Juan Gelman and ‘the bankruptcy of Argentine morality’
by Habitus · 02/25/10
Our contributing editor Ilan Stavans has a piece in the Forward about the Jewish-Argentine poet Juan Gelman. Stavans writes:
He makes me think of the Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement who came to Argentina seeking a Promised Land but rapidly found disillusionment. Gelman isn’t an immigrant, but his parents and siblings were born in Ukraine of martial stock. His father fought in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Growing disappointment with the promise of a new life in the New World is Gelman’s theme. It culminated in 1976, at the peak of the Dirty War, when police kidnapped his 20-year-old son, along with the son’s pregnant wife; they were never to be seen again. Theirs became two more names added to the long list of desaparecidos.
For more from Buenos Aires and Ilan Stavans, take a look at Habitus no.3.
