Lost Bread

by Edith Bruck, Gabriella Romani (Translator), David Yanoff (Translator)

Overview

Bruck's "spare prose captures the raw terror and bitter sorrow of the camps. She also finds lyrical beauty and unexpected joy in moments of calm. Reading her work is like breaking bread with her, seeking light amid the shadows cast by history."
—Wall Street Journal

Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, renowned author and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish girl living in Hungary during World War II. 

In 1944, twelve-year-old Ditke, her parents, and her siblings are forced out of their home by the Nazis and sent to a series of concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. Miraculously surviving the war with one of her sisters, but losing her parents and a brother, Ditke begins a tortuous journey—first back to Hungary, where she knows she doesn’t belong, and then to Israel. There, she holds various jobs before she leaves with a dance troupe, touring Turkey, Switzerland, and Italy. In Italy she finds a home, at last, and a small measure of peace; there, too, she falls in love and marries.

Writing as herself, Edith Bruck closes Lost Bread by addressing a letter to God expressing her rejection of hatred, her love for life, and her hope never to lose her memory or ability to continue speaking for those who perished in the Nazi concentration camps. After the book’s publication in Italy, Pope Francis visited Bruck and thanked her for bearing witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781589881785
Publisher:	Dry, Paul Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Pages:	142
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Edith Bruck was born in Hungary in 1931, and as a young teen 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 end of WWII, she briefly returned to Hungary, lived in Czechoslovakia, and then moved to Israel, where she stayed for three years. Working for a dancing troupe in 1954 she traveled to Italy where she decided to settle and where she still lives today.

Bruck is the author of more than twenty books, both prose and poetry, devoted to her life-long commitment to Holocaust testimony, starting with Who Loves You Like This (1959, Italian edition; 2001, English edition, Paul Dry Books). She has won several Italian literary awards; most recently, in 2021, Lost Bread was a finalist for the prestigious Premio Strega and winner of Premio Strega giovani (youth).

Bruck has gained national and international recognition for her writings in Holocaust testimony and, more generally, in contemporary Italian literature. Among other honors, in 2021 she received the Cavalieriato di Gran Croce, conferred by the President of Italy. Along with Primo Levi, Edith Bruck is one of the most prolific writers of Holocaust narratives in Italian. Her books have been translated into many languages including English, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew. She lives in Rome.

Gabriella Romani is Professor of Italian at Seton Hall University. With Brenda Webster she translated Edith Bruck’s Letter to My Mother (2006) and Enrico Castelnuovo’s The Moncalvos (2017). She is from Rome and now lives in Philadelphia. 

David Yanoff is an attorney and author from Philadelphia.

Editorial Reviews

Shortlisted for the Strega Prize 2021 (Italy)

Awarded the Strega Youth Prize 2021 (Italy)

Bruck's "spare prose captures the raw terror and bitter sorrow of the camps. She also finds lyrical beauty and unexpected joy in moments of calm. Reading her work is like breaking bread with her, seeking light amid the shadows cast by history."
—Wall Street Journal

"Bruck’s frequent focus on the period following the liberation of the camps is part of what makes her work original and compelling. Hence, some of the most poignant lines in Lost Bread describe the emotional and geographic dislocation experienced after World War II."
—Boston Globe

"Brutal but hopeful . . . Sobering in its considerations and denunciations of ascendant fascist movements."
—Foreword Reviews

"Riveting."
—Jewish Book Council

“A strong message about the power of memory and human resilience. Because of books like Lost Bread, the story of the Holocaust will never be forgotten.”
—Association of Jewish Libraries

"Many stories have been written about the Holocaust. Lost Bread spends only one chapter on Bruck’s months in the camps. Rather, her story examines the complex response individuals had post-war, asking the important question: what have we learned, if we have learned anything, for Jews as well as non-Jews. While Bruck’s faith remains unsullied, the question she asks remains unanswered."
—Historical Novel Reviews

“Lost Bread adds an essential chapter to the literature of the Holocaust. With a broad transnational sweep, it recounts a refugee's search for a new home, from country to country, until finally settling in Italy. In this elegant translation, the voice of Edith Bruck—Italy's most important witness together with Primo Levi—reaches the English reader with all its poignance and raw emotional power.”
—Michael F. Moore, translator of The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi, and The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni 

“Written with the emotional honesty and intimate authenticity that only a Holocaust survivor can claim, Edith Bruck’s Lost Bread is a remarkable testimony to the author’s human spirit and the blossoming of life after the Holocaust. Beginning in a small village in Hungary, Bruck tells the story of Ditke’s unlikely survival through a ghetto and concentration camps before claiming and creating a new life in Israel and Italy. Lost Bread is a beautifully crafted, urgent novel that achieves the highest goals of Holocaust fiction: to leave the reader with more compassion and understanding for survivors of the Shoah. An unforgettable, triumphant account. ”
—Anna Salton Eisen, author of Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust and The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir (National Jewish Book Award Finalist)

“Lost Bread is Edith Bruck’s ‘long poem written by life,’ a minimalist fable that deftly distills the vileness of the Holocaust into heart-wrenching observations and moments that dance precariously between horror and hope. Writing in her adopted language—Italian—Bruck sheds the misery her native Hungarian tongue fated her to, allowing Bruck to find sense in survival, if not in her prior destiny. She finally speaks her name, makes peace with God, and graces our world with the gift of powerful, needful witness testimony, wielding prose honed as sharp as a diamond that cuts. A stunning addition to the Holocaust canon.”
—Tara Lynn Masih, author of My Real Name Is Hanna (National Jewish Book Award Finalist)

"A fast-paced, unadorned, and intensely compelling saga of Holocaust survival and its aftermath. While the memoir begins as a folk tale about a girl who walked barefoot in the warm dust of a rural village 'long long ago,' it soon becomes a searing historical chronicle whose narrator takes on the first-person urgency of a protagonist living through the reality of the Shoah. The 'lost bread' of her mother’s lament on the eve of deportation has a powerful, and ironic Biblical charge. This leave-taking is an inverse Exodus—there is no staff-of-life to lead Hungarian Jews in 1944 to a Promised Land. Edith Bruck can only retrieve that loss through her writing. If there is a Promised Land in Bruck’s narrative, it is Italy, which gave her the community and the language to bear witness. And thanks to Gabriella Romani and David Yanoff’s superb translation, (framed by Romani’s Introduction and her 2022 interview with Bruck), we too can be its recipients."
—Millicent Marcus, Sarai Ribicoff Professor of Italian Studies, Yale University

“With every line of Lost Bread Edith Bruck entrusts to her readers the memories that the atrocity of the Shoah could not destroy. Memory is the salvation that defies horror. Memory keeps alive the unwavering love that a mother kneads into the bread she bakes for her children. This English translation of Bruck’s forceful—yet delicate and immensely dignified—testimony preserves the intensity of the original Italian. When you slowly turn the last page of the book, you know that the tenderness and the poignancy of that lost bread will stay with you forever.” 
—Helena Sanson, Professor of Italian, History of Linguistics, and Women’s Studies, University of Cambridge

“Lost Bread is on the same scale as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man . . . It is impossible, with each line, not to tremble.”
—Le Point (France)

“A testimony that teaches us to look at reality and discover fragments of beauty and hope.”
—L’Osservatore Romano (Vatican City)

“Lost Bread is part of the great autobiographical accounts of the Shoah and the deportation.”
—Agence France-Presse

“A poetic (and hate-free) journey through the Nazi horror gallery.”
—Il Fatto Quotidiano (Italy)

“All Edith Bruck’s life’s work is a testimony, and ultimately the extreme, desperate, word-filled effort to make the incomprehensible comprehensible.”
—Corriere della Sera Sette (Italy)

“A tale that you have to read until the last page, full of history, of life, of love.”
—Furio Colombo

From the Publisher