Novel “The Letters That Didn’t Arrive” | Struggle for your own memory

Mauricio Rosencof brings together experiences ranging from loss, exile and foreignness to isolation in “The Letters That Didn’t Arrive”. Photo: IMAGO/Newscom/GDA At the end of July, Mauricio Rosencof's "The Letters That Didn't Arrive" was published again by Association A. The book was published in the original Spanish in Uruguay in 2000, and in 2004 in a first translation, also by Willi Zurbrüggen, in German. When you approach the book, you immediately come across biographical cornerstones that the publisher also uses to promote the volume. Rosencof was born in Uruguay in 1933 as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. His parents and his older brother fled the increasing anti-Semitism of the interwar period. Both his father and his mother had to leave a large number of relatives behind. In Uruguay they are part of the small Jewish exile community and receive news of the start of the Second World War, although letters from Europe gradually dry up. Mauricio Rosencof's relatives who remained in Poland are murdered by the Germans. When Rosencof travels to Poland decades later to look for them, he can hardly find any. The Germans' crime was also to remember the dead.

In the 1960s, Mauricio Rosencof became a member of the MLN Tupamaros. In 1972 he was imprisoned. A year later, the military staged a coup and kidnapped Rosencof and eight other members of the Tupamaros. The prisoners, known as “hostages of the state,” remain in almost complete isolation for twelve years. After his release, Rosencof wrote novels and plays. From 2005 to 2010 he was head of the cultural department of the city of Montevideo. His former cellmate and founding member of the Tupamaros, Pepe Mujica, became president of the country from 2010 to 2015 as a candidate for the left-wing alliance Frente Amplio.

Speaking, remembering and writing have long since become political practices here.

It is this contemporary historical context that makes the book interesting. It is the formal implementation that makes it a great novel. Mauricio Rosencof brings together all the disparate experiences from loss, exile and foreignness to isolation in “The Letters That Didn’t Arrive” while searching for a language that addresses remembering, forgetting and repression. In the first part he not only describes his childhood experiences in Montevideo. He contrasts this naive view of the world with letters from relatives that they send to South America from Poland in the 1930s and 1940s. Rosencof imagines himself in his unknown relatives in order to understand the pressure and narrowness of their situation. At the same time, he manages to consistently tell the child's perspective and avoids the danger of kitsch or unnecessary naivety through precision. The child's world is destroyed without him already knowing about it.

»The world is something I don't understand much about. Fito says that he has a cousin in Buenos Aires named Pascualito and that Buenos Aires has a reddish glow. Sometimes we can even see him. (…) It is not light like from a lamp. No. More like a cloud that you can see at night. Buenos Aires is a reddish cloud, and that's where Pascualito lives. But my brother thinks what we see is something different. This cloud is coming from a dance hall three streets away. My brother says he'll take Fito and me with him and we'll go there at night. 'So that you believe me.' Buenos Aires is a dance hall."

Part 2 is a letter that Rosencof also subsequently imagines: Here you can hear the voice of the prisoner who, after his imprisonment, tries to reconstruct a letter to his father in order to get in touch with him from his isolation. The attempt to find suitable formulations fails again and again. It is both a continuous struggle for one's own memory and for closeness to the father, who has now grown old: "And now here, father, where the world is three short steps long, then a U-turn and three steps again, but I'd rather not tell you about that, for what reason. But this is my world, twice a meter without light without a book without a face without sun without water without without and I'm writing to you, but not about it, that's only my business, I'll put up with that for months, years, years, so many years, and we have to talk about everything we've never talked about (...)."

Speaking, remembering and writing have long since become political practices here. Rosencof preserves himself through the means of language and uncovers all the facets of his disparate affiliations. In part 3 he continues the conversation with his father, which breaks off continuously. »Why am I telling you this, Dad? Oh yeah, because all I'm trying to tell you is this: the first time I walked on sunlit sidewalks again, I felt like I'd never been away."

The publisher labels the book as a novel. At the same time, there are pictures of the Rosencof family in the back as evidence of the family story. However, the text, read as a book of memories, has a far greater power than the supposedly concrete content would suggest. Because in this volume, remembering and telling become an act of rebellion. Not only that: the fiction in which Rosencof imagines letters from his relatives murdered by the Germans also works against this crime: “The plates are washed, the night is dark, let's sit down and tell each other something, let's remember. The reflection of the flames in the eyes revives the memory.«

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