A Single, Numberless Death by Nora Strejilevich (review)

148 The Latin Arnericanist Spring 2005 A Single, Numberless Death. By Nora Strejilevich.Translator: Cristinade la Torre (trans.).Charlottesville,VA: Universityof Virginia Press, 2002, p. 176,$14.95. Nora Strejilevich’s novel was first published in Spanish in 1997 by the North-South Center of the University of Miami as part of its Letras de Oro prize competition. Una sola muerte numerosa was later masterfully translated into English by Cristina de la Torre with collaboration of the author, and together they were able to bring the same emotion and power of the original to English readers. With A Single, Numberless Death, Strejilevich comes to join other authors like Jacobo Timerman with his Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without CL Number and Alicia Partnoy with The Little School who have written their experiences of torture and horror during the years of the Dirty War in Argentina . Strejilevich’s book gives voice to her own suffering and the suffering of those who did not have a chance to speak and were imprisoned, tortured and killed by the military junta that held power in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The dictatorship described itself as the Processo de Reorganiiacicin Nacional, or Process for National Reorganization. The task they believed they had to undertake was based on the idea that some individuals were considered subversive and nonArgentine because their ideas did not agree with those of Western : Christian traditions, and consequently they were individuals who had to be eliminated from society. Secret detention centers, concentration camps and clandestine prisons were set around the country to carry out the illegal detentions and torture commanded by the military regime. Those years of terror resulted in more than 30,000 “disappeared” people, kidnapped, imprisoned, abused, and assassinated in the hands of the junta. The memoir is made of a mosaic of nonlinear events that draw upon the author’s own experience during those years. Strejilevich walks back through the past and retells the painful events of its several chambers. Among memories of her infancy and youth, of the imprisonment period, of torture and captivity, and of life in exile after the nightmare was over, the reader also hears other people’s voices, other stories of the ones who suffered around her. Bold headings separate these assorted vignettes. Some of these headings are quotes by General Jorge Rafael Videla, by Admiral Emilio Massera, fragments of documents from CONADEP (Comisibn Nacional sobre la Desaparicion de Personas, established in 1983), from the book Nunca Mus (Never again): Book Reviews 149 A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Dissappeared People and other sources. The many stories, news clippings, letters, poems, and dialogues, punctuated by archival material, convey the state of confusion and turmoil that invaded the country and its people during those years. Being Jewish, Strejilevich is sensitive to the role of Jewish identity played in the Dirty War. Argentina has one of the largest Jewish populations of Latin America, approximately 250,000 out of 34 million, that is .735 percent; alarmingly this number “accounted for about 12 percent of the disappeared” (p.174). A CONADEP file documents how Jews were taken out on a daily basis, beaten up and tortured in a Nazi fashion. Once, for example, Hitler’s speeches were played and the guards forced some Jewish prisoners to salute and say things like “I love Hitler,” a cause of amusement to the torturers; they painted swastikas on prisoners’ bodies, threatened to make soap out of them, and brought Nazi propaganda for them to read (p.18). A fragment from Nunca Mds tells that the interrogations were centered on Jewish matters: the torturers wanted to know if there was any military training in the kibbutzim, asked for descriptions of the organizers of the study tours, and of the Jewish Agency facility. They assured their victim that “they were primarily concerned with ‘the problem of subversion ,’ but the ‘Jewish problem’ was next in importance, and they were gathering information for their files” (p.19). A glossaiy at the end of the book presents key words that appear throughout the narrative which help to elucidate some specific vocabulary pertaining to this historical moment in Argentina. Words such as “el proceso”, “montoneros...