Reading group “Le premier exil” by Santiago H. Amigorena

Once a month, the reading group meets up to discuss a couple of books selected in advance (from classical to contemporary French literature) and discovers other members’ views on them. Meetings take place at the Institut français d’Écosse, usually on the last Tuesday of the month.

About the book :

The Inner Ghetto recounted the silence, in 1945, of the man who would become the author’s grandfather, Vicente Rosenberg, who emigrated to Buenos Aires. Le premier exil opens with the death, twenty years later, in the same city, of the narrator’s maternal great-grandfather, Abuelo Zeide, a Jew from kyiv. But the narrator’s family had to flee Argentina for Uruguay, and escape the dictatorship, after the military coup in 1968. It is a novel of a more mysterious age than all the others, which began when the narrator was six years old with a first exile from Argentina to Uruguay, and ended at twelve with a second exile, in Europe. With a sense of self-mockery and drama, the author tells the story of the origins of his own silence, his tormented relationship with language, his traumas, his learning about life, and his first intuition of the power of literature in one’s existence. Behind this tale of a troubled, laconic childhood, the book also paints a portrait of the South American continent, which is gradually covered by a bloody night, where torture and disappearances become routine.