Leaving

Leaving is a literary novel that traces the story of three migrations: a Jewish family's move from Poland to Argentina (between the two World Wars); part of that family's exit from Argentina to the United States (during the political upheavals of the 1970s); and the contemporary travels of the protagonist (the inheritor of all previous migrations) and his American girlfriend (and later fiancée) in the United States. The family memories take the reader to Buenos Aires, to the voyage from Leaving is a literary novel that traces the story of three migrations: a Jewish family's move from Poland to Argentina (between the two World Wars); part of that family's exit from Argentina to the United States (during the political upheavals of the 1970s); and the contemporary travels of the protagonist (the inheritor of all previous migrations) and his American girlfriend (and later fiancée) in the United States. The family memories take the reader to Buenos Aires, to the voyage from Poland to the Americas, to New York, Paris, Champaign/Urbana, Providence, Boulder, San Diego and San Francisco, among other places. In the process, Leaving explores what it means to be Jewish Latin American (Argentine, in this case), as well as what happened to that mixed heritage once it is exiled from South America in the U.S. The novel is written primarily in English, with some Spanish idioms scattered throughout; there is also one brief section (5 pages) that is entirely in Spanish, and purposefully left untranslated. Leaving is a unique novel, as it tells the stories of the family at its center, while exploring broader themes of memory, language and translation in issues of identity and cross-cultural communication. Latin American identity takes on specific aspects in this novel. With respect not only to Argentine culture, but also to the manifestations and memories of that Jewish Argentine culture once the main character in the novel have to leave Argentina and move to the United States after the military coup of 1976. In addition, the novel's very style and structure (an experimental, fragmented collection of interconnected narratives) seeks to mirror the difficulty in recounting and understanding past events, especially as they are distorted by conflicting versions of history and the uncertainty of memory itself, as well as by the changes in languages associated with each migration, with each "leaving."