Born in Buenos Aires in 1951, Ana Maria Shua is one of the most exciting and prolific young Latin American Jewish writers. She published her first book at the age of sixteen; since then she has published thirteen books, including nonfiction, novels, short stories, and children's books. The Book of Memories, originally published in Spanish in 1994, is a humorous yet moving exploration of a Jewish family's history, as seen through the eyes of three generations of women. The story begins with Grandfather Gedalia leaving Poland with forged papers to escape the army and sailing to Argentina, the...

First published in 1973, this book traces the history of Luis de Carvajal the Younger and his family in Spain, their migration to the New World, their religious practices, and their adventures in New Spain until one by one they were put to flight or indicted by the Inquisition. Luis himself was burned at the stake in 1596 at the age of thirty. He left behind not only his legacy as an exemplary secret Jew but also valuable literary documents--his memoirs, his last will and testament, and his letters to his mother and sisters in the inquisitorial prison.

This important history documents the religious customs of the crypto-Jewish culture in Spain, Portugal, and their American colonies, principally Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. In coping with clandestineness, crypto-Jews rapidly evolved their own idiosyncratic religion. Its Jewish core was quickly replaced with concepts and practices from the surrounding Catholic culture covered by a veneer of Jewish theology. Included in this award-winning volume are examinations of crypto-Jewish beliefs, superstitions, birth customs, education, marriage and sex, holidays, dietary laws, conversions and death, and...

Jewish Latin American literature in Spanish begins with The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, a series of vignettes about shtetl life in Argentina first published in 1910 and now available for the first time in an English-language paperback edition as the inaugural volume in the new Jewish Latin America series. Praised for its depiction of how two entirely different cultures could coexist in a symbiotic relationship, Jewish Gauchos was written about a decade after Jewish immigration to Argentina began in earnest. The author, a major figure in Argentine literature, was a great influence on...

From Brazil's most distinguished and important Jewish writer comes this anthology comprised of six collections: in The Carnival of the Animals, Scliar uses political allegory to convey what was normally censored during the height of repression under Brazil's military regime. These tragicomic stories reveal Scliar's interest in issues of oppression, persecution, holocaust, mutability, and the interplay between good and evil. The Ballad of the False Messiah develops the theme of postponement in the sense that for Jews redemption is always postponed in a vain wait for the Messiah. In The...