Rites

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Victor Perera's father a Talmudic scholar was a first-generation immigrant to Guatemala who initially earned a living as an itinerant pedlar selling bolts of cloth to Indians. After arranging his marriage to a third cousin from Jerusalem by post he rose to become the owner of a leading department store in the capital.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>His son moved with a child's adaptability between the sheltered life of his bourgeois family and the Catholic Hispanic autocratic and sex- dominated world outside. While his Indian nurse his white classmates and his mestizo best friend were all destroyed by the violent character of life in Central America Victor Perera managed to survive.</span></p>