Letter from Zélia Amado about Jorge Amado

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The wife and partner of the famous Brazilian writer, Zélia Amado, describes the author's success on the streets of Portugal.

Letter from Zélia Amado to the couple Zora Seljan and Antonio Olinto (called "Zolintos") recounting Jorge Amado's adventures in Portugal, where he was widely recognized on the streets because of his soap operas. One page, very delicate tissue paper, with a letterhead from the Tivoli Hotel, in Lisbon, where the Amado couple used to stay. In Portuguese. 13.5 cm X 20 cm. Portugal, undated. Excellent condition. Single piece.

Extract

(...) Jorge is pointed out - often stopped - by the streets like the guy in the soap operas. That's because the people think - Portugal in weight watches Brazilian soap operas - that Jorge is the author of them all and, some that he is an actor: "Look at the guy who writes the soap operas!", "look that the lord has a head!" , "Isn't the lord Colonel Ramiro by any chance?" (...) They put their feet in their hands, they confuse everything (...).

A great admirer of Jorge Amado's work, Zélia Amado (1916 - 2008) began working with Jorge Amado in 1945 in the movement for the amnesty of political prisoners. A short time later, the two writers got married and Zélia decided to help her husband by revising and typing his original manuscripts on the machine. They lived in Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Czechoslovakia, where Zélia started the project to photograph Jorge, allowing a record of all the key events in the writer's life. Finally, they moved to Salvador, Bahia, their homeland.

Jorge Amado maintained an intense correspondence with Brazilian and foreign personalities throughout his life. There are more than 100,000 pages in the process of being cataloged at its foundation, documents that will unfortunately – by the writer's own will – be made available to the public only from 2051 onwards. Jorge Amado evidently talked about literature, but also art or simple everyday facts , with Brazilian or foreign intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Juscelino Kubitschek or François Mitterrand, offering your Foundation an invaluable source of research.

This document is interesting because it represents a direct witness to the international success of Jorge Amado, the importance of his work in Brazilian popular culture and the support of wives (or husbands) - often unknown - of great artists, sportsmen, scientists, politicians, etc. .