The Ghetto Within
In 1928, former soldier and law student Vicente Rosenberg left Poland to start a new life in Argentina. He marries the beautiful Rosita and adores their three children. His life is simple, spending time with his family, running his furniture store, and occasionally stopping by a cafe with his friends, fellow Polish exiles. His mother, still living in Poland, writes frequently, but Vicente seldom writes back, finding correspondence a chore. However, things change in 1940 as war rages in Europe. Suddenly, he is desperate to hear from his mother and writes to her often. Her responses detail the desperate situation around her, and she pleads for his help. Eventually, the letters stop coming, and he relies on newspapers to reveal the hardship Polish Jews are facing, leaving him to only imagine what his mother’s fate might be.
Vicente was the author’s grandfather, and the novel is an imagining of his life during the 1940s. The letters from his great-grandmother remain, but Amigorena was a child when his grandfather died. They never had a chance to discuss the war, though it seems such a discussion would have been unlikely as the real Vicente, as in the novel, walled himself off and kept his grief to himself, never confiding in his friends and family. The story is the author’s re-creation of what his grandfather must have thought and felt, a meditation on his emotions. In a less skillful author’s hands, this story would be too tortuous to read, but Amigorena’s use of lyrical language and thoughtful exploration creates a fascinating description of a man’s emotional prison. This important book shows how the horrors of the Holocaust were felt far outside of Europe and produced generations of pain.
