The Prophet of the Andes is about Segundo, a Peruvian man who becomes an Orthodox Jew after losing his father in 1944. The book follows him as he tries to find out what it means to be Jewish and also discovers that there are many other Jews living in South America. "I realized there was a whole phenomena in Latin America where people were trying to follow on Segundo's paths," she says.
Graciela Mochkofsky is a writer for The New Yorker and dean of CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She has written six nonfiction books in Spanish. Her new book, her first in English, is The Prophet of the Andes.
“It connects with me as a journalist, actually — it’s this idea of just seeking truth and how elusive that is. So this is a person who thinks he can get to the true meaning of God and of how he needs to live. And he thinks that by asking the right questions, and by reading, and reading, and reading, and by discussing collectively, he can get to the truth. And he can’t.”
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