Letters That Never Came

By Mauricio Rosencof

Book Overview

Originally published in Spanish in 2000 and first appearing in English in 2004, The Letters that Never Came is an autobiographical novel in three parts that reflects Rosencof's life growing up in 1930s Uruguay as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and, later, his twelve-year imprisonment during the military dictatorship his country suffered. Part I is a rich evocation of life in Montevideo in the mid-1930s as seen through the eyes of young Moishe. Every day, Moishe's father waits for the postman, hoping for news of his family, who are prisoners of the Nazis. Interspersed among Moishe's reminiscences are the letters those relatives might have written--but never came. In Part II, Moishe is imprisoned in the dungeons of the military junta that governed Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s. Tortured and starving, he takes refuge in the world of his imagination, composing another letter that never came--a letter to his father that embodies his own quest for identity. Part III is largely a meditation on the redemptive power of the word, real and imagined. This poignant, humane work, as Uruguayan and Jewish as it is universal, links the cruelty of the Holocaust to that of the Uruguayan military and the resistance of Hitler's victims to his own.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 089672865X
• ISBN13: 9780896728653
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Poignant, evocative and urgent

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.

awesome!

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.