Looking for Alicia won the 2024 Jacob Isaac Segal award for Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme, offered by the Jewish Public Library of Montreal. https://jewishpubliclibrary.org/events-programs-courses/jisegal-awards-2024/

The jury’s citation reads:

“Marc Raboy’s Looking for Alicia delves into Argentina’s post-Peron period of terror, almost fifty years ago now, to chart the life, the disappearance, and almost certain death of a young journalist and activist who shared a surname with the author, and perhaps a distant kinship. The book is a quest, a chronicle, and a passionate analysis of a terrifying episode in that country’s history, forthright in its assessment of the major players on both sides of the struggle. Raboy’s quest is all the more poignant for the resemblances between the author and Alicia— their common family origins as immigrants from shtetls in Ukraine, their Jewish upbringing, and their shared passion for social justice, one life lived in Buenos Aires the other in Montreal. The comparisons between the trajectories of these two socially conscious journalists following the same tradition of left-wing Jewish commitment—with very different consequences—enhance the impact of an already riveting story. The book is beautifully written, masterfully structured, and is the jury’s unanimous choice as the winner of the 2024 Segal Prize for Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme.”

 

(December 3, 2024)