A Conversation with Alicia Dujovne Ortiz

During the celebration of this year’s Hispanic Heritage Month, Syracuse University welcomes renowned Argentinean writer Alicia Dujovne Ortiz whose latest work, El Camarada Carlos, was released in Buenos Aires in August 2007. A fiction writer, biographer, and poet, Dujovne Ortiz is the author of numerous works including Eva Perón, la biografía, one of the premiere biographies of the famed “patron saint of Peronism.”

“Dujovne Ortiz's quirky, worldly wise, faintly feminist writing has charm and even wisdom…This book gives the essential elements of the Evita story in a perceptive and entertaining presentation with a good balance of fact, speculation, and myth.”San Francisco Chronicle Book Review on Eva Perón: A Biography (translated by Shawn Fields).

El Camarada Carlos, is a biography of her father Carlos Dujovne, a revolutionary idealist out of the Jewish colonies of Entre Ríos, Argentina who, in his youth, had been a secret Soviet agent for the Argentine Communist Party.

“I have not written this book from my filial devotion. Although the affection is perceivable, this one is a work filled with documents not necessarily boring, where only I allow the first person to narrate unexpected trips, searches and those findings that arise suddenly,” states Dujovne Ortíz.

The author was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and has lived in exile in France for over 29 years. Her exilic identity is the source of inspiration for much of her writing. Her work has been translated in over 20 different languages worldwide.

She has a notable journalistic career working for several newspapers, including La Nación in Argentina and Le Monde in France, among others. For 17 years she was the literary advisor for Editions Gallimard, the prestigious French publisher, and in 1986 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.