The Moldavian Pimp

In a bar in the Buenos Aires suburb of Villa Crespo our narrator recalls his encounters with an old man of Lithuanian descent, Samuel Warschauer, whom he came to know shortly before the man died. Among his papers, he found the script of a curious play entitled The Moldavian Pimp. Performed in Yiddish, the play concerns young Jewish girls from the Ukraine promised the hopes and freedoms of a new life in Argentina, only to find themselves sold into prostitution.

Set in the Argentine capital and Paris, and ranging in time from the 1920s to the present day, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s beautiful and moving novel about Jewish immigrants may be among the few records we have of an extraordinary and little-known twilight society.