The ghetto within A novel

In his first novel to be translated into English, French Argentine writer Amigorena imagines the torment of his Jewish grandfather, who emigrated to South America only to be haunted into silence by his mother's wartime messages from Warsaw. By 1940, Vincente Rosenburg was well established in Buenos Aires, running his furniture store by day and enjoying tranquil evenings with his wife, Rosita, and their three young children. The "war in Europe was so remote one might still have thought it was peacetime." But his mother's increasingly infrequent letters describe how "complicated" life under the Nazis has become. Eventually, the euphemisms fall away, laying bare the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto. When his mother's correspondence stops altogether, Vincente goes silent, swallowing his suffering and dashing his Argentinian domestic bliss. Well-known in France for his films (and high-profile romantic relationships), Amigorena has focused his autobiographical writing on the challenges of overcoming silence. Here, despite remaining largely off-camera, the "writer who never wanted to write" reveals something powerful about his motivations and the continued intergenerational resonance of survivor's guilt.

The time: the 1940s. The place: Buenos Aires. Vicente Rosenberg emigrated there from Poland in 1928, but his mother and brother refused to join him. Like much of the rest of the world, at first he chooses to ignore new, unbelievable atrocities occurring 8,000 miles away, but as the situation in Europe increasingly worsens, he learns that his mother is trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. Crippled by guilt and remorse, out of touch with his family, despondent and gradually withdrawing into himself, he decides to die by suicide only to have his wife interrupt the attempt with news of a pregnancy. At the end, the reader is surprised to discover that the omniscient narrator is actually Vicente's real grandson, the author himself, adding an autobiographical dimension to the novel. VERDICT An Argentine film director and screenwriter residing in France (and writing in French), Amigorena (A Laconic Childhood) almost seamlessly alternates the narration between the fictional lives of the Argentine exiles and documentation of the horrific events in Europe. Coupled with the themes of exile and the struggle for Jewish identity, he brilliantly parallels the plight of the forsaken victims within the ghetto and Vicente's sense of helplessness, as if he, too, were enclosed by walls.--Lawrence Olszewski

A Jewish man in 1940 Argentina confronts his mother's fate when she's confined in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Argentina, Amigorena grew up in France, whose language he writes in and where this novel has been nominated for several prizes, including the Prix Goncourt. It is part of a series of autobiographical novels the author, also a prolific screenwriter, has been writing since the 1990s, and in a preface, he calls the present novel "the source" of the project. The last chapter clarifies the connection. The narrative follows a few years in the life of Vicente Rosenberg, who moved to Argentina from Poland in 1928, leaving behind his mother. Despite her many letters pleading for a response, he does not write to her for years, even as antisemitism rises in Europe. Then German troops invade Poland and the Nazis create the Warsaw ghetto. Shortly after the novel opens in late 1940, Vicente gets a letter in which his mother describes hardships in the ghetto and asks him to send money. He thinks of all the chances he had to get her out of Warsaw. He feels the onset of a "sense of the guilt that he would never truly erase from his heart." The novel tracks the deepening of this guilt and its effect on Vicente and his wife and three children. In the next few years, the letters stop and news of the death camps starts to reach Vicente. His life becomes a "desolate void" in which "his wife and children scarcely existed." He stops speaking and gambles compulsively. Amigorena charts the man's guilt-driven psychological deterioration in careful detail, from small matters ("What difference would it make whether or not he ate more gnocchi?") to abject misery. Even in extremes of emotion, the translation offers controlled, lucid prose. A bleak, affecting portrait that points to immeasurable collateral damage. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.