Posted on November 9, 2018 at 11:30 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
One of our favorite podcasts periodically does an episode with the theme “unearthed” — and today, we’re mimicking that.
The diary of a Polish teenager executed during World War II and short stories from a Nobel laureate are both set to be published in English within the next year, reports the Guardian.
After Renia Spiegel was shot in 1942, her boyfriend — who wrote the final entry — came into possession of the seven-hundred-page journal.
After surviving the war, the young man found Renia’s mother and sister and handed over her diary.
Renia’s mother died without bringing herself to read the journal; her sister, Ariana, left it unopened for years as well.
But recently, Ariana’s daughter, Alexandra Bellak, decided to have it translated, in recognition of how important it is to remember the horrors of the Holocaust.
The diary is already available in Polish and will be published in English in full next year — along with Ariana’s own story of survival.
You can peek at The Diary of Renia Spiegel in the Guardian and Smithsonian magazine.
Our other unearthed literature story also comes thanks to a younger relative of the writer.
The daughter of Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz recently shared a box of his papers with a journalist writing a book about Mahfouz.
Eighteen of the fifty handwritten stories found in that box had never been published; they’ll be out in Arabic next month and in English next fall.
Mahfouz won the Nobel prize in literature in 1988 and died in 2006.
Learn more about the author, who wrote over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories, and his work (both new and old) in the Guardian.
Categories: Today in Books