ugust 16, 2003 A Treasure Hunt for Lost Memories By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN ONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Twenty years ago, an anthropologist named Teresa Porzecanski placed an advertisement in a Jewish newspaper serving this distant compass point of the Diaspora. She was looking for the residue of an unrecorded history, the letters and snapshots of tens of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Mystified about why a scholar would care for the contents of their closets and bottom drawers, the aging immigrants or their offspring warily came forward, not only with mail and photographs but also with silverware, ritual candlesticks, samovars. Ms. Porzecanski and her students then set out, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, to interview family elders. Those memories and donations began an unlikely boomlet in scholarship and literature chronicling the Jewish experience in a nation that espoused and largely practiced an American-style commitment to the melting pot...