"I bought a copy of The South American Handbook
in France en route to Buenos Aires. I could never have imagined,
however, that these pages with their information on Argentina would
eventually function as the background to my own pictures. Once I
started, I couldn't stop until most of the pages were covered by drawn
and colored images and by scribbled sentences and signs.
I took the little red book with me wherever I went. No one could
possibly have suspected that I related to it as my diary. During the
day, I would sketch houses, and toward the evening, figures from the
Carnaval celebrating Argentina's 150th anniversary of Independence. In
the small hours of the night, however, I depicted Eichmann, Nazis,
personal memoirs, and members of my own family, as well as local people
I encountered during my stay in Argentina. For four whole months, I
filled the book with my colored drawings, continually revising.
Upon returning to Israel, I hid it in a closet in my mother's house.
Following her death seventeen years later, I recovered it just as I had
left it. Now I saw how each picture told a story, and how every snatch
of sentence in color hinted at the event it described.
Today, after many years, the book still affects me, as if I had made
these drawings only yesterday."
Peter Z. Malkin
