The Letters That Never Came

By Mauricio Rosencof and Ilan Stavans

Originally published in Spanish in 2000 and first appearing in English in 2004, The Letters that Never Came is an autobiographical novel in three parts that reflects Rosencof’s life growing up in 1930s Uruguay as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and, later, his twelve-year imprisonment during the military dictatorship his country suffered.
Part I is a rich evocation of life in Montevideo in the mid-1930s as seen through the eyes of young Moishe. Every day, Moishe's father waits for the postman, hoping for news of his family, who are prisoners of the Nazis. Interspersed among Moishe’s reminiscences are the letters those relatives might have written—but never came.
In Part II, Moishe is imprisoned in the dungeons of the military junta that governed Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s. Tortured and starving, he takes refuge in the world of his imagination, composing another letter that never came—a letter to his father that embodies his own quest for identity.
Part III is largely a meditation on the redemptive power of the word, real and imagined. This poignant, humane work, as Uruguayan and Jewish as it is universal, links the cruelty of the Holocaust to that of the Uruguayan military and the resistance of Hitler's victims to his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780896728660

Mauricio Rosencof

Mauricio Rosencof is a well-known Uruguayan playwright, poet, and journalist. Since 2005 he has been Director of Culture of the Municipality of Montevideo.

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the americas

ADVISORY BOARD

Irene Vilar, series editor

Edna Acosta-Belén

Daniel Alarcón

Frederick Luis Aldama

Esther Allen

Homero Aridjis

Harold Augenbraum

Stanley H. Barkan

Junot Díaz

Dedi Felman

Rosario Ferré

Jean Franco

Rigoberto González

Edith Grossman

Naomi Lindstrom

Adriana V. López

Jaime Manrique

Mirta Ojito

Gavin O’Toole

Bud Parr

Margaret Sayers Peden

Gregory Rabassa

Luis J. Rodriguez

Lissette Rolón-Collazo

Rossana Rosado

Daniel Shapiro

Mónica de la Torre

Silvio Torres-Saillant

Doug Unger

Oscar Villalon

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The Letters

That Never Came

Mauricio Rosencof. Photo by Nancy Urrutia

Copyright © 2014 by Mauricio Rosencof, 2000. By arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt e. K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Translation © 2014 by Louise B. Popkin

Introduction by Ilan Stavans © 2004 by Ilan Stavans

Originally published as Cartas que no llegaron, copyright © 2000

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).∞

Cover design by Anna Coventry-Arredondo

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014933155

ISBN (paper): 978-0-89672-865-3

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-89672-866-0

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037 | Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

800.832.4042 | [e-mail] | www.ttupress.org

Contents

Introduction

Translator’s Note

Part One: Wartime in the Barrio

Part Two: The Letter

Part Three: Days Beyond Time

Glossary

The Letters

That Never Came

Introduction

ILAN STAVANS

S ilence is the real crime against humanity, states Mauricio Rosencof in his wrenching autobiographical novel, The Letters that Never Came . He ought to know: he spent thirteen years in prison before regaining his freedom in 1985, with the return of the democracy to Uruguay and the declaration of an amnesty for the political prisoners. Of those thirteen years, eleven and a half were spent in solitary confinement and almost total inactivity. His cells were filthy and barely three feet by six. His diet was atrocious and he spent long periods on the verge of starvation, sometimes drinking his own urine to stay alive. He was tortured savagely and repeatedly and had to be hospitalized on several occasions. Except for a thirty-minute visit with immediate family once a month, he saw no one, talked to no one, heard no human voice except that of his captors, who were under strict orders to address him only with insults and commands. For the most part, he was allowed no reading matter, writing materials, or other means of distraction. To pass the time, Rosencof would watch a spider on the wall, studying the web it carefully designed. Or else, he would set his mind free, revisiting every moment in his life, from his childhood in a working-class neighborhood in Montevideo to his apprenticeship as a journalist, his experience as a playwright, and his involvement with the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN-Tupamaros), an urban guerrilla movement active in Uruguay from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. But never, ever did he capitulate to silence.

As his captors saw it, his misdeeds were threefold: to be Jewish, to be a well-known intellectual, and to be associated with the Tupamaros (so-named after the 18th century Inca mutineer Tupac Amaru). In that respect his story is not uncommon under the Latin American dictatorships: for example, Jewish activists and intellectuals figured prominently in the resistance to the military in Brazil and in Argentina’s Dirty War, where they were well-represented among the many thousands of desaparecidos. But Uruguay is a country the size of Washington State, with the population of Los Angeles—barely 80,000 square miles and 3.5 million inhabitants. Thus, the drama that played itself out there for almost two decades made it onto few radar screens.

And yet, throughout most of the 20th century in particular, as a stable democracy in a region known for its tumultuous history, Uruguay outdid its larger neighbors. With its strong tradition of constitutional government, its advanced social legislation, and its high standard of living, literacy rate, and cultural level, it was known as the ‘Switzerland of South America." Then, beginning in the mid-1960s, stability gave way to discord. Faced with an economic crisis and escalating social unrest, the Uruguayan Armed Forces became increasingly involved in politics. Eventually, they took complete control of the government in a process known as the autogolpe, or self-coup, which involved a gradual surrender of power by the civil authorities and culminated in June 1973 with the closing of Parliament.

By then, all hell had broken loose. No political or trade union activity was allowed. The university was intervened, ironclad censorship was imposed on the media, and all citizens were classified into categories according to their degree of dangerousness. By 1975, Uruguay had the highest per capita ratio of political prisoners of any country in the world: one out of every 50 inhabitants detained and at least interrogated, one out of every 500 imprisoned for months or years. In the police stations, military barracks, and clandestine torture centers, prisoners were subjected to incredible brutality. Almost routinely, they had to stand absolutely still, arms outstretched and legs apart, for hours or even days at a time (the so-called plantón). With their wrists bound behind them, they were often suspended by the arms from hooks on the wall, or seated astride sharp objects and rocked back and forth (the ‘sawhorse’). They underwent the ‘submarine’ (immersion in filthy water to the point of near-drowning), or a ‘dry’ version of the submarine, involving near-asphyxiation inside plastic bags (sometimes with the addition of toxic gases). They suffered beatings, burning with cigarettes, electric shocks to the most sensitive parts of their bodies, staking, simulated executions, sleep deprivation, prolonged hooding, to cite a few more examples. The Switzerland of South America had become Uganda on the River Plate.

Rosencof was born in 1933 into a family of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Belzyce, Poland. But his Jewishness played a small part in his identity, at least until he reached adulthood. Known affectionately as el Ruso, by the 1950s he was a passionate political activist and founding member of the Uruguayan Communist Youth. Professionally speaking, he had also begun to explore his talents as a journalist and a man of the theater. Over the next several years he gained a solid reputation in both fields. As a journalist, he contributed regularly to the pages of Marcha and other left-wing periodicals. His plays, set in different sectors of Uruguayan society, dealt with social issues as diverse as prostitution in the slums (Las Ranas [The Frogs]) and the decaying values of the middle class (Pensión Familiar [Family Hotel]).

In 1966 Rosencof made a trip to Artigas, a sugar cane and rice-growing area in Northern Uruguay where the field hands had worked for decades under miserable, slave-like conditions. In the early 1960s, they had formed a union, organized a strike, and marched with their families to Montevideo; there, the police had dispersed them forcefully and the government had disbanded the union. I will never forget the sight of the barefoot children who came to Montevideo on [that] march, Rosencof would comment later. . . . For the first time in their lives, they saw not just coffee shops, tall buildings and trolley cars, but also milk and chocolate. For him, that trip north would prove to be a watershed event. He wrote articles for Marcha which were later gathered into a volume entitled La rebelión de los cañeros (The Revolt of the Cane Workers). And it was in Artigas that he met an idealistic young law student and socialist named Raúl Sendic, who had helped the field hands form their union. Sendic would go on to become the founder and leader of the MLN, with Rosencof as one of his key collaborators.

In 1968, as repression and violence escalated in Uruguay, Rosencof went underground, taking as his nom de guerre the name of his brother, Leonel. He remained active in hiding for four more years. Then, in 1972, he was captured. For the next eight months he was tortured continuously, requiring hospitalization on two separate occasions. At one point, word got out that he was being burned with a blowtorch, and the public outcry was so great that the generals, hoping to ‘dispel all rumors,’ decided to let his parents visit him. By that time, he was such a wreck that his own father didn’t recognize him. Not long afterwards, Rosencof was transferred briefly to the Libertad Penitentiary, paradoxically named after the town in which it is located. Then, in September, 1973, he, Sendic and seven other Tupamaro leaders were classified as ‘hostages’ by the Armed Forces—that is, they were told (and word was circulated to the outside world) that they would be summarily executed if their organization (by then, all but defunct) undertook any further actions. For the next ten years, they were rotated every few months, in groups of three, among a series of tiny cells in isolated military outposts. Their living conditions in those places can only be described as subhuman (Sendic, for example, spent a good part of his imprisonment in a narrow, dried-out well). Often, their families were not informed of their whereabouts. The Uruguayan military didn’t want to be held accountable for their treatment of the hostages, nor did they want the guards to relate to their prisoners as human beings, so the prisoners were kept on the move.

But only superficially . . . For in the darkness of their dungeons, their situation was unchanging, the torture especially gruesome (and in Rosencof’s case, often accompanied by anti-Semitic slurs), the silence unremitting. For the writer, then, words became a means of resistance and a form of survival. Even without pen and paper, he wrote constantly—poems, plays, fiction—, mostly in his head although every so often, he managed to jot something down and sneak it out of whatever hellhole he was in. One of his coping strategies was to advertise his verbal talents and offer his services as a scribe. When their superiors weren’t around, the young soldiers would ask him to write love letters and acrostics to their girl friends. He could sometimes trade these for the stub of a pencil, with which to scribble a few lines on cigarette paper. He would roll his tiny manuscripts up tightly and tuck them into the hems of his underwear. When his relatives took his dirty clothes home to be laundered, they knew to check for hidden notes. He has written about a particular one they overlooked. His underwear came back with ink stains on it, and he was beaten to a pulp as the guards tried to discover what he had written. They were sure it was a subversive message, he comments wryly, but it was a love poem.

The Letters that Never Came, a