Jacqueline Harpman is a dead Holocaust survivor who went viral on TikTok, and literary translators should be working overtime to translate all of her funny, poignant novels as soon as possible.

Harpman was born in 1929 in Belgium to Jeanne Honorez and Andries Harpman, who was Jewish. In May 1940, the same month Nazis invaded Belgium, her family moved to Casablanca, Morocco, according to an interview with the Belgian journalist Joëlle Smets. Harpman faced institutional antisemitism in Morocco, then a French protectorate, and moved back to Belgium in October 1945, after the war ended.

In Belgium, Harpman became both a celebrated author and a professional psychoanalyst. She published the slim, dystopian novel I Who Have Never Known Men in French in 1995, and it was translated soon afterward into English by Ros Schwartz. In 2022, in the wake of the first Trump administration and the popularity of dystopian fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale, the book was re-released. Book bloggers on TikTok, who usually seem more interested in romance and fantasy, did the seemingly impossible and made a nearly 30-year-old Belgian novel in translation go viral, a rare win for the crazies among us who envision a world where everyone has impeccable literary taste. It sold 100,000 copies in the U.S. last year.