Bom Retiro, or The Childhood Neighborhood

Eliezer Levin

1972

Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, the so-called “Days of Awe” arrived.

There was no Jew in all of Bom Retiro who, God forbid, would ever think of not observing them. Any endeavor, no matter how important, was set aside. Even those who never opened the prayer book all year long, would rush, on the eve of the Day of Atonement, to close their businesses…

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Creator Bio

Eliezer Levin

b. 1930

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.

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