Letter to My Mother by Edith Bruck, Brenda Webster (Translator), Gabriella Romani (Translator)

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Synopsis

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

Annotation

Nominated for a 26th Annual 2006 Northern California Book Award in the category of Translation.

Biography

Translator Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore, Columbia, and Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is also a freelance writer and critic who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome, and she is the current president of PEN West. Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologized critical studies, Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study (Stanford) and Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Macmillan), and translated poetry from the Italian for The Other Voice (Norton) and The Penguin Book of Women Poets. She is co-editor of the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster's mother) Ethel Schwabacher, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Indiana 1993). She is the author of three novels, Sins of the Mothers (Baskerville 1993), Paradise Farm (SUNY, 1999), and The Beheading Game (Wings Press, 2006) and a memoir, The Last Good Freudian (Holmes and Meier, 2000). She is currently working on a novel about the tragic death of Freud's most brilliant disciple.