Eduardo Halfon / Photo by David Herran

Like many readers, I first fell under the spell of Eduardo Halfon with The Polish Boxer, his 2012 debut collection of linked vignettes. Everything about it seemed alluring. The ten stories careened around the world—from Guatemala to Serbia, Israel, and beyond—in the footsteps of a restless narrator named Eduardo Halfon, a Jewish-Guatemalan writer like the author himself. Then there was the collagelike collaboration of five translators (who does that?). Even the cover design, with its wispy curls of smoke, suggested an ineffable, enigmatic quality. 

The Polish Boxer, I would learn, was something of a literary chameleon, changing its complexion with each translated edition. Halfon was intent on creating an ever-changing body of work, reshaping and expanding as he went along. With his subsequent books—Monastery, Mourning, and Canción—Halfon continued to craft slim, evocative pastiches that glanced off each other, exploring recurring motifs of family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the long shadow of Guatemala’s civil war (see “The Amphitheater,” WLT, Sept. 2022).

His latest novel, Tarantula (translated by Daniel Hahn and out May 19 from Bellevue Literary Press), goes even deeper into the heart of these themes. The book alternates between memories of a Jewish children’s camp in the Guatemalan highlands in the early 1980s—at the peak of state-led terror against the Indigenous population—and a reckoning decades later in a dimly lit Berlin tavern. It’s full of foreboding and riddled with questions: What actually happened back in that camp, and what was the meaning of the counselors’ shocking impersonation of Nazi officers? Were they preparing the children for a violent world or perpetuating a cycle of force and intimidation themselves? I spoke with Halfon, fifty-four, who now lives in Berlin, about Tarantula and the strange, mysterious journey of his fictional project. 

Anderson Tepper: You’ve described your work as a novela en marcha, or an “ongoing novel.” How have your books evolved and how do they fit together?

Eduardo Halfon: What’s most surprising to me is that none of this was planned, and it continues to be unplanned, almost unmanned—like an unmanned mission to who knows where. As I’ve been working on these books, I’m as surprised by where the stories go as the readers. It all began with the Spanish version of The Polish Boxer in 2008, which was just a series of episodes in one man’s life. That was where this narrator, this other Eduardo Halfon, first appeared. I was just writing these stories about different encounters—at a Mark Twain conference; with a girl in Antigua, Guatemala; with a gypsy pianist from Serbia—for no other reason than the stories themselves. 

There was no inkling of a book, much less one titled The Polish Boxer. Because, although the story of my grandfather and the boxer at Auschwitz weaves in and out, that was the last piece I wrote. Only then did I sort of realize there was a collection here, a grouping. When I published the original Spanish edition, it was only ninety-nine pages, and it sort of just fluttered in Spain. But then one of those stories continued and became another book two years later, called The Pirouette. Three years after that, another of the original stories became a chapter in Monastery.

Then, all of a sudden, I started to see how this one original book started spawning others. Erika [Goldman, editor of Bellevue] called and said, “I love The Polish Boxer but it’s too short. Can we add other stories?” And since I had the idea of combining The Polish Boxer and The Pirouette—because they had the same voice, the same story, the same character—I said, “Yes, let me put it together in a way that works.” That was the first time somebody started twisting my books into shape. The Germans saw that version of The Polish Boxer and liked it. But the Japanese said, “Can we add some more stories?” So the Japanese version of The Polish Boxer is three books in one—it includes Monastery. And the Dutch liked that version.

Tepper: Tarantula might be your most traditional novel, in a sense. It pretty much follows one story from beginning to end. 

Halfon: Yes, in Tarantula there is much more of the feeling of a novel than in my other books. This is less of a fragmentary novel. Though it is fragmented, it forms something of a fragmented whole.

Tepper: Tell me about some of the essential themes that run through your work, especially the intersection of personal and national histories as a Guatemalan Jew.

Halfon: Both of these very large stories—the Guatemalan genocide and the Jewish genocide—form big parts of my identity that I’ve been tinkering with in all my books. They’re everywhere: my relationship with Judaism, my relationship with Guatemala, my fleeing from both. My trying to understand what it means to be Guatemalan, what it means to be Jewish. These stories, which have flowed in and out of my previous books, suddenly become the focal point of Tarantula. This summer camp in the Guatemalan mountains is the perfect setting to play out these stories, because it is a Jewish summer camp within a Guatemalan civil war. But I thought it was too unbelievable, too melodramatic for a book. I saw it as this fantastical, surreal event from my childhood, but it turned out to be very literary and very current.

Both of these very large stories—the Guatemalan genocide and the Jewish genocide—form big parts of my identity that I’ve been tinkering with in all my books.

Tepper: In Tarantula, you speak about unlocking “the secret vault of memory.” This book seems even more about reconnecting with submerged memories than your other books. 

Halfon: I think memory has always been the raw material from which I work: childhood memory, family memory, ancestral memory. Those first ten years of my life in Guatemala in the 1970s hold a special attraction to me, and I keep going back to them almost as if I were looking for some kind of understanding or evidence. But memory for me is nothing but a jumping-off point, because what I’m doing is fiction. This is not autobiographical in the sense that people think it is. The jumping-off point is autobiographical, intimate, but then the story that I tell is fiction. It is manipulated memory. 

The jumping-off point is autobiographical, intimate, but then the story that I tell is fiction. It is manipulated memory. 

Tepper: How is your narrator, the fictional Eduardo Halfon, taken from your life and not from your life?

Halfon: He arrived, already formed. Let me explain. His voice is very different from mine, but that voice came when I was starting to write those first few stories. He came as a smoker—I am not a smoker. He travels a lot; he’s much more nomadic than I am, almost as if he’s in search of roots, somewhere to settle down. And he’s also much more confused. He needs guidance, which almost always comes in the form of a woman who shows him where he is going. And though we share certain biographical aspects—we’re both Eduardo Halfon; we’re both engineers, Guatemalan, Jewish—he’s not me. 

Tepper: He’s made his home in Berlin, as you have, too. Has the city had an effect on you and your writing? As one character asks in the book, “How do you feel here in Berlin, Eduardo, as a Jew?”

Halfon: [Laughs] That is a question I got a lot my first year here. We’ve been here now five years; we arrived right after Covid. I was offered a fellowship to come write for a year. It was at the end of that academic year that the story of Tarantula crept up on me. For some reason, it took Berlin to uncover it, to show me that it could be something that I could tell. And then we decided to stay—we found a great house on the outskirts of Berlin. So when you ask, “How do I feel as a Jew in Berlin?” it’s very curious because we live in Wannsee, which is a beautiful, lush forest. But this is also where the Wannsee Conference took place [a Nazi meeting in 1942 to coordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”]. So, I’m almost at ground zero for my books. This is where my grandfather was mostly interned, in a camp right outside Berlin in Sachsenhausen. 

Berlin is a city where history is everywhere—plaques, reminders—almost the opposite of the way Guatemalans deal with their history.

Berlin is a city where history is everywhere—plaques, reminders—almost the opposite of the way Guatemalans deal with their history. In Guatemala, you don’t talk about the civil war, you don’t talk about the massacres. Even if I tried to run away to the forest here, I couldn’t escape the past. I’ll give you an example: just across the street from where we live—right in front of our house—was the house of Colonel von Stauffenberg. He was the colonel behind Operation Valkyrie, who tried to assassinate Hitler. He lived right across the street! 

Tepper: Tarantula raises ethical questions of how you prepare children, particularly Jewish children, for threats of violence. It’s rooted in the time period of the 1980s but of course resonates powerfully in our present moment. 

Halfon: It’s very, very interesting: This book came out two years ago in Spain and France, and I think this is like the tenth or twelfth translation. So I’ve been talking about this book for a while. And the question I get the most is, “Did you write this before or after October 7th?” It’s a very loaded question, but an appropriate one—because although I finished it before October 7, and although the book takes place in the early 1980s, it could not be more current. It could not be more current. 

For some reason, this small story that took place in the ’80s—in Guatemala, of all places—seems to resonate with what is happening now in Gaza and Israel, the militarism of what’s happening and the way that Jewish children have been brought up. This was not a religious summer camp—it was a very military set-up, with its marching and following orders. It felt like a basic training for kids. I’ve lost count of how many Jews have contacted me who went through similar experiences in the ’80s. What for me was so unique apparently was going on all over the place—in Jewish camps in New York, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Israel. The idea of using reenactment to teach is a common one. But I never knew it was so widespread among Jewish kids, especially back then. 

And you have to remember, besides everything else this story takes place within the most violent years of the Guatemalan civil war, in the mountains where that war was taking place. So the camp had this surreal aspect to it, and the second half of the book goes into the uncertainty of being lost in the woods during the war. The menace of that war is ever-present, so it is a kind of horror story that I’m writing. There is the horror of the camp and then there is the horror of the unknown.

Tepper: You evoke that atmosphere thrillingly in your language—there’s a rhythmic, incantatory quality to your writing. I’m curious if Roberto Bolaño or other contemporary Latin American writers have had a particular influence on you?

That is not the Latin American way of writing. But I spend a long time on how my language sounds and reverberates, its musicality. 

Halfon: Yes, I would say that Bolaño especially was a big influence on me, because I was beginning to discover literature—as a reader and then as a writer—when Bolaño was becoming Bolaño in the late 1990s. Bolaño did something for me that no other writer had done before: he was writing about a Latin America that I recognized. I loved the writers of the Boom—García Márquez, Asturias, Vargas Llosa—but that was not my Latin America. That was not the gritty, grimy, cosmopolitan Latin America I knew. Bolaño was also writing about Latin America from Spain, from the outside, which was my experience as well. And he was writing in a way that just jumped off the page—a very lyrical, vibrant, sexy way of dealing with language. My own language is very succinct, to the point—this is my longest book by far, and it’s barely a hundred and some pages. That is not the Latin American way of writing. But I spend a long time on how my language sounds and reverberates, its musicality. 

Tepper: Finally, what is your relationship to Guatemala now? Are you able to return?

Halfon: Yes, I go to Guatemala every year. My parents still live there; we have an apartment there. We spend our summers in Guatemala, which is very important for my son—and I guess for me, too. Guatemala is still an open question for me, and for some reason these stories—or these memories—come back when I’m there. So I always go back. But my relationship with Guatemala is very similar to my relationship with the synagogue—from afar, from the outside, still.