Teresa Porzecanski writes from Uruguay about the multicultural experience of Jewish immigrants in Montevideo. Her exotic characters from Europe, Africa, and the New World bring together and struggle with the mixture of Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Latin American cultures. Porzecanski is herself the daughter of immigrants who came to Montevideo in 1926 from the Baltics and Syria. Sun Inventions, her first novel, published in 1982, is a semiautobiographical story of an immigrant family from the multifaceted perspective of a woman who is an academic, a mother, a writer searching for meaning in the universe. Perfumes of Carthage (1994) tells the stories of Lunita Mualdeb and her Sephardic family and Angela Tejera [Weaver], whose name was given to her African grandfather by a Brazilian slave owner.

Sun inventions translated by Johnny Payne; Perfumes of Carthage (Perfumes de Cartago) translated by Phyllis Silverstein; introduction by Ilan Stavans.