Return to Book Page. Ilan Stavans Introduction ,. Toby Talbot Translation ,. Arthur Miller Foreword. The bestselling, classic personal chronicle of the Argentine publisher's ordeal at the hands of the Argentine government--imprisoned and tortured as a dissenter and as a Jew--that aroused the conscience of the world. Jacobo Timerman was born in the Ukraine, moved with his family to Argentina in , and was deported to Israel in He returned to Argentina i The bestselling, classic personal chronicle of the Argentine publisher's ordeal at the hands of the Argentine government--imprisoned and tortured as a dissenter and as a Jew--that aroused the conscience of the world.
He returned to Argentina in An outspoken champion of human rights and freedom of the press, he criticized all repressive governments and organizations, regardless of their political ideologies. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number.
Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. Feb 13, Scott rated it did not like it. Good grief, I could not finish this short book fast enough. I thought it would be about the experience of a prisoner under Argentina's dictatorship.
That becomes nearly a side story, allowing Timerman to expound upon anti-Semitism and Zionism. Had the book actually been about being a prisoner, I would have found it much more rewarding. The passages that do deal with it are extremely well-written and both extremely disturbing and enlightening. The depiction of a dehumanizing system is very Good grief, I could not finish this short book fast enough.
The depiction of a dehumanizing system is very important reading. However, I had a hard time with his theorizing. The way he easily threw around terms like fascist, communist, terrorist, nazi, etc. The self-righteousness that he always had the right answer and understood the correct path put me off. Finally, there was the major role Zionism played in the book. Timerman clearly believed anti-Semitism was universal and inevitable and that the solution was Zionism.
I don't discount how horrific anti-Semitism is, nor the anti-Semitic nature of the Argentinian regime, but Zionism is not the answer. The moral superiority he places in a movement that destroyed and ethnically-cleansed the Palestinian people is intolerable. The tragic irony is that while he was writing about his experiences with torture in his new Tel Aviv home, Palestinians were being tortured in similar ways by Israel - the very Zionist project he so ardently supported.
View all 4 comments. As the publisher of one of the few domestic newspapers to openly criticize the violence of both the left and the right in s Argentina, Jacobo Timerman was a marked man.
Detained without charge by the military junta in and held in clandestine concentration camps until his sudden release and deportation to Israel in , Timerman was subjected to extensive physical torture as well as the psychological trauma of isolation cells, humiliation at the hands of his captors, and ongoing uncerta As the publisher of one of the few domestic newspapers to openly criticize the violence of both the left and the right in s Argentina, Jacobo Timerman was a marked man.
Detained without charge by the military junta in and held in clandestine concentration camps until his sudden release and deportation to Israel in , Timerman was subjected to extensive physical torture as well as the psychological trauma of isolation cells, humiliation at the hands of his captors, and ongoing uncertainty over his fate and that of his family and peers. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is a poignant and poetic memoir of Timerman's rapid descent from being a well-known public figure to a nameless and hidden victim of the military junta's oppression, but also an exploration of the societal passivity that permits totalitarianism to take hold.
Timerman's book gives a unique take on this complicated country. Though he began life as an immigrant, Timerman rose to a place among Argentina's intelligentsia. As a journalist, he enjoyed access to the nation's elites and to the corridors of power. As a detainee, he acknowledges a certain level of special treatment few others had the celebrity of Timerman, which even led members of the junta and foreign governments to intervene on his behalf.
But Timerman did not escape the sadistic nature of the regime, and he gives a measured account of the torture applied to him and his fellow political prisoners. Parallel to this narrative, Timerman also explores wider psychological and political themes.
He writes eloquently of the sense of asphyxiation as all rational paths for resolving the political impasse confronting Argentina in the mid s were closed off by the extremes especially the right's fervent mission to restore order by any means. Chapter Five is particularly effective at conveying the dwindling space for reason in those tumultuous days, and is a valuable perspective for anyone seeking to understand the onset of the dictatorship.
Timerman also explores the prisoner's condition, ruminating on the themes of hope, memory, and prisoner-captor relations. His insights are chilling: "Memory is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man", "Aside from suicide, there's one other temptation—madness", "Hope is something that belongs to the interrogator rather than the prisoner. The interrogator always seems to feel that he can succeed in modifying the will of the interrogated. The regime emulated many aspects of the Nazi machine, from an ideological obsession with rooting out the "enemy within" to the institutionalization of concentration camps and extermination as state policy.
While the junta considered many groups suspect and targeted many sectors of society ruthlessly, Jews were often singled out for special humiliation and persecution by the regime. Timerman describes the repeated interrogations of his faith and his presumed ulterior motives as a Jew. In a passage at the heart of Chapter Nine, he relays the barrage of questions directed at him during his appearance at a military tribunal on an unspecified charge. His captors inform him that World War III has begun, that Argentina is the vanguard in thwarting left-wing terrorism, that Jews have a hand in the anti-Argentine campaign that threatens to undermine the war effort.
Timerman is bemused but not altogether surprised by this pastiche of conspiracy theories, ideological fervor, and deep-seated discrimination—what he terms "hatred transformed into fantasy"—masquerading as an organizing principle for society. After all, we've seen this before. Writing after his release and expulsion from Argentina to Israel, a country he barely knows, Timerman dedicates much of Chapter Eleven to asserting his view that the then ongoing Argentine dictatorship demonstrated that the world had learned nothing from the Holocaust.
Both were permeated by the same silence from the majority, the same political accommodations with totalitarian intolerance, the same terror visited upon scapegoat minorities. As Timerman notes in a passage describing the period not long before the coup, What there was, from the start, was the great silence, which appears in every civilized country that passively accepts the inevitability of violence, and then the fear that suddenly befalls it.
That silence which can transform any nation into an accomplice. It is this broader discussion—of the public passivity which can pave the way to totalitarianism—that elevates this book from a tale of one man's torture at the hands of a distant dictatorship, to a work with continuing resonance in our current era and those yet to come.
View 1 comment. Gregory McMichael, one of the three men convicted of murdering year-old Ahmaud Arbery, has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.
His son, Travis McMichael, was also sentenced to life without parole. The judge has not yet announced the sentence for William "Roddie" Bryan. Judge Timothy Walmsley has sentenced Travis McMichael to life in prison without parole in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, the year-old Black jogger killed in February Live Coronavirus pandemic. Live Voting rights legislation. ET, January 7, Sort by Latest Oldest Dropdown arrow.
The mother, the father, the community, and maybe even parts of the nation, but closure is hard to define and is a granular concept. It's seen differently by all depending on their perspective and the prism of your lives," Walmsley said.
A minute of silence: Walmsley called for silence for one minute before moving forward with the sentencing. The chase of Arbery occurred for about five minutes, the judge said once he resumed speaking. Two key witnesses who had testified against Hartfield in had died, so their original testimony was read into the record. None of the physical evidence — the pickaxe that was allegedly used in the murder, a car allegedly used by Hartfield, or DNA from the victim — was still around.
None of this mattered. Jurors convicted Hartfield again, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison. Prosecutors got what they wanted, only 35 years later. But that is not where this story ends. And this time the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, as much a player as a referee in this case, finally rescued Hartfield. That was his fault, the judges concluded. But it did credit him for speaking up from to That, finally, was enough to sustain a claim.
And enough to get him released. The irony is thick. By arguing over technicalities in a case of such obvious injustice state attorneys sabotaged their own cause. Which brings us to Monday. And a nap. Jerry Hartfield took a nap Monday afternoon, which means Jerry Hartfield must have woken up shortly thereafter and wondered if it all had been a dream.
Hartfield says he found God during those long years of incarceration with the help of chaplains and nuns and other spiritual advisors. He received little job or career training all those years because everyone presumed he was serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.
Then again, his life story is right there in the first lines of a famous hymn: I once was lost but now am found. A nonprofit news organization covering the U.
Life Inside. When Timerman was only twelve, his father died, forcing Jacobo to become a provider for the family. Closed off to other industries due to his heritage, Timerman became a journalist. After building up his career by reporting for international outlets such as Commentary and Agence France-Presse , Timerman founded a number of his own news-weeklies, including Confirmado and Primera Plana , the latter of which was frequently likened to Argentina's version of TIME Magazine.
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