The Silver Candelabra & Other Stories: A Century of Jewish Argentine Literature

by Rita Gardiol (Editor), Rita Gardiol

In a revealing look at the Jewish experience in Argentina, 12 authors present the struggle to create an identity in a new country and maintain it through successive generations in this collection of short stories and memoirs. Beginning with Alberto Gerchunoff and ending with more contemporary authors such as German Rosenmacher and Alicia Steimberg, the stories range in theme from immigration and Zionism to economic hardship and military repression. The book contains biographical information for each author and frames their work within a larger cultural context.

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[Dov Zeller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a big short fiction reader, but came across this book somehow (don't recall) and am glad I checked it out of the library. This Argentine Jewish writing, mostly--if not all--by people whose families fled Eastern European pogroms and other violence, poses interesting questions about diasporic writing and literary identity. A lot of the stories still have an Eastern European Jewish cadence to them, but the struggles seem to me universal in the sense of their focus on relationships, identity, belonging, questions of assimilation into cultures that conflict with familial/traditional cultures.

Below is an interesting review I found. There are very few and the book doesn't seem to have a large readership, but hopefully it at least is being read in college/university classes focused on Argentinian, South American or Jewish Argentinian/South American writers.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10...