Helena Janeczek

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Helena Janeczek (born 1964 in Munich ) is a German-Italian writer.

Life

Helena Janeczek's parents are Polish survivors of the Holocaust ; her father survived in hiding, her mother was a prisoner in Auschwitz . They got stuck as Displaced Persons in Munich because they could not get a visa for the USA, and their mother opened a retail shop there with goods from Italy. Janeczek got her first name after her grandmother who was murdered in Auschwitz and her middle name after relatives who were also killed. She suffers from her parents' persecution trauma. She attended school in Munich and learned her “ mother tongue ” German from her German nanny . She went to Italy to study in 1983, where she received Italian citizenship. She lives in Gallarate and works in Milan .

Janeczek initially worked as an editor at the Adelphi publishing house , for whom she translated works by Albert Einstein and Jizchak Katzenelson into Italian. She then moved to Mondadori . She writes for the literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti .

Janeczek published her collection of poems Ins Freie with Suhrkamp-Verlag in Germany in 1989 . In 1995 she and her mother attended the commemoration ceremony for the fifty-year liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau . Her novel Lezioni di tenebra , published in 1997, deals autobiographically with her family history and is a document of biographical writing of the second generation after the Holocaust. The novel was awarded the Premio Bagutta Opera Prima. Her third novel La ragazza con la Leica about the photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa was published in 2017 and received the Premio Bagutta and the most important Italian literary prize, the Premio Strega in 2018 . In 2020 Janeczek was awarded the Spycher: Leuk Literature Prize.

Works (selection)

  • In the open: poems . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1989
  • Lezioni di tenebra . Milan: Mondadori, 1997
  • Cibo . Milan: Mondadori, 2002
  • Le rondini di Montecassino . Parma: Guanda, 2010
  • Bloody Cow . Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2012
  • La ragazza con la Leica . Parma: Guanda, 2017 (German: The girl with the Leica . Berlin Verlag, 2020, ISBN 978-3827013989 )

literature

  • Federica K. Clementi: Helena Janeczek's Lessons of Darkness: Uncharted Paths to Shoah Memory through Food and Language . In: Contemporary Women's Writing , 6, 1, March 2012, pp. 1-19 ISSN 1754-1476
  • Dorothee Gelhard, Irmela von der Lühe (ed.): Who testifies for the witness? Positions of Jewish Remembrance in the 20th Century . Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2012 ISBN 978-3-631-62107-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Details of the vita in Federica K. Clementi, 2012
  2. ↑ Emilia Constantini: Strega 2018 a Helena Janeczek. Dopo 15 anni il premio è donna , Corriere, July 15, 2018
  3. ↑ Helena Janeczek excellent , boersenblatt.net, published and accessed on July 2, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Janeczek, Helena
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich