Arado Y La Espada, El

The works that elevated Theodor Kallifatides as one of the great European writers of the second half of the 20th century were his three novels Peasants and Gentlemen (1973), The Plow and the Sword (1975) and A Cruel Peace (1977), which is now translated for the first time into Spanish. With them, Kallifatides portrayed his childhood and adolescence and at the same time the most tragic period in the contemporary history of Greece, which runs from the Nazis invaded the country in 1941 to the end of the Greek civil war in 1949, and the misery of the postwar period in a devastated country. In The Plow and the Sword, the inhabitants of Yalós seem to be able to breathe easy, after the arrival of the British army and the end of the Second World War. But soon the roar of weapons resounds again. In the post-war vacuum, the fascists take power and groups of resistant partisans, who already fought against the Nazis, confront them. The family of Minos, the child protagonist of the trilogy, emerges in the foreground: Uncle Stelios, teller of endless stories and anecdotes, the teacher freed from Nazi prisons who can finally reunite with his family, Minos and his first love by a Jewish girl, Rebeca, the older brothers, who flee to the mountains to join the resistance.