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Many countries in the New World plus elsewhere celebrate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, which occurred on October 12, 1492 in the Julian calendar and October 21, 1492 in the modern Gregorian calendar, as an official holiday. The day is celebrated as Columbus Day in the United States, as Día de la Raza in many countries in the Americas, as Día de las Culturas (Day of the Cultures) in Costa Rica, as Discovery Day in the Bahamas, as Día de la Hispanidad and Fiesta Nacional in Spain, as Día de las Américas (Day of the Americas) in Uruguay and as Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance) in Venezuela. These holidays have been celebrated unofficially since the late 18th century, and officially in various countries since the early 20th century. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The pulp mill dispute between Argentina and Uruguay is an ongoing dispute between private citizens, organizations, and the governments of these two South American countries about the construction of pulp mills on the Uruguay River. As a diplomatic, economic, and public relations conflict between both parties, the dispute has also affected tourism and transportation as well as the otherwise amicable relations between the two countries. The feud is unprecedented between the two countries, which have shared historical and cultural ties. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Modern Language Review, published by Modern Humanities Research Association on January 1, 2009. The length of the article is 11611 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: Jose Enrique Rodo (Uruguay, 1871-1917) is best known for his essay Ariel (1900), a work often criticized for its alleged aloofness and detachmentfrom the pressing material concerns of Latin America, and whose most famous section is devoted to censuring the materialism of the United States. The present article uses unpublished correspondence from the Rodo Archive in Montevideo to explore part of a forgotten side of Rodo's career which tends to modify this received perception. It deals with a number of enterprises which Rodo entered into with a view to making money. Some involved the spread of culture, while at other times the goal was unadulterated financial gain. Unfortunately for him, the enterprises did not bring him wealth.

Citation Details
Title: Money, culture, and enterprise in Jose Enrique Rodo.(Critical essay)
Author: Gustavo San Roman
Publication: The Modern Language Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2009
Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association
Volume: 104Issue: 1Page: 83(25)

Article Type: Critical essay

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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The Letters that Never Came is an autobiographical novel in three parts. Part I is a rich evocation of life in a working-class neighborhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the mid-1930s, as seen through the eyes of Moishe, the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants. In what is a daily routine, Moishe’s father waits for the postman at the window, always hoping for news of his family from the Old Country. Don Isaac’s relatives are prisoners of the Nazis, so all he can read Moishe and his mother is letters from before. Interspersed among the child narrator’s reminiscences are the letters those relatives might have written, bearing witness to their suffering. Letters that never came.

In Part II, we find Moishe in the dungeons of the military junta that governed his country through the 1970s and part of the 1980s. Held in isolation, tortured and starving, he takes refuge in the world of his imagination, composing another letter that never came—a letter to his father that embodies his own quest for identity—while his parents, penniless, are evicted from their house and stigmatized as the mother and father of a "subversive."

Part III of Rosencof’s text is largely a meditation on the redemptive power of the word, real and imagined. This poignant, humane work, as Uruguayan and Jewish as it is universal, links the cruelty of the Holocaust to that of the Uruguayan military and the resistance of Hitler’s victims to his own. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Poignant, evocative and urgent
Like Mauricio Rosencof, the author of this book, I am Uruguayan - but this book has a message for every reader, regardless of his or her nationality, religion or political ideology.

The son of poor Polish/Jewish immigrants (his father was a tailor), Mauricio Rosencof's childhood was punctuated by poverty and absence - that of his elder brother, who, as he tells us, "protected me all my life, until he died", and that of his parents' Polish relatives, assassinated by the Germans and authors of the real or imagined "letters that never came". But Mauricio's early years were also marked by the kindness of his parents, by his hungry alertness to the world, and by the magical background of a long-gone Montevideo - all of which he evokes masterfully.

Suffering was to feature prominently in adulthood too. For about twelve years (1973 - 1985), Uruguay was scourged by a shameful and bloody military dictatorship that ended one of the longest and stablest democratic traditions in South America. Mauricio, a left-wing activist, was imprisoned and tortured, while his aged father and mother were persecuted as the "parents of a subversive". During these dark times, the letters that never came were the ones he could not write, the ones that told of the brutal treatment meted out to him, of the terror, the hope and the endurance.

I read the book in the original Spanish and so cannot comment on the translation, but I hope it does justice to Rosencof's spare, austere and yet profoundly evocative writing.

It should also be noted that "The letters..." inspired a play (which included Hebrew dances or "rikudim") and ran for a long time in Montevideo's renowned "Teatro El Galpón".

This wonderfully crafted memoir is an urgent and important read which speaks of family ties, heritage, love, grief, beliefs, and - above all - the force of the human spirit.

awesome!
i read this book in the original spanish a couple of years ago and was blown away.rosencof creatively weaves together his own historywith that of his ancestors who perished in hitler's camps.i have not read this translated version, but it is probably excellent since it is part of a series that has included terrific books. ... Read more

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"In many previous essays, I have departed from and arrived at two presuppositions that seem contradictory. The first: it is not true that history never repeats itself; it always repeats itself. The second precept, at least four hundred years old: history progresses. That is to say, humanity learns from past experience and in the process overcomes itself. Both human realities have always battled each other. If the human race instead of accepting the artificial fatalism of Clash of Civilizations it were to recognize the urgency of a Dialogue of Cultures, this battle would not sow the fields with corpses and nations with hate. The process of history, from its economic roots, is determined by and cannot be contradictory to the interests of humanity. If we accompany it with the new awareness demanded by posterity, we will not only advance a perhaps inevitable process; above all, we will avoid more pain and the spilling of blood and death that has tinged the world hate-red in this greatest crisis of history." ... Read more

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Book Review

Many people merely dream of traveling around the world. This highly unusual man acts on his dreams. Every time he starts to wonder about an interesting place he has not been, he simply packs his bags, grabs a camera and goes to the airport to claim his seat. Soon he is in Brazil, China, Africa or anywhere there are people to meet, things to see and do, like taking pictures, buying art, shaking hands, asking questions and being entertained by professional guides and story tellers. "Hello, how are you, good to meet you. I'm Leon Freeman from Memphis, Tennessee." I found his introduction by a tribesman in Papua New Guinea as a cousin the most striking story of them all.

Mr. Freeman retired from his school teaching career and immediately set out to explore the world. Over the years he visited five continents, sixty-two countries and a string of islands ringing the globe like pearls. He discovered one satisfying fundamental fact: in human essence, we are all one. Whatever differences there might be in our outer physical appearance or our diverse cultural extensions, there are no qualitative differences to the principle: 'all human babies are created equal.'

In this picture book, Mr. Freeman provides the viewer with unforgettable, vicarious experiences to enjoy time and time again for many years to come.

- Maia Jaribu Ajanaku, SMU - Retired Teacher, Entrepreneur ... Read more