“Each one has several lives, not successive but intertwined with each other, like threads that cross throughout existence and that await the outcome to differentiate themselves.
In Hebrew our lives form a tapestry, until we undo the knots by telling our stories.”
It is no coincidence that Alicia Dujovne Ortiz chose these words by Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur for the beginning of
Andanzas
, her brand new autobiographical trilogy.
The presentation of the book at the Alianza Francesa in Buenos Aires, a dialogue with the author that I had the pleasure of carrying out, allowed us to look at that plot of crossed threads that unravel and wrap us in the circularity of life.
Since that first exile that took her to Paris in 1978 with her 13-year-old daughter, leaving the dictatorship behind, Dujovne had several "definitive" returns to Argentina that ended up depositing her once again in the city that welcomed her with her first suitcase of exiled
-"What did I take with me?
My school notebooks and those of my daughter, and her 6-year-old pajamas, which I still have ”-and in which she now, after a decade in the field, she decided to settle down.
She did it in some apartments that she had always liked, with her brick front.
What she didn't realize until the possibility of moving there arose was how much of the history of what would be her new home had to do with her own history.
Built in the 1920s or 1930s, the funds to build them came from the Rothschild and Hirsch barons, to house Jews who were fleeing the pogroms and had not yet managed to leave Europe.
Here comes the surprise: it was none other than Baron de Hirsch who rescued Alicia's grandparents from the Ukraine and gave them shelter in the Jewish colonies of Entre Ríos.
In the basements of those buildings that she lives in today, the Nazis tortured people;
a plaque remembers the names of the boys whose fate was Auschwitz.
Emotions get confused.
In a Buenos Aires sunset, Alicia sighs, moved and at peace.
That house, so alien and so hers, completes the circle of a life.