A well-known novelist, playwright and short story writer in his homeland, Rosencof (Florida, Uruguay, 1933) was also a victim of the military dictatorship the country suffered from 1973 to 1985 – he was imprisoned for many years for being a Communist and a political activist in the movement known as the Tupamaros.

But it would be a mistake to classify this moving book as a chronicle of his ordeal as a political prisoner, although it is partly that. Rosencof also makes a long, probing journey into the farther past, in search of the years of his childhood and the long-vanished Uruguay into which he was born. In the process, he compellingly brings to life the working-class neighbourhood where his father, a Polish-Jewish immigrant and a tailor, toiled night and day to earn a meagre living for his wife and boys – and where Mauricio, or Moshe as he was called by his parents, grew up seamlessly incorporating both his Jewish heritage and Uruguayan identity.

In prose that somehow manages to be both straightforward and lyrical – and all the more beautiful for its sparseness – the author portrays a courageous family haunted by exile, poverty and death, but attaining salvation through dignity and love. Rosencof can convey with believable ease the feelings and perceptions of the child he was, and retain that transparent vision when describing the hardships he encountered in later life.

Contrary to what some people seem to believe nowadays, I don’t think that having been persecuted, or having been through a lot of suffering, automatically entitles your book to be considered “literature”; but if you can write well about whatever it is that you went through, or your family did, I’m going to want to read it. Rosencof writes from the heart, with intelligence and compassion, and certainly deserves the wider readership this translation will probably grant him.