This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Jeanne Bonner is an editor, essayist, and literary translator, specializing in overlooked or emerging Italian women writers. She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Writing from Bennington College. She won the 2018 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian literature. She teaches writing part-time and works as a contract news editor at CNN. During her Short-Term Fellowship at The New York Public Library, she conducted research on Holocaust imagery in the works of Italian women writers.

When did you first get the idea for your research project? 

It was after I began translating works by Italian transnational author Edith Bruck, a peer of Primo Levi and a fellow survivor of Auschwitz. I have published some poems in translation that she wrote, and I am working on her short stories during my time at The New York Public Library.

What brought you to the Library? 

I applied for an NYPL fellowship so I could conduct research that will assist me in my translations of short stories from Bruck’s collections Due Stanze Vuote and Andremo in Città, as well as further my study of Italian women writers from the Holocaust era. 

What research tools could you not live without?

Dictionaries. That’s why coming to NYPL is such a thrill—there are scores of Italian dictionaries, tomes on grammar, books of synonyms, and etymological studies.

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

Liliana Segre, one of the few remaining Italian survivors of the Holocaust still alive, said menstruation was among her first thoughts when she was deported to a concentration camp in 1944. Segre said she and her fellow prisoners didn’t have underwear or any kind of rag to absorb the blood flow when the monthly cycle would arrive. But what’s even more chilling is that Segre and the other female prisoners needn’t have worried because most of the women never got a period in the Lager. Slowly their starved bodies became skeletal, making menstruation almost impossible.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

That in the opinion of many survivors, including Primo Levi, the foremost Italian chronicler of the Holocaust, women fared much worse in Nazi concentration camps than men. Levi, who wrote an introduction to Liana Millu’s Il Fumo di Birkenau, said the women's situation was "a good deal worse" for a variety of reasons, including "the haunting presence of the crematoria, located right in the middle of the women’s camp, inescapable, undeniable, their ungodly smoke rising from the chimneys to contaminate every day and every night, every moment of respite or illusion, every dream and timorous hope." (From the English translation by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Smoke Over Birkenau).

Describe a moment when your research took an unexpected turn.

Here at the library, after translating other works by Ms. Bruck, I began to translate Due Stanze Vuote (“Two Empty Rooms”), a book I don’t own and which is difficult to obtain. And what I found is that it might be the most compelling of all of her works because it evokes the absurdity of anti-Semitism mixed with class warfare and denial about the Holocaust. I’ve been focusing on translating one section of the title story of the collection, which takes place in 1963, and the scene that emerges is scathing in its analysis of attitudes toward Jews: the main character of the short story is a Holocaust survivor like Bruck who returns to her native village in Hungary where she is greeted like a celebrity and a talisman. The townspeople are so stunned she’s still alive they take it as an omen and rush to touch her and feed her in the belief it will absolve them of the guilt they feel over doing nothing to help her family before they were deported. 

How do you maintain your research momentum?

I take breaks by walking. In New York, I love walking downtown. 

After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?

When I’m in New York, I meet up with friends in Bryant Park and visit my sister’s family in New Jersey. At home, I walk my dog and play with my son, Leo.

What tabs do you currently have open on your computer? 

The NYPL research page and the Garzanti Linguistica web site, which is an online Italian dictionary that allows me to look up the Italian definition of a word, rather than immediately seeking out the English translation. Plus, my own personal blog where I document among other things my lifelong study of the Italian language and culture.

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?

If you have an idea, no matter who you are, no matter whether you are affiliated with a university or research institution or not, pursue it. The New York Public Library can be your ally for your project. It was so apparent while I was at NYPL that the library is a public good, here for all of us, for no other reason than reading and studying enrich our lives, making our society richer as a whole. And on behalf of all of us, the Library is collecting books, photos, oral histories, and myriad other materials for our edification.