Samuel Eichelbaum

The son of Russian immigrants, Samuel Eichelbaum was a leading Argentine dramatist in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, his plays a mainstay of the Buenos Aires theatrical season. He was raised amidst the Jewish agricultural colonies, which provided the inspiration for his early short fiction. “A Good Harvest” drew on his own family’s experience: his father, who found the isolation of the colonies stultifying, burned two of his fields and moved the family to the capital. Eichelbaum’s plays are known for their intense self-analysis and introspection, their probing of human motivation, and their searching for hidden motives behind even the most trivial acts. Several of his plays feature urban, middle-class Jewish characters.