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August 23, 2024
by
Arthur Kiron

Penn acquires Jorge Luis Borges’s handwritten draft of “Yo, Judío”

black and white photograph of seated middle-aged man wearing a suit jacket

Jorge Luis Borges 1951 by Greta Stern. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We are truly delighted to announce the acquisition of Jorge Luis Borges’s handwritten draft of the essay “Yo, Judío” (I, a Jew), that in 1934, he sent to Sigfrido Radaelli, editor of the magazine Megáfono. Borges, the Argentine author and essayist and former director of the Mariano Moreno National Library of Argentina, is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and a generative creative spirit of Latin American magical realism. This draft was soon published in the twelfth issue of Megáfono, April 1934 (p. 60). Here Borges confronts with great wit and irony the accusation leveled in the Nazi-associated Argentine magazine Crisol that he deliberately hid his Jewish ancestry. In response, Borges notes that he spent time looking into this matter, in part because his maternal grandmother’s family name, Azvedo, can be identified with Portuguese Conversos—just not in his case; still, he declares that he would be proud to be Jewish. The manuscript is now cataloged.

 In 2014 Borges’s legacy and relationship with Jews and Judaism was the subject of a special issue of Penn’s Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR 104.3 [2014])

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Arthur Kiron

Arthur Kiron

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