The Three Musketeers

Elias Traum, a former Argentinean currently residing in Israel, returns to Buenos Aires after twenty years of absence to mourn his two friends―two fellow Jews who together with him once comprised “the three musketeers.” These young men signed their own death sentences when they joined the Montoneros, the left-wing Peronist guerrilla group, back in the bad days of the Dirty Wars in the 1970s and ’80s.

Javier Mosan is an unmotivated Jewish journalist who writes for a popular daily newspaper in Argentina. His main hobbies are indulging in sexual fantasies and dodging writing assignments. When Mosan is sent to interview Traum, he believes it will be yet another routine job. Yet upon arriving at the airport Mosan is attacked, while Traum is kidnapped, mugged and then deposited on the side of the road like so much garbage. There is no doubt that the past has returned to take revenge.

But what past is it? The revolutionary or the romantic? And how is the Israeli Intelligence involved? The story takes us from the bars of Buenos Aires to the beaches of Mar Del Plata, through a forgotten childhood and an era of dictatorship, between memories and reality, until everything converges in an exciting, thrilling ending.

Translated from Spanish by Sharon Wood.

Marcelo Birmajer is one of South America’s most prominent young writers. He has written over 20 books as well as screenplays for some of Argentinean cinema’s most important films. His unique style, a combination of Latin machismo, self-irony, and Jewish humor, has earned him the title “The Woody Allen of Pampas.”