The Silver Candelabra & Other Stories
By Rita GardiolTranslated by Rita Gardiol
ISBN: 0-935480-88-9
Price: $17.00
Pages: 224
The Silver Candelabra & Other Stories offers a poignant and revealing look at the Jewish experience in Argentina. Twelve authors present the struggle to create an identity for themselves in a new country and maintain it through successive generations. Beginning with the cornerstone of all Jewish Latin American literature, Alberto Gerchunoff, and ending with stories by more contemporary authors such as German Rosenmacher and Alicia Steimberg, the stories range in theme from specifically Jewish concerns like immigration and Zionism, to issues of economic hardship and military repression in Argentina. The collection contains biographical information which introduces each author and frames their work within a larger cultural context. The inclusion of a preface by Darrell. B. Lockhart and an extensive bibliography make this anthology an excellent academic resource and ideal for classroom use.
Editor and translator Rita Gardiol is a professor of Spanish at Indiana University. She first became interested in the Jewish population of Argentina in 1988, after meeting the Jewish Argentine parents of a colleague. Through her research she discovered that, while Argentina had long been considered the "melting pot" of South America with its Spanish, Italian, German and English immigrant mix, there remains a less recognized Jewish ethnic group originating from Russia and Eastern Europe. Fleeing from the pogroms at the beginning of the century, and again from the political and economic devastation of World War I, more than 300,000 Eastern European Jews settled in Argentina, establishing the largest Jewish population in Latin America and the fifth largest in the world.