In 1995, the University of Nebraska Press planned to an English-language version, with a translation by Dick Gerdes, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia. The university press described the book as important to Holocaust studies as a rare account of a Romanian and Latin American Jew. However, its publication was delayed by a dispute about the book's principal authorship and status as a novel or autobiography. Isacovici asserted that the book was his memoir, and that he had hired Rodriguez to improve the Spanish text. Rodriguez threatened legal action, stating that the book was fictionalized, incorporated some of his own memories, and argued he was the main author and should be credited as such. The controversy has been critiqued as an example of literary usurpation and as an attempt to cast doubt on a Holocaust survivor's experience.