After Maternal Infrastructure: Natal Relationality and Holocaust Testimony in Edith Bruck

This article rereads Edith Bruck’s Chi ti ama così and Lettera alla madre through a birth-centered, maternal-relational framework that treats the mother-daughter relation as a primary scene of Holocaust testimony rather than an affective supplement. It argues that dominant biopolitical analyses of Auschwitz under-theorize the life-infrastructure—bread, warmth, care, authority, transmissibility—through which a subject survives long enough to bear witness. Close readings show Chi ti ama così tracing the incremental collapse of ‘maternal infrastructure’—the material conditions of life produced by maternal labor—from rural poverty to the camp, culminating in the mother’s reduction to smoke and imagined “soap.” Lettera alla madre then reconfigures testimony as maternal address: the injunction to “obey” and the Kaddish role-reversal stage survival as “leftover life” and test the limits of forgiveness, agency, and filial reproach. Bringing Arendtian natality into dialogue with Italian feminist thought and memory and narratability theory, the article argues that maternal address becomes a structuring condition of witnessing and reads Bruck’s adopted Italian as the idiom of a maternal archive.