Edith Bruck, Il pane perduto [The Lost Bread],
La nave di Teseo, 2021
From our formative years onwards, we were taught to celebrate the Day for Jewish-Christian Dialogue, from which grew a focus on writers, particularly Jewish ones, who recount the Shoah. On this occasion, I had the opportunity to read The Lost Bread by Edith Bruck, published in 2021. The book was a finalist for the Strega Prize, which in its essentiality, without indulging in scenes from my many readings, recounts a time span that reaches our day. What strikes me is the ability of Edith Bruck, a Hungarian Jew, to succeed in rebuilding, after so much suffering in concentration camps, after the lost illusion of the Promised Land, a completely different life (she has also been on vacation in Ischia, my native island, in the fabulous '60s). A life without hatred but with a strong determination to witness what happened when, even today, denialism seem to take over. Such women, like Edith, are necessary to nourish the collective memory but also that of those who wish to prevent the horror from happening again.