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Rosa Nissan (b. 1939, Mexico City) emerged as a celebrated figure in the Mexican literary world in 1992 with the publication of Novia que te vea, a novel that became an instant editorial success. This story about Oshinica, a Jewish girl, and her coming of age in a predominately Catholic, Mexican society became the script for a 1993 award-winning film of the same title. Hisho que te nazca (1996) continues narrating Oshinica's life, picking up where Novia que te vea leaves off. It provides the reader with details of the life of a Mexican-Jewish housewife and her struggle to deal with her predetermined roles as dedicated, caring mother and loving wife. Nissan's third book, Las tierras prometidas: cr6nica de un viaje a Israel (1997), a travel chronicle, gives a true account of her visit to Israel. Her most recent work, No solo para dormir es la noche (1999), a collection of short stories, incorporates the narrator's familiar style into texts that deal with the challenges of being a woman in a society that still needs to come to terms with issues of gender equality. Nissan's voice stands out as refreshing because of her presentation of male-female interactions. Each of these works also attempts to create a space in between the two cultures that make up her identity: the Mexican and the Jewish.
The Jews of Mexico account for only 0.63% of the total population-approximately 40,800 people-and therefore represent a very small minority (Schuvaks 75, Elkin 193). They reside primarily in the three major urban centers, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara, and in the border city of Tijuana (Hamui de Halave 20). Becky Rubinstein traces the first massive Jewish immigrations back to 1848 and explains that Maximilian brought 100 Jewish families from Austria and Belgium in 1864 (1). The next considerable migration occurred in 1920 with the arrival of 9,000 Ashkenazi and 6,000 Sephardic Jews, which increased the number of Jews in Mexico to about 21,000 (Rubinstein 1). The Mexican government's initial openness to immigrants changed into a race-based policy that welcomed from Western Europe more than Poles, Arabs, Turks, Africans and Chinese. In Mexico, we find three main Jewish communities divided according to their members' national origin. The Ashkenazi speak Yiddish and came from Hungary,...