Losers And Keepers In Argentina

Rifke Schulman, a Russian Jew, came to Argentina in 1889 at the age of eighteen and helped set up the small agricultural colony called Moises Ville. Rifke's journal and the accompanying short stories introduce Bela Pelatnik, a victim of the white slave trade; Henoch Rosenvitch, the love of Rifke's life; Leah Uberman on her way to attend Moises Ville's centennial celebration; and many others. The book spans the last hundred years and examines the experience of Jewish immigrants in both North and South America, some of whom were nourished by their roots, others who severed their ties to an old way of life. In looking at the choices they all made, the ways they found love or shut themselves off from it, Nina Barragan offers a moving and multidimensional portrait of early twentieth-century Argentina and its contemporary descendants.

The first anthology of its kind, I Am of the Tribe of Judah: Poems from Jewish Latin America brings together poetry from the Mexican border to the tip of South America. Originally written in Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish, Ladino, Casteidish, and Hebrew, these poems have been translated into English, many for the first time, by a group of prize-winning translators. This multilingual collection looks at the tradition across more than five hundred years, featuring poems that exalt being Jewish, whether Ashkenazi or Sephardic, and poems that express humor and satire. Conversely, there are poems in response to anti-Semitism and poems of exile, of protest, and of the Holocaust. In a different mode, there are wondrous poems on mysticism and Kabbalah. The book includes an insightful introduction and historical background by world-renowned literary and social critic Ilan Stavans, professor at Amherst College.

There has been a dramatic increase in the amount of narrative work published by Chicana and Latina authors in the past 5 to 10 years. Nonetheless, there has been little attempt to catalog this material. This reference provides convenient access to all forms of narrative written by Chicana and Latina authors from the early 1940s through 2002. In doing so, it helps users locate these works and surveys the growth of this vast body of literature. The volume cites more than 2,750 short stories, novels, novel excerpts, and autobiographies written by some 600 Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Nuyorican women authors. These citations are grouped in five indexes: an author/title index, title/author index, anthology index, novel index, and autobiography index. Short annotations are provided for the anthologies, novels, and autobiographies. Thus the user who knows the title of a work can discover the author, the other works the author has written, and the anthologies in which the author's shorter pieces have been reprinted, along with information about particular works.

Comprehensive history of crypto-Jewish beliefs and social customs.

These novels, written by Perla Suez in Spanish and translated into English by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, take place in Entre RAA-os, the Argentine province where thousands of Jewish immigrants settled at the end of the nineteenth century.

These two autobiographical novels lay bare the life journey of a Mexican Jewish woman reconciling herself with a Sephardic background, her parent's dictates, and her husband's and family's expectations. The only constant in her life is a need to find her own way, and the story of how she does so is intensely personal and yet universal in its humanness. This quest begins in Oshinica's childhood: at about age ten she's taken from the public school in Mexico City and placed in a Jewish one. There she begins to understand what it means to be Jewish. Though somewhat indifferent to Hebrew lessons, she warms to the teacher who shares experiences of the Holocaust and learns that being Jewish means being different. Oshinica's family thwarts her desire to enter the university and instead she's pushed into marriage at age seventeen. Children follow quickly, four in all, and into the 1960s Oshinica tries to be a dutiful wife and mother while continuing to be an obedient daughter. But the insular Jewish neighborhood that sheltered and defined her life is impinged upon as modernity transforms Mexico City. Seeing films like the Fellini movie 8 1/2 and experiencing a culturally changing capital city sets her on a quest for her own voice and space. Eventually she separates and divorces, supports herself as a commercial photographer, and enrolls in a creative writing course taught by Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexicoás most prominent women authors. The short pieces begun in that course evolved into these two novels. The remarkable story they tell is how Oshinicaás many, and often painful, journeys of discovery led to a personal peace. áIáve never met a person so natural and spontaneous. Rosa Nissán adapts herself to life the way a plant adapts itself to the soil or the sun.ááElena Poniatowska

Twentieth-century Jewish history is embodied in this autobiography of a World War II Holocaust survivor who lives today in Argentina. Charles Papiernik was educated in a Polish stetl, a small town. Breaking away from his ultra-orthodox Hasidic teachers, he became active in socialist youth movements in Warsaw and moved to Paris to join his brothers. In spite of being deported and spending time in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, he survived the war and immigrated to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he opened a business and prospered. After twenty-five years in Uruguay, political and economic turmoil prompted him to immigrate once again, this time to Buenos Aires, where, once again, his business acumen led to financial success. He eventually retired, devoting his energies to telling the public about the horrors of the Holocaust. One of the few South American Holocaust memoirs available in English, Papiernik's story is very different from the stereotypical image of Holocaust survivors in South America forced to live cheek by jowl with ex-Nazis. Papiernik took Uruguay and Argentina by storm and claims never to have encountered anti-Semitism.