Rites: A Childhood in Guatemala

Victor Perera's father, a talmudic scholar, was a first-generation immigrant in Guatemala who began as an itinerant pedlar, selling bolts of cloth to Indians. He later arranged a marriage by mail with a third cousin from Jerusalem, and gradually became one of the capital's leading merchants. His son moved with the adaptability of a child between the sheltered life of his bourgeois family and the Catholic, anti-semitic and sex-dominated world outside. Victor Perera survived, but the violent character of life in Guatemala - a land haunted by death squads - crippled the lives of his Indian nurse, his white classmates and his "mestizo" best friend.