The Lost Embrace

Opening remarks by writer Marcelo Birmajer

Marcelo Birmajer is a Jewish-Argentine writer, one of the most prominent and widely appreciated voices in Argentine literature in particular, and Latin American literature more broadly. In his novel “Three Musketeers” (Keter Publishing), Javier Musen is a Jewish journalist lacking ambition, preoccupied mainly with sexual fantasies and avoiding writing assignments. Elías Traum, a former Argentine and current Israeli, returns to Buenos Aires after more than twenty years in order to recite Kaddish for two of his friends—two brilliant young Jews who, together with him, were known as “the Three Musketeers.” Those young men sealed their fate when they joined the “Montoneros” guerrilla movement in the 1970s.

Birmajer also wrote the screenplay for the film “Lost Embrace,” directed by Daniel Burman, and has been described in the American press as “the Woody Allen of the Pampas.” He frequently engages with his secular Jewish identity, and in his writing addresses issues of Islamic terrorism even before they personally affected him: his brother, Rubén, was murdered in a stabbing attack at the Jaffa Gate in 2015.