Jacobo Timerman — journalist, editor and author with roots in the USSR
Jacobo Timerman was born on 6 January 1923 in Bar, a small town in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union, to Nathan Timerman and Eve, née Berman, a Jewish family. In 1928, when he was five, the family emigrated to Argentina and settled in Buenos Aires. His father died when he was twelve, leaving his mother to support him and his younger brother. As a teenager he read widely in American literature, briefly studied engineering, and then turned to journalism, writing first for Jewish publications and later for Agence France-Presse and leading Buenos Aires newspapers.
In 1962, with partners, he founded Primera Plana, a weekly newsmagazine modelled on Time and Newsweek that transformed Argentine journalism, and in 1965 a second, Confirmado. He was also a commentator on radio and television. In 1971 he founded the daily La Opinión, modelled on Le Monde, which he published and edited and which many considered the greatest achievement of his career; it was temporarily closed several times between 1973 and 1976, and reported on violence and on antisemitism in the country.
In April 1977 the military government took over La Opinión, and Timerman was detained without charge. He was held in clandestine prisons and tortured, and later placed under house arrest; he would later quote an officer who called him 'a talented, arrogant Jew' as the reason for his arrest. After international pressure, notably from the United States and Israel, and an order of the Argentine Supreme Court, he was released in 1979, stripped of his Argentine citizenship and deported to Israel. There he wrote Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), an account of his imprisonment that became an international bestseller and drew worldwide attention to the disappearances in Argentina.
In Israel he wrote The Longest War (1982), on the war in Lebanon, a book that drew sharp criticism there; he also lived in Madrid and New York, and published books on Chile and Cuba. After the return of democracy he went back to Argentina in 1984, testified about his detention, and later became editor of the daily La Razón.
He died in Buenos Aires on 11 November 1999, aged seventy-six.
"Brought to Argentina by his family in 1928, aged five; deported to Israel in 1979; returned to Argentina in 1984."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Bar, Vinnytsia region, Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine)
Born in Bar, in the Ukrainian SSR, in 1923 to Nathan Timerman and Eve Berman, he emigrated to Argentina with his family at the age of five, in 1928.
Bar, Vinnytsia region, Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.