I recall how confident you sounded when you insisted that you could learn agriculture and help establish a women-only village for your lost sisters. If this is still your dream, once I am settled, I can liaise with the Baron’s office in Buenos Aires to help establish such a village for formerly subjugated women who wish to immigrate and, like you, start a new life in the Holy Land.

Respectfully yours,

Sergio Rosenberg

Batya hugged the letter to her chest. There would be no tango in their future, but together they could choreograph their own dance.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

Author’s Note

This novel is inspired by real events, a buried shameful chapter in history that has rarely been explored in English-language fiction. It is the tragic story of over 150,000 women who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were deceived and lured from Eastern Europe into prostitution in South America.

The Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem hinted about this outrage in his short story “The Man from Buenos Aires” (which appeared in the same Railroad Stories collection that features the memorable character of Tevye the Dairyman).

This novel is the fictional story of a young Jewish woman who meets that mysterious, shady man from Buenos Aires. It is a tribute to the few women who found the strength and courage to rise above the tragedy of their fate and fought back.

The historical events in the novel actually took place between 1892 and 1910; however, the pimps’ union, Zwi Migdal, operated with impunity for seventy years. All the characters in this novel are fictional except for the Jewish German baron Maurice de Hirsch, whose ambitious vision for world Jewry and his unprecedented generosity have been largely forgotten.

—New York, 2019

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank the anonymous librarian in Buenos Aires with whom I chatted in 2007. When I asked her about “the Jewish prostitutes and pimps,” she forgot her English. That was my first clue to the depth of the dark secret of this shameful, long chapter not only in the history of Argentine Jews but in the history of all my people.

In researching The Third Daughter, I was greatly helped by Ana (Anita) Weinstein, director of the Documentation and Information Center on Argentine Jewry in AMIA, Buenos Aires, who also read the final manuscript for accuracy. My Spanish-language, Argentina-based assistants, Henry Osman and Mónica Correa, translated material and helped me study architecture, food, dress, urban development, and customs in Buenos Aires of the late 1800s.

The medical information research began with Dr. MaryAnn Millar, followed by Dr. Wendy Macias-Konstantopoulos, director, Human Trafficking Initiative, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. The latter’s appreciation and interest in helping me make this complex subject public reconfirmed the importance of my telling the story of one such young victim.

My knowledge of tango dancing was enhanced by lessons from Jean Maurasse, Scott Edholm, and Craig Gordon and the comments of tango experts Sherry Palencia and Camille Cusomano.