Edith Bruck in the Mirror

Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives

Philip Balma

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612493343
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Jüdische Literaturkritik

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 It also includes previously unpublished interviews with the author.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.

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.

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, 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 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 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Edith Bruck
• 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 Translated by Elizabeth Hellman
• Appendix Two: When Art and Life Imitate Each Other: A Conversation with Edith Bruck. Translated by Erika Brownlee
• Bibliography
• Index