Encounters in Comala I | Interview with Jacobo Sefamí (26:34)
At the launch of our podcast we had the opportunity to talk with Mexican writer and professor Jacobo Sefamí.
Biografía Jacobo Sefamí
Born in Mexico City in 1957, the writer Jacobo Sefamí, a descendant of Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Turkey and Syria to the Mexican capital, is today Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California at Irvine. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas and a B.A. in Hispanic Letters from the Universidad Autónoma de México. Beyond academia, his literary work is undoubtedly marked by his own biography. For that nostalgic journey, and at the same time full of humor, that the author undertakes in search of his identity through the novel, as in his 2004 text Los dolientes, in which Sefamí narrates the mourning rituals of the Syrian Jewish community in Mexico. But it is not the only means of literary transport that the author chooses to escort the reader on this journey to the origins. The short story also becomes a suitable vehicle to immerse us in the contrasts proposed by the chronicles of that journey to Syria that the author draws in his work Por tierras extrañas (2019). And, of course, poetry to give shape to those vestiges of a family tragedy that for the author’s memory are impossible to erase, as in his work Mili en lo inacabado mutante (2019).
