8 Christianstadt, 3 Ciccarelli, Andrea, 12, 13, 18, 19, 32n39, 33n52, 64n5 critical analysis of Edith Bruck’s work by, 38, 41, 43 Cineaste, 81 Cinecittà, 74, 138 Cinema, 75, 77 cinema, Italian. See also Italophone literature; Italy; Kapò; Storie vere Andremo in città and, 89–96, 124, 130–31n77, 130n71 anti-Semitism in, 73–78, 127n21, 127n24 depictions of Jews in, 70–78, 165 dictatorship of truth in, 80 directorial debut of Edith Bruck in, 97–98 Holocaust addressed in, 69–72 Improvviso, 7, 96–105, 124 neorealist, 74–78 persecution of Jewish screenwriters and directors and, 76–77, 126n11 Quale Sardegna?, 7, 105–10, 124 Racial Laws of 1938-1939 and, 74–75, 77–78 screenwriting by Edith Bruck, 7, 28n4, 69–70, 71, 124–25, 132–33n112 Un altare per la madre, 7, 110–14, 125 Claims Conference, 5 Cold War, 5, 71–72 colonialism, 16–17, 23–25 Communism, 84 concentration camps, 3, 9, 15, 25, 49–50, 59. See also Holocaust, the poetry of Edith Bruck and, 144, 156–57 represented in Kapò, 83–84 Corriere della Sera, 62 Cosenza, Francesco, 16–17, 34n53 Creolizzare l’Europa: letteratura e migrazione, 13



Index 215

Crowdus, Gary, 86 cultural provenance, 46 “Curve of transit,” 38, 44, 49 Czechoslovakia, 3 Dachau, 3, 53 Dante, 56 Da qui verso casa, 35n64 De Benedetti, Aldo, 78 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 77–78, 95, 164 decolonization, 13–14 Dedicato a Franz Drago, 118–20, 121 “De l’abjection,” 85–86 Della Rocca, Roberto, 3 De Matteis, Carlo, 70 De Santis, Giuseppe, 75 De Sica, Vittorio de, 74 dictatorship of truth, 80 Dietro il buio, 120–22, 123 Die Windrose, 81 director, Edith Bruck as. See also cinema, Italian Attilio Bertolucci: la camera da letto, 122–26 Dedicato a Franz Drago, 118–20, 121 Dietro il buio, 120–22, 123 Edith Bruck on, 123–24 Improvviso, 96–105, 124 Nani come noi, 115–18, 121, 123 Quale Sardegna?, 7, 105–10, 124 reviews of, 104–05 Storie vere, 114–26, 125 Un altare per la madre, 7, 110–14, 125 Dire l’indicibile, 70 Di Veroli, Mortara, 10 Divina Commedia, 56 documentaries, 7, 29–30n22 Drago, Franz, 118–20 Drowned and the Saved, The, 169 Due stanze vuote, 7, 29n12, 44, 56–57, 61, 67n39, 68n40, 68n47, 124 forward by Primo Levi, 71 popularity of, 62

Primo Levi on, 70–71 Dupe negative, 80 Durišin, Dionýz, 13, 16, 33n51 “Ebreo fino a un certo punto,” 163–64 El Ghibli, 17, 34n53 Emilio, Paolo, 77 È Natale, vado a vedere, 43 Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture, 32n45 Endre, 152 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 19 “Eravamo in otto,” 144 Faenza, Roberto, 71, 72 Fantino, Claudio, 97–98 Fascism, 25, 26, 73, 74, 82. See also Holocaust, the Jewish identity under, 163–64 Ovra and, 76–77 Feldman, Ruth, 140 Fellini, Federico, 99 Ferraro, Eveljn, 16 Ferreol, Andrea, 99, 104 Fink, Guido, 73 Flaiano, Ennio, 16 Fontana, Eugenio, 78 France, 24–25 Freud, Sigmund, 24 “Frontier, Exile, and Migration in the Contemporary Italian Novel,” 12, 39 frontier literature, 12 Gabbai, Ruggero, 72 Galvani, Graziella, 83 Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The, 171–72 Germany reparations paid to Holocaust survivors by, 5–6 translation and publication of Edith Bruck’s writing in, 9–10 Ghiaccio sul fiume, 124 Giacomino, 164–65

216

index

Giagni, Giandomenico, 124 Gierzynska-Zalewska, Hanna, 169–70 Giorgi, Eleonora, 124 Giorgio, Adalgisa, 10, 42, 56 Giovanna, 80, 81 Gnisci, Armando, 25, 32n45 on approach to study of migrant authors, 13–20, 38 “curve of transit” concept, 38, 44, 49 “house of after” concept, 38, 52, 63 on Maria Cristina Mauceri, 20–21 on migrant writers and infinite state of limbo, 21–22, 38 on traumatic nature of migration, 22–23 Godfather, The, 46 Gordon, Robert S. C., 26 Goria, Giovanni, 98 “Grande Migrazione,” 19–20 Grandi, Serena, 124 Grün, Milan, 3, 4 Gubar, Susan, 137, 139, 140–41 Guida, Elisa, 141–42, 145, 152 Gyula, Illyés, 152, 153–55 Herr Goldberg; Erzählungen, 31n33 Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures, A, 1 History of Italian Cinema, The, 76 Holocaust, the, 23, 60–61, 67n38, 126n3. See also antisemitism; Chi ti ama così; poetry, Holocaust addressed in works by Edith Bruck, 26–28, 37, 41–42, 60–63, 66n20, 67n39, 68n40–41, 70–71 colonialism and, 23–25 concentration camps, 3, 9, 15, 25, 49–50, 59, 83 Edith Bruck’s family and, 3, 9, 15, 49–50, 59 exploitation of memories of, 175n5 filmic representations in the 1960s, 70, 71–72



Holocaust poetry in Italy and, 138–41 Italianized narratives of, 26–27 Italian Jews and, 71–72 Italy and, 5 mass deportations during, 25 popularity of works examining, 62–63 reparations paid to Germany to survivors of, 5–6 represented in poetry of Edith Bruck, 144 use of terminology of, 24 worldwide migration after, 4, 19–20 Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, The, 175n5 Holocaust in Italian Culture, The, 26 Holocaust Poetry, 140 Homage to the Eighth District, 45 Hotel Meina, 105 “house of after,” 38, 52, 63 Hungary, 22, 28n5, 39, 56–57 Andremo in città set in, 91 childhood of Edith Bruck in, 2–3, 5 influences on poetry of Edith Bruck, 152–59, 161n25 Hurni-Machler, Susanne, 31n33 I bambini ci guardano, 74 identity, Jewish, 163–70 Israel and, 172–73 language and, 170–72 Primo Levi on, 163–64, 173 Il cavallo, 124 “Il cavallo,” 18 Il Duce, 74 Il rovescio del gioco, 18, 19 Il Silenzio degli amanti, 42, 52, 54–56, 60–61, 63 Il tatuaggio, 42, 63, 141–43, 149, 154 Il tempo di uccidere, 16 Immigrato, 14 Improvviso, 7, 96–105, 124 In difesa del padre, 8, 42, 143, 149, 161n24



Index 217

“Infanzia,” 143 Inferno, 56 injustice, 55–56 Intersezioni, 43 I soliti ignoti, 87 Israel Edith Bruck’s migration to, 3–4, 172 translation and publication of Edith Bruck’s writing in, 10 Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz, 71–72 Italophone literature, 1, 10, 32n45. See also cinema, Italian; poetry, Holocaust; poetry of Edith Bruck acceptance of migrant writers, 19 approach to studying migrants in, 13–17, 38 classification schemes in, 22 “curve of transit” in, 38, 44, 49 database of migrant authors in, 17–18 Edith Bruck’s place in, 11–13, 15 first-generation immigrants and, 15 Holocaust narratives in, 26–27 “house of after” concept, 38, 52, 63 Hungarian poetry translated into, 152–59 Italian colonialism examined in, 16–17 Jewish Diaspora and, 14 linguistic latencies in, 45–46 migrant writers in infinite state limbo and, 21–22, 38 North African writers and, 16–17, 25 postcolonialism and, 17, 22 taxonomies of migrant, 18–19, 26, 33–34n52, 33n51 terminology and classification of, 28n3 Italy. See also antisemitism; cinema, Italian Bruck’s migration to, 4 colonialism, 16–17, 23 fascism in, 25, 26, 73, 74, 82 Ovra, 76–77



Racial Laws of 1938–1939, 25, 74–75, 77–78, 159 stereotypes of postwar, 5 Itinerario, 42 Itinerario: Útirány, 30n27 Jaeggy, Flleur, 12, 19, 45, 46 Janeczek, Helena, 35n64, 173 Jelloun, Ben, 14 Jensen, Lars, 1 Jews after the Holocaust, 4, 19–20 authors use of Jewish culture and Jewish languages, 170–72 communities of Italy, 165–66 depictions in Italian cinema, 70–78, 165 Diaspora, 14 identity, 163–70 matrilineage and, 166–67 persecution in the Italian film industry, 76–77 Racial Laws of 1938–1939 and, 74–75 works of Edith Bruck and, 26–28 “Jews of Sicily and Calabria: The Italian Anusim That Nobody Know,” 165–66 Jona che visse nella balena, 71 Jószef, Attila, 152, 153–56 Kapò, 7, 69, 124. See also cinema, Italian concentration camps represented in, 83–84 critiques of, 85–86 Edith Bruck’s collaboration on, 80, 82–83, 84–85 love story in, 86–87 plot of, 78–79 special features on DVD of, 83–84, 87–88 Transit references to, 79, 85, 87, 90 working environment for shooting of, 88–89 Két kéz, 154

218

index

Kezich, Tullio, 99 Khouma, Pap, 17 Kuhn, Annette, 97 Kúmá, 39, 65n11 La grande strada azzurra, 80, 81 La letteratura italiana della migrazione, 14, 16, 32n39 L’Allegria di Naufragi, 161n24 La Repubblica, 80, 115, 120 La Stampa, 30n22, 62, 68n41 review of Improvviso, 104–05 latencies, linguistic, 45–46 La tregua, 139 L’attrice, 42, 52–54, 61, 66n16 La vita è bella, 91 Lawrence, D. H., 106, 110 Le divine impurità. Primo Levi tra scienza e letteratura, 137 L’educazione del te, 21, 23 L’Espresso, 84, 88 Lettera alla madre, 7, 8, 10–11, 30n22, 39, 42, 61, 143 as fiction, 57–58 popularity of, 61–62 themes of, 49–51 Lettera da Francoforte, 40, 42 Levi, Primo, 10, 27, 49, 50, 56, 57, 59, 67n30, 67n38, 125 on Due stanze vuote, 61 on Edith Bruck’s work, 70–71 friendship with Edith Bruck, 126n4, 163–64 on Jewish identity, 163–64, 173 literary debut, 83 on poetry, 137 poetry of, 138–41, 153, 160n9–10 Lewis, David, 105–06 Life is Beautiful, 67n38, 91 linguistic latencies, 45–46 Lizzani, Carlo, 72, 75, 95, 105 Longanesci, Leo, 138 L’oro di Roma, 72, 95

L’osteria di Brema, 139 L’Ovra a Cinecittà, 76 L’Uguaglianza, padre!, 142 Lunetta, Mario, 62, 68n40 L’Unità, 29n22, 84 L’univers concentrationnaire, 86 Madeo, Liliana, 30n22 Magris, Claudio, 43 Mai, Karin, 105–06 Malabaila, Damiano, 125 Manifesto della Razza, 73 Maraini, Dacia, 30n22 Marcus, Millicent, 71–72, 91, 93 “Maria, Maria, Marianna,” 29–30n22 Marino, Emanuele Valerio, 76, 77 Marino, Natalina, 76 Marxism, 82 Masslo, Jerry Essan, 17, 34n54 Mauceri, Maria Cristina, 10, 20–21, 38, 39–40, 63 on thematic ghetto, 41, 60, 65n14 Meale, Roberto, 98 memory, multidirectional, 23–24 Methnani, Salah, 14, 16, 17 Mi capirebbero le scimmie, 156 Miething, Christoph, 166 Migration Italy, 15 Miravelle, Sergio, 99 Monicelli, Mario, 87 Monologo, 42, 145–47, 149 Morante, Elsa, 138 Moravia, Alberto, 77, 79 Multidirectional Memory, 23–24 Mussolini, Benito, 74, 75, 79 Mussolini, Vittorio, 75–76, 77 Nani come noi, 115–18, 121, 123 Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing, 138 “Nascita,” 143 Nazism. See Holocaust, the Neorealism, 74–78



Index 219

Kapò and, 80–81 Nero, Franco, 113 North Africa, 16–17, 25 Nuda proprietà, 7, 46–48, 52, 60–61 popularity of, 62–63 Nuovo Planetario Italiano, 19, 20 Occupazioni farsesche, 30n22 Ossessione, 74, 77, 79–80 Out of Place, 56 Ovra, 76–77 Paese Sera, 80 Paisà, 80 Parati, Graziella, 15, 18, 38 “Parliamo madre,” 142–43 Patke, Rajeev Shridhar, 1 Paul Dry Books, 39 Pavolini, Alessandro, 77 Perra, Emiliano, 71–72 Persinsala, 92 Petöfi, Sándor, 154 Picchietti, Virginia, 71, 72–74 Pierangeli, Fabio, 166 Piperno, Alessandro, 166–67, 172–73 Poddar, Prem, 1 Poesie, 155 poetry, Holocaust, 138–41, 159–60n4. See also Italophone literature; writings of Edith Bruck of Primo Levi, 138–39, 153, 160n9–10 Poetry After Auschwitz, 137, 140 poetry of Edith Bruck, 63–64, 141–51, 161n25 In difesa del padre, 8, 42, 143, 149, 161n24 Edith Bruck on writing, 143, 152 Hungarian influences on, 152–59 Il tatuaggio, 42, 63, 141–43, 149, 154 Monologo, 42, 145–47, 149 “Parliamo madre,” 142–43 Specchi, 147–49, 151, 171

Pontecorvo, Gillo, 7, 69, 71, 72, 75, 78–79, 90, 126n11 documentary approach to filmmaking, 80–81 on love story inserted into Kapò, 86–87 references in Transit to, 79, 85, 87 sources used by, 129n53 technical and stylistic choices made by, 81–82 Pontecorvo, Marco, 72 Postman Always Rings Twice, The, 79–80 Pratolini, Vasco, 92 Pressburger, Giorgio, 12, 19, 22, 26, 43, 173 Homage to the Eighth District, 45, 46 Pressburger, Nicola, 45 Prismes: critique de la culture et société, 137 Privato, 11, 42, 58–59 Puzo, Mario, 46 Quale Sardegna?, 7, 105–10, 124 Quanta stella c’è nel cielo, 7, 30n25, 30n26, 44, 57 Racial Laws of 1938–1939, 74, 77–78, 159 Racial Manifesto, 25, 75 Radnóti, Mikos, 27, 152–53, 156–57 RAI, 7, 97, 105, 114, 124, 125 Remnants of Auschwitz, 126n3 reparations to Holocaust survivors, 5–6 Resine, 40 Risi, Nelo, 4, 7, 8, 41, 69, 71, 89, 124, 158 Andremo in città, 89, 92–96, 130n71 Edith Bruck’s poetry dedicated to, 147 on poetry, 151–52, 161n25 translation of poetry with Edith Bruck, 153–54 Risorgimento, 159 Rivette, Jacques, 85–86 Rochliz, Joseph, 72 Romani, Gabriella, 11–12, 13, 39, 49, 57 on Privato, 58, 59

220

index

Rosselli, Giacomo, 99 Rossellini, Roberto, 74, 80 Roth, Dany, 4 Rothberg, Michael, 23, 25 Ruberto, Laura E., 18 Said, Edward, 56 Salah, Asher, 73, 78 Salerno, Eric, 25, 35n72 Sarfatti, Michele, 127n21 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 80 Sátoraljaújhely ghetto, 3 Schneider, Helga, 35n64 screen memories, 24 screenwriting by Edith Bruck, 7, 28n4, 69–70, 124–25, 132–33n112. See also cinema, Italian Andremo in città, 71 “Scrivere ovunque. Diaspore europee e migrazione planetaria,” 20 Scrobogna, Federico, 93 Sea and Sardinia, 106, 110 Segre, Daniele, 72 “A Semiotics of Judaism,” 71 Se questo è un uomo, 139, 163–64 Serkowska, Hanna, 28 Se ti dimentico, Gerusalemme: Scrittori italiani ebrei nella Terra Promessa, 172 sexuality addressed in Edith Bruck’s works, 55–57 Shoah. See Holocaust, the siblings of Edith Bruck, 3 Signora Auschwitz, 9 “Signoral Auschwitz: il dono della parola,” 61 Sinopoli, Franca, 18 16 Ottobre 1943, 95 slavery, 23–24 Slovakia, 3 Sodi, Risa, 138 Solinas, Franco, 82 “Sono fragile,” 145–46 Sottili, Ricardo, 30n22

Soviet Union, 9 Specchi, 147–49, 151, 171 Speelman, Raniero, 28, 172 Springer, Edith, 40, 173 Squarotti, Barberi, 63 Stawinski, Jerzy, 92 Steinschreiber family, 2, 91 Storie naturali, 125 Storie vere, 7, 114–15, 125 Attilio Bertolucci: la camera da letto, 122–26 Dedicato a Franz Drago, 118–20, 121 Dietro il buio, 120–22, 123 Nani come noi, 115–18, 121, 123 Strasgberg, Susan, 81, 83, 87, 89, 90 “Strategies for Remembering: Auschwitz, Mother, and Writing in Edith Bruck,” 42 Suleiman, Susan, 8 “A Surprise,” 8 Swann, Brian, 140 Sweet Days of Discipline, The, 45 Teatro-Insieme, 29n22 Terdiman, Richard, 23 Terzieff, Laurent, 86 Texts and Translations, 39 theatrical works, 29–30n22 thematic ghetto, 41, 60, 65n14, 147 Tiszabercel, Hungary, 2–3, 28n5 Totò a colori, 81 “Tracce,” 50–51 Trahan, Elizabeth, 8 Transit, 37, 42, 44–46, 56, 61, 79, 89 assault of Edith Bruck incorporated into, 89–91 popularity of, 62 references to Kapò and Gillo Pontecorvo in, 79, 85, 87, 90 translations of Bruck’s works, 7–8, 39–40, 64n5 Treves, Giorgio, 72 Tuttolibri, 62, 63 Two Hands, 154



Index 221

Uccideteli tutti, 25, 35n72 Un altare per la madre, 7, 110–14, 125, 158–59 “Una Sorpresa,” 39 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 35n64, 161n24 “Un momento critico,” 75 Vajda, László, 77, 128n29 Vasvári, Louise O., 8, 10 Venice Film Festival, 98, 105 Ventennio, 73, 74 Visconti, Luchino, 74, 77, 79–80 Vitas, Ratko, 94 Webster, Brenda, 4, 10, 39 Wertmuller, Lina, 97 Who Love You Like This, 39, 153 Winkler, Angela, 112 Women’s Companion to International Film, The, 97 writings of Edith Bruck. See also Bruck, Edith; director, Edith Bruck as; poetry of Edith Bruck; individual works autobiographically focused, 43, 57 awards for, 18, 62 Bruck’s use of Italian and, 15–16, 30–31n27, 41 in collaboration with Gillo Pontecorvo, 80, 82–83, 84–85 concepts of homeland, boarders, and exile in, 12, 38–39, 46–48, 59–60 concepts of journey, movement, and physical/geographical transition in, 42–43, 52–54, 58–59 creative distance from the Holocaust in, 46–51 critical attention to, 18 death explored in, 49–51 documentary, 7, 29–30n22 first, 2, 4–5 Holocaust addressed in, 26–28, 37, 60–63, 66n20, 67n39, 68n40–41, 70–71



influence of Hungarian writers on, 152–59 injustice addressed in, 55–56 linguistic latencies in, 45–46 as migrant writing, 11–15, 20, 22 poetry, 63–64, 141–51 scholarship on, 1–2, 10–11, 26–27, 29n13 screenwriting, 7, 28n4, 69–70, 71, 124–25, 132–33n112 separation between fiction and reality in, 56–57 sexuality addressed in, 54–55 theatrical, 29–30n22 thematic ghetto in, 41, 60, 65n14, 147 themes in, 40, 41–42, 51–52 total oeuvre of, 7, 8, 28n4 transitional period in, 44–46 translations of, 7–10, 39–40, 64n5 transnational nature of, 40–41 Yiddish in, 171

Yiddish, 171 Zavattini, Cesare, 92