Sinay, Javier, (The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America [originally published in Spanish in 2013 and translated by Robert Croll, hc, Restless Books, 2022] 978-1632062987 [ - Javier Sinay discovers an article from 1947 by his great-grandfather, Mijl (Mihl) Hacohen Sinay, a pioneering Yiddish journalist and editor, detailing twenty-two unsolved murders in Moisés Ville at the end of the 19th century. He launches his own investigation that soon turns into an exploration of the history of Moisés Ville, one of the first Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina, and Sinay’s own connection to this historically thriving Jewish epicenter.
Seeking refuge from the pogroms of Czarist Russia, a group of Jewish immigrants founded Moisés Ville in the late 1880s. Like their town’s prophetic namesake, these immigrants fled one form of persecution only to encounter a different set of hardships: exploitative land prices, starvation, illness, language barriers, and a series of murders perpetrated by roving gauchos who preyed upon their vulnerability. Sinay, though a descendant of these immigrants, is unfamiliar with this turbulent history, and his research into the spate of violence plunges him into his family’s past and their link to Moisés Ville. He combs through libraries and archives in search of documents about the murders and hires a book detective to track down issues of Der Viderkol, the first Yiddish newspaper in Argentina started by his great-grandfather. He even enrolls in Yiddish classes so he can read the newspaper and other contemporaneous records for himself. Through interviews with his family members, current residents of Moisés Ville, historians, and archivists, Sinay compiles moving portraits of the victims of these heinous murders and reveals the fascinating and complex history of the town once known as the “Jerusalem of South America.” – Amazon]
International · Fiction author
Javier Sinay
Javier Sinay (born 1980 in Buenos Aires) [- a contemporary Argentine writer and investigative journalist living in Buenos Aires. Sinay specialized in narrative journalism and true crime (known in Spanish as crónica). He has worked extensively across Latin America, serving as the editor of Rolling Stone (Argentina) and a South American correspondent for Mexico’s El Universal. His work frequently appears in prominent publications like La Nación, Clarín, and international outlets including Gatopardo and Tablet Magazine. In 2015, he won the prestigious Gabriel García Márquez Award for his narrative journalism, and his book Sangre joven won the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for crime writing. Sinay has profoundly enriched Latin American Jewish literature by bridging the gap between forgotten Yiddish-language history and modern Spanish/English readership. In his 2021 work, La caja de letras (“The Box of Letters”), Sinay translated and resurrected a nearly century-old text tracking the history of early 20th-century Jewish-Argentine journalism. His work provides deep historical context on the early agricultural shtetls of Argentina, exploring the unique intersection of Jewish immigrants adapting to the rugged life of the South American pampas.]