The Moldavian Pimp

By Edgardo Cozarinsky

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0099483750
• ISBN13: 9780099483755
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.3" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

imbued by shame, romance and tango

"Brevity is a sister of talent", - Anton Chekhov, the Russian master of short story, used to say. Moldavian Pimp is precisely the novel Chekhov would have meant if he had a chance to read it. From the turn of the century to roughly the mid-1930s, the notorious and efficient organization Zwi Migdal used to be #1 in supply of female flesh from Eastern Europe to its 2000 brothels in Argentina. Zwi Migdal was a blight from which the Argentine Jewish community vigorously distanced its reputation, for its members and its victims were Jewish. "The stories aren't made up, they're inherited", - this is how Moldavian Pimp starts. The novel consists of several intersecting stories about the perpetrators and the victims of prostitution. The stories came to light as all stories of "shame and romance" do - by accidental discovery of their memento. The student of theater was conducting the research on long-gone Yiddish theaters in Buenos Aires. He came across the manuscript of the tango musical titled Moldavian Pimp. His research was side-tracked by the inquiry into the lives of the author and the actors of Moldavian Pimp. It turned out that they all had the connection to the infamous industry. The novel is not about the Argentine tango per se, but it is imbued with the tango, no matter where each story takes you - to the dinky provincial bar in Argentina of the 1920s or to the bohemian cafe in modern Paris. Aside from being a very fine work of fiction, Moldavian Pimp takes off all romantic patina from the phrase "Tango was born in brothels". This is how it really was.