Tarantula
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Dark lessons from a childhood sleepaway camp reverberate in the present
In 1984, Eduardo and his younger brother, living in exile for several years in the United States, travel back to their native Guatemala to participate in a Jewish children’s camp in a remote forest of the highland mountains. They no longer know their homeland. They barely speak the language. Their parents had insisted that they spend a few days at the camp to learn not only ways of survival in the wild, but also ways of survival in the wild for Jewish children. It’s not the same, they had been told. Upon their arrival, they are met with the promise of adventure. But early one morning, they are roused from bed and forced to play a sinister game they can’t afford to lose.
Many years later, Eduardo, now a father himself and living in Berlin, happens upon a former campmate in Paris who connects him to Samuel Blum—the counselor who kept a snake in his pocket, had what a young Eduardo took for a tarantula crawling down his arm, and offers no apologies for the camp’s disturbing methods.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guatemalan writer Halfon (Canción) reflects on his time at a nightmarish summer camp in this resonant autofiction. At 13, narrator Eduardo and his younger brother are sent by their parents from Florida to their native Guatemala to attend a remote camp for Jewish students. Expecting to learn a few survival skills and sit around a campfire, Eduardo is shocked and unsettled when they're subjected to a "military" regimen, complete with hazing, surprise 3 a.m. drills, and Zionist sing-alongs, which he gathers are intended to indoctrinate them into supporting the Israeli state. This disturbing ordeal has stayed with Eduardo, now a writer raising a family in Berlin. He remembers trying to escape, feeling so frightened that "my own shadow was trying to get away, that it no longer wanted to follow me across the mountain." A chance meeting with a former camper puts him back in touch with their sinister and unapologetic counselor Samuel Blum, who, in Eduardo's memory, carried a snake in his pocket and a tarantula on his arm. As the dreamlike story shifts back and forth in time, Eduardo confronts a chilling realization about the camp's abuses and reflects on the effects of inherited trauma and victimhood. It's a breath of fresh air.
