Edith Bruck in the Mirror: Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives

By Philip Balma

Author 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. 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 It also includes previously unpublished interviews with the author.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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781612493343

Book preview

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

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 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 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 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 Bergen-Belsen. 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 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)

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 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 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 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 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 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,