Tali Goldman: "In the face of the logic of immediacy, I think storytelling still works."

A young journalist with an old-school craft. When Tali Goldman was born in 1987, the dictatorship was already history (albeit a history still breathing down the neck of democracy), Raúl Alfonsín was in the second half of his administration; Nunca Más had been in bookstores for two years. And yet, everything about her—her outlook , her interests, and her way of practicing her craft —seems to be from before . Although she's also a child of her time and can write podcast scripts, when it comes to writing a story, her habits and customs are those she learned from the start in newsrooms where people still smoked, landlines rang, and shouted: "In the face of the logic of social media, of the immediate, I think these kinds of stories still work ," she tells Clarín a few days before the publication of her third book , Cómo se puede querer tanto a alguien (Paisanita editora).

The volume functions almost as a manual of good journalism : three very different chronicles that, however, are linked, intertwined, by the subject matter, by the intersections between their protagonists, because all three in their own way (and in different ways) capture a way of being a journalist .

The first, titled after the book, features Diana Wassner de Malamud , a figurehead of Memoria Activa since her husband died in the AMIA attack. It also portrays this country through the lens of a life, that of her widow. The second, "Operatvo Milut," reconstructs Daniel Recanati's actions to rescue more than 400 people from the clutches of the dictatorship from the Jewish Agency for Israel in Buenos Aires. The last, "Tras el represor de Rodolfo Walsh," unravels a cinematic operation in the midst of the pandemic to extradite former prefect Gonzalo "Chispa" Sánchez from Brazil, accused, among other crimes, of kidnapping the author of Operación Masacre .

They could be standalone chronicles—indeed, they were at the time—but here they function as a complete narrative: the history of Argentina over the last 50 years and the continuing tensions that are as current as they were half a century ago.

–The book features three chronicles, one that won an award last year and two others previously published in Latin American magazines that have been republished here for this format. How and why did you choose these over others? What unites them?

–I started the first of the stories on my own. No one had asked me for it, and in fact, I had offered it to various media outlets, but no one accepted it because they felt it had already been told. In fact, many interviews with her had been published, but I wanted to look at other things, to see this woman in her late twenties, with two young daughters, who becomes a widow and begins to seek justice for her husband and for all the victims of the AMIA. I was a few years older than her as a mother at the time, and I was able to empathize with a whole different side of that experience. The second story is connected to this one because there's a moment in the story where the destinies of Diana Malamud and Daniel Recanati intersect. Someone had mentioned to me that she had gone into exile during the dictatorship thanks to the efforts of the Jewish Agency. For me, it's an important article because it was the first time I wrote about the dictatorship and the Jewish community. And the third is also a very important article because it was the first one I published in Gatopardo, the first one edited by Leila Guerriero, and it also had that Jewish resonance in the surname of Ezequiel Rochistein, the National Director of Criminal Investigation for the Ministry of Security, who led the operation. All three linked two themes: the dictatorship and Jewishness, which are also two obsessions that run through my work.

–What was the reason for the lack of interest in Diana Malamud’s story?

–Well, AMIA isn't usually a blockbuster story, I think. I feel like it's experienced as a rehash, like a return to the same old stuff. It happens to me too, but I saw this story as something else entirely.

–There's a reproach she herself makes to you, after hours and hours of interviews, because it seems to her that you never talk about AMIA.

–Yes, at one point that doubt arose, and I found it very interesting because he's been talking about this topic for 30 years. Precisely, Iran, the car bomb, Carlos Menem, Nisman, the investigation, the case... these are omnipresent themes, and I felt there was something missing from that personal story, from a life that could provide a more comprehensive understanding, including what the AMIA bombing meant for society. After two years of refusals, I decided I was going to write it anyway and started at the end of 2023.

–You mentioned earlier about two obsessions. The topics you address are very unique, a look at issues from another era. What do you see when you look back at your collection of articles?

–The dictatorship is my great obsession. I pay close attention to what's published, what appears, and there are thousands of stories to tell. I think this connection has to do with my own history. The dictatorship was very present in my family's life, and later I researched the story of Estela de Carlotto's grandson for a book by María Seoane. When I look back at all my work, perhaps my first book, dedicated to women trade unionists, I feel like it was a bit of a hangover in my life. Although I'm proud of that book and enjoyed writing it, today I no longer feel comfortable talking about it. As a journalist, that topic isn't appealing to me. I feel like I saw something at the time that was vacant; it interested me, but now I feel very alien to that universe.

–You didn't become involved with Jewish themes until recently. What changed?

–I recently added Jewish-related topics. I always felt it was the domain of my father, who is a rabbi (Editor's note: Daniel Goldman, rabbi of the Bet El Community and disciple of Rabbi Marshall Meyer). The second story in the book is the first I dedicated to a Jewish theme. In fact, my father wrote a book titled Being Jewish in the Seventies: Testimonies of Horror and Resistance During the Last Dictatorship (21st Century), which I had in my library for many years. That's why this story was personally important to me.

–You have a collection of short stories in which Jewish themes are also very present. Was it fiction that opened up that possibility?

–There's something from that universe I was able to reconcile with through literature. But the story about Daniel Recanati is a turning point in my life as well, because that universe, that of the disappeared Jews, also connects with my father. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were invited to Jewish holidays at home in those years, as well as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, relatives... When I do the interviews for that story, I understand those experiences because I've known them since I was a child, and I inaugurated this new thematic obsession. So, returning to the question, these three stories also bring together two disciplinary fields from which I'm working: journalism and literature.

–There's something almost outdated about your work mechanics: practices that are the opposite of clickbait, urgency, and social media. How do you deal with changes in the profession and the place from which you approach it?

–The clearest proof is the media's rejection of a feature that ends up winning a contest. Feature writing, or nonfiction, which is what I do, basically seeks to give a story a perspective. Every story can be told in a thousand ways, and for me, nonfiction has much more to do with form than substance. The issue is how we tell those stories. That's why I was very surprised to win this contest because, in a way, it's an endorsement of old-school journalism, which is what shaped me: the feature in which the journalist doesn't appear, in which the voice is that of the protagonist. In a way, I feel a kind of vindication of that old school: if it wins a contest like this, it's not dead. Given the logic of social media and the immediacy of the immediate, I think these kinds of stories still work.

–Why do they still work?

–Because there's a weariness with everything else, and because they're a space of resistance. As Leila Guerriero says, the one who writes chronicles is the anti-journalist, the one who arrives late, the one who isn't interested in the urgency of events, the one who needs time. That's an act of resistance in these times.

How can you love someone so much, by Tali Goldman (Paisanita editora).