The Immigrant’s Lament was first published in Hebrew in 1994. Benarroch’s poetry has been published in a dozen languages, including Urdu and Chinese. Julia Uceda considers that Benarroch holds the memory of the world in his poetry, while Jose Luis Garcia Martin thinks that his poems are more than poetry, they are a document.
“If I had a nomination vote for the nobel prize he’d be in the running.” Klaus Gerken, Ygdrasil editor.
His reputation has been steadily growing and his books have been published in Spain, Israel and the U.S.A. Benarroch was awarded the prime minister literary prize in 2008 and the Yehuda Amichai poetry prize in 2012.
The Immigrant’s Lament has been published in Hebrew, French, Italian, English and Portuguese.
This collection of poetry tells the life story of a Moroccan man who was born into a Jewish family. The first poems are about Moshe’s childhood in Morocco with his parents, but they soon switch to poems about his adult life. To be honest, when I started reading the poems, I expected a collection of poems about a man adjusting to life in a new country. Most of the poems were just about a confused man who didn’t know where to go in life. This confusion bled into the poems, and eventually I didn’t know if they were all even being written about the same person.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you were interested in deciphering abstract poetry or reading the few hard-hitting cohesive poems around the middle of the novel.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Read my full review here:
https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=105041
I rate this book 2 out of 5 books.
