Edgardo Cozarinsky in conversation with Julia Pascal      

The Argentinian writer talks about life as seen from the New World, longings for the Old World, 1920s Buenos Aires, Jewish gauchos, literature and films.

Born in 1939 in Buenos Aires, Edgardo Cozarinsky moved to Paris in 1974 and now divides his time between the two cities. An imaginative filmmaker and fiction writer, he documents the experience of exile and displacement. He is the author of Borges in/and/on Film, The Bride from Odessa and The Moldavian Pimp. His films include One Man's War, Warriors and Captives, Rothschild's Violin and Ghosts of Tangier.

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, and Odessa, both before and after World War II, the eleven haunting stories in The Bride from Odessa belong to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: they tell of the uprooted exile who settles down in a strange but proud land and looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memory.

The Moldavian Pimp is about young Jewish girls from Ukraine recruited by Jewish pimps in the 1920s to go to Argentina on the promise of a new life, only to find themselves sold into prostitution, but for Cozarinsky the historical references in his book are intended to resonate in the present with the current influx of central European girls forced into the sex trade in countries such as France and Britain.

Edgardo Cozarinsky, "writes superbly of exile, love and death in the Argentine captial," Ian Thomson says in the Independent, and the Scotsman's Allan Massie finds he "restores your faith in imaginative literature." “A profound knowledge of the cultures of Mittel-europa, of the literatures of France, the United States and Britain translated into Buenos Aires vernacular, gives Cozarinsky’s narratives a fiery intellectual strength and a powerful originality.” -- Alberto Manguel

Julia Pascal is a playwright and theatre director. She is the author of Memoirs of a Jewish Childhood and Truth Dare of Promise. Her plays include The Holocaust Trilogy, The Yiddish Queen Lear, Woman in the Moon, The Golem and Crossing Jerusalem. She is currently Writer in Residence at The Wiener Library. For Pascal Theatre Company she has produced a dvd archive Jewish Mothers and Daughters (in partnership with London Jewish Cultural Centre) which presents 50 interviews with Jewish women of diverse backgrounds as a historical resource. She is known for her writing of challenging works, unafraid of convention, political situation or societal pressures.