Bom Retiro, or The Childhood Neighborhood

The Brazilian author Eliezer Levin captured life in Jewish Brazil with a unique, stunning vividness. Born in southern Brazil, Levin used his childhood milieu—a busy, vital Jewish neighborhood in São Paulo—as both setting and subject. His first novel, set during the 1930s and 1940s, outlined an idyllic, insular Jewish world, its pleasures offset by grim, troubling world events. Later, Levin published two more novels and two short-story collections. Like his childhood itself, Levin’s work is lively and polyglot, with a dash of Yiddish and Hebrew spicing up the Portuguese.