The Way Out

Starred review from November 29, 2021
Argentinian journalist Sinay makes his English-language debut with a gripping account of a series of murders in Moisés Ville, Argentina’s first Jewish agricultural colony, founded in 1889 by Jews seeking refuge from pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1889 and 1906, 22 Jews of Moisés Ville were killed, their deaths part of a wave of violence carried out by gauchos in a region where law enforcement, or any government presence, was minimal. Among the many crimes, the most horrific was the 1897 massacre of almost the entire Waisman family by thieves who looted the household after the slaughter. Reconstructing the century-plus-old crimes proved a daunting challenge, with many relevant records lost in the 1994 Buenos Aires terror attack on that city’s major Jewish community center. Sinay supplements the scant archival material with interviews with the victims’ descendants and his own family members, creating a disturbing picture of refugees from oppressive regimes further victimized by murderous outlaws as they tried to build new lives. Sinay acknowledges the impossibility of fully separating legends from facts (as he was able to do in the case of one murder, for which details of another homicide had been misattributed), but his diligence has produced as definitive an account as possible of what actually happened during this bloody period. This nuanced search for truth should have broad appeal.

January 1, 2022
An award-winning Buenos Aires-based journalist investigates murders that took place in the first Jewish agricultural settlement in Argentina. When Sinay found an article that his great-grandfather had written about a series of Jewish immigrant murders that had taken place at the end of the 19th century in the Santa Fe province, he was instantly intrigued. Mijl Hacohen Sinay had been a Belarus-born teacher and journalist who founded the first Yiddish-language newspaper in Argentina after settling in Buenos Aires in 1898 at the age of 21. Deciding to probe Mijl's story at greater depth, Sinay discovered that most of the documentation about the murders--including the book Mijl had written about them in 1947--was written in Yiddish, a language Sinay could not read. The author's search took him first to the Buenos Aires Jewish Museum and later, to the tiny town where the murders occurred. Named for the biblical Jewish liberator Moses, Mois�s Ville was viewed as a beacon of freedom by Eastern European Jews fleeing the "tyranny of Russia." But rather than becoming a haven, it became a place where gauchos killed and robbed the new immigrants. With the help of a Yiddish translator, Sinay unearthed not only imprecise information in Mijl's accounts, but also silences on key issues. The gaucho terrorists he excoriated had also suffered. Before the immigrants arrived, they had been stripped of their nomadic freedoms and unwillingly forced to assimilate into the capitalist economy. In sacrificing journalist rigor, Mijl had ultimately written a book with undercurrents that evoked the horrors of the Holocaust as well as the concomitant fear of Jewish cultural and linguistic loss. Intelligent and well-researched, this book will most likely attract readers interested in Argentinian history and/or the modern Jewish Diaspora. The audience may be limited, but this is still a worthy, unique entry in Jewish history.

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August 1, 2020
In the early years of the Clinton administration, we find Piglia's literary alter ego, Emilio Renzi, in New Jersey, teaching a course at prestigious Taylor University. Including evocative, Updikean descriptions of American suburbia, this is an unusual mystery novel in which Renzi faces odd occurrences: a disconcerting late-night phone call offering him drugs, a colleague with a pet shark, and his colleague, Ida Brown's, insistence on maintaining absolute secrecy regarding their romantic relationship. When Ida suddenly dies, Renzi becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth of her violent end. What follows is a fascinating exploration of a character based on the Unabomber. Piglia captures the confusing sense of wonderment and bafflement that academics felt when considering the actions of that man, his manifesto, and the fallout of his capture. With his trademark mixture of autobiography and fiction, reminiscent of Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Rachel Cusk, Piglia explores themes similar to those of Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991), regarding the connection between art and violence, in this thoughtful, slight, and mesmeric crime novel by a giant of innovative literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2020
The late Argentine writer and Princeton professor continues his Emilio Renzi cycle of novels. Renzi, an investigator-turned-novelist, returns as a visiting professor of literature at a leafy college in New Jersey while researching the Argentina-born British novelist W.H. Hudson. There he meets Ida Brown, a combative academic superstar who imagines herself outside the system while actually being the system: "Her salary was a state secret," writes Piglia, "but it was said that they raised it every six months and that her sole condition was that she must earn one hundred dollars more than the highest-paid male (that's not what she called them) in her profession." Ida is working on Joseph Conrad, a friend of Hudson's, and warns Renzi to stay away from her intellectual territory. Naturally, they fall into bed together, hiding their tryst by publicly pretending that nothing is going on. Everything comes full circle: Renzi is "interested in writers who were tied to some double identity, bound up in two languages and two traditions," just as he himself is--and as Ida is, and the Russian widow across the hall, and other players in the novel. Things take an unanticipated bad turn when Ida dies, the victim of a letter bomb, which brings out the investigator in Renzi. He himself comes under suspicion, grilled by detectives, one of whom tells him grimly, "Nothing is irrelevant under these circumstances." Whodunit? Conrad's novel The Secret Agent figures in a sidelong way while the perp is a failed scholar of Dostoyevsky-an cast whom Renzi visits in prison: "When he moved, his footsteps clinked with a gloomy sound; he was detained, and for the first time the word took on its full meaning for me." It's all very bookish. The resolution of the story is nicely indefinite, though Piglia's appropriation of the Unabomber and his manifesto seems a touch obvious, as are the faint echoes of Stieg Larsson. An offbeat take on the campus novel, full of sex, intrigue, and marginalia.

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