Teresa Porzecanski

Teresa Porzecanski (born 1945) is a Uruguayan anthropologist and writer. From an Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish family (her father was originally from Libau and her mother from Syria), her works have included a focus on the Jewish communities of Uruguay. She is a professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay.

She grew up in Montevideo. From 1978-1981, she collected oral histories of Jewish immigrants which was published as Life Stories of Jewish Immigrants to Uruguay in its first edition in Spanish in 1986. In a review for the American Jewish Archives, Alejandro Lilienthal called it a good introduction to the subject, but criticized the work as not containing any original analysis; outside of the transcriptions of the oral histories, the context in the introduction was simply compiled work that others had previously published.

Her fiction is part of a tradition of works expressing erotic desires created by Uruguayan women.

In 1992, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, during which she studied the Sephardim and rabbinic lore. She has also received a Fulbright scholarship.

Selected works

Fiction

• The Riddle and other stories (1967)
• Constructions (Constucciones) (1979)
• Sun Inventions (La invention de los soles) (1982)
• An Erotic Novel (Una novela erotica) (1986)
• Messiah in Montevideo (Mesias en Montevideo) (1989)
• Breath is a Forge (La respiracion es una fragua) (1989)
• Perfumes of Carthage (Perfumes de Cartago) (1994)

Nonfiction

• Life Stories of Jewish Immagrants to Uruguay (La vida empezo aca: Inmigrantes judios al Uruguay: Historias de vida y perspectiva antropologica de la conformacion de la communidad judia uruguya, contrastes culturales ye procesos de enculturacion) (2nd ed, 1986; 2005)