Customer Reviews

The Letters That Never Came (Jewish Latin Amer Series)

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Like Mauricio Rosencof, the author of this book, I am Uruguayan - but this book has a message for every reader, regardless of his or her nationality, religion or political ideology.

The son of poor Polish/Jewish immigrants (his father was a tailor), Mauricio Rosencof's childhood was punctuated by poverty and absence - that of his elder brother, who, as he tells us, "protected me all my life, until he died", and that of his parents' Polish relatives, assassinated by the Germans and authors of the real or imagined "letters that never came". But Mauricio's early years were also marked by the kindness of his parents, by his hungry alertness to the world, and by the magical background of a long-gone Montevideo - all of which he evokes masterfully.

Suffering was to feature prominently in adulthood too. For about twelve years (1973 - 1985), Uruguay was scourged by a shameful and bloody military dictatorship that ended one of the longest and stablest democratic traditions in South America. Mauricio, a left-wing activist, was imprisoned and tortured, while his aged father and mother were persecuted as the "parents of a subversive". During these dark times, the letters that never came were the ones he could not write, the ones that told of the brutal treatment meted out to him, of the terror, the hope and the endurance.

I read the book in the original Spanish and so cannot comment on the translation, but I hope it does justice to Rosencof's spare, austere and yet profoundly evocative writing.

It should also be noted that "The letters..." inspired a play (which included Hebrew dances or "rikudim") and ran for a long time in Montevideo's renowned "Teatro El Galpón".

This wonderfully crafted memoir is an urgent and important read which speaks of family ties, heritage, love, grief, beliefs, and - above all - the force of the human spirit.

i read this book in the original spanish a couple of years ago and was blown away. rosencof creatively weaves together his own history with that of his ancestors who perished in hitler's camps. i have not read this translated version, but it is probably excellent since it is part of a series that has included terrific books.