The Bride from Odessa: Stories

By Edgardo Cozarinsky

Book Overview

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, and Odessa, both before and after World War II, the eleven stories in The Bride from Odessa belong to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of history, who sets down in a strange but proud land and looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memory. Edgardo Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists, and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina, is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair. The Bride from Odessa describes a secret land without borders--it is provocative and mysterious fiction of the highest order.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374116733
• ISBN13: 9780374116736
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant collection of stories

This collection of stories is excellently written, addicting to read, and takes you on a ride across several continents in its exploration of Jewish migration during and following World War 2. Its range of subject matter is impressive -- the book has stories set in different time periods & places, each with different and unique goals. Cozarinsky's style is metropolitan and compelling and the use of style to convey points is well done -- for example he uses excerpts of letters and other historical documents to call into question the truthfulness of memory. The stories are a quick read but made me want to read more, and I am eager to return to the book to catch all the details I missed the first time through. I highly recommend this book.