The Letters That Never Came

By Mauricio Rosencof

Book Overview

The Letters that Never Came is an autobiographical novel in three parts. Part I is a rich evocation of life in a working-class neighborhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the mid-1930s, as seen through the eyes of Moishe, the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants. In what is a daily routine, Moishe's father waits for the postman at the window, always hoping for news of his family from the Old Country. Don Isaac's relatives are prisoners of the Nazis, so all he can read Moishe and his mother is letters from before. Interspersed among the child narrator's reminiscences are the letters those relatives might have written, bearing witness to their suffering. Letters that never came.

In Part II, we find Moishe in the dungeons of the military junta that governed his country through the 1970s and part of the 1980s. Held in isolation, 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--while his parents, penniless, are evicted from their house and stigmatized as the mother and father of a "subversive."

Part III of Rosencof's text 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.

The Letters that Never Came was originally published in Spanish in 2000 in Uruguay.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826333737
• ISBN13: 9780826333735
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 106 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.6"

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.