IL PANE PERDUTO

A testimony to the horrors of Nazism and the Shoah, an enduring and poignant literary memoir that holds the memories of a lifetime.

Sixty years after her first book, Edith Bruck remembers her life before and after Auschwitz. Coming from a remote Hungarian village where her family barely makes a living, and having survived only with the support of her older sister Judit, Edith Bruck is on an odyssey, once again. Where to live and with whom? Behind her lie the burnt lives of many loved ones, including her parents. Ahead of her is debris. The world is an alien place to her and she decides to escape to somewhere else. Bruck recounts the feeling of being a stranger to her own family who has not experienced the camps. She lands in Italy and becomes the manager of a beauty parlor for the upper class in Rome during the 1950s. Finally, she recalls her most significant encounter with her lifelong companion, the poet and film director Nelo Risi, with whom she forms an artistic and sentimental partnership that was to last sixty years. Edith Bruck was born into a poor, large Jewish family. In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz. A survivor she arrived in Italy after years of pilgrimage. In 1962, she published a volume of short stories entitled "Andremo in città" which her husband Nelo Risi made into a film. She has received several literary awards and her work has been widely translated. Bruck is the author of: Chi ti ama così (1959), Quanta stella c'è nel cielo (2009), Privato (2010), Il sogno rapito (2014), La rondine sul termosifone (2017), Ti lascio dormire (2019).