2018 School Spending Survey Report
The Ghetto Within
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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.
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