In the short story collections The Polish Boxer and Duel, the Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon told about his one grandfather, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz. In the beautiful, layered novella Deuntje, it is his other grandfather’s turn, a Lebanese Jew who settled in Guatemala after many wanderings and was kidnapped there in 1967 by guerrilla fighters. After 35 days, after the family paid a hefty ransom, he was released. Why was he screwed? Because he would exploit his employees? Or did the guerrillas want money to finance their political struggle? Or was he betrayed by a Jewish friend? Halfon calmly puts things together. He also shows little emotion when he talks about the military violence in Guatemalan society and the horrific way in which some of the kidnappers died. But it is precisely because of their baldness that you get the shivers of these kinds of passages, which also resonate in the fragments in which Halfon reports on his deceptively carefree experiences at a writers conference in Japan.
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