Book, Inner Ghetto, O[LS]

Buenos Aires, early 1940s. Vicente Rosenberg, who emigrated alone from Poland in 1928, owns a furniture store, is married and has children. He enjoys the big city to the south: he frequents the cafes, swaps Jewish food for empanadas, reads the local newspapers, feels perfectly at home in the Castilian language. He does not practice the religion of his ancestors. He is a man of the 20th century, a satisfied inhabitant of the New World. His mother, however, remained in Warsaw. And in the sporadic letters he manages to write to his son, he describes his situation, which progressively worsens when the Nazis build the infamous ghetto to isolate the Jewish population. As time passes, the letters reveal a dramatic situation. People shot down in broad daylight. The murderous sarcasm of the German soldiery. Hunger, disease and open-air animalization. The mother no longer has hope: the end of everyone is near in that place. It is at this point that Vicente begins to get affected. He, who until then remembered little about his Jewish condition, realizes that, in the time in which he lives, everything that a person can be disappears when he is identified as a Jew. He, who speaks several languages ​​and does not attend the temple, feels that everything he does will be useless. Vicente starts to talk less, preferring silence, saying only what is essential. The guilt — for leaving his mother in the ghetto, for being Jewish, for being alive while they massacre millions of his own — gnaws at him from the inside, reducing the young man to a kind of walking carcass. Mutism progresses and leaves family, friends and employees bewildered, unable to define his condition or help him. This gesture will impact your entire life. And the future of their descendants. With this poignant and captivating novel, Amigorena was a finalist for France's main literary awards and one of the biggest publishing successes of recent times.