Word: argentinas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MEMORABLE CHARACTERS here--like most of Bashevis Singer's more important character sketches elsewhere--derive the most rudimentary aspects of their personalities from being Jewish. "Hanka" is the story of a mysterious woman by the same name whom the first-person narrator meets in Argentina. She lived in the ghettoes of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation--saved only by her Gentile lover on the "Aryan side" of the city. Despite surviving the Holocaust, her experience living in a hidden closet, every minute fearing capture and torture, has convinced Hanka that she is dead: "Those who stood at the threshhold...
...Argentina is the saddest place on the continent: ravaged by years of misgovernment, terrorism from the left and right, inflation that runs at 20% to 30% a month, despair and cynicism among the large and seemingly helpless bourgeoisie. How this highly favored land, with its 10 ft. of topsoil and 25 million homogeneous people of European descent, achieved such a colossal mess defies understanding. For the past six weeks the word has been that a coup could come any day, with the army taking over from the pathetic Isabel Peron, but there is only modest hope that this would make...
...with the unions "a dynamic social compact" that should help stabilize wages and prices for some months. Unannounced, a fellow in an electric-blue gym suit bursts in from a side door and seats himself. He turns out to be the head of the C.G.T., the AFL-CIO of Argentina. A few minutes later, from a different side door, the head of the metallurgical workers union barges in. Excusing themselves, the American visitors pass through a corridor where a dozen more labor leaders are milling around, accompanied by four or five dozen bodyguards. Ten days later−so much...
Jorge Luis Borges, the great poet and essayist, the most eminent living Argentine, is proud to come from a patriot family. Some fought for Argentina and "some died...
...country. I am ashamed of my country today." Is there any hope for Argentina? "No−oh, maybe in 200 years." Borges is almost totally blind, but he knows how shabby Buenos Aires has become, "and I still get homesick if I'm away for a few months...