 Scliar is best known outside Brazil for his 1981 novel "Max and the Cats" ("Max e os Felinos"), the story of a young German man who flees Berlin after he comes to the attention of the Nazis for having had an affair with a married woman.Making his way to Brazil, his ship sinks, and he finds himself alone in a dinghy with a jaguar who had been travelling in the hold.Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, into a Jewish family that immigrated to Brazil from Bessarabia in 1919.