Novel
The Letters That Never Came
Las cartas que no llegaron
Mauricio Rosencof · 2000
Synopsis
Moishe grows up in Montevideo in the thirties and forties, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. On Sundays, in the kitchen, they read the letters from the father's sister, who stayed behind there, shut in the ghetto and then in a camp; the mother keeps in a shoebox the photos of the relatives who have disappeared. Then the letters stop arriving. Grown to manhood and a political prisoner, alone in his cell, the narrator writes to his father, Isaac, and later goes to Europe to look for a trace of his family.
Context
Published in Montevideo in 2000 by Alfaguara, the book has three parts: days of the neighbourhood and of war, a letter to the father, then days without time. Critics read it as a hybrid narrative, between novel, testimony, letters and essay, and place it within the country's prison literature. During his detention, deprived of anything to write with, the author composed letters to his father in his head; the word dictatorship does not appear in the book. It was translated into English and German in 2004, into French in 2009, and into Portuguese in 2013.
Who it is for
A short novel in Spanish, of about one hundred and twenty pages, between childhood memories and imaginary letters.
Prizes and reception
Translated into four languages; critics read it as an elegy in letters, one of the books of Uruguayan prison memory.
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