Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in Spanish. A graphic novel, part documentary, part fiction, using the fotonovela form to imagine the two hours before the terrorist attack against the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994. Explores the faulty police investigation of the atrocity, and minorities’ vulnerability in democratic societies.
Trade Review“This is a book that all of us need to read and study, so that we never get accustomed to atrocities and never take them for granted.”
—Rabbi Jack Riemer Jewish News Service
“Creative dream team Stavans and Brodsky skillfully interweave poignant prose with striking imagery that builds to a slow, painful crescendo in the moments leading up to an apocalyptic punctum: the 1994 explosion in the Once neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Everyday Jewish life explodes with dark horror, resonating with a planetary history of Jewish persecution and genocide. Like Jan Komski, Edith Birkin, and Primo Levi, who have dared to turn catastrophic events into art, Once@9:53am exposes the unbearable, tragic tyranny of terrorism.”
—Frederick Luis Aldama,author of The Aesthetics of Discomfort (with Herbert Lindenberger) and Your Brain on Latino Comics
“Hemmed in by simplistic conventions, [the fotonovela] seems an unlikely form for so dark a tale as this, and yet it is precisely the ways in which Stavans, who wrote the text, and Brodsky, who took the photographs, both use and modify the conventions that makes Once@9:53am the powerful work it is.”
—Mitchell Abidor Jewish Currents
“A unique work in a unique form that should not be missed by anyone interested in Latin American Jewish culture.”
—Julian Voloj Jewish Book Council
