ROSENCOF, MAURICIO

ROSENCOF, MAURICIO (1933– ), Uruguayan playwright, novelist, and poet. Born in Florida, Uruguay, he became one of the country's leading writers and journalists. He was a leader in the underground National Liberation Movement (Tupamaros), and in 1972 he was detained by the military government and held as a political prisoner in complete isolation for more than 11 years. His memoirs as a detainee are compiled in the three-volume Memorias del calabozo (1987–88). Rosencof is a major dramatist in Uruguay. His works Las ranas (1961), La valija (1965), El saco de Antonio (1985), and … y nuestros caballos serán blancos (1985) are classics of 20th century Uruguayan theater. His early works almost exclusively consisted of a critical view of Uruguayan society and political processes with particular emphasis on the struggle for social justice. Many of his post-incarceration works may be classified as children's literature, such as Canciones para alegrar a una niña (1985), Leyendas del abuelo de la tarde (1990), and Los trabajitos de Dios (2001). The novel Las cartas que no llegaron (2000) represents the author's first effort to write a specifically Jewish-themed text. The novel is an intimate, personal memoir of his time spent imprisoned as a political detainee interwoven with his family's connection to the Holocaust. In doing so, Rosencof joins a number of Latin American Jewish authors who find common ground in the persecution of socalled subversives, tortured and killed in concentration camps by neo-fascist military governments, and Jews murdered under European Nazism. (Darrell B. Lockhart (2nd ed.)