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Eduardo Halfon Awarded Guggenheim

We're delighted to report that Eduardo Halfon has been awarded a Guggenheim Latin American and Caribbean Fellowship. In “The Polish Boxer,” from our July 2009 Memory and Lies issue, Halfon gives voice to his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, whose revision of the past has enabled him to live into the present. The grandfather's reorganization of the facts—the digits tattooed on his arm are his phone number; a Polish boxer he met in Auschwitz saved his life—allows him to survive to tell this tale to his descendants. His grandson senses the elisions (“I even understood the question that is never asked: What did you have to do to survive?”), but knows the story is now his to tell. Halfon hopes to use his Guggenheim to travel to Łodz, his grandfather's native city, “to look for the remnants of his story and write it there.”

English

We're delighted to report that Eduardo Halfon has been awarded a Guggenheim Latin American and Caribbean Fellowship. In “The Polish Boxer,” from our July 2009 Memory and Lies issue, Halfon gives voice to his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, whose revision of the past has enabled him to live into the present. The grandfather's reorganization of the facts—the digits tattooed on his arm are his phone number; a Polish boxer he met in Auschwitz saved his life—allows him to survive to tell this tale to his descendants. His grandson senses the elisions (“I even understood the question that is never asked: What did you have to do to survive?”), but knows the story is now his to tell. Halfon hopes to use his Guggenheim to travel to Łodz, his grandfather's native city, “to look for the remnants of his story and write it there.”

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