ESPINOZA, ENRIQUE

ESPINOZA, ENRIQUE (pseudonym of Samuel Glusberg ; 1898–1987), Argentine author, publisher, and, journalist. His pseudonym combines the names of Henrich Heine and Baruch Spinoza. Born in Kishinev, Espinoza arrived in Argentina at the age of seven. He founded and edited the literary reviews Cuadernos Americanos (1919) and Babel (1921–51), first in Buenos Aires and later in Santiago de Chile, where he settled in 1935 for health and political reasons, and also founded the Babel publishing house, which launched books by new Argentinian writers. In 1945 he conducted a symposium on "the Jewish Question" among prominent Latin American intellectuals, published in Babel 26. He was co-founder and first secretary of the Argentine Writers' Association, and a member of avant-garde movements in literature and the arts. His short stories and articles deal with Jewish identity, immigration, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, as well as ethical and universal social issues. His contemporaries saw him as the perfect intellectual blend of cosmopolitanism and Jewishness. His best-known stories appeared in La levita gris: cuentos judíos de ambiente porteño (1924); and Ruth y Noemí (1934). His essays were collected in De un lado y otro (1956), Heine, el ángel y el león (1953), and Spinoza, ángel y paloma (1978).

bibliography:

R. Gardiol, Argentina's Jewish Short Story Writers (1986); N. Lindstrom, Jewish Issues in Argentine Literature (1989); d.b. Lockhart, Jewish Writers of Latin America. A Dictionary (1997).

[Florinda Goldberg (2^nd ed.)]