Musicians and Watchmakers

Told from the perspective of an adolescent girl, this humorous and deceptively intuitive account of a Jewish family living in 1940s Buenos Aires tackles themes of identity and history through a flawlessly rendered colloquial style. Semi-autobiographical and charged with energy to match the young narrator's age, this episodic novel tackles issues of religious belonging, the first sparks of political awareness, budding sexuality, and the complications of an eccentric family.

Humorously told from an adolescent girl's perspective, MUSICIANS AND WATCHMAKERS is a deceptively intuitive account of a Jewish family living in Buenos Aires in the 1940s. Award-winning author Alicia Steimberg captures the quirky insights of a teenager in a flawlessly rendered colloquial style.

Publishers Weekly

A pungent, semi-autobiographical account of growing up Jewish in Argentina in the 1940s, this small gem of a novel (originally published in Spanish in 1971) is marked by Steimberg's distinctive voice--wittily irreverent, ironic yet warm, at once precocious and worldly-wise. The young narrator (also named Alicia Steimberg) conjures up an offbeat family portrait gallery, including Alicia's controlling, widowed mother, hypochondriac maternal Kiev-born grandmother, atheist vegetarian grandfather and endlessly feuding aunts. Alicia, stigmatized by her anti-Semitic fifth-grade teacher, undergoes a pseudo-conversion to Catholicism with a Catholic playmate 10 years her senior. The narrator's blossoming sexuality (and her mother's dire reprimands against autoeroticism), the trauma of an uncle pawing her sexually, her budding political sensibility in regimented Peronist Argentina are recorded with great humor and the perceptiveness of a sensitive, insecure girl in an eccentric, overbearing family. Labinger's translation is a delight, conveying the sights, sounds, misconceptions and dreams of an intensely experienced youth. (Aug.)

Alicia Steimberg is an Argentine author, an educator, and a translator. She was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Iowa and has served as the director of books with the Argentine Secretariate of Culture. Andrea G. Labinger is an emerita professor of Spanish at the University of La Verne, where she is a former founding director of the university's honors program. She lives in the Los Angeles area.