Mourning

By Eduardo Halfon

The nomadic odyssey of Eduardo Halfon continues as he searches for his roots through tangled childhood memories of a haunting family tragedy

International Latino Book Award Winner * Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner

In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous wanderer travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory’s strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South.

Mourning is a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
• Release date: May 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781942658450

Eduardo Halfon

Eduardo Halfon nació en 1971 en la ciudad de Guatemala. Ha publicado quince libros de ficción. Su obra ha sido traducida al inglés, alemán, francés, italiano, serbio, portugués, holandés, japonés, noruego, turco y croata. En 2007 fue nombrado uno de los 39 mejores jóvenes escritores latinoamericanos por el Hay Festival de Bogotá. En 2011 recibió la beca Guggenheim, y en 2015 le fue otorgado en Francia el prestigioso Premio Roger Caillois de Literatura Latinoamericana. Su novela “Duelo” (Libros del Asteroide 2017) fue galardonada con el Premio de las Librerías de Navarra (España), el Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Francia), el Edward Lewis Wallant Award (EEUU) y el International Latino Book Award (EEUU). Su novela más reciente es “Canción” (Libros del Asteroide 2021). En 2018 recibió el Premio Nacional de Literatura de Guatemala, el mayor galardón literario de su país natal.

Book preview

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Reviews for Mourning

[juju2cat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to explain this book but it was very much like a calm companionable walk/talk with a friend usually in a misty rain or in a bar smoking cigarettes and drinking the local favorite. I've never read a book like this before and I'm glad I did.

[glendalea_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is probably the first time I have tried to review a book that I really like and not able to explain why. Part personal history, part dream-like recollections. Family myths or truths? I easily read this in one sitting and I will read it again in a heartbeat, if for no other reason than to figure out why the heck I like this story so much! A special thank you to the publishers for including a bonus copy of Tinkers by Paul Harding.

[carolynschroeder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a tender and odd little book that hovers somewhere between novella and vignettes, memoir and fiction, about the protagonist's family history. Each chapter is Halfon's discoveries about various parts of his family members, much weaved into the horrors of the Jewish plight during the second world war. Halfon has an amazing way of capturing small scenes, such as a Polish guide of sorts, an old, crabby woman, eating live herring. I am amazed that such spare language can be so enmeshing. My only complaint is the free-form of Halfon's writing, much like "The Polish Boxer" ... it can be like whiplash from chapter to chapter. But if you don't mind traveling along with the author, this book is definitely worth your time.

[mclane_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This work of fiction is a wonderful novel whose individual chapters can be enjoyed as stand-alone short stories. The narrator, Eduardo, is a native of Guatamala, but was raised as an American. His family roots go back to many countries, including Lebanon, Poland, Italy, and other parts of Europe and South America. The shadow of the Holocaust and the diaspora of the Jewish people hangs heavily over the family history. Although the story can be chilling and morose at times, Eduardo's voice can also be amusing, buoyant, and distinctly American. Recommended highly!

[ellinpollachek · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Mourning by Eduardo HalfonReviewed by Ellin PollachekEduardo Halfon tells two tales in his newly released memoir, Mourning. The first, written in two parts: Signor Hoffman and Oh Ghetto My Love tells of his journey to Poland in search of his grandfather’s youth. The second, Mourning, is a reminiscence of his trip to Guatemala, the home of his childhood in search of what really happened to his father’s younger brother who, he believes, drowned at five years old. Mourning is the more successful of the two stories probably because, in it, Halfon is recalling his own childhood memories in Guatemala. The same is not true for his story of Poland. In Mourning Halfon returns to Guatemala where he spent the first 10 years of his life. It is where his Polish grandfather, Signor Hoffman, established residency after he survived Auschwitz and where his other grandfather also lived. As a child, Halfon learned that his father had an elder brother Salomon who, at the age of five, drowned in Lake Amatitlan which was near his Lebanese grandfather’s home on the shores of the lake. Halfon was five when he heard the story of his father’s elder brother drowning and because, the author and the boy were the same age, Halfon developed a strange attachment to the boy he never met. He even prayed for him. And then his mother told him it wasn’t true; Salomon didn’t drown, he died in New York. It was in search of the story surrounding Salomon’s drowning that Halfon returned to the land of his birth. He visited his Lebanese grandparent’s home on the lakeshore where the drowning took place. He knocked on doors, questioned people, asking if they remembered a child drowning and each of them did. But none of them were named Salomon. Halfon does find his answer by way of an herbalist, an old woman with potions and secrets.Signor Hoffman and Oh Ghetto My Love is about Halfon’s journey to Lodz where his other Polish grandfather, Signor Hoffman, lived before being rounded up by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz. Halfon meets with people who take him around, invite him to speak at a seminar, and finally bring him to the apartment in which his grandfather lived prior to his capture by the Nazis. Memoirs are difficult to write. Not only do they require that the author create believable characters with emotional lives with which the reader can identify, but a memoir has to have something else: intimacy. Halfon provides none of that. The reader doesn’t feel Halfon or Signor Hoffman. In fact, at a number of points Halfon asks himself why he is in Poland and doesn’t have an answer. Although Mourning is better written than Signor Hoffman and Oh Ghettto My Love the writing is disjointed and confusing and not the least bit intimate.

[seeword · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This short autobiographical novel is divided into three section: Signor Hoffman in which the narrator visits a former concentration camp in Italy; in Oh Ghetto My Love he journeys Łódź, Poland to see the place where his grandfather lived before being sent to the camps; Mourning, the longest section, tells of his search to find the truth about a mysterious family member who may or may not have drowned in Guatemala's Lake Amatitlán. Although each section can stand alone, they are tied together by the search for personal, family, and ethnic identity. There is a sense of loss, of mourning, for things he'll never know.Halfon is an engaging writer who balances the terrors of his family history with touches of warmth, humor, and occasional absurdities. His descriptions of people and places are excellent. After reading his description of a polluted lake, I actually cringed when he stepped into it. A worthwhile read.

[berthirsch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mourning by Eduardo HalfonIn a way this is a continuation of stories Halfon had started, first with the Polish Boxer and then with Monastery. As in those books he writes about his family roots and his search for his own identity and understanding what his forefathers experienced in their lives. Halfon’s personal history is unique with Jewish grandparents from both Poland and Lebanon, his Polish grandfather having survived the Nazi concentration camps. In Mourning he relates a trip taken to Lodz, Poland where a Madame Maroszek serves as his guide as he visits his grandfather’s childhood home, an apartment now occupied by a single mother and her curious son, as Halfon explores its interiors he comes upon a locker in the bathroom filled with pornographic films the mother had once starred in, he secretly steals one of them for future exploration. Additionally, he visits the camps and in Lodz also eats at the one remaining Jewish style restaurant, Anatewka, which is still in operation. Halfon comments throughout about these events and the Poles who stood by, one passage stating “I have always been more appalled by man’s apathy in the face of horror than by the horror itself”.He also visits the ghetto where children perished and where his grandfather, as a boy playing games, was captured by the German occupiers. Indeed, children dying becomes a later theme in the book when he revisits a family weekend retreat in Lake Amatitlan in Guatemala where his family had emigrated to following WW II. There he searches for other answers about his grandfather’s brother, Solomon, who the legend goes drowned in the lake.While this book does not quite live up to the first 2 books it continues the journey and all 3 should be looked upon as a complete trilogy perhaps to be continued by Halfon in the future. Halfon is a very good writer his work reminds me of both Junot Diaz and Jonathon Safer Foer. I highly recommend all three books.

[bale_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Halfon’s prose is pure elegance. It falls off the pages quietly, yet powerfully. Storytelling as subject and method is important to the author. To tell one's story is to mark it in history - to testify- so it will not be forgotten. Halfon uses writing to dissect his ancestral story and work through his Jewish history, especially as it relates to his maternal grandfather and the Holocaust. The outcome is beautiful, sometimes satiric and often hauntingly sad. It is an exceptional work of literature.

[gailnyoka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A short but exquisite novel, Mourning isn’t easily described. It wanders from country to country, among cities and towns, and different landscapes. Its author is in search of something that he isn’t sure of. It might be the ghosts of his grandparents’ generation, whose lives were devastated by the holocaust. It might be the mystery of a boy’s death.Secrets unspoken and truths only half-told are wrapped in the cloak of mourning.

[banjo123 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a selection of stories by Guatemalan-American writer, Eduardo Halfon. He has an interesting history; his family is Jewish and his grandfather a Auschwitz survivor. Halfon was born in Guatemala, but moved to Florida when he was 10. I have read a couple of other books by him, he writes short stories based on family history, so pretty autobiographical. I read an interview with him, he said that he thinks in English, but writes in Spanish. His writing is direct, but thick with emotion. He can be meandering, but then circle around to make a very tough point. This book has three stories; the first two are set in Europe; he is brought to speak about his writing in Italy, and to visit a Holocaust memorial there; visits Poland to see where his grandfather was born. The third story, mourning, recounts his attempts, including a trip to Guatemala, to learn more about an uncle Salomon, who had died in unclear circumstance.

[richard4greenfield · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book and I plan on reading everything by Eduardo Halfon. This dreamlike sequence of places and times collapse history. The last piece was my favorite, with a haunted return to the narrator's childhood home, who discovers his take on the history of his family is wrong. The story of drowned boys in an ancient volcanic lake, and the ritual of cleansing the narrator goes through, could have turned into a sappy transcendent ending, but instead, there's still a feeling that the wounds of his past remain, and the story of his life and his family and their diaspora following the Holocaust remain somehow opaque, despite all attempts for clarity. The sentences are what get me: Halfon is a poet. The writing so economical and stripped down and yet lyrical, too. The translators have done stunning work here, but I imagine that is Spanish, this was equally lyrical work. An exciting discovery of a new writer for me.