Sergio Chejfec Knihy

"Could anyone possibly believe that writing doesn't exist? It would be like denying the existence of rain." The perfect green notebook forms the basis for Sergio Chejfec's work, collecting writing, and allowing it to exist in a state of permanent possibility, or, as he says, "The written word is also capable of waiting for the next opportunity to appear and to continue to reveal itself by and for itself." This same notebook is also the jumping off point for this essay, which considers the dimensions of the act of writing (legibility, annotation, facsimile, inscription, typewriter versus word processor versus pen) as a way of thinking, as a record of relative degrees of permanence, and as a performance. From Kafka through Borges, Nabokov, Levrero, Walser, the implications of how we write take on meaning as well worth considering as what we write. This is a love letter to the act of writing as practice, bearing down on all the ways it happens (cleaning typewriter keys, the inevitable drying out of the bottle of wite-out, the difference between Word Perfect and Word) to open up all the ways in which "when we express our thought, it changes."

"Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed." The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour-from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions. Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite understand-a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge, haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just outside our reach"-- Provided by publisher

Reflexionen über Familiengeschichte, Exil- und Migrationssituationen sowie Gedächtnis und literarische Verarbeitung von Vergangenheitstraumata und Zukunftsträumen prägen die Gespräche, die Erna Pfeiffer mit 15 zeitgenössischen Autorinnen und Autoren aus Argentinien führt, die aus einem jüdischen Umfeld stammen. Seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert war die jüdische Einwanderung aus Europa und Nordafrika eine der größten Gruppen, die den Atlantik überquerten, auf der Suche nach einem „Gelobten Land“ für Schutz vor Anfeindungen und wirtschaftlicher Not. Moises Ville war eine der ersten Siedlungen in der Provinz Santa Fe. Im 20. Jahrhundert fanden etwa 45.000 Menschen aus Mittel- und Osteuropa vor der Shoa in Buenos Aires eine neue Existenz. Paradoxerweise mussten viele ihrer Nachfahren als engagierte Intellektuelle und Künstler vor den argentinischen Militärdiktaturen der 1960er- und 70er-Jahre ins politische Exil flüchten. Inneres Exil, Rückzug aus der Öffentlichkeit und zeitweiliges Verstummen waren Strategien, um Verfolgung zu entkommen. Unter den „Verschwundenen“ waren viele jüdischer Herkunft, was Erinnerungen an den Holocaust wachruft.