Mr. Cozarinsky has written a story based on a part of history I knew nothing about. In the 1920s, organized gangs imported Jewish women to South America to work as prostitutes.

In this novel, a university student befriends an old man, and through him, discovers the world of South American Jewish theatre, gangsters and prostitutes. The novel gives us stories within stories: of the elderly man, his son who lives in Paris, and the prostitutes they were involved with. This is a short book, sparsely but beautifully written. I was intrigued by the whole era portrayed, as well as how history tends to repeat itself within families, and how life imitates art -- or is it the other way around? ( )

This delightfully written and yet sobering novella, harking back to the 1920s yet utterly modern, was recommended to me when I read Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas last year, and I am sorry it took me so long to get it and read it. The tales within tales start when a contemporary Argentinian student meets a dying man and acquires a treasure trove of old theater posters. This leads him to a 1920s Yiddish musical entitled "The Moldavian Pimp," and the story morphs to that of the dying man when he was young, a tango musician and possibly a gangster and pimp as well, and the two young women who were his girlfriends/wives, then switches to his son, now middle-aged and living in contemporary Paris, and then back to the student. Through these different tales, all told in beautiful, spare, elliptical prose, as well as the different times and different people, a picture of a period of Argentinian Jewish history, little known and considered shameful by the Argentinian Jewish community, comes alive, as full of questions as it is of answers, and connects to questions of prostitution today. It is a meditation, as well, on how we try to understand a history we can never really know.

In fact, there was a large and thriving group of Jewish gangsters, known as Zwi Migdal, which imported thousands of young eastern European Jewish girls to Argentina to work in brothels, many if not most under false pretenses. Who knew?

The Moldavian Pimp is a book which reaches back into a time when Argentina was the location of a profitable prostitution ring run by Jewish gansters! This was no small enterprise either. Jewish pimps would go to Eastern European shtetls and lure poor families into giving up their young girls for the promise of a better life in the Americas.

In Edgardo Cozarinsky's book, a 25-year-old Buenos Aires student interviews an old man for information to include in a dissertation. Shortly thereafter, the old man dies. The student examines a box of posters left by the old man and realizes that it was the old man himself in a poster of a musical. The scene in the book then fades into the 1920's when we encounter one young girl who had been lured to Argentina with just such a promise as noted above. In beautiful prose, we see the story of this young woman and the old man, in his younger days, slowly unfold. The story takes us to several people and we examine it from different angles, never really knowing what is the truth, but we see nevertheless see some disturbing facts arise from these stories. Who were these Jewish pimps and prostitutes? Why were they in Argentina? What happened to them? This book will take you into that unsettling world.

Even though this book was small, I found the topic utterly fascinating. I loved this book for presenting such a fascinating but little known topic and for the way in which the author made the story come alive with his unique way of story-telling and looking back into Argentine history. ( )