Traveler of the Century By Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $30 There was a time when Latin American writers felt compelled — maybe the word is “constrained” — to focus their work on a single topic: Latin America. Jorge Luis Borges sought to change this…
Amid Buenos Aires’s Once-Abasto area — a tight knit urban oasis of kosher restaurants, stores, butcher shops and synagogues — sits the large but crowded flagship store of the wine producer Tariag 613. Fighting for shelf space are crates of matzo, kosher food stuffs and wines from the San Juan area, a lesser known wine…
In the metropolitan area where Adolf Eichmann once hid, a rabbi is now a member of parliament. Rabbi Sergio Bergman, representing the center-right PRO Party Buenos Aires’s municipal election, won 45% of the vote in a race featuring 10 candidates, according to the JTA. He garnered more than three times the votes of his runner…
On the morning of July 18, 1994, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of Argentina took place with the bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. The investigation into the attack is ongoing. In his new fotonovela, “Once @ 9:53 am,” Forward contributing editor Ilan Stavans, along with…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. On March 12 the Yiddish theater lost one of its most beloved stars. Shifra Lerer, an Argentine-born actress who toured the world and who later appeared in films by Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet, died in Manhattan at the age of 95. I met Shifra during my…
Like Homer’s “Odyssey,” the film “Anita,” which screened in January at the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival and is showing until February 8 at the New York Reelabilities film festival, is the story of someone trying to find her way home. During the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires,…
A tragic event can provide a filmmaker with compelling material for a movie, but simply presenting calamity on the big screen doesn’t necessarily result in a good story. In director Fabian Hofman’s semi-autobiographical “I Miss You” (“Te Extraño”), which screened in November at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and will be shown on January 22…
Crossposted from Haaretz Singing was a necessity and inevitability for Claudia Nurit Henig. Born in Argentina, her mother tongue is Ladino, a language that seems to encompass infinite musical riches. Even the transition as a child from Buenos Aires to Arad, after losing her parents one after the next, did not dull Henig’s passion for…
סאָװעטיש־ייִדיש איז געװען אַ ראַדיקאַלער עקספּערימענט, װאָס פֿאַרנעמט אַ װיכטיקן פּלאַץ אױף דער װעלטמאַפּע פֿון ייִדישער קולטור
