For about a century, Argentina was a promised land to which dreamers from all over the world immigrated, until a series of dictatorships made it a land from which they emigrated. These are precisely the years in which the book by Andrés Nauman, who was born in Buenos Aires and emigrated from there with his family to Spain, takes place. Based on an unfinished letter written to him by his grandmother Blanca, the narrator embarks on a journey through time. He returns to his hometown, "the place where I am no longer but still am," and writes a letter within a letter, a memory within a memory. Before us is the story of the twentieth century in Latin America and not only there, and also a personal, intimate story of one family and one continuous experience of exile: Jews from Belarus, French from Bourges, and Lithuanians, Poles, and Galicians, who came together as one family, a family that lived in Argentina for two or three generations until it was forced to continue its journey. In intimate, moving, and funny writing, Nauman returns to the place and time that made him a writer and immigrant "within the language," a situation that, as he says, undermines "the foundations of inner speech. That is, the very state of writing." On his way to complete his own grandmother's unfinished letter, he brings to life an entire world of unforgettable family figures, from Leonardo the dandy, through Jacobo, the hat dealer with engineering dreams, to Lydia, the art dealer with a natural sense, and a host of other characters of entrepreneurs, adventurers, revolutionaries, and dreamers. "Once Upon a Time in Argentina" is a coming-of-age story, a political novel, and a love song for those who are no longer there. A tour of the intricacies of a family tree that stretches across a territory that is real and fantastic, foreign yet universal. A book that makes us wonder about the meaning of identity in the frenetic world in which we live.