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Survivor in the Land of Snob
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18114 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1990 |
3,420 Words |
| Author
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Dolores Moyano Martin
Dolores Moyano Martin is a Washington-based writer who
specializes in Latin American affairs. |
PARADISE
Elena Castedo
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990
323 pp., $19.95
I must have been five or six years old when my father took me to a charity benefit for foreign children in the 1940s in Cordoba, Argentina. "Refugees," he explained in a hushed and solemn tone - unusual for him, an ironic and irreverent man - were enemies of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco who had managed to outwit and escape these ogres. When we go to the house where the benefit was held, my heart was beating and my mouth dry with excitement. My disappointment couldn't have been greater when, instead of the fairy-tale heroes I anticipated, I was introduced to three thin, pale girls wearing long, black stockings, who clung to each other and glared at me, as if I were the ogre. When they finally decided to play, they would suddenly burst into tears or run away and hide without, I thought, the slightest provocation. Later, my father explained that the girl's parents had been taken away from them but that the girls had survived by hiding and by pretending to be French and not speaking their own language, not even among themselves. Will then, I remember arguing, if one could hide and cry and still be a hero than even I could be a "refugee!" Now, thanks to Elena Castedo's exceptionally fine novel Paradise, I know what my father was trying to tell me on that day, almost fifty years ago, about children and the meaning of courage.
The novel is the saga of Solita, a refugee girl, and her family's escape form Spain after the civil war and their exile in a Latin-American country clearly based on Chile. Solita tells us that in
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