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Moldavian PimpEditions
ReviewHaving never come across the name Edgardo Cozarinsky, who made a name in his native Argentina as a film-maker, I was first drawn to his moving and elegantly written first novel by its cover – a cover of an old tango score showing a dancing couple and a bandoneon player. Encouraged by the subject, I read it in one sitting and have been forcing it onto fellow tango-fanatics ever since. But you don’t have to be one to be impressed by this slim (133p) but powerful tale of love and survival, shattered dreams and despair, corruption, sex and money. The novel is set in Buenos Aires in the 1920s and in the present day. The narrator comes across a mysterious play, ‘The Moldavian Pimp’, in a box of old theatre programmes belonging to a dying old man of Lithuanian descent, Samuel Warshauer. The play was performed in Yiddish in 1927-28, and deals with a shameful business: the luring of young Jewish women from the Ukraine into a life of prostitution in Argentina, with promises of freedom and a new life. Behind this very efficient system of white slave trafficking was a notorious organisation ‘Zwi Migdal’ operating under the protection of the corrupt Argentinian police force. It is against this background of factual information that, as he interweaves the multilayered stories of life in brothels, seedy tango halls and Yiddish theatres, the narrator begins to ask questions: What audience would such play attract? Who was the playwright and what was his story? Was he himself the Moldavian Pimp? ‘It’s dangerous to make up stories. If they are any good, they end up coming true. After a while they get passed on, and by then it’s no longer important that they were made up: there’ll always be someone who has lived them…’ muses Warschauer in the opening paragraph. Haunting, disturbing, compelling, it makes uncomfortable reading in a day when – a century later - similar stories of human trafficking and immigration are being replayed all over Europe. Read also: ‘The Tango Singer |
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