Susana Soca

Through her mother's aristocratic connections Susana Soca grew up in Montevideo with many influential kinsfolk such as her uncle, the writer and Uruguayan senator Eduardo Acevedo Díaz who had signed as a witness on her parents' marriage certificate.

Marta Behrens later told an interviewer how she remembered seeing a little girl sitting in the doctor's car outside the house when she went to visit her grandmother.

Behrens remembered Soca, who must have been around twelve at the time, sitting in the car in the fading evening light with a face that "showed sadness".

[5] Early on Susana Soca mastered various languages: Spanish, French, English, German, Latin, Italian, Greek and subsequently Russian.

[9] Travel became difficult in Europe over the next few years, and much of their subsequent friendship was conducted by letter, as a result of which Soca was able greatly to improve her Russian.

Soca played a part in concealing the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago (which had been refused publication in the Soviet Union), though the extent of her involvement remains contested.

Later they took a suite at the Hotel George V. 1939 was a year of mounting international tension, especially in Europe, and by the time the women were ready to return to Uruguay the Second World War had broken out.

On 3 September 1939, France and Britain declared war on Germany: on the streets of Paris and London eerily little changed, as the governments in those cities waited to see what Hitler would do next.

As she would later explain in the foreword to her 1959 poetry collection "En un país de la memoria",[10] this provided a route by which she was able to find her personal identity and her homeland in the Spanish language.

[11] After the war Susana Soca founded Cahiers de La Licorne (literally, "notebooks of the unicorn"), a French conceived transatlantic literary journal designed and presented as a twice yearly periodical-anthology.

[13] There was also a cohort of Latin American writers, hitherto unknown in Europe, whose works were first introduced to European readers thanks to La Licorne.

In Montevideo she attracted figures from the arts whose families had fled from Germany during the Hitler years such as the photographer Gisèle Freund, whom she knew from her time in Paris, and the journalist Hellmut Freund who provided various contributions to Entregas de la Licorne, including an essay about the pioneering artist-photographer Jeanne Mandello who had arrived in Uruguay in 1941.

She also organised and funded exhibitions that introduced European artists in Latin America, and acted as a sponsor for Uruguayan literary talents such as Felisberto Hernández.

[16][17] The full extent and importance of Soca's "behind the scenes" activities in literature and the arts during the 1940s and 1950s becomes apparent from literary anthologies, diaries and correspondence, much of which became available to scholars only after her death, for instance in the writings of Albert Camus and Emil Cioran, from pictures and photographs, and from the collected correspondence of others, such as Victoria Ocampo, Roger Caillois, Felisberto Hernández, Juan Ramón Jiménez, José Bergamín-María Zambrano.

[11] Pablo Picasso produced an oil-painting of Soca in the 1940s which he then sent to her: it is not clear where the portrait itself has ended up, but a photograph taken in Paris in 1943 by André Ostier shows her standing beside it.

[11] One of her first pieces of published work is the extended essay she wrote about Rainer Maria Rilke which appeared in the periodical "Alfar" in 1932.

[10] In 2018 the Uruguayan novelist Claudia Amengual wrote El lugar inalcanzable, with a fictionalized Susana Soca facing a difficult life in Nazi-occupied Paris.