Vincent, Isabel 1965–

PERSONAL: Born 1965.

ADDRESSES: Home—Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Office—c/o National Post, 300-1450 Don Mills Rd., Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3R5, Canada.

CAREER: Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, began as reporter, Latin American Bureau Chief, 1991–95; National Post, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada, investigative reporter.

AWARDS, HONORS: Inter-American Press Association Citation, 1993, for coverage of Peru's Shining Path guerillas; National Newspaper Award finalist, 1994, for coverage of the drug wars in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Southam Fellowship and Canadian Association of Journalists' Award for excellence in investigative journalism, both for foreign reporting and See No Evil: The Strange Case of Christine Lamont and David Spencer.

WRITINGS:

See No Evil: The Strange Case of Christine Lamont and David Spencer, Reed Books Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice, Morrow (New York, NY), 1997.

Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas, 1860 to 1939, Morrow (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Marie Claire, Saturday Night, New Yorker, Independent, Daily Telegraph, and other international publications.

SIDELIGHTS: Isabel Vincent is an award-winning multilingual journalist who was chosen as a finalist for Canada's National Newspaper Award, the equivalent of the American Pulitzer Prize, for her reporting on the drug wars in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro.

Vincent is the author of several nonfiction books, including Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice, an investigation into the fortunes that were deposited in Swiss and Swedish banks by European Jews threatened by the Nazis. Vincent also investigates whether these two countries secretly collaborated with the Germans, supplying them with resources to finance their war and reaping a windfall from the atrocities of World War II. Vincent's case study is the Hammersfelds, a family of Viennese Jews who have attempted to reclaim their assets. Booklist contributor Jay Freeman wrote that their efforts "add saving grace to what otherwise would be a depressing tale of greed and indifference to human suffering."

Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas, 1860 to 1939 is Vincent's history of the sexual slavery of young Jewish women who were forced into prostitution by the Jewish gang known as Zwi Migdal. The gang ran brothels on several continents, including North America, and their base was in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Vincent follows the lives of three of the women the gang forced into prostitution, including Sophia Chamys, who was sent to Buenos Aires and locked in a house. The other Jewish residents of the city refused to acknowledge the women and would not give them proper burials when they died. Consequently, the prostitutes formed the Chesed Shel Ermess and purchased their own cemetery in 1916. In 1942, they bought a synagogue.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor described Bodies and Souls as "riveting and disturbing." A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that Vincent "demonstrates her strength as a writer and storyteller, which enables her to a least partially retrieve this all-but-lost world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 1997, Jay Freeman, review of Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice, p. 385.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2005, review of Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas, 1860 to 1939, p. 965.

Publishers Weekly, November 10, 1997, review of Hitle's Silent Partners, p. 67.