Goldenberg, Jorge

(1941– )

   Argentine screenwriter, playwright, and acting teacher. Born in the city of San Martín, in the province of Buenos Aires, to Jewish immigrants, Goldenberg has evoked the milieu of his childhood in one of his best-known plays, Krinsky. His parents’ travels and migrations read like a map of the Eastern European Jewish experience in the 20th century. His father was born in then-czarist Russia, in a town that would later become part of Romania and is now in the Republic of Moldavia. The elder Goldenberg emigrated in 1928 and was soon active in the socialist and labor movements in Argentina. He served several stints with the great Yiddish theater companies that periodically toured Argentina in the pre–World War II years. Jorge’s mother, born in what was then Poland, now Belarus after the breakup of the Soviet Union, immigrated to Argentina in 1936. Her family, except for a sibling, would all perish in the Holocaust. Speaking of his childhood, Goldenberg has revealed in an interview that his middle name, Víctor, expressed his parents’ hope for an Allied victory in Europe.

   A student at the Instituto de Cine at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fé, he saw his studies interrupted by the 1966 military coup that brought General Juan Carlos Onganía to power. Goldenberg then moved to Buenos Aires, where he won a research fellowship from the Fondo Nacional de Arte. There, he also worked on several award-winning Argentine films. After a 1969 stint in Paris, he returned to his work as a screenwriter, particularly in collaboration with the playwright Oscar Viale, with whom he would write No toquen a la nena (Don’t Touch the Girl, 1973, directed by Juan José Jusid); Juan que reía (Juan Who Laughed, 1976, directed by Carlos Galletini); and Plata Dulce (Sweet Silver, 1982, directed by Fernando Ayala).

   As a playwright, critical notice arrived with his play Argentine Quebracho Company, which premiered at the Teatro Lasalle in Buenos Aires in 1973. In 1975 he would be awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize for his play Relevo 1923 (Change of Guard, 1923), which tells of a political assassination within the Argentine anarchist movement of the early 20th century. His 1983 play, Knepp, addressed the issue of the desaparecidos (missing) in a metaphorical examination of the tensions between memory and oblivion, as personified by the experience of the seemingly deserted wife, María Elena, who is given the opportunity by a mysterious man to contact her husband once a week. The play has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Russian and staged abroad on numerous occasions. In 1983, Goldenberg collaborated in the third cycle of Teatro Abierto Argentino, perhaps the best-known example of cultural resistance to emerge from Argentina during the “dirty war.” Included in the cycle were three of his monologues, El padre (The Father), Maquillaje (Makeup), and Otseifinan. In later years, he would further explore “dirty war” topics in films in which he collaborated with the noted director María Luisa Bemberg. In the 1986 film Miss Mary, Bemberg and he shared screenplay credits, as they would do in the 1993 film De eso no se habla (We Don’t Talk about That) along with Aldo Romero and Julio Llinás.

   Also in 1983, a prolific year, Goldenberg wrote what is perhaps one of his best-known plays, Krinsky, staged in 1986. The play is based on the historical figure of Adolfo Krinsky, an eccentric inhabitant of the author’s native city, Santa Fé. Krinsky made a precarious living as a librarian in a Jewish community center and as an itinerant photographer. According to Goldenberg, many legends grew around Krinsky, particularly as a raggedy coat, lined with old peso notes, was discovered among his possessions after his solitary death. Although the author says his plays do not deal directly with Jewish themes, Krinsky explores themes of displacement in the figure of the old Jewish immigrant who looks back on a failed socialist utopia. In the play—as in life—Krinsky is also a Yiddish poet, a circumstance that the author uses to explore the “zone of radical otherness” for which language is a conduit. Goldenberg, who is himself fluent in Yiddish—which he describes as a “language that expresses catastrophe” (“una lengua que expresa una catastrophe”)—uses it to describe the longing for un hogar (a home) forever lost, in this case the world of Eastern European Jewry, which was destroyed by the Holocaust. Goldenberg wrote many critically acclaimed movies, many of which have found success with worldwide audiences. They include La película del rey (distributed in 1986 as A King and His Movie), El Entusiasmo (Enthusiasm, 1999), Francisca (2002), and Perder es cuestión de método (distributed in 2004 as The Art of Losing). His latest screenplay was for Morirse está en hebreo (distributed in 2008 as My Mexican Shivah), a cross-cultural slapstick comedy set in Mexico City’s Jewish community. In addition to his work as playwright and screenwriter, he conducts theater seminars in Europe and Argentina, where he often collaborates with his theater-director wife, Berta. He has also adapted several classics for the Buenos Aires stage, including Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Goldenberg has received numerous awards at home and abroad, as well as for his participation in film festivals in Sundance, Biarritz, Mar de Plata, and Havana. He lives in Buenos Aires.