Between the World Wars in Argentina

It is not without significance that one of the chapters of the Quixote rewritten by Pierre Menard concerns a debate between "arms and letters." In 1939, Hitler was moving a substantial army into Poland and Czechoslovakia and 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed in Germany on Kristallnacht (Night of Crystal, named for the broken storefront windows) on November 9 and 10, 1938. Borges had been trapped in Zurich during World War I, his father having made the mistake of taking his family with him to Europe in 1914 in order to seek treatment for advancing blindness. The Borges family had ties to Europe, as did (and does) Argentina itself, since at that time roughly one-third of Argentines were European immigrants, some of them Jews who had left Hitler's Germany. The military armament and sense of impending disaster in Europe would have been apparent to Borges as he wrote. He...