Little Ema slips and falls from the rooftop of her grandparents’ house. The last thing she remembers before crashing to the ground is her mother’s expression: frozen as she watches from her car across the street. It’s the day before Christmas. The silence reigning in the neighborhood, an Argentine beach town, is shattered by the wail of ambulance sirens.
Argentine writer Adriana Riva opens her debut novel, Salt, with a scene that sets the tone for a narrative full of tragedy and irony — a captivating story that delves into Jewish Argentine identity, long-buried family secrets, and inescapable transgenerational legacies.
The story unfolds in three parts: “The Fall,” “The Trip,” and “The Birth.” In the first section, Ema recounts her childhood accident at age eleven. She’s encased in plaster and bedridden for months, her world reduced to a view of the ceiling above her. She suffers through her recovery in silence, while her mother, Elena, retreats, entrusting Ema’s care to Juvencia, a Paraguayan maid who speaks to Ema in her native language, Guaraní.
As a mother, Elena is distant and enigmatic. When she married, she discarded her given name, Raquel Tabulnik — deemed too Jewish, too foreign, too low-class — and reinvented herself as Elena Sagasti, taking her husband’s surname, which was better suited to the elite Argentine circles she aspired to join. In severing the threads of her past, Elena believed she had buried her heritage for good.
Decades later, a question from Ema’s eight-year-old son, Antonio, about their family’s past prompts her to question her origins. The discovery of a box labeled with the family’s original surname, in an old building in Argentine province La Pampa, leads Ema, her sister, her mother, and her aunt Sara to embark on a journey to Macachín — the town where their bobe and zeide, both Ukrainian immigrants, first settled.
In Macachín, the streets are unpaved, and the walls’ colors have faded. The vibrant world their ancestors had built — a life filled with Yiddish and Spanish, bustling family tables, and a close-knit community gathering in the shul that hosted bar mitzvahs and weddings — has been reduced to ruins, reconstructed only in Sara’s memories.
“Where does a family begin, and where does it end?” Ema wonders. She and her sister, mother, and aunt are family, yet they are also strangers to one another. They are bound by blood but distanced by silence and resentment.
Salt is a poignant meditation on Jewish identity, love, loss, legacy, and memory. It is a story of family fractures and the struggle to hold onto the past. It is a reflection on migration, culture, and tradition, and, above all, it is a story of women — grandmothers, mothers, and daughters — and all that they carry.
Jessica Ruetter is a writer and the founder of Bibliofilia, an online platform dedicated to Spanish-language literature. Through interviews with Latin American authors and book recommendations, she connects readers across the Hispanic world. She recently graduated from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
