TARANTULA

In his latest short but powerful autobiographical novel, Halfon continues reflecting on the traumas of the Holocaust while raising the question of whether they are beyond the scope of fiction.

In 1984, three years after his family moved to Florida to escape the brutal civil war in Guatemala, 13-year-old Eduardo and his younger brother are sent back to their homeland to participate in a Jewish children’s camp. Although his parents don’t say so, Halfon thinks they wanted to “restore” their Americanized children to Judaism. But the camp turns out to be a horrific place—a simulated concentration camp where the idea is to mistreat the kids into appreciating how evil the Nazis were. “Jewish children…need to learn as early as possible…that everyone else is an antisemite, that the whole world revolves around this most ancient hatred,” says their counselor, Samuel Blum, who wears an SS uniform and a swastika armband and first appears with a tarantula crawling down his arm. A desperate Eduardo escapes the camp, getting lost and confused in the mountains but finding safe haven with a young Indigenous woman. But Halfon, who witnessed the post-Auschwitz delirium of his Polish grandfather, will never be able to escape such painful memories—or the ones he creates himself. “Is imagination so fanciful and audacious that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?” he asks, haunted by a “No Dogs or Jews Allowed” sign he may or may not have seen as a little kid outside his unbothered father’s Florida golf club. A winning storyteller with a subtle sense of irony, Halfon moves with ease through experiences past and present, here and there, trusting his powers of observation to draw readers in. Refusing to traffic in suffering, he makes us feel the horrors on a deeper level.

A darkly unsettling but highly readable novel by a leading voice in Latin American fiction.