Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences, Representations, and Identity (Jewish Latin America)

Returning to Babel Jewish Latin America Issues and Methods Edited by Raanan Rein (Tel Aviv University) Editorial Bo...

Author: Edited by Amalia Ran and Jean Axelrad Cahan

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Returning to Babel

Jewish Latin America Issues and Methods

Edited by

Raanan Rein (Tel Aviv University) Editorial Board

Edna Aizenberg (Marymount Manhattan College) Judah Cohen (Indiana University) Luis Roniger (Wake Forest University) David Sheinin (Trent University) Rosalie Sitman (Tel Aviv University)

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/jlam

Returning to Babel Jewish Latin American Experiences, Representations, and Identity

Edited by

Amalia Ran and Jean Axelrad Cahan

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

Cover illustration: Cover illustration courtesy of Mirta Kupferminc. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Returning to Babel : Jewish Latin American experiences, representations, and identity / edited by Amalia Ran and Jean Axelrad Cahan. p. cm. — ( Jewish Latin America: issues and methods) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20395-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Latin America—Identity. 2. Jews—Latin America—Intellectual life—21st century. 3. Jews—Latin America— Social life and customs. 4. Jews—Cultural assimilation—Latin America. 5. Social integration. 6. Latin American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. 7. Jewish literature— Latin America—History and criticism. I. Ran, Amalia. II. Cahan, Jean Axelrad. III. Title. IV. Series. F1419.J4R49 2012 980’.004924—dc23

2011030299

ISSN 2211-0968 ISBN 978 90 04 20395 2 Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables .......................................................... Acknowledgements ..................................................................... List of Contributors ....................................................................

ix xi xiii

Introduction: Rethinking Jewish Identity in Latin America ..... Amalia Ran and Jean Axelrad Cahan

1

PART ONE

JEWISH LATIN AMERICAN EXPERIENCES, PAST AND PRESENT Chapter One Jewish Latin American Historiography: The Challenges Ahead ........................................................... Raanan Rein

17

Chapter Two Educating Argentine Jews: Sephardim and Their Schools, 1920s–1960s ................................................... Adriana Brodsky

33

Chapter Three The Jewish Latin American Writer and Tradition: The Case of Sergio Chejfec ................................. Sergio Waisman

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PART TWO

JEWISHNESS AS LITERARY REPRESENTATION Chapter Four Should We Bury the Jewish Gaucho? A New Gerchunoff for the Twenty-First Century ............................. Edna Aizenberg

65

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contents

Chapter Five Hacer la América: The Diasporic Imagination in Saed’s Triple crónica de un nombre ......................................... Joanna L. Mitchell

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Chapter Six Judaism, Sexuality, and the Nation in Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband ................................................ Ariana Vigil

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PART THREE

JEWISH AND LO LATINOAMERICANO IN THE ARTS Chapter Seven Borges and the Kabbalah: Pre-Texts to a Text ................................................................................. Saúl Sosnowski

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Chapter Eight Music of the Underdog: Sociological and Musical Similarities between Muzika Mizrahit and Salsa ........ Moshe Morad

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Chapter Nine Jewish Puberty in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Constructing Judeo-Latinidad .................. Tzvi Tal

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PART FOUR

THE NOTION OF OTHERNESS AND THE QUESTION OF INTEGRATION Chapter Ten “The books that should not be missing in any Jewish home”: Translation as a Cultural Policy in Argentina, 1919–1938 ............................................................ Alejandro Dujovne Chapter Eleven Beyond Identity: Clarice Lispector and the Ethical Transcendence of Being for the Other ..................... Nelson H. Vieira

159

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contents Chapter Twelve Plausible Alternatives in the Jewish Argentinean Integration Game .............................................. Lourdes Barranco-Cortés

vii 195

Chapter Thirteen Otherness in El árbol de la Gitana ............... Dayana Soto y Caballero de Galicia

213

Bibliography ................................................................................ Index ...........................................................................................

225 237

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Figures Chapter Two Map 1 ...........................................................................................

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Chapter Seven Figure 1. La Biblioteca Infinita/The Infinite Library. Mirta Kupferminc, digital print-impresión digital, 70 × 100 cms. 2008. Image from the exhibition Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access, with Saúl Sosnowski. Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2008 ................................................ Figure 2. La Escritura del Dios/The God’s Script. Mirta Kupferminc, aguafuerte, aguatinta- etching, 40 × 60 cms. 2004. Image from Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word, with Saúl Sosnowski.This image hides in its shape, the words “El Secreto” ............................................................................. Figure 3. Página del libro Borges y la Cábala: Senderos del Verbo/ Page from the book Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word. Mirta Kupferminc, etching, 40 × 60 (open) cms. 2006. Page from the book with Saúl Sosnowski ............................... Figure 4. Después del Golem/After the Golem. Mirta Kupferminc, digital print-impresión digital, 70 × 100 cms. 2008. Image from the exhibition Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access, with Saúl Sosnowski. Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2008 .................................................................. Figure 5. Hechos de Barro/Made of Mud. Mirta Kupferminc, digital print-impresión digital, 55 × 45 cms. 2008. Image from the exhibition Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access, with Saúl Sosnowski. Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2008 .......................................................................

107

111

114

117

119

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list of figures and tables

Chapter Eight Figure 6. Album cover of Héctor Lavoe, “the king of salsa” (photo used with permission from Codigo Music/Fania Records) ................................................................................... Figure 7. Album cover of Zohar Argov, “the king of muzika mizrahit ” (photo used with permission from Reuveni Productions/Reuveni Brothers) ............................................... Figure 8. Drumming in a religious African-Cuban ceremony in Havana (Photo: Moshe Morad, 2006) .................................... Figure 9. Drumming in a Bedouin hafla in the Jordanian desert (Photo: Moshe Morad, 2008) ..................................................

139 140 141 142

Tables Chapter Two Adriana Brodsky, Sephardic Schools Mentioned in the Article ................................................................................

37

Chapter Ten Alejandro Dujovne, Books Translated by Salomón Resnick ..................................................................................... 168 Alejandro Dujovne, Books Written by Salomón Resnick ..................................................................................... 170 Alejandro Dujovne, Titles Published by the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina ................................................. 172

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors would like to express sincere appreciation to the Norman and Bernice Harris Center for Judaic Studies and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of NebraskaLincoln for their generous support. Both programs made possible an international symposium associated with this volume (held in Lincoln, Nebraska, in April 2009) and have sought to promote the field of Latin American Jewish studies in other ways as well.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Edna Aizenberg. Aizenberg is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. One of the pioneers of Latin American Jewish literary studies in the U.S., Aizenberg is Co-President of LAJSA, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association. A renowned scholar of Jorge Luis Borges, her book The Aleph Weaver (1984; expanded Spanish ed., 1997), initiated the study of Judaism and the Shoah in Borges’s work. Her volumes in Latin American Jewish studies are Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff ’s Los gauchos judíos (2002), Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff and Argentine-Jewish Literature (2002; paperback ed. 2004); and together with Margalit Bejarano, the forthcoming Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: an Interdisciplinary Approach (Syracuse University Press). Lourdes Barranco-Cortés. Barranco-Cortés is an Argentinean native, who obtained her law degree from Universidad de la Cuenca del Plata in Corrientes, Argentina, and her Master degree from the department of Foreign Languages at the University of NebraskaLincoln. Barranco-Cortés was a lecturer of Spanish in Concordia University and the University of Nebraska. Currently, she serves as a Spanish instructor at the International Center of West Lafayette, Indiana. Her research interests include: Jewish-Argentinean literature, intersection of sociological and literary discussion of minority issues, women and gender studies in Latin America. Adriana Brodsky. Brodsky is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She obtained her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2004. Currently, Brodsky is working on her manuscript entitled Becoming Argentine Jews: Sephardim and the Construction of Ethnic and National Identities, 1880–1960, which focuses on Sephardic communities that settled in Argentina from the end of the 19th century to mid-20th century. Her new project explores the experiences of Argentine Sephardic youth—some of whom made aliyah—in the 1960s–1970s. Her overall research interests center on the construction of the Argentine Jewish community from the

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list of contributors

perspective of its Sephardic minority, on the participation of Sephardim in the Zionist movement, and on the role played by ethnic minorities in the formation of the nation. Alejandro Dujovne. Dujovne received his Ph.D. in social sciences from IDES-Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. He is a member of the research project “Written culture, printed word and intellectual field” at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, and founder and member of the Jewish Studies Area of IDES (NEJ). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). His doctoral dissertation examined the production and circulation of books in the Jewish community of Buenos Aires in the frame of a wider transnational geography of production and circulation of “Jewish books” between 1919 and 1979. His current research focuses on the social trajectories of five Jewish publishers who were key figures in the Argentine cultural modernization process between 1946 and 1970. Mirta Kupferminc. Kupferminc is an Argentine artist who resides in her hometown of Buenos Aires. She held more than 50 oneperson shows in Argentina, Cuba, China, Germany, England, Israel, Japan, France, Spain, United States, Taiwan, and Uruguay. Kupferminc represented Argentina at numerous International Biennials: among other exhibitions, her work can be found at the Sokey Academy of Fine Arts in Tokyo, Kleinsassen Museum in Fulda, Germany, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Kupferminc worked and designed several books for bibliophyls with scholars, such as Santiago Kovadloff, Eliahu Toker, and Saúl Sosnowski, and lectured in many international universities. Together with Arquitect Andrés Segal, she built the Monument to the Victims of the Terrorist Attack in AMIA, placed in Plaza Lavalle, Buenos Aires. Joanna L. Mitchell. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Denison University, Ohio. Her fields of research include narratives of Diaspora and immigration, hybridity and mestizaje. Mitchell has published articles on contemporary Jewish Mexican literature, as well as articles and an interview on U.S. Latina theater and prose. She is currently at work on a monograph on Jewish Mexican narrative writing.


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Moshe Morad. Morad is completing his doctorate degree in the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London. Morad is an Israeli media/music industry producer and a lecturer who specializes in World Music, Latin music, ethnomusicology, and the music industry. His research interests include music and identity among marginalized groups, with a special focus on Latin America, particularly Cuba. His current scholarship involves music and homosexuality in Latin America. He published various articles and reviews in academic journals, as well as the general press, including “ ‘Invertidos’ in AfroCuban religion” (Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide). Morad served as Managing Director of NMC Music, Director of Global Marketing at EMI Music, and head of World Music label “Hemisphere”. He produced and compiled numerous music albums and compilations, and worked with top World Music artists such as Yasmin Levy (Israel ) and Ilham Al Madfai (Iraq). Currently, he presents a daily prime-time program on Israeli Radio and special “on location” features on BBC Radio 3. Raanan Rein. Rein is the Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University and Director of its S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies. He is the Co-Editor of Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe and the Co-President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association. His most recent books include: In the Shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the Second Line of Argentina’s Populist Movement (Stanford, 2008), and Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on History, Ethnicity and Diaspora (Brill, 2010). He is co-editor of Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (New Mexico, 2008; with Jeffrey Lesser). Saúl Sosnowski. Sosnowski is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, and Director of the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. Until recently, Sosnowski served also as the University’s Associate Provost for International Affairs. He is the author of Julio Cortázar: Una búsqueda mítica, Borges y la Cábala: La búsqueda del Verbo (translated into Portuguese and German), La orilla inminente: Escritores judíos-argentinos, of over 80 articles published in journals and collective volumes, and editor and co-editor of over 15 volumes. Sosnowski is the founder and editor of the literary journal Hispamérica, and he serves on the boards of several scholarly journals. His projects “A Culture for Democracy in Latin America,” and “New Leadership

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for a Democratic Society,” as well as his lectures and publications center on issues of civil education, democracy and conflict management with a focus on Latin America. Dayana Soto y Caballero de Galicia. Soto y Caballero de Galicia is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her research entitled “Passing en Galdós: El personaje en busca de una nueva identidad” explores how characters in this Spanish author recognize social differences through an inner psychological experience and utilize passing as a tool to acquire social mobility and favors. Her academic interests include interdisciplinary approaches to the European Nineteenth Century, as well as Medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature, and Spanish and Latin American Cinema. Tzvi Tal. Tal is a Professor at the Department of Film and Television of Sapir College and the Department of General Studies at the University of Haifa. He is an Associated Researcher in the Institute of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Tel Aviv. His recent investigations and publications focus on the cinematographic reconstruction of collective memories and identities, both at historical films and at Jewish narratives in Latin American films. Amongst his latest publications: Silverscreens and Revolution: A Comparative Vision of Argentina Liberation Cinema and Brazilian Cinema Novo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Lumiere and Tel Aviv University, 2005); “Loved Ones and Ethnic Objects: Jews and Palestinians in the Spanish comedy Film,” in Spain and Israel: Twenty Years Later, edited by Raanan Rein (Sevilla: Fundación Tres Culturas, 2007), 215–223; “La Rosales: History, Intertextuality and Allegory in a Film of Transition to Democracy in Argentina,” in History & Cinema, coord. Josep Maria Caparrós Lera (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions Universitat de Barcelona, 2010). Nelson H. Vieira. Vieira is Professor of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University. He is the founding editor of the literary journal, Brasil/Brazil and former President of Latin American Jewish Studies Association (1995–2002). He published extensively on Brazilian fiction, among his major publications are: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Brazil, Ed. & Trans, (2009); Anonymous Celebrity by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Trans. (2009); The Prophet and Other Stories by Samuel Rawet [ Intro & Trans.] (1998); Jewish Voices


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in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity (1995); Construindo a Imagem do judeu: Algumas abordagens téoricas [ Editor] (1994); Brasil e Portugal: A imagem recíproca (1991); Roads to Today’s Portugal [Editor] (1983); and The Promise by Bernardo Santareno, Trans. (1981). Ariana Vigil. Vigil is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her primary area of research is contemporary U.S. Latina/o literature with special emphasis on Latina/os and military violence, issues of gender and sexuality, and Jewish Latina/o literature. Sergio Waisman. Waisman is Chair of the Department of Romance, German and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Associate Professor of Spanish and International Affairs, and Affiliated Faculty of Judaic Studies at The George Washington University. His book Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery was published in English by Bucknell University Press and in Argentina by Adriana Hidalgo Editora (both in 2005). His first novel, Leaving, was published in the U.S. in 2004 (Intelibooks), and in 2010 as Irse in Argentina (Bajo la luna). Waisman has translated, among others, works by Ricardo Piglia, Leopoldo Lugones, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Nataniel Aguirre, and Mariano Azuela. His translation of The Absent City by Piglia (Duke) received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2000. His latest translation is An Anthology of Spanish-American Modernismo (MLA, with Kelly Washbourne).

INTRODUCTION

RETHINKING JEWISH IDENTITY IN LATIN AMERICA Amalia Ran and Jean Axelrad Cahan During the early 1980s a rather new phenomenon emerged, which may be described as the flourishing of the field of Latin American Jewish studies. Within American universities and intellectual circles, this change led to rediscovering and publishing novels, anthologies, and critical articles and to translating original works from Spanish and Portuguese into English. This shift of thought in the scholarly arena emphasized interdisciplinary explorations, while focusing on the juxtaposition and intersection of different academic fields. Beyond traditional interests such as the experiences of European Jewish immigrants or the different relations of Jewish diasporas to the state of Israel and Israeli culture, the emerging field of Latin American Jewish studies became part of research on both Latin American ethnicity and Jewish studies with its multidisciplinary perspectives. It now became important to examine Jewish identity in new contexts—national, regional, historical, and cultural. There were new sources and bases for discussing collective memory, otherness, and inclusiveness. In short, this period of consolidation and expansion allowed scholars as well as writers and artists to study lo latinoamericano within a wider framework.1 1 The scholarship on Jewish Latin America cannot be fully indicated here, but the following works are of primary importance: Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002); Robert DiAntonio and Nora Glickman, eds., Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writing (New York: New York University Press, 1993); David William Foster, ed., Latin American Jewish Cultural Production (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009); Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Ariana Huberman and Alejandro Meter, eds., Memoria y representación: Configuraciones culturales y literarias en el imaginario judío latinoamericano (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2006); Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, eds., Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008); Naomi Lindstrom, Jewish Issues in Argentine Literature: From Gerchunoff to Szichman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989); Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on History, Ethnicity and Diaspora (Boston: Brill Publishers, 2010); Leonardo Senkman, La identidad judía en la literatura argentina (Buenos

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amalia ran and jean axelrad cahan

The dilemmas of integration, assimilation, and acculturation of the first generations of Jewish immigrants to Latin American countries; accusations of double national loyalty; feelings of being second-class citizens; the loss of traditional values through the impact of transnational and cross-cultural movements, mass media, and high-speed technology—in short, all these processes have reshaped the meaning of being Jewish in Latin America today. What are the new representations of Jewish Latin America? What experiences condense the current identity of Latin American Jews or Jewish Latin Americans? How do these experiences compare with other similar—and yet dissimilar— experiences and representations within the Latin American context? It seems there is a tower of Babel—a multiplicity of languages (Spanish, Portuguese, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino), along with a multiplicity of cultural and social symbols. Overlaying this linguistic, psychological, historical, and cultural multiplicity are political complexities: majority-minority relations; differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities; interactions or lack of communication between urban centers (Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Mexico City) and peripheries (rural territories, Jewish agricultural colonies in remote areas, and interior provinces); otherness or estrangement (analyzed in the European context through Georg Simmel’s notion of a combination of nearness to and remoteness from various ‘host’ nationalities); the richness and ambivalence implied by the possession of multiple linguistic ‘homes’; life at the economic and social margins; class consciousness and religious identification.2 All these factors affect personal experience, which is the core of any artistic representation. As implied by the title of this collection, the image or metaphor of Babel points to just such a multiplicity and confusion of languages and identities: where—according to the Babylonian story—there had once been only one language for all humanity, there came a profusion. Aires: Ediciones Pardes, 1983); Saúl Sosnowski, La orilla inminente: Escritores judíos argentinos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa S. A., 1987). 2 The nineteenth-century German Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel’s famous essay “The Stranger” addresses several of the themes explored in this volume. Simmel describes the stranger not as a wanderer “who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes today and stays tomorrow.” The stranger’s every relationship consists of a “union of closeness and remoteness.” While this obviously affects his human interactions in a negative way, introducing skepticism, it also has its positive side in that it allows for greater objectivity in assessing the structures and customs of the ‘host’ society. For the essay itself and for explication of Simmel’s thought more generally, see: [Georg Simmel], On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

introduction

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The Babylonian story also points to incipient social and political inequalities, along with the ambitions and self-confidence of those who wished to change and transform the existing order, sometimes with technological means. Thus, the image of the tower of Babel well serves to underscore the notions discussed in this book. This collection of essays explores the multiple representations by and of Jewish Latin Americans. Digging into different historical and cultural experiences allows the reader to revisit the canon of Jewish Latin American culture and to expand the horizons of both what is traditionally considered Jewish and what is included as latinoamericano. Reflections on intimate and public spheres; on signs and their significances; on the consumption of time, space, and resources of all kinds; on foundational myths and the question of belonging and exclusion; on the motifs of urbanization, technology, and profusion of languages and identities—all are put forward here. The borders of the cultures and identities represented in this edited volume—whether national, transnational, or other—are neither closed nor rigid. But as will be demonstrated in the following pages, the fluidity of identity may also carry with it subterranean anxieties and restrictions. Historical Background The Jewish presence in Latin America may be traced to the arrival of the first Europeans to the continent, with Christopher Columbus and the conquest of America. Its history begins with the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced emigration of thousands of Spanish Jews to Portugal and, a few years later, to Holland, Turkey, Greece, and North Africa. As is well-known, some of these expelled Jews traveled clandestinely to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America. Here their identity remained occluded for generations to come, through fear of persecution and of the inquisitorial institutions in the newly colonized territories. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, with renewed large-scale waves of European immigration, did self-conscious and organized Jewish communities begin to form in Latin America.3 3 Of approximately 65 million people who emigrated from Europe in a century and a half, about 4 million were Jews, which represents about 6 percent of the entire

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The first Jews to immigrate to Latin America during the latter period were of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic origin (the first primarily from Germany, France, and Switzerland; the latter primarily from the Ottoman Empire and Morocco). Deteriorating socioeconomic and political conditions, including violent persecutions and pogroms in Eastern Europe, led to Jewish emigration from the old continent to the Americas. Between 1889 and 1917 an estimated 150,000 Jews migrated to Latin America, most of them to Argentina. The interwar period (1918–39) saw additional waves of migration from Central and Eastern Europe; these gradually became integrated into growing networks of Jewish schools, societies, clubs, and other institutions throughout the continent. Representations of Jewish Life and Identity in Latin America The Jewish presence in Latin America received its first artistic representations in Yiddish, with a proliferation of newspapers, books, and theater plays focusing on the daily life of Jews in their new environment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, works on this theme appeared in Spanish as well. Among the first Jewish writers to publish in Spanish and seek wider audiences were Alberto Gerchunoff (Argentina, 1883–1950), Samuel Glusberg (aka Enrique Espinoza, Argentina, 1889–1967), and César Tiempo (aka Israel Zeitlin, Argentina, 1906–80). Their works emphasize concerns relating to integration into the new societies and fear of assimilation, often praising the new country as a true ‘promised land.’ Succeeding generations of Jewish authors in Latin America raised not only problems of Jewish

emigration from Europe. The percentage of Jews in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century is estimated as 1.5 or 2. The intensity of Jewish emigration was therefore three to four times as great as that of the general emigration from Europe. Different national censuses of migratory destinations indicate that from 1821 to 1932, an estimated 32,244,000 immigrants entered the United States; 5,206,000 entered Canada; and approximately 4,431,000 immigrated to Brazil. Cuba received 857,000 immigrants from 1901 to 1931; and Chile another 726,000 immigrants between 1882 and 1932. Approximately 713,000 immigrants entered Uruguay between 1836 and 1932. Mexico received 226,000 newcomers between 1911 and 1931. See Samuel L. Baily and Eduardo José Míguez, eds., Mass Migration to Modern Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2003); Judith Elkin Laikin, The Jews of Latin America, rev. ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1998); Jacob Lestschinsky, Jewish Migrations in Recent Generations (Tel-Aviv: Aleph, 1965).

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identity but broader questions about cultural difference, marginality, and authoritarian politics. Among these authors are Clarice Lispector (Brazil, 1920–77), David Viñas (Argentina, 1927–2011), Margo Glantz (Mexico, 1930–), Isaac Chocrón (Venezuela, 1933–), Marcos Aguinis (Argentina, 1935–), Germán Rozenmacher (Argentina, 1936–71), José Kozer (Cuba, 1940–), Isaac Goldemberg (Peru, 1945–), Teresa Porzecanski (Uruguay, 1945–), and Marjorie Agosín (Chile, 1955–). The literary works of these writers highlight experiences of dislocation, alterity, exile, and nostalgia by evoking collective memory and reorganizing genealogical stories. One of the more prevalent themes in Latin American Jewish scholarship and writing is the dilemma of ‘double identity.’ The problem, a common one in Europe for centuries, arises for Jewish immigrants and their descendants from the accusation of having divided cultural and national loyalties. This criticism repeatedly obliges members of the Jewish community to reevaluate, articulate, and defend their membership and citizenship in society. The tension between idealized images dreamed by immigrants, on the one hand, and the impossibility of transforming them into a concrete reality, on the other, together with the well-known lack of acceptance of foreigners in the receiving society, are an integral part of personal development processes and collective identity formation in any migratory group. Within the artistic texts that focus on the Jewish experience in Latin America, these dilemmas appear as repeated motifs that provoke internal crisis.4 Another topic often discussed is the relation between Jewish Latin American communities, on the one hand, and Israel and Zionism, on the other. While earlier generations of Jewish Latin Americans saw in Zionism, the Jewish settlements in Palestine, and the newly formed Jewish agricultural communities in Brazil and Argentina manifestations of long-held dreams, including the emergence of a ‘new Jewish man,’ later generations, born and raised in Latin America, took a diminished, perhaps more realistic perspective. They expressed both a yearning to belong and a sense of alienation, underscoring 4 Concerning Jewish ‘double identity’ in Latin America, see also Aizenberg, Books and Bombs; DiAntonio and Glickman, Tradition and Innovation; Florinda Goldberg, “Literatura judía latinoamericana: Modelos para armar,” Revista iberoamericana 66, no. 191 (2000): 309–34; Santiago Kovadloff, “Un lugar en el tiempo: La Argentina como vivencia de los judíos,” Hispamérica 14, no. 42 (1985): 79–89; Lindstrom, Jewish Issues in Argentine Literature; Senkman, La identidad judía; and Sosnowski, La orilla inminente.

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xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist attitudes in their societies. For many second- and third-generation Latin American Jews, Latin America no longer represented a true place of becoming, but a lost paradise; this territory, despite the fact that it marginalized and excluded them, was nevertheless home. In recent years, this notion of home has been further explored by younger members of the Jewish Latin American collectivity, such as the Argentinean writer Marcelo Birmajer (1966–) and the filmmaker Daniel Burman (1973–). These younger authors have gained public recognition by incorporating Jewish folkloric elements into their work, while also displaying the commonalities among Jews and others. Anecdotally, the Jew is presented as a variation on a common social type: the middle-aged urban man who struggles to face the difficulties and absurdities of everyday life and who seeks to evade boredom, family crises, and problematic love affairs. In other words, despite being portrayed via Jewish characteristics, this character becomes the incarnation of the typical Latin American who struggles to stay afloat in the midst of a globalized, confusing, and indifferent city and nation. Relations between Latin American Jewish communities and the state of Israel have long been complex and remain a source of friction. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the formation of the state in 1948, Israel’s government passed the Law of Return (5 July 1950), declaring the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel and receive immediate citizenship. The law evinced solidarity and a sense of responsibility toward fellow Jews after the European tragedy, but also aimed to facilitate Jewish migration to the new society. The law, however, continues to be perceived as one that has serious implications for the sovereignty of other states. In the case of the Jewish Latin American communities and their close ties to Israel, the conflict concerning the limits of state sovereignty found expression on several occasions. The dependence of some Jewish institutions on the Jewish Agency for Israel (a semiautonomous organization that preceded the formation of Israel ); the predominance of Zionist ideology in educational institutions, and the replacement of Yiddish with Hebrew as a cultural language further emphasize the role of Israel in Jewish communal life. Often the level of tolerance of the Jewish community by the rest of society has depended on how this relation was viewed from the outside ( we might note that the linguistic conflation in Spanish of ‘Israeli’ and ‘israelita’—a member of the people of Israel and hence a synonym for the term ‘Jew’—

introduction

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underscores the problematic nature of Jewish identity and encourages the accusation of double loyalty). A few international incidents highlight these problematic relations. In May 1960 the Israeli intelligence service Mossad kidnapped the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and transported him to Israel for trial. The Eichmann case provoked a strong antiSemitic reaction in Argentina, with Israel frequently described as an imperialist country. The episode in turn affected both Israeli policy and that of the local Jewish leadership with respect to Jewish desaparecidos during the Argentine ‘Dirty War’ of the 1970s. On the one hand, Israel and its diplomats were obliged, during the years of military junta, to negotiate with the current Argentine government and not to endanger a recently negotiated arms deal and the delicate bilateral balance recuperated after the Eichmann affair. Israel also had to consider the problem of interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation, and indeed the internal affairs of local Jewish communities. On the other hand, Israel did not wish to ignore the severe human rights violations taking place in Argentina. Ultimately, the Argentine Jewish leadership and the Israeli authorities were blamed for their weak response to this humanitarian crisis and their inability to save some of the estimated one thousand Jews who disappeared or died during the Dirty War. Reports of torture and anti-Semitic persecution in prisons and the junta’s clandestine concentration camps were published outside Argentina in the early 1980s, but Israel’s overall reaction was conditioned by the desire to conserve good relations with Argentina, especially because of its long-lasting neutrality regarding the IsraeliArab conflict, and other factors of realpolitik.5 Circumstances in Latin America and the international arena expose the fact that ties between Latin American Jewish communities and the state of Israel remain a source of friction. Two terrorist attacks in Buenos Aires, on the Israeli embassy (1992) and on the Jewish

5 For more information on this episode, see Raanan Rein, Argentina, Israel y los judíos: Encuentros y desencuentros. Mitos y realidades (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Lumiere, 2001); Raanan Rein; “The Eichmann Kidnapping: Its Effects on Argentine-Israeli Relations and the Local Jewish Community;” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 101–20; Efraim Zadoff, “Israel y la violación de los derechos humanos en Argentina,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, http://www.mfa.gov.il/desaparecidos/pdfspen/IsraelyArgentina .pdf.

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Community Center (AMIA, 1994); recent invective against the Jewish community of Venezuela by Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela; physical assaults on the Jewish community of Caracas; violent demonstrations against the Israeli president Shimon Peres during a recent visit to Brazil and Argentina (including placards comparing Peres to Hitler as a condemnation of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories); the recent recognition of the future Palestinian state by some Latin American countries—all point to the conclusion that in discussing Jewish Latin American life and culture, the full range of the historic, political, and socioeconomic contexts must be considered, including wider questions such as how the Arab-Israeli conflict impacts Latin America. Although these processes may seem to be only remotely connected to what is occurring in Latin America today, in fact they form part of the multilateral relations among all parties involved and contribute to the dilemma most Jewish Latin American communities face in needing to defend themselves from false accusations and threats at home. As at other times and places, so in Jewish Latin American life the nature and significance of memory must be explored. Academic scholarship as well as literature in this area tends to emphasize the migratory past, specific persecutions, and the sense of marginality as unique Jewish experiences that, at the same time, serve as a universal example testifying to recent history. The mythological figure of the ‘wandering Jew,’ for example, sometimes a sinister figure in the European perspective, often appears in Latin American writing as a symbol of immigration and the quest for belonging. By manipulating this phantasmagoric character, which has no national or territorial loyalty, literary works discuss the relations between private and public experiences of migration, the problem of minority status, and relations with the majority culture, all within certain regional contexts. In this way, the works under consideration here offer distinctive interpretations of the meaning of being Jewish in Latin America and/or of being an Argentinean, Mexican, Brazilian, or Cuban Jew. Moreover, we should not ignore the relation between language and origin that dominates Jewish Latin American research. The tendency to insert into Spanish and Portuguese expressions taken from Yiddish, Ladino, or Hebrew reconfirms migratory origins and a hybrid model of culture; more recently, the impact of English should be noted as many Jewish Latin Americans resettle in North America and begin to

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write and produce from their new homes.6 Latin America, like North America, is thus seen, to a certain extent, as a ‘melting pot’ of idioms, traditions, and identities. The personal dilemmas discussed here—the fading or loss of traditional values through both integration and more contemporary transnational developments, transcending geographic and political border—affect how Jews in Latin America conceive of themselves and their nationality and how they are perceived by others. Overview of Volume The essays in this volume allow the reader to investigate the variegated field of Latin American Jewish studies and to revisit the canon of Jewish Latin American literature, history, and culture by expanding the horizon of what is traditionally considered ‘Jewish’ or ‘latinoamericano.’ Reflections on intimate and public spheres; on the consumption of time, space, and natural resources; on foundational myths; on questions of belonging and exclusion, are among the main concerns discussed here. The opening section’s essays intend to provide a broad view of some of the key concerns relating to ethnicity, tradition, and Diaspora from historical and literary perspectives. Raanan Rein’s study, “Jewish Latin American Historiography: The Challenges Ahead,” focuses on the need for creating a new ethnic studies methodology to discuss the Latin American context. The case of Jewish Latin American experience may serve as a lens for observing how such a methodological change might be implemented. Despite its relative youth, the field of Latin American Jewish studies has become a vibrant and diversified area of academic inquiry, disciplines, and trends that challenges the traditional boundaries of the field. Rein argues that in this process several aspects of Jewish life in various countries have received more scholarly attention than others and that some countries still remain under-researched. His chapter is a challenge to fill these lacunae. Though Jewish Argentina is the subject of several scholarly works, Adriana Brodsky’s essay “Educating Argentine Jews: Sephardim and

6 For example, the writers Sergio Waisman (United States, 1967) and Eduardo Halfón (Guatemala, 1971), who live and produce in the United States, often refer in their work to their Latin American and Jewish roots.

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Their Schools, 1920–1960” focuses on one of the less investigated fields mentioned in Rein’s essay. Brodsky writes about the educational system of Sephardic Jews in Argentina and proposes that, although mostly religious in orientation and objectives, Sephardic schools nevertheless participated in various discussions that connected Sephardic organizations with other Argentines, Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic communities in a multi-vocal conversation over financial support, national (Argentine and Jewish) loyalty, neighborhood participation, and ethnic singularity. By attending these schools, Sephardic children not only learned their prayers but became part of their communities, their multiethnic neighborhoods, and their nation. In his contribution, “The Jewish Latin American Writer and Tradition: The Case of Sergio Chejfec,” Sergio Waisman challenges the traditional academic boundaries discussed by Rein. Waisman suggests viewing literature as a border zone between languages and cultures, between past and present, between tradition and modernity. In this zone, Jewish Latin American identity might endure without falling into self-ghettoizing tendencies. According to Waisman, the literary zone is in fact doubly a border, doubly ‘minor’ and peripheral; as such it has great potential for innovation and experiment. Waisman examines Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec’s novels, Lenta biografía and Los planetas, in order to explore the problem of articulating difference—particularly when the latter has ceased to be apparent—and speaking of and with silence in the writing process. The second part of this volume shifts from the broad view of some of the key concerns relating to ethnicity, tradition, and Diaspora and discusses different literary representations of Jewishness in Latin America in a number of novels rarely studied within the framework of Latin American Jewish studies. Edna Aizenberg’s essay, “Should We Bury the Jewish Gaucho? A New Gerchunoff for the Twenty-First Century,” offers a new interpretation of the renowned Argentinean writer Alberto Gerchunoff ’s classic work by commenting on some of his less well-known texts. These texts provide a more realistic, less idealized image of the author, disclosing his critical views on Zionism, on the Jewish presence in Argentina, and on anti-Semitism in both Argentina and Nazi-occupied Europe. Aizenberg, thus, offers the reader an innovative perspective on Gerchunoff ’s work. In her essay “Hacer la América: The Diasporic Imagination in Saed’s Triple crónica de un nombre,” Joanna Mitchell reopens the question of Jewish diasporic identity. In studying Saed’s novel, Mitchell explores

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the significance and transitional function of a ‘diasporic thirdspace.’ This space first allows immigrants to negotiate a place in the host country and then to sustain an image of the ethnic heritage, which will allow later generations to articulate their own conception of identity. Mitchell maintains that collective imagination plays a role in the integration of immigrant groups into their adopted nations; literary imagination in particular is used as a vehicle for that process. Ariana Vigil’s essay, “Judaism, Sexuality, and the Nation in Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband,” analyzes a novel set in midnineteenth-century Guatemala. By focusing on issues of sexuality and reproduction alongside considerations of immigration, nationalism, and liberal politics, Vigil explores how the relationship between Jewish characters and issues of familial and national reproduction presents a unique perspective on Jewish heteronormativity and national and transnational identity. According to Vigil, male Jewish characters support the strengthening of heterosexist power and institutions while themselves never fully participating in or reaping the benefits of these institutions. Goldman’s challenge to traditional notions of citizenship and belonging proposes to see these individuals who live outside recognized political and geographic boundaries as those who have left the most significant marks on nuestra América. While literature and history are the main focus of most scholarship on Jewish Latin Americans, other cultural representations, often neglected by critics, also form part of this corpus. The third part of this volume focuses on artistic representations of Jewishness and lo latinoamericano in film, visual arts, and music. The original series of essays included here, exploring topics seldom noted in previous scholarly works, reflects upon these unique artistic experiences, broadening the discussion of Jewishness and lo latinoamericano beyond the written word. In their joint project, Saúl Sosnowski and Mirta Kupferminc offer a different look at one of Argentina’s most recognized writers, Jorge Luis Borges, and his fascination with the Kabbalah. “Borges and the Kabbalah: Pre-Texts to a Text” is an unusual essay on dialogue between image and text, constructed around the limited-edition book Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word, published by the same authors in 2006. Moshe Morad’s essay focuses on musical expressions. “Music of the Underdog: Sociological and Musical Similarities between Israeli Muzika Mizrahit and Salsa” explores the similarities between Israeli ‘oriental’ pop music, identified with Sephardic Jews from Arab countries, and

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salsa music. Historically identified with minority ‘underdog’ migrant groups, both musical genres provided much-needed cultural-identity spaces for the excluded. Both emerged in the 1970s among migrant communities in the poor neighbourhoods of large urban centres—salsa in the barrios of New York, among Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants, and muzika mizrahit among oriental Jews in the southern shchunot (poor neighbourhoods) of Tel Aviv. Morad claims that both genres are hybrid, based on the rich musical heritages of immigrant groups suffering from marginalization, humiliation, and discrimination, having developed as a form of cultural resistance to the tendency of acculturation and assimilation into the hegemonic culture. At the same time, this music also provided a ‘way in’ to the majority society. In his essay “Jewish Puberty in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Constructing Judeo-Latinidad,” Tzvi Tal highlights a new kind of cinematographic representation of Jewish experience, which allows any type of viewer to identify with the medium and with the inherent catharsis produced by the film. According to Tal, these representations provide an esthetic testimony of the social changes during the moment of production, while participating in the construction of imaginaries, memories, and identities. Tal analyzes films directed by Ariel Winograd, Cao Hamburguer, and Federico Veiroj, which represent the transition between infancy and adolescence, focusing on Jewish protagonists. His essay proposes to view the cinematographic text as an artistic representation of the past, as well as an allegory of the social and political present. Judeo-Latinidad, according to Tal, is just another manifestation of white ethnicity, which also belongs doubtlessly to the multicultural mosaic of Latin American societies. The fourth and closing part of this volume departs from the distinctive cultural representations discussed above and turns to exploration of the notion of otherness and the question of integration in Jewish Latin America. In his essay “‘The Books That Should Not Be Missing in Any Jewish Home’: Translation as a Cultural Policy in Argentina, 1919–1938,” Alejandro Dujovne examines the large body of works translated from Yiddish into Spanish. These works became an important part of Jewish Argentinean culture during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Dujovne studies the relations between translators and the cultural associations that promoted dissemination of knowledge of Jewish history and culture. He emphasizes the language gap between Jewish cultural heritage and the new generations of Argentine Jews, as well as the different ways in which the translation

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enterprise encouraged the development of cultural practices that could demonstrate the legitimacy of the Jewish presence within Argentine society, thus leading to full integration. In “Beyond Identity: Clarice Lispector and the Ethical Transcendence of Being for the Other,” Nelson Vieira studies the modes of alterity in the work of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, as well as the impact of diverse Jewish thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas upon her writing. Vieira suggests that Lispector’s spiritual prose of ethical transcendence is an expression of her search for significances that are usually elusive; Lispector relies upon non-rational means of love, and ethical and spiritual faith, in order to lift the self beyond the self toward the other. In this way, Vieira argues, Lispector’s work evokes a better world while also pointing to the imperfections of the human condition. Otherness is also the focus of Lourdes Barranco-Cortés’s essay “Plausible Alternatives in the Jewish Argentinean Integration Game.” Barranco-Cortés examines Ricardo Feierstein’s novel La logia del umbral, which elaborates on issues of integration and assimilation in contemporary Argentina and within its Jewish community. The essay explores different paths available to the Jewish Argentinean to becoming part of the majority, despite living in a double reality. The game of integration played by the characters in this novel is revealed as a symbolic one, in which everyone may choose immigration, assimilation, or isolation in order to survive in an era when uncertainty rules. In “Otherness in El árbol de la Gitana,” Dayana Soto y Caballero de Galicia discusses the notion of alterity provoked by exile. This essay analyzes autobiographical and fantastic elements in Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s novel in order to narrate the story of exile. Soto y Caballero de Galicia emphasizes three forms of otherness: the condition of exile, racial fusion, and the female narrative act. She distances herself from the historical literary canon and seeks to create an intimate and unique discourse. The narrative text is thus seen as a legitimate, vital space for discussing identity and collective memory, while interweaving the personal story with the official history of the nation. Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences, Representations, and Identity questions and reexamines some of the prevalent interpretations in Latin American Jewish studies and seeks to instigate a new paradigm based on an interdisciplinary approach comprising literature, culture, history, cinematography, music, and visual arts. This collection aims to explore the broad range of theoretical and disciplinary

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perspectives concerning Latin American Jewish experiences, thereby offering a framework inviting readers to discuss new and old trends and to elaborate on these concerns. We turn now to the rich production of imaginaries and artifacts concerning Jewish Latin Americans, revisiting these works in a new light.

PART ONE

JEWISH LATIN AMERICAN EXPERIENCES, PAST AND PRESENT

CHAPTER ONE

JEWISH LATIN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY: THE CHALLENGES AHEAD Raanan Rein* Despite its relative youth, Latin American Jewish studies has become a vibrant and diversified area of academic inquiry and already boasts an array of schools, disciplines, and trends that are clearly stretching the boundaries of this burgeoning field.1 In the process, and not by coincidence, several aspects of Jewish life in various countries have received much scholarly attention, to the detriment of other aspects and different countries that remain underresearched. This imbalance needs to be addressed, and redressed, as we expand the disciplinary, thematic, and geographical borders of our field. This essay is a preliminary attempt to map some of these neglected topics, such as the mosaic of identities of Jews in Latin America, as well as the identity of those Jewish Latin Americans who have relocated to Israel, the United States, and Europe. The following anecdotes illustrate the central issues that I would like to discuss briefly here. Story Number One: A couple of years ago, I attended a bar mitzvah ceremony in a Reform community in Tel Aviv led by Israeli Argentine actor Esteban Gottfried, the main character in a movie on Argentine * This essay was written during a research stay at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. I would like to thank the center’s staff and its director, Martine Brownley, as well as my colleague Jeffrey Lesser for his valuable comments and suggestions. 1 In 1982 the first conference on Latin American Jewish studies was held in the United States. See Judith Laikin Elkin, ed., Resources for Latin American Jewish Studies: Proceedings of the First Research Conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (Cincinnati: Latin American Jewish Studies Association, 1984). See also Judith Laikin Elkin, “Exploring the Jewish Archipelago in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 30, no. 3 (1995): 224–38; Robert M. Levine, “Research on Brazilian Jewry: An Overview,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 20, nos. 39–40 (1995): 227–37; Naomi Lindstrom, “Recent Tendencies in Latin American Jewish Studies,” Shofar 19, no. 3 (2001): 23–32; Gilbert Merkx, “Jewish Studies as a Subject of Latin American Studies,” in the Jewish Presence in Latin America, ed. Judith Laikin Elkin and Gilbert W. Merkx (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 3–10.

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immigrants in Israel entitled Like Fish Out of Water.2 While Gottfried spoke in Hebrew, with only a slight Spanish accent, most members of this community are Argentines, and the Torah scroll they use was donated to them by the Bet-El community of Buenos Aires. When the ceremony ended, and most of the participants moved to the adjoining room for Kiddush, Gottfried and the pianist sang, now in Spanish, “El día que me quieras” [The Day You Love Me], one of Carlos Gardel’s most famous tangos. Story Number Two: A few years earlier, I happened to be in Buenos Aires during Pessach (Passover). For the seder meal, I was invited to the home of Yume and Raquel, my wife’s cousins. Gathered around the table were Jews and non-Jews, Ashkenazim and Sephardim. The various platters that were placed before us offered a combination of delicacies from the typical East European Jewish kitchen and traditional Argentine dishes, foodstuffs that were kosher for Pessach together with non-kosher food. Throughout the meal, in the background, the television set broadcast an important football match. From time to time, several of the guests, mostly (but not only) some of the men, stole a glance in the direction of the screen in order to at least keep up with the score. At one point someone asked how Atlanta, the football club from the Jewish neighborhood of Villa Crespo, was doing and whether the team had won their last game. Between the compote and the coffee, some of the family members tried to sing one of the holiday songs in broken Hebrew; at the same time, we began to hear the sounds of the drums from the local branch of the Peronist party, followed by the chant of Peronist hymns: “Perón, Perón, qué grande sos / mi general cuánto valés / Perón, Perón, Gran Conductor / sos el primer trabajador!” [Perón, Perón, how great you are! / My general, how we admire you! / Perón, Perón, Great Leader / You’re worker number one!] Story Number Three: Ester Rollanski, daughter of one of Argentina’s most famous Yiddish scholars, a renowned intellectual and cultural entrepreneur, faced a problem back in the 1960s. On Sundays she used to teach Yiddish to the kids in her neighborhood. The kids were often not very enthusiastic about having to study anything on a Sunday morning, but one day, Rollanski had an idea. She would talk to them in Yiddish about the neighborhood’s soccer club and its games and stars. The trick worked well, a smiling Ester told me

2

Like Fish Out of Water, dir. Jorge Yochanan Weller (Israel, 2007).

jewish latin american historiography

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decades later. The neighborhood in question was Villa Crespo, considered by many the Jewish neighborhood of the Argentine capital, and the club was Club Atlético Atlanta, to which my current research project is devoted.3 My argument in this essay is twofold: First, we are far from a normalization of Jewish Latin American historiography. Current historiography largely excludes the Fried, Walonik, and Bichman families who gathered around that seder table from discussion of the Jewish experience in Latin America; it leaves out important aspects of Jewish social history and popular culture on the continent. The absence of Jews unaffiliated with community institutions from current research is conspicuous. And second, in these times of globalization and multiculturalism, with the growing legitimization of transnational ties and identities of all sorts, we should expand the territorial boundaries of our field so as to include Jewish Latin Americans who have relocated to other places, such as Israel, the United States, and Europe. That is, we should “open up rigid boundaries and definitions of what constitutes the Latin American.”4 How much do we really know about Jewish experiences in twentiethcentury Latin America in general and in Argentina in particular? I would like to argue that although new questions have been formulated, and although subject areas that seemed to be extensively surveyed by historians have been reopened, our acquaintance with this field still leaves a lot to be desired. Why? First, historiography to this point has excluded the experiences of the majority of Jews in Latin America and tended to focus on Jews as victims in any given context. Jews have been, in fact, one of the most successful immigrant groups in Latin America and were integral to the making of Argentina. They were normally placed in the ‘white’ category in societies that, more often than not, have placed special importance on the black/white continuum. The urban experiences of Jewish immigrants could provide bases for comparative studies by a variety of social historians. Second, a clear, ideological bias—that is, a Zionist bias—has led to the avoidance of certain issues that might damage the image of the state

3 See Raanan Rein, “On the Trail of Buenos Aires’ Atlanta Soccer Club: Jewish Argentine Popular Culture,” paper presented at the American Historical Association conference, New York, Jan. 2009. 4 Edna Aizenberg, “How a Samovar Helped Me Theorize Latin American Writing,” Shofar 19, no. 3 (2001): 33–40.

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of Israel in this region. Finally, film and documentary directors, novelists, and singers have recently expanded the limits of the discussion on Jewish Latin Americans much more than historians, sociologists, or political scientists ever did. Toward a Normalization of Jewish Latin American Historiography Several years ago Paula Hyman published an essay entitled “The Normalization of American Jewish History.” Hyman begins by relating her past experience in Columbia University’s PhD program in Jewish history, back in the late 1960s. At the time, she says, “it was clear that American Jewish history fell outside the parameters of the field.”5 The prevalent view was that “the American Jewish experience was in no way integral to the study of Jewish history. For one thing, opting for residence in America meant abandoning Jewish languages. . . . For another, Jews in America, it was argued, had produced no great thinkers contributing to the enrichment of what was deemed to be an unbroken tradition of Jewish culture. The American Jewish community was also too new to assert a claim to lasting historical significance.” This all sounds very familiar to most of us who devote ourselves to studying the Jewish experience in Latin America. However, while Hyman might claim that by now American Jewish history is a recognized subfield of both modern Jewish history and modern American history, we— that is, scholars of Latin American Jewish topics—are still struggling to achieve such status. We are not marginal or simply exotic, as we were until the 1970s or 1980s, but we have still a long way to go. The Euro-centrism of Jewish studies was replaced by a Euro-North American-centrism. This essay is therefore in part also a kind of manifesto, calling both for the normalization of Jewish Latin American history and for the deessentialization of Jewish Latin American studies. Generally speaking, current Jewish historiography is characterized by essentialism and parochialism—that is, by its inward-looking nature and its inability or unwillingness to analyze events and processes in the context of the

5 Paula E. Hyman, “The Normalization of American Jewish History,” American Jewish History 91, nos. 3–4 (2003): 353–59.


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experiences of other communities of similar but not identical backgrounds and traditions. To ‘essentialize’ means to impute a fundamental and absolutely necessary constitutive quality to a person, a social category, an ethnic group, a religious community, or a nation. Essentialism, then, denotes any form of analysis that disregards the relational aspects of group culture or identity and instead values the subject itself as an autonomous, separate, and internally coherent entity, unfragmented and untouched by external forces.6 Essentializing inevitably becomes a representation that distorts and disguises the characteristics of the social or ethnic group in question and tends to silence internal inconsistencies. Homi K. Bhabha’s deconstruction of the nation as an act of narration reveals the way in which essentialist understandings of the nation falsely presuppose a timeless continuity and an organic unity, at the same time as they assume internal sameness and external difference or otherness.7 In this way, essentialism guarantees the comfort of social belonging and the power of political affiliation, stressing the emotional power of distinctive cultures to define experience in strong, ‘takenfor-granted’ sentimental and cultural bonds. Self-essentializing, as a rhetorical device, becomes part and parcel of imagined communities, turning them into morally or religiously superior entities that, on a political level, represent the total displacement and devaluation of the other.8 As a strategy, it can easily be manipulated to mobilize groups into action whenever there is competition for territory, resources, political power, prestige, or ideological legitimization. One of the distinguishing features of the new approaches to Latin American Jewish studies offered by various scholars is the effort to challenge the essentialism that characterizes so many studies of the Jewish experience on this continent.9

6 See Pnina Webner, “Essentialising Essentialism, Essentialising Silence: Ambivalence and Multiplicity in the Construction of Racism and Ethnicity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Webner and Tariq Modood (London: Zed Books, 1997), 226–56. 7 Homi K. Bhabha, introduction to Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–7. 8 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage Books, 1978), 22. 9 See, e.g., the special issue “The Jewish Diaspora of Latin America,” Shofar 19, no. 3 (2001), guest-edited by Nelson Vieira; and the special issue “Gender, Ethnicity, and Politics: Latin American Jewry Revisited,” Jewish History 18, no. 1 (2004), guestedited by Raanan Rein.

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In mid-2008, the Jewish magazine Forward published an article entitled “Is Adam Sandler Our Greatest Jewish Mind?” Forward ’s Web editor, Daniel Treiman, answered with a qualified yes. He discussed the movie 50 First Dates, where, apart from the main character’s name (Henry Roth), there is no reference to Jews or Jewish identity. Yet at the end of the movie, completely out of the blue, “Sandler is standing under a chuppah, sporting a yarmulke and a tallis.”10 Treiman claims that “to be an American Jew today is to be, like Sandler, a part of the mainstream, not apart from it. In our daily lives, most of us,” he says, “are no different from our non-Jewish neighbors. . . . At the same time, we’re not abashed when it comes to expressing our Jewishness. Getting hitched under a chuppah is no longer so exotic.” I would argue that much of this is relevant to Jews in Latin America as well, but very little has found its way into the historiography. In this sense, I could ask, for example, whether Daniel Burman and Marcelo Birmajer are the greatest Jewish minds in Argentina. In his various movies, especially El abrazo partido (The Lost Embrace), Burman challenges the particularity of Jewish experience. El abrazo depicts the lives of middle-class Jews, Italians, Asians, and other immigrant groups living and working together in a love-hate relationship.11 The experiences of the various ethnic groups seem similar in many respects, as are their strategies for becoming Argentines. Even the diasporic condition does not appear as a uniquely Jewish phenomenon in the movie; instead, the film stresses the Jewish contribution to the effort to shape la argentinidad, Argentine collective identity. The Tension between Ethnicity and Nation In a joint essay Jeffrey Lesser and I published a few years ago, we argued that most studies of ethnicity emphasize exceptionalism.12 The uniqueness of the ethnic experience is assumed a priori as a category 10 Daniel Treiman, “Is Adam Sandler Our Greatest Jewish Mind?” Forward, 27 June 2008. 11 On Burman’s films, see Carolina Rocha, “Identidad masculina y judía en la trilogía de Daniel Burman,” Letras hispanas 4, no. 2 (2007): http://letrashispanas.unlv.edu/ Vol4iss2/RochaF07.pdf; Carolina Rocha, “Cine despolitizado de principio de siglo: Bar El Chino y El abrazo partido,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 85, no. 3 (2008): 335–49. 12 Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, “Challenging Particularity: Jews as a Lens on Latin American Ethnicity,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2006):


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of analysis in scholarship and historiography, and comparisons are restricted to the experiences of members of the same group in different countries. This suggests that Jews, for example, are a minority unlike others and that therefore, when studying Argentine Jews or Brazilian Jews, one need only be familiar with the experiences of Jews in South Africa or Australia. Exceptionalism suggests that ethnicity is a not a national phenomenon, that ethnic group members are either separate from or victims of a certain national culture. This tendency is not exclusive to scholarship on Jews. Research on Latin Americans of Japanese, Chinese, and Lebanese descent, for example, usually presents the particular group first and foremost in its diasporic condition. However, transnational ethnicity is not necessarily a more dominant component of identity than national identity. Research on Jewish Latin Americans might focus on engagement in the national context in order to construct comparisons, and perhaps contact zones, with other ethnic minorities, such as those of Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Armenian, Syrian, and Lebanese descent. A recent book published in Buenos Aires highlights, for example, the social, cultural, and economic interrelations among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim immigrants from Syria to Argentina, at least until the 1950s.13 In Comparing Jewish Societies, Todd Endelman laments the fact that “historians of the Jews and their religion have been a conservative lot in the way they go about their work, reluctant, if not averse, to introducing a comparative dimension to their writing.”14 After all, given its diasporic character, Jewish history is better suited to comparative treatment than more conventional, territorially focused fields. At any rate, I know of no research project that has ever tested the interrelated and fluid relationship between national identity and the presumed primacy of diasporic solidarity among Jews. As Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about the Jewish Argentine author Carlos M. Grünberg, one might say that Argentine Jews have always struggled to be “unmistakably Argentine.”15 In fact, the tension between ethnicity and 249–63; Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 13 Susana Brauner, Ortodoxia religiosa y pragmatismo politico: Los judíos de origen sirio (Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2009). 14 Todd M. Endelman, ed., Comparing Jewish Societies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 15 Jorge Luis Borges, “Prólogo,” in Mester de judería; prólogo de Jorge Luis Borges, ed. C. M. Grünberg (Buenos Aires: Editorial Argirópolis, 1940).

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nation that his comment reveals might be a starting point for research. It seems that anthropologists, rather than historians, are beginning to adopt this path. Research on ethnicity in Latin America often presumes that the children and grandchildren of immigrants express a special relationship to their ancestors’ place of birth or imagined homeland. Implicit in this assumption is the idea that ethnic minorities do not play a significant role in national identity formation. Studies of Jewish Latin Americans, for example, often assume that rank-and-file support of Zionist organizations has been first and foremost about the state of Israel. However, it is about time that researchers started to ask whether participation in Zionist activity is necessarily about Israel as the presumed homeland. Put differently, to what homeland does Zionist activity in Latin America actually relate? Furthermore, does support for Israel constitute a main ingredient of the identity of Latin American Jews? This is a position often advanced but hardly tested.16 My own research, together with that of Mollie Lewis, suggests that being Zionist in Argentina, for example, has often had little to do with the state of Israel. More often, it was part of the strategies Jews espoused in order to become Argentines. Like every other immigrant community, Jews in Argentina or Brazil needed to have their Madre Patria. Just as the Italian immigrants had Italy and the Spanish immigrants had Spain, so Jews had their own imagined Madre Patria—Zion, or Israel. This brand of Zionism was part of the Jewish effort to shape new identities and make Argentina a home, emphasizing more the idea of a nation of origin than a political project to ensure the future.17 Becoming Argentine while staying Jewish, not relocating to Palestine—this was the primary objective of many Jews. Indeed, Arnd Schneider’s recent sociological work on Argentine citizens who have gained Italian passports suggests

16 Amalia Ran, “ ‘Israel’: An Abstract Concept or Concrete Reality in Recent Judeo-Argentinean Narrative?” in Latin American Jewish Cultural Production, ed. D. W. Foster (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 24–40; Amalia Ran, “Hechos de orillas: Nuevos modos de expresar la identidad judeo-argentina contemporánea” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2007). 17 Raanan Rein and Mollie Lewis, “Complementary Identities: Sephardim, Zionists and Argentines between the Two World Wars” [Hebrew], Pe’amim [Studies in Oriental Jewry], 111–12 (2007): 79–102.


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that holding a foreign passport is critical to contemporary middle-class Argentine identity.18 Furthermore, because organized communities and Jewish institutions were dominated by Zionist political parties in the early 1950s, historiography has tended to devote little attention to non-Zionists in Latin America. Their experiences and their efforts to integrate into Argentine or Mexican society lay on the margins of the currently dominant, hegemonic narratives of Latin American Jewry.19 Many scholars continue to suggest that Israel, as the Jewish ethnic ‘homeland,’ has a commitment to its diasporic communities, and that its interests are similar to those of these communities, including Jewish Latin Americans. These scholars thus make the largely untested assumption that the center of ethnic collective identity must be outside the nation of residence, reflecting the relative lack of debate about the location of the diasporic center and community. Recent scholarship, however, challenges this assumption and suggests that the bond between the Jewish Diaspora and the state of Israel, at least in recent decades, is similar to other diasporic/national links.20 In fact, many Israelis regard the Jewish Diaspora with a certain disdain, and Israeli policy makers often show little sensitivity toward the needs and sensibilities of individual Jewish communities in Latin America. This attitude was reflected, for example, in the Israeli government’s decision to limit the help extended to Jewish Argentine victims of the Argentine dictatorship in order to maintain good relations with the ruling junta.21 This realpolitik attitude combines foundational Zionism’s ‘negation of the Diaspora’ with a contemporary belief in Israel that diasporic Jews should maintain a one-way connection that includes loyalty, political and moral support, and financial assistance. Scholars studying ethnicity in Latin America often presume that heritage makes one a member of an ethnic community. The scholarship

18 Arnd Schneider, Futures Lost: Nostalgia and Identity among Italian Immigrants in Argentina (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 19 A recent exception is a dissertation by Nerina Visacovsky: “El discurso pedagógico de la izquierda judeo-argentina (1935–1968)” (PhD diss., Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de San Martín, 2009). 20 See, e.g., Gabriel Sheffer, “Is the Jewish Diaspora Unique? Reflections on the Diaspora’s Current Situation,” Israel Studies 10, no. 1 (2005): 1–35. 21 See Raanan Rein and Efraim Davidi, “A Jewish Hero Becomes an Enemy of the People of Israel: The Timerman Affaire, the Israeli Establishment and the Hebrew Press,” Israel (Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel), no. 15 (2009): 167–91.

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thus mirrors the position of many Latin Americans who believe the same thing. Yet when one examines exogamy, the rates are often above 50 percent; many individuals do not see themselves (or wish to be seen) as members of a formally constituted ethnic community. There are many studies of ethnic-community leaders and institutions, but few of what might be termed ‘unaffiliated ethnics.’ This broad tendency is repeated in studies of Jewish Latin Americans. Research has ignored the 50 percent (or often more) of Jews unaffiliated with Jewish institutions. The frequently used term ‘Jewish community’ is misleading if it refers only to those affiliated with Jewish organizations, synagogues, social clubs, or youth movements. Documenting life stories and reclaiming the memories of unaffiliated Jews will provide important lessons on the nature of national and ethnic identity. Studies might be conducted, for example, of Jews married to non-Jews, of individuals who express Jewish identity based on culture rather than on religion or ethnicity, and of authors who do not explicitly express their Jewishness. The Gap between Public Discourses and Social Practices Much scholarship on Latin American ethnicity correctly notes that dominant majority discourses are frequently racist. Yet there is often a huge gap between rhetoric and social practice. Indeed, racist expressions have not prevented many Latin American ethnic groups from entering into the dominant political, cultural, economic, and social sectors. Yet scholars focusing on discourse tend to find victims, often suggesting that racism represents an absolutely hegemonic structure. Thus, ethnic identity formation appears based primarily on the struggle against discrimination and exclusion. Scholars examining social status, on the other hand, come to a different conclusion. They suggest that success among Asian, Middle Eastern, and Jewish Latin Americans places them in the ‘white’ category. The scholarship on Jewish Latin Americans is a case in point. The literature is almost uniform in suggesting that anti-Semitism in Latin America is stronger than in other regions of the world. One might get the impression that life for Jews on the continent has been unbearable, a continued nightmare. Yet even Haim Avni, whose own work often focuses on anti-Semitism, has correctly noted the “overdeveloped


27

focus of research energy [on] anti-Semitism.”22 For example, in her story “With All that I Am,” Ana María Shua tells of her family’s visit to the United States in the 1960s: Our Yankee aunts and uncles and cousins are surprised that we can live comfortably in a Nazi country like Argentina. We try to persuade them in every possible way that Argentina is not a Nazi country, although there may be some anti-Semitic groups. . . . We try to persuade them that our Jewish community, one of the biggest in the world, lives comfortably integrated into Argentine life . . ., we try to persuade them that both my parents and my sister and I have always gone to public schools and universities without suffering from the slightest discrimination, but they look at us compassionately and do not believe us. They have read that our country is Nazi, they read it in books, in newspapers and in magazines, and they are convinced that we are just so used to persecution and mistreatment that we don’t even notice them any longer.23

At the same time, the historiography has neglected the rich culture of everyday life created by Jewish immigrants (mostly, but not only, of East European descent) and especially by their children. There is an urgent need to shift the focus toward a new social and cultural history that explores the active role played by these Jews in shaping their world and their relations with majority populations, a history that would incorporate a considerably broader range of lived experiences and that would refer to people’s own comprehension of the social events around them. This conception of culture is reflected in a definition the historian Peter Burke offers in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, of culture as a “system of shared meanings, attitudes and values and the symbolic forms in which they are expressed.”24

22 Haim Avni, “Post-War Latin American Jewry: An Agenda for the Study of the Last Five Decades,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America: New Studies on History and Literature, ed. David Sheinin and Lois Baer Barr (New York: Garland, 1996), 3–19. In his recent works Bernardo Sorj has characterized most studies on anti-Semitism in Brazil as gross inflation and exaggeration. See, e.g., Bernardo Sorj, “Brazilian NonAnti-Semite Sociability and Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism: Latin America in the Jewish World, ed. Judit Bokser Liwerant, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yossi Gorny, and Raanan Rein (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 151–69. 23 Ana María Shua, “With All That I Am,” in Taking Root: Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosín (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 259–60. 24 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), xi.

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Culture, then, is the material of daily lives, with their commonplace understandings, feelings, and responses.25 Much of the literature gives the mistaken impression of homogenous and unstratified immigrant-descended ethnic communities. Latin Americans of Asian and Middle Eastern descent appear to exist uniformly in the middle class or higher, a view reinforced by scholarly focus on ethnic success stories such as those of Alberto Fujimori (Peru), Celso Lafer (Brazil ), and Carlos Saúl Menem (Argentina). This monolithic picture is accentuated further in the case of Jewish Latin Americans, who are presented in the scholarship as having rapidly and exclusively moved into middle- to- upper-middle class status—as if all Jews in the continent were always white and rich. This largely unexamined assumption—that Jewish Latin Americans are typically white and well-off—has kept many scholars from even considering research on the Jewish working class or the Jewish poor. Could it be that the latter simply did not comply with the celebratory myth focusing on the success of the Jews who moved from Pale to Pampa and quite rapidly became a middle-class community? While very many Argentine Jews did indeed follow this trajectory, not all of them did. In a recent study I conducted of the second line of Peronist leadership, for example, I was surprised to see what an important role Jews played in the organized labor movement and how many of them supported Juan Perón, yet almost no one, so far, seems to be interested in them.26 There are, however, other approaches. First, we might learn a lesson from cinema scholars, who have correctly noted that in Hollywood, for example, people with ‘non-Jewish’ names are not necessarily nonJews. Who knows what the biography of the Argentine journalist and politician Emilio Perina, born Moisés Konstantinovsky, would teach us about ethnicity? Or that of the popular Argentine sports journalist Luis Elías Sojit, born with the last name Shoijet? Second, discourses of anti-Semitism, even when emanating from strong centers of political power, do not always translate into absolute oppression. Discussing racist discourses in the context of individual and group mobility may well change our understanding of the nature of both oppression and Raymond Williams called culture “a structure of feeling” in his famous The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 158. 26 Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the Second Line of Argentina’s Populist Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 25


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success. Third, we might question whether minority-group identity is in fact primarily a reaction to social bigotry. Stereotypes often function because of their positive presumptions, and there is a distinction to be made between Judeophobes (those who hate all Jews) and anti-Semites (those who hold some or many negative stereotypical notions about Jews). Furthermore, those who express negative stereotypes about Jews (or any other ethnic group) may hold positive stereotypes as well. Lacunae in Contemporary Historiography A number of other areas in Latin American ethnic studies generally and Jewish Latin American studies specifically have been similarly underresearched. Notable among them is gender. Studies of Jewish women in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries too often focus on prostitutes or novelists, although obviously Jewish women have played fundamental roles in all aspects of society. As Sandra McGee Deutsch has emphasized in the Argentine case, “Jewish women are virtually absent from the secondary historical sources. Studying them is vital for its own sake, to recover the voices and tell the untold stories of the unheard half of the Jewish population.”27 The same holds true for children and sexual minorities. Another issue relates to the presentation of homogenous ethnic communities (e.g., the Jewish community, the Arab community, the Asian community). While the distinctions are occasionally more refined ( Japanese and Chinese and Indians, Syrians and Lebanese and Palestinians), the literature is primarily monolithic and community focused. Examining ethnic groups grosso modo, however, ignores intraethnic divisions that are often replicated over many generations. The number of Okinawans among Latin American Nikkei is very large, as is the number of Muslims among Middle Easterners, who are often presented in the scholarship mostly as Christians. Further, among Jewish Latin Americans there is a relative lack of research on Sephardic Jews. Smaller in number, more traditionalist, and less actively Zionist than Ashkenazic Jews, Sephardic Jews are not always considered an important part of the story of Jews in Latin

27 Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Changing the Landscape: The Study of Argentine Jewish Women and New Historical Vistas,” Jewish History 18, no. 1 (2004): 49–73.

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America. As the history of a minority within a minority, their story is supposedly less crucial for our understanding of the Jewish experience on the continent. In addition, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic groups have themselves been further divided by nation and city of origin. Moreover, scholars have probably exaggerated religious and cultural differences in their descriptions of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, as well as their purported complete lack of interaction. Adriana Brodsky’s work is an important contribution in the direction of restoring the place of these people in the history of Jewish Latin America.28 Of course, the size of a minority group should not be a criterion determining the research attention it receives. Numerically smaller communities and subcommunities can teach us much about ethnic relations. Leo Spitzer’s study of Jews in the virtually ignored nation of Bolivia has become a model for the study of ethnicity, Diaspora, and memory.29 Apart from the need to transcend disciplinary boundaries, then, we should also consider expanding the geographical territory analyzed. A few years ago there was a debate among members of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association as to whether it was legitimate to include papers devoted to Jewish Latin Americans living in Israel. My position in that debate was clear: I believe that Jewish Israelis of Latin American origin should be included in this research field. During the first decades after the establishment of the state of Israel, such Israelis tried to hide or repress the Latin American component of their identity. However, Israeli society has gone through a profound change, in part due to the massive immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Bearing one’s foreign name, using one’s mother tongue, and keeping cultural traits from one’s country of origin are socially much more legitimate these days. Israelis who recently emigrated from Latin America take advantage of this new cultural and intellectual climate and are no longer hesitant to display publicly (or, in the case of older immigrants, to reassert) the Latin American component of their identity.30 In the summer of 2009, for 28 Adriana Brodsky, “The Contours of Identity: Sephardic Jews and the Construction of Jewish Communities in Argentina, 1880 to the Present” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2004). 29 Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). 30 Luis Roniger and Deby Babis, “Latin American Israelis: The Collective Identity of an Invisible Community,” in Jewish Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism, ed. Judit Bokser Liwerant et al. (Boston, 2008), 297–320.


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example, my wife and I went to the so-called Festival Argentina in the Israeli city of Rishon Le-Zion. Around three thousand Latin American Israelis were gathered there. Some came to listen to the Argentine singer León Gieco, most were engaging in the diasporic act of asserting and displaying their Latin American identity. The same condition argues that we should include in our discussion the growing population of Jewish Latin Americans in the United States. Conclusion If one analyzes the programs of recent conferences on Latin American Jewish studies, one becomes aware of the research devoted to certain topics and the lack of research on others. Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Zionism, and Israel are often prominent. Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico occupy center stage. Ashkenazic Jews attract most of the research attention. While all these issues are of importance, the impression I carried with me was that we are still far from the normalization process that Jewish American studies has gone through. While Paula Hyman might point to various comparative studies of Italian, Irish, Polish, and Jewish experiences in the Untied Sates, this is not the case for Latin American Jewish studies. Studies of social history and popular cultural and gender issues are also often conspicuously absent from our field. I would like to echo here Edna Aizenberg’s call for “a pluralization of our discipline to achieve a kaleidoscopic diversity within an enveloping oneness,” but at the same time I would like to go one step further and suggest that all of the commonly held assumptions discussed above become research questions, to be challenged and reexamined.31 As I have argued elsewhere, with my colleague Jeffrey Lesser, there is a need for a new ethnic studies for Latin America, and the study of Jewish Latin Americans can serve as a lens, or at least as an example, of how that might be implemented.32

Aizenberg, “How a Samovar Helped Me Theorize.” Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, eds., Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). 31 32

CHAPTER TWO

EDUCATING ARGENTINE JEWS: SEPHARDIM AND THEIR SCHOOLS, 1920s–1960s Adriana Brodsky Starting in the 1890s and until the 1950s, Sephardic Jews settled in Buenos Aires and other provincial towns and cities in Argentina. Unlike Ashkenazic immigrants, Sephardim did not have support from international immigrant organizations, and the migratory process was the result of family and group connections. In Buenos Aires, the various Sephardic groups settled in different neighborhoods: Moroccans in the Sud neighborhood; Ladino-speaking Jews in Villa Crespo, Downtown, Once, and Colegiales; and Arab-speaking Jews in Once, La Boca, and Flores. This last group, the largest numerically speaking, included both those originally from Aleppo and immigrants from Damascus. The distinction based on place of origin that Sephardic groups insisted on in Buenos Aires, however, was not preserved in the provinces, where there were fewer settlers (and fewer available resources). Provincial towns and capitals witnessed the creation of single Sephardic communities and cemeteries.1 Most Sephardic groups in Buenos Aires founded Talmudei Torah (schools) almost as soon as they created their main community organizations. Some of the communities included their educational objectives in their societies’ by-laws,2 and the names of the communal organizations evidenced their intentions of focusing on schools: for example, Sociedad Kahal Kadosh y Talmud Tora La Hermandad

1 There were, of course, some exceptions in cities with larger Sephardic populations, like Rosario (Santa Fé) and Córdoba. For more information on settlement in the provinces, see Adriana Mariel Brodsky, “Re-configurando comunidades: Judíos sefaradíes/arabes in Argentine, 1900–1950,” in Arabes y judíos en Iberoamérica: Similitudes, diferencias y tensiones sobre el transfondo de las tres culturas, ed. Raanan Rein (Madrid: Fondo de las Tres culturas, 2008), 117–34. 2 See, e.g., Minute Book of the Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires, Acta 13 de Agosto 1913, by-laws approved in 1915; Agudat Dodim, article 3 of bylaws, 1935.

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Sefaradí (Villa Crespo Ottoman Jews) and the Asociación Israelita Talmud Tora Sefaradim Yesod Hadath (Aleppine Jews in Once). In the provincial capitals, Sephardim also founded schools. The Sociedad Israelita Sefaradí Talmud Tora, for example, formed in 1921, gathering both Aleppine and Damascene Jews in the city of Córdoba.3 In Santa Fé, the Sociedad Israelita ‘Schalom Verehut,’ (sic), created in 1931 by Ottoman Jews, organized a Talmud Torah in 1933.4 Schools also opened in the cities of Salta, Rosario (Etz Ajaim), Catamarca, Corrientesm, and Posadas (Misiones). Efraim Zadoff, in his comprehensive survey of Jewish education in Argentina, defines these Talmudei Torah as attempts Jews made to retain their cultural specificities.5 In the face of an appealing (and free) universal educational system set up by the Argentine government, Zadoff reasoned, Jewish communities used these schools to avoid the loss of identity that could come from contact with one of the fundamentals of Argentine culture so engrained in its educational project: Roman Catholicism.6 Unlike other types of Jewish schools founded by other Argentine Jewish groups, Sephardim mostly focused their attention on Talmudei Torah, which almost exclusively, Zadoff argues, taught boys to read Hebrew and therefore to be fluent in saying prayers.7 Susana Bianchi, in her book Historia de las religiones en la Argentina: Las minorías religiosas, agrees with Zadoff ’s characterization of Sephardic educational institutions, defining them as “very close-knit” projects that allowed for “very little connection among the various Sephardic groups and no contact at all with Ashkenazim.”8 M. Fernanda Astiz, in a recent article on Jewish acculturation and education, also suggests that “Sephardim were largely apolitical . . . [and that therefore it was] easier for them to remain faithful to their communal traditions.”9

3 “Instituciones de Córdoba: Historiando su desarrollo,” Israel, 9, 16 July 1926, 4–5; Jacobo Rubin, Historia de la Comunidad Israelita Sefaradí de la provincia de Córdoba R.A., 1904–1973 (N.p., 1973), 5. All translations are my own. 4 Marcos Curzón, “Presencia judía en la ciudad de Santa Fé,” in III encuentro de historiadores: “Dra. Hebe Livi” (Santa Fé, 1999), 13. 5 Efraim Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía en Buenos Aires (1935–1957) (Buenos Aires: Mila, 1994), 54. 6 Ibid., 12. 7 Ibid., 54. 8 Susana Bianchi, Historia de las religiones en la Argentina: Las minorías religiosas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2004), 98. 9 M. Fernanda Astiz, “Jewish Acculturation: Identity, Society and Schooling: Buenos Aires, Argentina (1890–1930),” Journal of Jewish Identities 3, no. 1 (2010): 41–66, 50.

educating argentine jews

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It is easy to see why these Sephardic educational institutions came to be characterized as isolated community bulwarks against assimilation. The Talmudei Torah10 that Sephardim founded were indeed part of these groups’ organizational structures, and as such, they were supported by their members and leadership.11 The teachers themselves were usually also drawn from the community of origin to which the schools belonged, and at a time when settlement choices reflected ethnic belonging, the schools’ pupils too came from a population mostly of coreligionists. The schools were supervised by subcommittees of the main community institutions or by steering committees that had some (small ) degree of independence, even when their members were sometimes also community leaders. The rituals taught in these schools, and the practices they adopted, replicated the traditions followed in their places of origin.12 Nevertheless, I believe that the prevailing view of these schools exclusively as sites focused on preserving immigrant identity is perhaps too simplistic. The problem is both conceptual and methodological. On the one hand, scholars have stressed the apolitical nature of Sephardim (always compared to the highly politicized environment of Eastern Europe that Ashkenazim experienced in their countries of origin and brought with them to Argentina) and therefore the centrality of geography (not ideology) as the source of community organization.13

10 It should be stressed that even though some of the educational institutions founded by Sephardim were not mere Talmudei Torah, the literature tends to assume, to a large degree, that they were so. See, e.g., Victor Mirelman, En búsqueda de una identidad: Los inmigrantes judíos en Buenos Aires: 1890–1930 (Buenos Aires: Mila, 1988), 254–57. Zadoff ’s work, however, is more attentive to these differences. 11 Support for these schools came from members of the same community of origin, even if they were not attending the same ‘synagogue.’ See the Agudat Dodim example in Adriana Mariel Brodsky, “The Contours of Identity: Sephardic Jews and the Construction of Jewish Communities in Argentina, 1880 to the Present” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2004). 12 Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, 54. 13 The literature on Sephardim in Argentina is not that extensive. The view of Sephardim as ‘enclosed’ in themselves, however, is pervasive. See Victor Mirelman, “Sephardic Immigration to Argentina Prior to the Nazi Period,” in The Jewish Presence in Latin America, edited by Judith Laikin Elkin and Gilbert W. Merkx (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 33–44; Victor Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1930: In Search of an Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990); Victor Mirelman, “Sephardim in Latin America after Independence,” in Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History, edited by Martin A. Cohen and Abraham J. Peck (Tuscaloosa and London: American Jewish Archives, 1993), 235–65; Margalit Bacchi de Bejarano, “Los sefaradies de la Argentina,” Sefardica 1, no. 2 (1984): 37–43.

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These organizational strategies, however, have been assumed to define a Sephardic essence that permeates all interpretations of Sephardic institutions and community activities. Because Sephardim remained on the periphery of the Jewish political discussions of the day and gathered around their own, the tacit argument goes, their actions are never imagined as being impacted by the larger community, or as having had any impact outside communal spaces (always defined very narrowly), or as having changed through time. These conceptual assumptions lead to faulty methodological considerations. While it is true that few documents have survived that can chart the history of these Sephardic communities’ educational projects, and that most of those that have survived are organized community records and magazines, the existing material’s potential has not been explored. Nonetheless, it is precisely in the anecdotal references found in community records, narratives, descriptions, and magazine and newspaper articles that we can clearly see the much more nuanced role that Sephardic schools played within the Jewish community at large, both among Sephardim groups and as part of Argentina. I would like to propose, then, that even when mostly religious in orientation and objectives, these Sephardic schools nevertheless participated in various discussions that connected Sephardic organizations with Argentines, Ashkenazic Jews, and other Sephardic communities in a multivocal conversation over financial support, national (Argentine and Jewish) loyalty, neighborhood participation, and ethnic singularity. By attending these schools, Sephardic children not only learned their prayers but also became part of their communities, their multiethnic neighborhoods, and their nation. Close evaluation reveals that Sephardic schools were an integral part of a discursive and ‘performative’ field that allowed for many forms of identification, none contradictory and all valid. As stated above, the various Sephardic groups that settled in Buenos Aires founded schools in the neighborhoods where they settled. It was clear from the start that, although these institutions were ‘educational’ in nature, control was in the hands of the community, not the teachers. The schools represented the community, and as such, their leaders constantly chastised teachers for their behavior if it was thought to be detrimental to the organizations’ public image. The steering committee of Agudat Dodim in Flores, for example, drafted a Reglamento in an


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effort to avoid conflict among students, parents, and the association.14 Complaining that disorderly children stained the honor of the whole community, they insisted the teacher exercise more authority. But the call to employ more authority did not mean permission to use physical punishment: community leaders made it very clear that if the children got out of control, they would ultimately decide whether and how to reprimand the students and their families.15 Sephardic schools also opened in most provincial capitals, although educational projects in the country’s interior appear to have held lower priority, especially during these communities’ initial years, when the needs for a social hall, synagogue, and cemetery occupied the members’ minds and informed their budgetary decisions. Hijos de Sión, the Sephardic community in Posadas, for example, struggled constantly to keep its school open; an appropriate classroom space could not be found (sessions were first held sessions in a member’s home), and in 1948, when the school was finally moved to its own quarters, it proved very hard to staff it with qualified teachers.16 Sephardic Schools Mentioned in the Article

Buenos Aires

Misiones Córdoba

Name

Origina

Neighborhood

Chalom Yesod Hadath Or Torah Agudat Dodim Talmud Torah Hatikvah Talmud Torah Talmud Torah Talmud Torah Hijos de Sión Sociedad Israelita Siria de Córdoba

Ottoman Jews Aleppo Damascus Damascus Aleppo Jerusalem Morocco Ottoman Jews Aleppo Ottoman Syria

Colegiales Once Boca Flores Flores Once Sud Villa Crespo Ciudadela

“Rules and Regulations,” Agudat Dodim, steering committee meetings, 20 Jan. 1936. 15 See Or Torah, steering committee meetings, 12 Dec. 1927. 16 “Solidaridad piden los sefaradim de misiones,” Israel, 17 Oct. 1937; Sheila Nadia Saidman, Colectividad judía de posadas (Monografia de Grado, Universidad Nacional de Misiones, 1999), 22. 14

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Table (cont.)

Corrientes

Salta Santa Fe Rosario

Name

Origin

Sociedad Israelita ‘Schalom Verehut’ (later called Sociedad Hebrea Sefaradí) ‘La Unión’ Shalom Verehut (later called Sociedad Hebrea Sefaradí) Etz Ajaim

Ottoman Jews (after 1949, Moroccan Jews)

Neighborhood

Ottoman Jews (later Moroccan Jews) Morocco

For the provincial cities, I have listed the origin of the members of the organization that first founded the schools. Almost all provincial institutions tended to merge Sephardic groups from different origins soon after their initial creation.

a

As we see above, all these schools followed the directives stipulated by each community, without the existence of a central organization that unified Sephardic educational projects, teachers’ qualifications and obligations, and religious curriculum.17 Two attempts at the creation of such an organization were unsuccessful. The first was the Consistorio Rabínico Sefaradí, founded in 1928. Led by the gran rabino Sabetay D’Jaen, this organization was formed so that “a suitable candidate, capable of becoming the [Sephardic] people’s main authority, can guide the religious, spiritual and cultural destinies of our communities, which up to now have been quite unfocused and incoherent.”18 Rabbi D’Jaen, the candidate elected to lead the project’s early stages, carried out a very active, if short-lived agenda. He planned to teach Hebrew,19 wrote and directed a play entitled “Esther,”20 visited Talmudei Torah and gave out prizes to students,21 worked toward the creation of a Sephardic Youth Club,22 and organized conferences in The Vaad Hajinuj (Central Organization for Jewish Education) was created in 1935 by three Ashkenazic organizations. Most Sephardic institutions would not join in. For more information about the Vaad Hajinuj, see Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, chap. 4. 18 Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires, Minute Books, 12 Oct. 1928. 19 “Cursos de hebreo,” Israel (n/a). 20 “Esther,” Semanario Hebreo, 14 June 1929; Ricardo Djaen, “Teatro sefaradí en Buenos Aires: Esther, obra inédita de Sabetay Djaen,” Paper presented at AMILAT ( Jerusalem, 2009). 21 “Gran Rabinato Sefaradi: Información oficial,” Israel, 1 Feb. 1929, 5. 22 “Actividades del gran Rabinato Sefaradí de la R. Argentina,” Israel, 1 Jan. 1929. 17


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different venues.23 He traveled to many provincial centers and established contacts with Sephardic communities, attempting to carry out a census of Sephardic life and institutions in the provinces.24 Yet due to internal conflicts with many of the lay members of the Consistorio, this organization disbanded in 1930, and the effort to centralize Sephardic educational activities died with it. Another failed attempt was the suggestion, supported by the Sephardic magazine Israel, that a ‘Sephardic Conference of Hebrew Teachers in Argentina’ should be organized.25 This conference was prompted by the threatened closure of schools in the agricultural Jewish colonies of the Jewish Colonization Association (where most of the teachers were Sephardim), not necessarily by a specific desire to centralize Sephardic educational policy.26 There is, however, no evidence that this conference took place. The lack of a central body meant the absence of common educational objectives, but it was ultimately differences among Sephardim (differing economic positions and ideologies, as well as institutional objectives—like building a temple or purchasing a cemetery) that contributed to the creation of such diverse schools. Sephardic Talmudei Torah varied in many respects: the gender and number of students, the language of instruction, the type and condition of facilities, and active life span. Yesod Hadath (Aleppine Jews in Once) had 200 students in 1921, and the number grew to 450 in 1931; the school in Villa Crespo (Ottoman Jews) listed between 20 and 70 for the same years.27 The Agudat Dodim congregation in Flores ( Jews from Damascus),

23 “Mensajes de Pesah,” Israel (n/a); “Actividades del gran Rabinato Sefaradí de la R. Argentina,” Israel, 4 Jan. 1929. 24 See, e.g., Consistorio Rabínico Sefaradí to Sociedad Israelita Latina Hessed Veemet, Resistencia, Chaco, with an attached document describing the “Propósitos y programa del Gran Rabinato” (Purpose and Program of the Rabbinical Institution), 20 Nov. 1928. 25 “El peligro de clausura de las Escuelas Hebreas,” Israel, 22 Jan. 1932, title page. The call for the Congress seems to suggest the desire of the editors (Moroccan Jews) to organize the teachers in an effort to defend their source of work. Ashkenazi teachers had created a ‘labor union’ of sorts in the early 1930s. See Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, 83–93. 26 For the role of Sephardic teachers in Jewish Colonization Association colonies in Argentina, see, among others, Diana Lia Epstein, “Maestros marroquíes: Estrategia educativa e integración, 1890–1910” ( V. Jornadas Interescuelas/Departamentos de Historia y I Jornadas Rioplatenses Universitarias de Historia: Montevideo, Uruguay, 1995); Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía. 27 Susana Rodgers, Los judíos de Alepo en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Nuevos Tiempos, 2005); “Registro Talmud Torah alumnos, turno de la manana y de la tarde,” Sept. 1929; Mirelman, En búsqueda de una udentidad, 254.

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said to be teaching about 200 students, was “building a new section for girls in their new building,” and the Moroccan Jewish community was already teaching girls.28 The Damascene congregation in la Boca, Or Torah, the Aleppine Talmud Torah in Ciudadela, and the Sephardic congregation in Villa Crespo, on the other hand, only taught boys.29 While Yesod Hadath’s rabbi did not allow Hebrew to be used as a modern language in the 1920s, the Hatikva school (founded by Jews from Jerusalem) taught it.30 While the physical space of some schools was severely limited, others managed to build specifically for a school or to rent decent rooms.31 The Talmud Torah of the Sephardic community in Villa Crespo, for example, raised 20,000 m.n. c/l from among its members in order to build a school.32 The Jews of Damascus in La Boca used the profits derived from the sale of kosher meat in order to subsidize their Talmud Torah, and parents who did not frequent the kosher butchers were asked to pay monthly fees for their children’s education.33 The various institutions’ schools enjoyed different periods of enthusiastic activity: although some schools became very visible in the early 1930s (the Moroccan Talmud Torah and Hatikvah, which disappeared from the public eye in the next decade), others reached their peak in the late 1940s and 1950s (Yesod Hadath, Agudat Dodim, Chalom). Some institutions were able to keep their teachers for longer periods of time (Agudat Dodim), while others had trouble retaining them (Or Torah). Most communities taught children of elementary school age, but some attempted to reach young adults and

28 “Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires y Club Social Alianza,” Israel, 8 Jan. 1932, 9. 29 “Entrevista con Ruben Beraja,” no. 141, in Archivo de la Palabra, Centro de Investigación Mark Turkow, Comunidad Israelita Sefaradí de Buenos Aires; “Registro Talmud Torah alumnos, turno de la manana y de la tarde,” Sept. 1929. 30 Israel, 5 June 1931, 15, 2 Jan. 1932, 3. They “followed the Hebrew system of writing adopted in Palestine, the same used by the Ashkenazim” (5 June 1931). 31 Talmud Torah Etz Ajaim (Rosario), 1933–34, e.g., had a defective ceiling that made it hard to hold classes when it was raining. 32 “La inauguración del nuevo Talmud Torah de la Comunidad Israelita Sefaradí de Buenos Aires,” Israel, 2, 9 Aug. 1929, 14. 33 Or Torah, Minute Books, Acta No. 378, 8 Feb. 1932.


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create kindergartens.34 Some schools held classes daily, while others did so only a few days per week.35 Diversity also existed in the curriculum. Although the surviving material does not allow for a very clear picture of what was actually taught in these schools, the institutions obviously differed in what children were exposed to. Hatikvah, for example taught Hebrew, as well as “our origins and our history, the lives of our heroes and the biographies of those men who have fought for the rebirth of our nation in our holy land.”36 The children attending the Etz Ajaim school in Rosario learned “canto, lectura, escritura, lenguaje, historia, geografía y Religión,”37 while Agudat Dodim hired a maestro de temas patrios.38 Clearly, boys (and sometimes girls) attended these schools to learn how to pray and read the scriptures, and in many cases, religion may have been their main focus, but there is also evidence of students reciting poetry (in Hebrew, Spanish, and French!), dancing “classic Hebrew dances,”39 putting on plays,40 and learning about Palestinian geography.41 Communities were able to decide, on their own, what constituted ‘Jewish’ education and how to best achieve their objectives. Given the fact that Sephardic institutions in general were very diverse in terms of ideology, economic power, membership, and geographic location, among other issues, this educational diversity should not be surprising. Yet while the existing literature on Sephardim in Argentine 34 Israel, 20 Mar. 1925, 7; School in Posadas, Minute Books, Apr. 1949. For the kindergarten idea, see “Una hermosa iniciativa relativa a la educación infantil,” Israel, 13 Mar. 1925, 9; “El gran yeladim,” Israel, 20 Mar. 1925, 7; “Un Talmud Torah marroquí nocturo,” Israel, 20 Mar. 1925; Or Torah, Minute Books, Acta No. 352, 29 Jan. 1931. 35 See Rodgers, Los judíos de Alepo en Argentina, 37; printed material, Chalom, Apr. 1955. 36 Israel, 27 May 1932. 37 Etz Ajaim, Rosario, Sub-comisión escuela, Minute Books, 8 Feb. 1934 (“singing, reading, spelling, history, geography and religion”). 38 Agudat Dodim, Minute Books, 19 Apr. 1948 (“teacher of ‘national [Argentine]’ topics”). This inclusion of ‘Argentine topics’ had to do with the Consejo Nacional de Educación resolutions of 1938 and 1939, which required that all ‘religious and language’ schools had to teach Argentine history and geography. 39 “Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires y Club Social Alianza,” Israel, 8 Jan. 1932, 8; “El gran festival de las sociedades ‘Yesod Hadat’ y ‘Ahabat Zedek Sefaradit,’ ” Israel, 3–10 July 1931, 13; “Gran festival organizado por el Templo Jerusalem y Colegio Hatikva,” Israel, 8 Jan. 1932, 3. 40 Israel, 27 May 1932. Agudat Dodim students played a ‘biblical scene’ during the celebration of the Hilula of Rebí Schimihon (sic). 41 Etz Ajaim, Rosario, Sub-comisión escuela, Minute Books, 4 Feb. 1934.

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has always highlighted the diversity and isolation of these groups, it has nonetheless long assumed that all their educational institutions were similar.42 The related assumption of unchanged commonality among Sephardim of the same origin and within the same communities over time is also incorrect. While Damascene Jews in La Boca did not accept girls as students, for example, Damascene Jews in Flores did. While Aleppine Jews in Once at first resisted educating girls and using Hebrew (instead using Hebrew-Arabic translations),43 these policies were reversed in the 1930s, when modern methods for teaching Hebrew were introduced and girls were accepted alongside boys.44 While it is important to stress that Sephardic educational institutions were diverse, to counteract the literature’s tendency to portray all Sephardim and their institutions as ‘the same,’ it is perhaps equally important to eradicate the idea that the centrality of the community of origin meant that these Jews were not in contact with other Sephardim. Sephardic schools created networks of help, support, and advice among all Sephardim, even when their educational projects belonged to groups from diverse origins. In 1931 the Hatikvah school responded to a call from the Sephardic community in the province of Salta, sending it “syllabi, books, charts, the list of books used in the classes and important reports on the teaching of Hebrew.”45 This institution also received periodic visits from members of other communities who had started their own educational projects and wished to learn about the methods and materials used at the Hatikvah school. Jose Halac, for instance, president of the Talmud Torah of the Sociedad Israelita Siria de Córdoba, visited Hatikvah school in August 1929.46 Etz Ajaim, a society of Ottoman Jews in Buenos Aires, lent the Talmud Torah Hatikvah “benches for the schoolchildren.”47 And in 1933, it was Chalom, the Sephardic community in Colegiales ( Jews from the Balkans, Rhodes, and Salonika), that loaned Hatikvah benches.48 42 See Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía; and Bianchi, Historia de las Religiones en la Argentina. 43 The Damascene Jews of La Boca utilized this method of translation into Arabic, too, until they adopted Spanish (given the requirement of the Cursos Religiosos Israelitas -CR). See Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, 54; Mirelman, En búsqueda de una identidad, 255. 44 See Rodgers, Los judíos de Alepo en Argentina, 87. 45 “Talmud Tora ‘Atikva’ [sic],” Israel, 5 June 1931, 15. 46 “Talmud Tora Atikva [sic],” Israel, 2–9 Aug. 1929. 47 “Talmud Torah ‘Hatikvah’ [sic],” Israel, 22 and 29 June 1928, 7. 48 Chalom to “Templo Jerusalem y Colegio Atikva [sic],” 26 June 1933.


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These examples suggest that Sephardim, while interested in preserving traditions from their countries of origin, could and did think of themselves as a larger group whose members supported and learned from each other. Sephardic communities expressed pride at the performance of their schoolchildren, and almost all public community events involved the participation of the ‘young ones.’ The end of the academic year would nearly always be celebrated with a ‘show’ to which everyone in the community would be invited. The best students would be recognized, and prizes would be handed out.49 Children would recite poems, read prayers, sing, and dance, even when the events being celebrated were not related to the school. During a social gathering organized by the ‘Sociedad Israelita Sefaradí de Villa Crespo pro-Medicamentos,’ an event aimed at raising funds for purchasing medicine, the children of the community Talmud Torah recited monologues and prayers and put on an allegorical play entitled “Helping the Destitute.”50 They also played the violin and “a piano version of the Hativkva.”51 The performance of these children provided their institutions with an occasion to demonstrate the success of their educational projects not just to themselves, but also to others. Members of other Sephardic communities were invited to participate in these events, by handing out prizes and by acting as jurors and testing these young children’s knowledge. In 1931, members of the Hatikva school board, for example, attended the public exam given to Yesod Hadath students.52 In the same year, during an acto infantil organized by the Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires, members of the Hatikva school (teachers and members of the steering committee) and the Agudat Dodim school in Flores handed out prizes to advanced students of the Moroccan congregation Talmud Torah.53 Also present at this event was a representative of the Comunidad Israelita Sefaradí de Buenos Aires (Ottoman Jews of Villa Crespo). Education had become an important measure of success, and these communities took every chance to demonstrate to others the degree of their achievements. 49 See, e.g., “Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires,” Israel, 8 Jan. 1932, 9; invitation to Chalom’s “End of the Year Celebration,” Nov. 1954. 50 “Singular brillo alcanzó la celebración de Yom Atava,” Israel, 27 May 1932, 14. 51 Ibid. 52 “Talmud Tora ‘Yesod Hadat,’ ” Israel, 5 June 1931, 15. 53 “Gran festival organizado por el Templo Jerusalem y Colegio Hatikva,” Israel, 8 Jan. 1932, 3.

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Besides the sharing of resources among Sephardic organizations’ schools in Argentina, there is evidence that financial support for education also crossed the Atlantic. Although it was clear that the Sephardic communities in Argentina were not conceived of as transitory, the links with their communities of origin remained strong.54 On 26 December 1935, for example, members of the Sephardic community in Colegiales (Chalom) sent a money order to the Escuelas Israelitas in Rhodes.55 The letter written to the community in Rhodes announced the soon-to-arrive check, as well as the names of those who had contributed. Jews from Aleppo settled in Once neighborhood collected money in order to support religious schools in Jerusalem.56 Pride in education, then, was not just focused on schools in Argentina, also reaching individuals’ countries of origin and Palestine/Israel. These Sephardic schools and their leaders, far from remaining secluded from the rest of the Jewish community, also strengthened ties with Ashkenazim and their institutions. Some of the teachers who taught in the Sephardic schools were, in fact, Ashkenazim. Moisés Klein, for example, was the director of the school of the Chalom congregation,57 and Matilde Hertszcovich taught in the Agudat Dodim Talmud Torah. Or Torah school in La Boca hired Mrs. Rabinovich at the suggestion of Yedida Efrón, the director of Cursos Religiosos.58 Also at Efrón’s suggestion, the school in Posadas, Misiones, employed Batia Goldrig in 1948 to teach Hebrew. An organization originally set up in connection with the Jewish Colonization Association (founded by Baron Hirsch in Paris in 1891) and the Congregación Israelita de la República Argentina (the oldest Ashkenazic congregation in Argentina), Cursos Religiosos supervised the schools in the agricultural colonies set up by the Jewish Colonization Association in Argentina and financially supported Jewish schools in Buenos Aires. One of the schools backed by this (Ashkenazic) organization was Or Torah, which probably would not have been able to survive without its support.59 Cursos

54 For more examples, not necessarily on educational support, see Brodsky, “Re-configurando comunidades,” 117–34. 55 See letter to the Rhodes community, 26 Dec. 1935. The letter included a list of those who had donated money (and the amount donated). 56 Rodgers, Los judíos de Alepo en Argentina, 101. 57 “El Centro Cultural y Recreativo Israelita ‘Chalom’ y el problema educacional,” Israel, 21 July 1933, 3. 58 Or Torah, steering committee meeting, 17 May 1934. 59 Or Torah, steering committee meeting, 22 June 1936.


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Religiosos, while not necessarily determining the curriculum of the Or Torah school, was able to negotiate various changes that were incorporated into the school’s functioning. Or Torah, for example, was the first Arabic-speaking community that changed its school’s language of instruction from Arabic to Spanish.60 The opposite could also be true: some Sephardic institutions supported Ashkenazic schools. Chalom’s Talmud Torah, for instance, bought tickets in 1935 for an event organized by the Wolfsohn School (an important Ashkenazic educational institution), which was located in the same neighborhood.61 Connections with Ashkenazim were established not only through institutions, but with individuals as well. Given that communities used celebrations, festivals, and other social events to showcase their educational projects, it is not surprising that Sephardic congregations invited famous Ashkenazic men to such events. Max Gluksman, a notable Ashkenazi member and president of the Congregación Israelita de la República Argentina, was invited to the event the Moroccan Talmud Torah organized in 1931, mentioned above. The president of the B’nei Brith, Leopoldo Hirsch, was invited to the same celebration. Educational events clearly became opportunities for these Sephardic institutions’ leaders to socialize with their Ashkenazic peers. Ashkenazic and Sephardic children also found in schools a space to share. Although such intracommunity development would become more visible from the 1950s onward, we find that as early as the 1930s, Hatikvah school had several Ashkenazic students.62 With the creation of Escuelas Integrales—Jewish schools that taught the Argentine curriculum, as well as Hebrew and religious topics—some Sephardic schools attracted large numbers of Ashkenazim. In 1972, for example, Chalom opened its Escuela Hebrea Integral, with many Ashkenazim in attendance.63 It should be remembered, however, that after the 1950s, marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim began to blur identity lines, and the earlier strong identification with communities of origin faded. Parents now made Jewish educational choices with other considerations in mind: geographical convenience, price, and so on.

Mirelman, En búsqueda de una identidad, 255. Chalom School to Wolfson School, 28 July 1935. 62 Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, 71. This school was located in a neighborhood where both Ashkenazim and Sephardim lived. 63 See the 1972 invitation to the ‘bat mitzvah’ of the female students of this school. Several of the girls had ‘Ashkenazi’ last names. 60 61

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But while conversations over schools among Sephardim and between Sephardim and Ashkenazim existed, the available stories also remind us that the schools, although clearly Jewish and Sephardic, were also part of multiethnic neighborhoods. Picture La Boca neighborhood in 1927. On 26 June, at 12:45 P.M., a procession started in Hernandarias 831 (see ‘A’ on map 1). Leading the procession were the Argentine and ‘Hebrew’ flags,64 followed by the Jewish Orphanage Music Band, the students of the Damascene Talmud Torah, members of Unión Israelita Sefaradit Or Torah’s comisión directiva (steering committee), and guests. The schoolchildren, “dressed in white guardapolvos [uniforms worn by all Argentine schoolchildren] and carrying escarapelas [flag buttons] and Argentine flags,” marched to the beat of the songs (marchas) the band played, proudly walking along the streets Hernandarias, Pinzón, Patricios and ‘Brandzen.’ After walking for about five blocks, “cheered on by the public parked on the streets,” the group stopped at Brandsen 1444, site of the future building of the temple and Talmud Torah of this group of Syrian Jews living in the neighborhood (see ‘B’ on map 1).65 On a “well-lit and conveniently adorned” stage were the comisario (chief of police) of the neighborhood, Sr. Atilio Palacio, on behalf of the jefe de la policía de la capital; the sub-comisario; the justice of the peace Sr. Garibaldi; the oficial de justicia Sr. Calabrini; and “close to 2,000 [who] people stood around the makeshift palco.” Sharply at 1:30 P.M., Rabbi Shabetay D’Jaen made his entrance, and the event started. The band played both the Argentine and the Hebrew anthems, the students leading in the singing. Letters from the Argentine president, the intendente municipal, and the presidente del Consejo Nacional de Educación were read in order, and the founding stone for the new building was finally laid in place.66 As the president of Or Torah later put it, “Aquello [fue] realmente imponente.”67 The official opening of the synagogue of Brandsen Street two years later, in 1929, was even more imponente, as we read in the organization’s minute books. Students of the Talmud Torah also marched

64 Although singing the Hatikvah and carrying the ‘Hebrew’ flag in all official celebrations were requirements the Vaad Hajinuj established for all its schools in the late 1930s, this school did not belong to the organization. See Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, 285. 65 For more information about these Damascene Jews in Buenos Aires, see Brodsky, “Contours of Identity,” chap. 2. 66 Or Torah, Minute Books, Acta No. 215, 30 June 1927. 67 Ibid. (“That was really impressive”).


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Map 1

on that occasion, 14 April 1929, again wearing white guardapolvos and waving Argentine flags. They were again accompanied by members of the comisión directiva, the Music Band of the Jewish Orphanage, and two “silk flags”: the Argentine and the Hebrew ones. The route the procession followed was the same, and the audience in Brandsen 1444 was as prestigious: el intendente municipal Dr. José Luis Cantilo and Comisario Días, along with delegates from various Jewish and Argentine institutions. Students intoned the lyrics of the Argentine national anthem and of the Hatikvah and sang Hebrew chants in front of a Sefer Torah. Two students, Hizquia Mizrahi and Elias Levy, “correctly pronounced” Hebrew prayers, which were translated into Spanish by a member of the comisión directiva. The Club Boca Juniors, a neighborhood organization, sent a letter congratulating them on such a joyous occasion. Let us move to another Buenos Aires neighborhood and another Sephardic community. In 1931, the judios turcos of Villa Crespo celebrated the anniversary of the May Revolution (25 May). The magazine La Luz reported that the event, held at the Sociedad Comunidad Israelita Sefaradi on Camargo 870 on 21 May, began with a welcome speech given by the organization’s president, Don Aaron Levy. After the Argentine national anthem was sung by students and guests alike, Remigio Iriondo, one of the education councilors for the VII section, gave a patriotic speech in which he highlighted the events

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leading up to the May Revolution and the accomplishments of the first Argentine Patriotic government. After his talk, D. Elnecavé (editor of the magazine) and Isaac Bensignor (secretary of the Talmud Torah) addressed the audience, which responded enthusiastically. Later, the guests moved on to the classrooms, where they enjoyed some champagne while the Union de Damas Israelitas distributed some clothes donated by Mois Chami & Alderoqui, and Yohai & Acrech (both famous Jewish-owned clothing stores). Many important members of the community attended this event, as did Romulo Magnani, the chief of police (comisario) of the neighborhood; Mr. Flauquin, the chief of police’s secretary; Mr. Carlos Ferrari, the former chief of police; and various delegations from Ahavat Ajim (from Flores neighborhood), the Argentine League against Tuberculosis, the Social Jewish Club from Villa Crespo, the Schalom (sic) center, and others. Mr. David Boton was in charge of providing the music.68 The descriptions of the opening of the temple/Talmud Torah in La Boca and the celebration of the anniversary of the May Revolution provide us with very moving scenes. We see these Sephardic Jews marching in the streets, cheered on by passersby, making the neighborhood theirs, as it were, playing a very visible role in their shared barrio. Representatives of other neighborhood societies joined them (like the Club Atlético Boca Juniors), as did intendentes, comisarios, subcomisarios, and jueces de paz. It is clear that Argentina ultimately played a central role in these stories and schools, but not just through the presence of Argentine ‘officers,’ like the members of the Consejo Nacional de Educación and jefes de policía, who were invited to special occasions. Argentina was present in the wearing of guardapolvos blancos, the waving of Argentine flags, the singing of the Argentine national anthem, the celebration of fechas patrias, and the hiring of non-Jewish teachers for the instruction of temas patrios.69 It is true that the Argentine government attempted to regulate these schools, and all immigrant schools. There was a fear that Argentina was becoming too ‘foreign’ by allowing newcomers to instruct their children in their language of origin and by immersing these educational institutions in ‘local’ (meaning their countries of origin) political La Luz, 26 May 1933, 244. See Agudat Dodim, Minute Books, 6 Sept. 1944. One of the teachers hired to teach ‘temas patrióticos’ was Antonia Rossi de Luca. The other was a Jewish young lady, Matilde Hertszcovich (Ashkenazim). 68 69


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and educational contexts.70 In 1938 and 1939, the Consejo Nacional de Educación passed resolutions forcing all ‘language and religious’ schools to display Argentine national symbols, maps, and portraits of Argentine historical figures and to teach Argentine topics. Students were also expected to learn about the meaning of the Argentine national anthem. Teachers had to be tested by Argentine educational authorities in order to be allowed to teach, and textbooks, even in ‘foreign’ languages, had to incorporate Argentine topics.71 But while it is true that the Argentine government issued resolutions making it mandatory that ‘foreign’ institutions celebrate Argentine history, the events in La Boca and Villa Crespo, described above, took place before these laws were passed. These schools, then, which provided religious instruction to Jewish boys and girls, became spaces in which the history of the nation was exalted and celebrated alongside a variety of neighborhood and official guests. These representatives of the state were not distant bureaucratic workers, but members of the community as well. They worked in the neighborhood where this Jewish community had settled and, as such, were not strangers to the affairs and members of the Jewish societies. The relationship between Argentine (educational ) authorities and Sephardic institutions was cordial. Yesod Hadath’s school, for example, celebrated the anniversaries of the Revolución de Mayo and the Día de la Independencia and received strong support from the educational inspector, the officer in charge of making sure schools followed the law.72 The inspector de educación often participated in the events organized by Sephardic communities, as we can see from the opening of the temple in La Boca, described above. Many examples confirm the assertion that the celebration and exaltation of the nation was not just performed because the government legislated it.73 In the 1930s, members of the Sephardic community in Colegiales (Chalom) donated an Argentine flag to the local state school, not as individuals but as representatives of the Sephardic congregation. They organized an internal fund-raising event and later 70 See Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, 191–92. See also Lilia Ana Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: La construccióde la nacionalidad argentina a fines del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultural Económica de Argentina, 2001). 71 Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía, chap. 5. 72 Rodgers, Los judíos de Alepo en Argentina, 89. 73 See, e.g., “Las fiestas mayas y el Círculo Social Israelita,” Israel, 29 May–5 June 1925, 15.

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participated in an acto that the school organized in their honor, even purchasing the drinks and food served at the event.74 In 1931, the recently founded Jewish magazine La Luz announced in an editorial that the “anniversary of the Revolución de Mayo has been enthusiastically celebrated by this glorious Argentine nation, jealous of its freedom and independence.” The editor went on: Our coreligionists living in this blessed country, coming from all political persuasions and convictions, have also celebrated this holiday, and patriotic parties have been organized in all [ Jewish] centers. We do not exaggerate when we affirm that the Jewish community in Argentina celebrates the national [Argentine] holidays as well as its [own national] holidays. And that is only natural. For Israel, free countries are like air to mankind. Israelites, much like all other elements of the Argentine population, work toward the country’s prosperity, for its progress and greatness. [ The Israelitas] are happy living in this welcoming land. They only have one aspiration, a single wish, which is to see their new patria ranked among the best nations of the Universe.75

This text, because of its thinly veiled Zionist rhetoric, presents the discursive possibility that the national and the ethnic were not conceived as separately compartmentalized identities. Had this text made reference to ‘Jews’ as a religious group, the dichotomy between national and ethnic identities would have existed, but it would not have presented any contradiction: because Judaism was a religion, Jews could be citizens of any country without any question of their allegiance.76 The writer of this editorial, however, used language that, although vague and purposefully ambiguous (especially the reference to patria at the end), made no effort to explain any seeming incongruity between the organization accepting the national Argentine holidays as its own and keeping the Jewish holidays as well. In fact, Jews, referred to as ‘Israelitas,’ were made equal to all other immigrants working for the future greatness of the country where they lived.

74 Although the receipts are undated, it is clear that this event took place in the mid-1930s. See “Entrega y bendición de la bandera a la escuela no. 12, Consejo Escolar 10.” 75 La Luz, 29 May 1931, 141. Although it might seem confusing, the words ‘Israeli’ and ‘Israel’ (‘Israelitas’ and ‘Israel’ ) were used in the original version. The word ‘Israelita’ mean ‘Jew,’ and ‘Israel’ was used even before the creation of the state. 76 See Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).


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The Argentine ‘patriotic past,’ usually celebrated by ‘performing’ children, was also used as the foundation for ‘Jewish’ nationalism in Argentina. In an editorial published in La Luz after the celebration of 9 July (Argentine Independence Day), the writer began by reminding readers of the “iron will and character of Belgrano and San Martín in their fight for [Argentine] Independence.” At the end of the article, he added, “At times when the Jewish people are making efforts to obtain their total freedom and independence, we are sure they will fight, like those men did in 1816, to achieve it.”77 For Sephardic intellectuals, like the editor of La Luz, San Martín and Belgrano had become examples to follow in the fight for the Jewish state. The patriotic past, the weapon thought to instill nationalist (Argentine) beliefs, was here used to strengthen ethnic, in this case ‘Jewish,’ nationalist desires.78 Sephardic Talmudei Torah were not simply religious spaces used by Sephardic communities to avoid the ‘loss of ethnic particularity’ in the face of Catholic education. They were also conceived as a way to ‘create’ members of the new country, not members outside the rest of society. Sephardic schools were institutions that groups from various origins supported and helped, thereby creating a new group meaning around the word ‘Sephardic.’ Sephardic leaders from other communities and Ashkenazim participated in ‘educational’ events, and the achievements of students were publicly celebrated, displaying a shared belief in the importance of education, itself an important tenet of Argentine liberalism. Staging events in which students would wear white guardapolvos and sing the Argentine national anthem and the Hatikva in front of the intendente municipal and the inspector de educación were not contradictory to the Sephardic leaders (or to the invited national officials). In fact, sharing Hebrew, Arabic, French, and Spanish, singing national anthems, and learning about Sarmiento and Hertzl were ways in which these Sephardic immigrants constructed and acted out their Argentine and Jewish identities; Sephardic religious schools were instrumental in helping immigrants become Argentines.

La Luz, 10 July 1931, 262. For an analysis of Sephardic publications and their understanding of Zionism and national (Argentine) feelings, see Raanan Rein and Mollie Lewis, “Judíos, árabes, sefaradíes y argentinos: El caso del periódico Israel,” in Arabes y judíos en Iberoamérica: Similitudes, diferencias y tensiones sobre el transfondo de las tres culturas, edited by Raanan Rein (Madrid: Fondo de las Tres culturas, 2008), 83–115. 77 78

CHAPTER THREE

THE JEWISH LATIN AMERICAN WRITER AND TRADITION: THE CASE OF SERGIO CHEJFEC Sergio Waisman

When the end approaches, Cartaphilus wrote, no images of memory remain; only words remain. Words, displaced and mutilated words, the words of others, such were the meager alms left him by the hours and the centuries. —Jorge Luis Borges, “El inmortal” Is it not precisely abroad where what is yours is revealed to you as true and determining? —Sergio Chejfec, “El extranjero”

I would like to formulate the following hypothesis: at its best, Jewish Latin American literature is doubly marginal, because of the peripheral nature of both Jewish and Latin American letters vis-à-vis the European center and Occidental traditions. I believe this is what the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec suggests in his 2005 essay “Marcas en el laberinto” (Marks in the Labyrinth): Ubicado en la frontera de lo clandestino o lo secreto, el territorio del saber judío muchas veces ha ocupado el límite, la frontera que marca el comienzo del mundo gentil. En esta zona de tensión se ha desarrollado la más rica literatura judía. No solo la marginalidad de los autores, All translations are mine. The original of the Borges quote is as follows: “Cuando se acerca el fin, escribió Cartaphilus, ya no quedan imágenes del recuerdo; sólo quedan palabras. Palabras, palabras desplazadas y mutiladas, palabras de otros, fue la pobre limosna que le dejaron las horas y los siglos.” See Jorge Luis Borges, “El inmortal,” in Obras completas I (Barcelona: Emecé Editores, 1996), 533–44 (quotation at 543). The original of the Chefjec is as follows: “¿No es precisamente en el extranjero donde lo propio se le aparece a uno como cierto y determinante?” See “El extranjero,” in El gran libro de América judía, ed. Isaac Goldenberg (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998), 226–33 (quotation at 226). Important here is the ambiguity in the title of Chefjec’s story: ‘el extranjero’ is generally translated as ‘the foreigner’ or ‘the stranger,’ but given the storyline of the text in question, a more accurate translation is probably ‘abroad.’ The Spanish title denotes both.

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sergio waisman hecho en cualquier caso variable, sino básicamente el estatuto fronterizo de registros y preocupaciones respecto de lo admitido como judío o como nacional. Una circunstancia similar ocurriría en América Latina, cuya literatura de mayor complejidad y aliento estético no es la inmediatamente emblemática, la que se identifica con la mirada exterior, sino aquella que tiende a escribirse sobre la frontera borrosa de las tradiciones culturales, confundiendo las nociones de propio y ajeno.1 [ Located at the border of the clandestine or the secret, the territory of Jewish knowledge has often occupied the limit, the border that delineates the beginning of the gentile world. The richest of Jewish literature has been developed in this zone of tension. Not just the marginality of the authors, which in any case varies, but basically the border status of registers and concerns with respect to what is allowed as Jewish or as national. A similar circumstance occurs in Latin America, where the literature with the most complexity and aesthetic breadth is not the most immediately emblematic one, not the one that can be identified with an outside gaze, but rather that which tends to be written on the blurred border of cultural traditions, where the notions of what belongs to the self and to the other are confused.]

In his own work, Sergio Chejfec repeatedly mines this border—a zone between cultures and languages, between past and present, between traditions and religions—to establish a space wherein a literature can emerge. By implication, this border zone is where Jewish Latin American literature might persist without falling into self-ghettoizing tendencies. This is the border zone that I want to explore—a zone in fact doubly a border, if you will, doubly peripheral, doubly ‘minor’—and that, I would add, has its greatest potential for innovation and expansion precisely because of its peripheral nature. In Chejfec’s first novel, Lenta biografía [Slow Biography, 1990], this border is found in the territory between silence and speaking, between forgetting and remembering, between old and new, between Yiddish and Spanish, where the narrator gives voice to his father’s suppressed memories of the Holocaust. The confusion between self and other, between what belongs to the self and what belongs to the other, is played out in the confusion between the narrator’s writing of his own life and of his father’s. The narrator—ostensibly the writer Chejfec himself—tries to imagine his father’s purposefully silenced and forgotten memories; as he does so, in a complex process of deciphering and

1 Sergio Chejfec, “Marcas en el laberinto,” in El punto vacilante (Buenos Aires: Editorial Norma, 2005), 124.

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projecting, the narrator re-creates his father’s past and also his own. Writing the life of the father becomes a writing of one’s own life. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator sets out to write his autobiography (“mi vida”), but he is only able to do so when his father states that he wishes to write the story of his own life, and further, that he will do so in Yiddish and that the narrator will then be in charge of translating it into Spanish. Although the father is not serious about this, the moment becomes the catalyst that allows the narrator to begin writing his ‘life.’ What follows is the narrator’s process of imagining and reconstructing his father’s past, as if the narrator’s biography could only be written on the pages of the (imagined) biography of his father: imagined because his father never speaks about his own life, especially the period in which the narrator is most interested, the time his father lived in Poland, before immigrating to Argentina. Thus, although his father does not write his own life story for the son to translate, the son undertakes this project of retelling anyway. But what the son must retell is especially challenging, as it is neither written nor spoken by the father. The distance between source and target is especially large here: “Lo que me resultaba gravoso imaginar era la idea de traslación geográfica” [What was troublesome to imagine was the idea of geographic translation].2 What the son translates is not quite from Yiddish to Spanish, not quite from Eastern Europe to Argentina—although these expanses must also be traversed by the narrator—but rather from the narrator’s imagining of his father’s life story as seen in certain gestures, songs, and expressions of his that suggest that there are hidden stories underneath, behind, below. The narrator states that his work imagining his father’s past consists of “reconstruir desechos de historias quizá inexistentes y trasponerlos al papel” (reconstructing remainders of stories, which were perhaps inexistent, and transposing them on paper).3 These then are the remainders of the Old World that the narrator uses to ‘decipher’ his father’s life and then put on paper. The narrator of Lenta biografía recognizes the impossibility of recovering his father’s past, yet he is driven to attempt it. There are numerous obstacles and distances between the narrator and his father. In addition to the geographical, temporal, and linguistic spaces between

2 3

Chejfec, Lenta biografía, 20. Ibid., 67.

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them, there is the largest: the silence that the father keeps precisely in and about the area the narrator wishes to explore. The subjectivity of the contemporary Jewish Argentine writer will be written on the blank page of the Jewish Eastern European immigrant who escapes to South America from the atrocities of the Holocaust. The narrator’s identity is based—literally written—on his father’s identity and past, on his father’s suppressed memories. The contemporary Jewish Argentine writer writes his own story in Spanish, but what he writes is a translation from the Yiddish drawn from the silences and gestures of a survivor who does not want to or cannot speak about his past. The unspoken past that is the father’s is also the narrator’s; the past is the point that the narrator must reach if he is to locate his origins. The unspoken past is what the narrator must re-create in his writing if he is to slowly write a biography (una lenta biografía) that is at once his and his father’s. In this sense, imagining and reconstructing the past emerges as a search for origins that is also the beginning of a new subjectivity, of identity as oneself. “Mi pasado era el suyo” [ My past was his], the narrator-Chejfec says. “Había un pasado virtual y desconocido para mí, que mi padre ocultaba, y que al hacerlo ocluía mi origen” [ There was, for me, a virtual and unknown past, which my father hid, and as he did so he occluded my origins].4 Writing the silent (silenced?) other, the narrator writes himself. The writer’s task is to excavate, to burrow in search of what is not said. He must mine that which is ciphered in his father’s silences. As the narrator-Chejfec recovers his father’s past, and with it his Jewish European ancestry, he makes a tenuous connection with all Jewish history. At one point the narrator compares his father’s exodus from Poland to Argentina with the original, biblical exodus from Egypt: “No hay mayor diferencia entre el vadeo judío del mar Rojo y el vuelo de mi padre por sobre el océano para llegar a la Argentina” [ There is no major difference between the Jewish crossing of the Red Sea and my father’s flight to Argentina over the ocean].5 Significantly, the narrator’s rewriting is enacted from and into an Argentine space and time and language: “Yo ya nunca podría esperar reconstruir cabalmente el pasado de mi padre . . . porque de una manera sin duda obligada yo lo consideraría y evaluaría a la luz de mi pasado

4 5

Ibid., 125. Ibid., 45.


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argentino” [ I would never be able to wholly reconstruct my father’s past . . . because I would clearly be forced to consider and evaluate it in light of my Argentine past].6 Here, the work of reconstructing memory emerges as an adaptation of fragmented and equivocal memories, and the narrator’s memory—the writer’s—will necessarily surface through the filter of his ‘argentinidad’ [Argentineness]. The narrator-Chejfec writes his father’s broken past as a way to write his own life. This process of imagining, of reconstructing, necessarily involves imagining a past that the narrator has not lived, in a continent that the narrator does not know, from one language (Yiddish) into another (Spanish), through the sensitivity of the narrator’s new Argentine reality. As some critics have noted,7 Lenta biografía works extensively with the practice of translation: the narrator-Chejfec translates his father’s suppressed words from past to present, from silence to written word, from Yiddish to Spanish, from an Eastern European context and history to an Argentine context and present. Throughout the novel Chejfec constantly underscores the fact that various characters—primarily his father’s friends, who meet at his house every Sunday to re-create stories from their past (which focus on the story of a pursued, or persecuted, man [‘el perseguido’] and his family during the Holocaust)—are speaking in Yiddish. The narrator underscores this linguistic and cultural difference even as we read it in Spanish. Behind the scenes, so to speak, a translation has occurred—or better yet, is occurring in the retelling of the story. In the dynamic interaction between narrator and reader, continents, histories, and cultures undergo a shift. The language of Chejfec’s story is always already other, displaced, altered. We see, then, that the novel is engendered through a series of linguistic, geographic, and temporal rewritings. What is to be gained by speaking of these adaptations as translation? I believe that semantics matters here. Speaking of translation allows us to focus on distance and difference, on sameness and otherness. Speaking of translation allows us to focus on the constitutive elements of contemporary Ibid., 98. See especially Edna Aizenberg, “Lenta biografía: Chejfec’s Post-Holocaust, Postcolonial Had Gadya,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America: New Studies on History and Literature, ed. David Sheinin and Lois Baer Barr (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996), 53–60; and Ariana Huberman, “Paréntesis sobre paréntesis: Memoria y escritura en Lenta biografía de Sergio Chejfec,” in Memoria y representación: Configuraciones culturales y literarias en el imaginario judío latinoamericano, ed. Ariana Huberman and Alejandro Meter (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2006), 91–101. 6 7

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Jewish Latin American identity: distant and different from and in Latin America, distant and different from our Jewish forefathers— just as Latin American and Jewish traditions have always been both a part of and apart from European traditions, a condition that gives access to the universal by allowing us to innovate with irreverence, as Borges might say.8 The “game of shifting mirrors” (to borrow from Borges again),9 the multiple translations at the core of Lenta biografía, becomes the Jewish Latin American writer’s cultural heritage, a heritage (an identity) that is, from its inception, multiply mediated, deterritorialized, and necessarily already reimagined—in other words, translated. Herein is the ‘slow biography’ of the contemporary Jewish Argentine writer. Los planetas [The Planets], Sergio Chejfec’s 1999 novel, also works with a border zone delineated by violence and loss, past and present, memory and imagination, but this time the silenced life that the narrator seeks to re-create is that of a friend who was kidnapped and disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War. Chejfec’s text once again addresses an absence/presence duality, this time in the form of the narrator’s efforts, through a reconstruction of memories, conversations, and stories, to make his friend’s absence present, so to speak, to commemorate his friend’s life by writing in the space left by his absence. As the novel progresses, the narrator (S) and his friend (M) become doubles in a very complex way: in fact, M (the disappeared friend) was supposed to be the writer of the two, but now that he is gone, S enters the scene to write what M will now never be able to. S writes to say what M might have said; S’s writing becomes the presence of M’s disappearance. As Erin Graff Zivin says: The relationship between identity and alterity becomes a crucial motif in this novel because it structures the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the representation of the other. By becoming the other (the narrator contends that M was the ‘real’ writer), S acquires the authority necessary to relate the story of his friend’s disappearance.10

8 I refer here, as I do in the title of this article, to Borges’s seminal 1952 essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (The Argentine Writer and Tradition). See Obras completas I, 267–74. 9 The quotation “a game of shifting mirrors” (“un juego de espejos que se desplazan”) is taken from “El acercamiento a Almutásim.” See Obras completas I, 414–18 (quotation at 414). 10 Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in Latin American Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 171.


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There is, furthermore, another lack that S perceives and seeks to fill: the Jewishness of their identity. At one point, M and S see a group of orthodox Jews in Buenos Aires, and S becomes upset when M comments that those are the ‘authentic’ Jews, implying that they themselves (more modern, secularized, integrated) are somehow false, weaker imitations, as if there were something lacking in their own Jewish identity. The anachronistic orthodox Jews highlight, through contrast, a hollow in M’s and S’s Jewish identities. If not the outer garb and trappings of a religion, then what makes a Jew? If difference cannot be seen and heard and thus outwardly identified, then where does difference reside? And if difference—ethnic, religious, cultural—is only the result of a particular costume change, then what does this mean for us who are supposed to be different, for those of us who are different and yet do not look like it, do not sound like it? Earlier in Los planetas, the narrator reflects on this situation when he observes that M’s parents do not speak with an accent, while he had always associated speaking Spanish with an accent (a Yiddish accent, we assume) to be a key factor of Jewish identity in Argentina: Si la condición judía fuera un vacío o hueco que precisa ser llenado por atributos diferenciados, durante esos años le daba al habla defectuosa el valor de ingrediente fundamental para la mezcla. Desde siempre nos han enseñado a marcar ese lugar en blanco, y se sabe que en general también el resto del mundo se ocupó de hacerlo. Y en la falta de acento de la familia de M veía la señal de un peligro difuso, o una equivocación en el mejor, la abolición de las diferencias con el mundo. Y el mundo respira por las diferencias; esas diferencias son las que nos educan.11 [ If the condition of being Jewish is a hollow meant to be filled with distinguishing attributes, at the time I considered flawed speech to be a fundamental element of the mix. We have always been taught to delineate that empty space, to mark the blank, and we knew that everyone else had done the same. I saw, in the lack of an accent in M’s family, a diffuse sort of danger—or at best an equivocation—regarding the destruction of that which separated them from the rest of the world. And the world breathes through such differences; difference is our teacher.]

What is the perceived danger (threat, ‘peligro’ ), or at best equivocation (error, ‘equivocación’ ) that the narrator perceives at this point? Assimilation when he knows himself to be different? An erasure of past lives and stories that he is fighting hard to keep alive, to retell 11

Sergio Chefjec, Los planetas (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1999), 28.

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and reconstruct? If identity is to be performative, if difference is to be claimed and enacted instead of assigned and limiting, then the realization that there may in fact be no essential attributes of “the condition of being Jewish” is certain to cause anxiety. On the other hand, the hollowing out of identity can create new zones, zones of tension but also of tremendous potential. The threat is real: ghettoes, imposed from without or within, limits and limitations of bodies and minds. But equivocation? In what sense might error represent a best-case scenario? If the hollowing of Jewish identity, as the narrator of Los planetas says, leads to equivocation, this may be a way to approach fields of potentiality. Error, equivocation, digression; misreadings and mistranslations; peripheral and marginal contact zones; or perhaps the burrows and rhizomes of minor literatures, to use the underground botanical metaphor of Deleuze and Guattari.12 We must feel our way to the border, dig there at the site of the edge, let cartographers come later to draw new maps, see new perspectives. The question becomes: how to articulate difference, how to make a mark on the labyrinth when that mark is not in a different language anymore (no longer in Yiddish), or even in the accent of a different language? How to make a mark with invisible ink? How to speak not only of but with silence? How to encode the traces of the source in the writing of the target? We are dealing here with the ambiguous territory in between languages, cultures, traditions, nations, individuals. Among other things, Chejfec’s texts reflect on questions of Jewish and Argentine identity and what this means for the potential of a certain strand of literature. As the late Charlie Feiling has said about Chejfec’s Lenta biografía: El carácter conjetural de sus conjeturas [del narrador-Chejfec] establece a la vez una distancia respecto de su ‘condición judía’ y lo arraiga en ella mediante un paradójico establecimiento de lazos con su ‘condición argentina’. La historia que no transcurre en ninguna parte se narra desde el faro del fin del mundo, la humedad de Buenos Aires es agobiente.13 [ The conjectural character of the narrator’s conjectures establishes a distance with respect to his ‘Jewish condition’; simultaneously it roots

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 13 Charlie Feiling, “Fichero: Nota retroductoria,” in Lenta biografía by Sergio Chejfec (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1990), 170. 12


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him to this ‘Jewish condition’ through the paradoxical establishment of connections with his ‘Argentine condition.’ The story that takes place in no-man’s land is narrated from the lighthouse at the end of the world; the humidity in Buenos Aires is oppressive.]

A few years ago, Edna Aizenberg offered an insightful reading of Chejfec, as well as important observations about contemporary Jewish Argentine writing, in a reading of the ending of Lenta biografía. The end of this novel revolves around a reference to the Passover story of Had Gadya. I would like to end my text with a Passover anecdote of my own. Last year I was at a Pesej celebration with my family when a friend asked me if I did anything Jewish when I was a child. The question caught me a little off-guard. I thought about Erin Graff Zivin’s wonderful new book The Wandering Signifier, which led me to think briefly, very briefly, of Levinas. I thought that my friend was looking for a mirror to reflect the other—in this case, me—and thus see the otherness in her own identity. She wants me to be her mirror, I thought. I tried to think of specific Jewish things that I may have done as a child. I panicked. I overanalyzed. I said, “What do you mean by ‘Jewish’?” This served to redirect the conversation, and before long I was off the hook. Now I realize what my answer should have been. I should have said, “Everything. My family is Jewish. Everything we did was Jewish.” Just as, in a slightly different context, I could have said, “Everything. My family is Argentine. Everything we did was Argentine.” On our way home from the Seder, my daughter (who was eight years old at the time) asked from the back seat of the car if someone could tell her again what Passover is about. We do not do any Jewish things in our family now, no candles, no dietary restrictions, no rituals at home, no synagogue even for high holidays, no Hebrew School, so I am afraid my daughter is a bit confused about what it means to be Jewish. Or what it means to be Argentine, for that matter. (All of which is only further confounded by the fact that my wife is a nonpracticing Catholic from California.) In any case, I quickly reminded her that Passover commemorates Moses leading the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt. My daughter—a huge fan of all kinds of myths and legends—listened, drawn in by the richness of the story, I am sure. When I finished (in Spanish), she asked (in English), Were you ever a slave? Was I ever a slave? Again I was stumped. My daughter understood perfectly well that the Exodus story took place thousands of years ago. She was kidding. But she was not really kidding. That

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is how children are: somehow they know that the best stories can be read both literally and symbolically. We laughed in the car at the idea of being alive back then and being alive now to tell the story of what happened—to us—back then. We laughed at the dream of continuity and the story and the laughter that creates the dream of continuity. Tradition. Kabala. And that, I said, is why, whether we are religious or not, we always say for Passover, “El año que viene en Jerusalén.” There was quiet in the car. Then I heard my daughter murmur something to herself, in English. “Next year in Jerusalem,” I thought I heard her say.

PART TWO

JEWISHNESS AS LITERARY REPRESENTATION

CHAPTER FOUR

SHOULD WE BURY THE JEWISH GAUCHO? A NEW GERCHUNOFF FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edna Aizenberg One of the most important things I’ve learned as a literary critic is a certain humility. Although we may think that our pronouncements are Torah from Sinai, our readings are contingent, possibly enlightening, but by no means approximating Holy Writ. I won’t tread much further into these murky waters of the changeless eternity of Scripture. What I do know is that my words—and yours—are not forever; they are only for now and a bit later. Then, inexorably, there will be shifts. Why this opening meditation on critical contingency? Because in my own work, I have been subjected to the vagaries of time, to modifying and even contradicting what I’ve said. Certainly this is the case when it comes to Alberto Gerchunoff and his Los gauchos judíos (1910), the fictionalized account of the early twentieth-century settlement of Eastern European Jews on Argentina’s pampas. In the thirty years I’ve dealt with the book, not even the text itself, literary criticism’s primary material, has stayed the same; in fact, I was instrumental in destabilizing it, talking in my Parricide on the Pampa? about differing editions and about how all other critics were wrong. Checkmate, David Viñas and all the angry men of the 1970 parricidal generation who ‘dumped’ on their illustrious precursor.1 Be that as it may—and I could checkmate myself too—I’d like to savor the ephemeral power of criticism and say that thanks to my work and that of fellow scholars, no ‘given’ of Latin American Jewish studies is now more ‘given’ than the Jewish gaucho. Gerchunoff ’s literary creation, half real cowboy-farmer, half fantastic Hispanic-Yiddish hybrid,

1 On David Viñas’s and other critics’ attacks on Gerchunoff, see Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff and Argentine-Jewish Writing (Hanover: New England University Press, 2002), 17–30; Edna Aizenberg, Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff ’s Los gauchos judíos (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2000), 11–32.

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is now a staple of Latin American Jewish literature, available in the original Spanish and also speaking languages as diverse as English and Hebrew. Today, the ‘canon’ of Latin American Jewish literature in Spanish typically begins with Los gauchos judíos, as out of the book seem to flow all the issues and paradigms that have marked Latin American Jewish studies: immigration and exile, hyphenated identities, otherness and exclusion, acceptance and marginality. Even more, Gerchunoff nowadays equals ‘Jewish gaucho’ and ‘Jewish gaucho’ Gerchunoff. It’s time, I believe, to consider a new Gerchunoff as patriarch of a new paradigm for Latin American Jewish literature. This paradigm would part from La estrella de David [ The Star of David], the book Don Alberto prepared at the end of his life, but never got to publish because of his untimely death in 1950. Rather than a paean to the Argentine ‘Promised Land’ by a somewhat naive young immigrant, La estrella de David is the work of a mature political fighter, centered in the Shoah (Holocaust) as he witnessed and combated it and in the struggle for the founding of the state of Israel, in which he was a major Latin American player. The unpublished book isn’t yet available, but part of my project is to make it known and to facilitate its use. To take the first step, I’d like to share some of the characteristics of La estrella de David as a way of renovating our understanding of a pivotal figure, as well as expanding the material that constitutes our object of study into the twenty-first century. Gerchunoff is much more than Jewish gauchos, and Latin American Jewish literature much more than immigrant angst. But in order to move forward, I need to step back. In 1936, three years after Adolph Hitler’s rise to power, Don Alberto published a revised edition of Los gauchos judíos.2 When originally published, the book contained twenty-four interrelated vignettes, opening with “Genesis” and closing with “The Anthem.” The trajectory of this secular Haggadah, based on the Passover narration of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, was intentional—upward from the snowy village beginnings in Czarist persecution to the great

2 The “nueva edición corregida y aumentada” (new revised and enlarged edition) was published in Buenos Aires (Gleizer, 1936). Manuel Gleizer, a Russo-Jewish immigrant who became an influential editor, also published Jorge Luis Borges and other important Argentine authors, championing young and emerging writers. For the original, see Alberto Gerchunoff, Los gauchos judíos (La Plata: Joaquín Sesé, 1910). La estrella de David has never been published.

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paschal feast of liberation, in this case the centennial of Argentine independence, celebrated on the bountiful pampas.3 Although in this initial version of Los gauchos judíos, milk and honey do not constantly flow—we find embittering violence and bad crops and, yes, anti-Semitism—the tone remains cheery and hopeful. Yet much, much sooner than Gerchunoff, or few others, anticipated, the shadows only glimpsed in 1910 spread like a deadly plague, and the divergences between the book’s 1910 and 1936 editions mirror the sinister changes. Aside from the numerous linguistic emendations, Don Alberto’s most glaring revision is the inclusion of two new stories, “The Miraculous Doctor” and “The Silver Candelabra,” both placed right after the final tale, “The Anthem.” As a result of this tinkering, the internal cohesion of the book and its impact as a narrative of emancipation break down, fracturing the text, no longer progressing from slavery to freedom. Each new story, in addition, bespeaks the breakdown: the first relates the life of Dr. Nachum Yarcho, a beloved historical figure and one of the first physicians to serve the pampas settlements. Yarcho’s description contains a jarring touch: “He did of course wear glasses— he was a doctor after all—a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that were always . . . perched warily on his thin, hooked nose. If I may be permitted an anachronism, I will confess that Dr. Yarcho was hardly what we would today call a pure Aryan—quite the contrary.”4 A strange interjection, rupturing the timeframe and injecting an ominously timely note, if satirically related, a retort to the insidious racialist parlance of Hitlerism. “The Silver Candelabra,” the other interpolated story that now closes Los gauchos judíos, heightens the negative effect. It tells of Jewish space and heritage raped, how an unknown stranger, sticking his hand through the open window, steals the beautiful and obviously iconic silver candelabra from the sad and emaciated Gedali, a pious Jewish settler, exactly while he is intoning the Friday-night Sabbath prayers. The precious object disappears as Gedali continues intoning, concluding Gerchunoff ’s then already canonical book at the very moment when alien hands were reaching into Jewish homes, and Jews, increasingly sad and emaciated, were largely unable to resist.

3 4

Aizenberg, Parricide on the Pampa?, 39. Ibid., 174.

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These evil currents were swirling in Argentina as well since 1930, when José F. Uriburu, a right-wing general, overthrew the elected government and initiated a period of authoritarian, nationalistic, and later pro-Axis rule. Gerchunoff sends an anxious, bifurcated message, trying to maintain his initial optimism but at the same time rewriting his centennial hymn. There is more: the premier of Los gauchos judíos led to a fruitful sixteen-year literary run—Don Alberto published fifteen volumes of essays and fiction between 1910 and 1936; in contrast, the reedited story collection gave rise to exactly the opposite. With a minor exception, twelve protracted and arduous years passed with the publication of only one book, La clínica del Dr. Mefistófoles (Dr. Mephistopholes’s Clinic), a timely fantasy-cum-philosophical-dialogue based on the Faust legend, published in 1937 and itself reflecting some of the Faustian spirit of the era. Plenty was thus followed by a lean spell broken only at the end of Don Alberto’s life, with one essay anthology in 1949 and several posthumous editions. Did Don Alberto suffer from writer’s block? Quite the contrary: he was more garrulous and productive than ever. But new times demanded new writing. And here we come head on to Gerchunoff ’s response to the still-vexing question of Holocaust representation. In the very year 1936, the fourteenth Congress of the International Pen Club met in Buenos Aires, a politically supercharged gathering in which fascist and anti-fascist literati clashed. Among the anti-Hitler band was the playwright and critic H. Leivick, representing the Yiddish Pen Club, who defiantly attacked “literature for looking on while pogroms were visited on culture and people—and keeping still.”5 Leivick decried the fact that there was much talk at the meeting about the beauty of pure art, of pure poetry. Wasn’t the well-being of the “oppressed, helpless, devastated folk, whether Jew or Abyssinian,” more important, “for they are testimony to the divine spark in human life”? “Bear that in mind, delegates to this congress,” Leivick concluded, elevating ethics above art.6 Don Alberto, who was actively engaged at the congress, had the exactly same reaction, and his answer to the years of infamy was of a kind—to push aside works of the

H. Leivick, “Di heiligkeit fun mentschlechn lebn” [The Sanctity of Human Life], in Eseyen un redes [Essays and Lectures], ed. Y. Zilberberg (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1963), 125–26. 6 Ibid., 126. 5


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imagination for works of combat. He revealingly told an interviewer as much: Soy, antes que nada, un escritor, tengo escritos ensayos, novelas, diálogos filosóficos, cuentos. Tengo saudade de mi literatura. . . . Mas el monstruo fascista no murió aún y no llegó el tiempo del descanso! Es el problema de todo escritor, particularmente del escritor sudamericano. . . . Desde que comenzó la guerra me transformé en un soldado de la libertad, combatí en los diarios, con conferencias, las ideas tenebrosas que amenazaban dominar el mundo. No tuve más tiempo de pensar como escritor de imaginación, ni la serenidad necesaria para trocar la pluma de combatiente por la pluma de hombre de letras.7 [ I am before anything else a writer; I’ve written essays, novels, philosophical dialogues, stories. I miss my literature very much. . . . But the fascist monster still hasn’t died, and the time for rest still hasn’t come! It’s the problem of every writer, particularly the South American writer. . . . Since the beginning of the war I’ve become a soldier of liberty; I’ve fought against the sinister ideas that threatened to transform the world in newspapers, through lectures. I no longer had the time to think like a writer of the imagination, nor the peace of mind necessary to trade in my fighter’s pen for a man of letters’.]

On the ever-shifting continuum between journalism and belles-letters, combating or imagining, witnessing (dejar un testimonio) or inventing, Gerchunoff tended to the first options, reflecting from inevitably neglected South America what Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, writing on Holocaust representation, terms “regard for the primacy of the report that was exemplified during the war years by Thomas Mann and other writers who served as broadcasters or journalists devoted to publicizing the little-known facts of the atrocities.”8 Such reportage, argues Ezrahi, paved the way for documentary fiction of the Shoah, which slides a step further along the continuum toward “artistic reconstruction of the actual.”9 7 Sara Jaroslavsky de Lowy, Alberto Gerchunoff: Vida y obra, bibliografía, antología (New York: Hispanic Institute. 1957), 26. 8 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24. 9 Ibid, 48. A vast bibliography exists on Holocaust representation, with Saul Friedländer, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) as a seminal work. For material on Latin America, little covered in general, see Márcio Seligmann-Silva, ”Writing on the Shoah in Brazil,” in Latin American Jewish Cultural Production, ed. David Foster (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 63–82; Aizenberg, Books and Bombs, 127–41. See also, Edna Aizenberg, “Gerchunoff y la representación gráfica de la Shoá,” Hispamérica 38.114 (2009): 75–84.

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It is time that we give Don Alberto credit for confronting the issue of writing not only after Auschwitz, as the usual formulation goes, but during Auschwitz. Although we know that there is always an artistic, fictionalizing, derealizing process at work no matter what a writer or journalist claims, the primacy of the report may explain why, unlike Los gauchos judíos, made out of twenty-six stories, Gerchunoff basted La estrella de David out of double the number of newspaper articles and press releases published in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly in the militantly anti-fascist paper Argentina Libre and in JADLA, the Spanishlanguage news bulletin of the Jewish Agency’s Latin American Department. In the epoch of the lager, reality demanded its due even among the most supposedly ‘unreal’ of authors—Borges, for instance, a topic that I have dealt with elsewhere.10 I want to enter the reality of La estrella de David in more detail by revisioning the categories of territory, language, and ideology that I used previously in my parsing of Los gauchos judíos (see the introduction to Parricide on the Pampa?). First, territory: La estrella de David begins and ends with the matter of territory. The opening article, dated 1938 and entitled “Genios en emigración” (Emigrating Geniuses), revolves around— I quote Gerchunoff—“lo que en nuestro triste tiempo se llama Heimatlos, esto es hombres sin patria” (what in our sad times are called Heimatlos, men without a country). His two homeless intellectual stars are Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig, forced by the Nazis into exile, but whose greatness one day, says the author, will redeem the name of the very fatherlands that threw them out. The book’s final essay, penned a decade later, in 1949, has the title “El libro de Tuvia Kushnir” and celebrates Kushnir, one of the Lamed Hei band of thirty-five fallen heroes of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Kushnir, Gerchunoff explains, “tuvo el honor de caer en Gush Etzion, a donde se dirigió con un grupo de compañeros para socorrer a los que estaban sitiados allí. El nombre de Tuvia los designa, los conmemora, los exalta en el recuerdo del pueblo de Israel y de los judíos de la diáspora” [ had the honor of dying in Gush Etzion, where he went with a group of his comrades to aid those who were besieged there. Tuvia’s name bespeaks them, commemorates them,

10 See Edna Aizenberg, Borges el tejedor del Aleph y otros ensayos (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1997).


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and exalts them in the memory of the people of Israel and Diaspora Jewry]. To open: the figure of the victimized Wandering Jew unhappily updated in the Nazi era. To close: the new, strong, rooted Jew sacrificing for the ancestral homeland, who is to be revered among Diaspora Jews as well. In between the two possibilities: the record of how Don Alberto, as he condemned the increasing horrors of the Shoah, became ever more convinced of the Zionist imperative and the urgency of a Jewish national entity in Palestine. Staring into the face of the Jewish genocide, and by 1943 the Allied promise of judgment for war crimes, he pointedly states in a piece entitled “La postguerra y los judíos” [ The Postwar and the Jews]: “Los polacos y los yugoeslavos reclamarán como naciones; los judíos que no forman una nación . . . no ofrecerán en el vasto litigio la ventaja de una personería juridical definida e incuestionable” [ The Poles and the Yugoslavs will clamor for justice as nations; the Jews who don’t form a nation . . . won’t have the advantage of a clearly defined and uncontested legal status in the massive litigation process]. Gerchunoff names the second half of the book, composed between 1946 and 1949, simply “Israel,” as article after article analyzes the promise of the homeland and the immediate challenges facing a Jewish state, from British foreign minister Ernest Bevin and Great Britain’s obstructionist policies; to the oppositionist, pro-Nazi Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent the war years in Germany as Hitler’s guest; to the UN partition plan that carved out Jewish and Arab states in the lesser part of former British Mandatory Palestine; to the menace of the other Arab states; to the 1947–48 Israel War of Independence and the unceasing anti-Semitism, despite the crematoria and the genocide. When the state of Israel is established on 15 May 1948, Gerchunoff the hardboiled journalist cannot but join hands with the poet, prefacing every paragraph of political commentary in his song-of-an-essay by citing the biblical psalmist: “Cantad a Jehová canción nueva, porque ha hecho maravillas” [Sing a new song unto the Lord, for He has done wonders] (Psalm 98:1). The ancient words of Scripture lead me into my second category, language: Gerchunoff had said very clearly that during the fascist era he no longer had time to think like a writer of the imagination, yet I’ve just given an example of the ‘old Gerchunoff,’ if you will, the one of the biblical diction and the archaic turns of phrase, the one who in the article on the Heimatlos Freud and Zweig describes

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a Nazi as a “dolicocéfalo esencialmente rubio, con entronque en los campañeros de Atila,” which I venture to translate as a “basically blond dolicocephalus [long head] cognate with ‘Attila’s hordes’.” The cranial classification satirizes the Nazis’ racist ‘biology.’ But the news in La estrella de David isn’t that we find poetic diction. The news is that the urgency of the Shoah pushes him to engage more in pointed, direct plainspeaking, to call Nazis, Nazis and extermination, extermination. The matter of language and ‘Holocaust representation’ appears up front here: How much ‘beautification’? How much reality talk? Where to be on the continuum toward ‘artistic reconstruction of the actual’? The piece “Más de 1,000,000 de judíos” (More Than a Million Jews), for example, begins with painful irony shading reporting: El comité británico del Congreso Judío Mundial ha publicado el resumen de sus informaciones sobre la situación de las comunidades israelitas en los países ocupados por los alemanes. Es difícil investigar en los lugares dominados por los nazis lo que éstos hacen con los grupos de población a los cuales distinguen con la preferencia de su hostilidad. Sin embargo, se acaba por conocer sus métodos. [ The British Committee of the World Jewish Congress has published the summary of its information about the situation of the Jewish communities in German-occupied countries. In areas dominated by the Nazis it is difficult to investigate what they do to population groups singled out for their preferential hostility. Nevertheless, their methods have just been made known.]

Likely based on a United Press (UP) cable reprinted internationally, the piece appeared on page one of Argentina Libre on 2 July 1942. In contrast, the New York Times buried an article based on the same UP story on page 7. But my point isn’t the Times, for which I refer my readers to Laurel Leff ’s exhaustive study Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper. Gerchunoff understood that the ‘Final Solution’ demanded that he curb his tendency to highblown rhetoric and Cervantine diction and say what was required up front. The later articles in La estrella de David use this in-your-face language especially from 1942 onward, as Hitler’s genocidal plans became known (and they were known to a great extent), showing us a Gerchunoff we little knew from Los gauchos judíos. My third category, ideology: everything I’ve written is essentially about ideology, ideology of territory, of language, Territorialism (Argentina is fine) vs. Zionism (we need Israel ); fictional discourse vs. factual reportage. In Los gauchos judíos, Don Alberto leaned toward the


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first options, in La estrella de David toward the second; his personal circumstances and the demands of the day were different—no more Centennial ideology of a Land of Peace and Prosperity in a country governed by a pro-Axis military; no more generous flag that redeems the Wandering Jews in an Argentina and a world that shuts its doors to the tortured Israelites. Even Gerchunoff ’s reaching out to Christendom in fraternal love, with his Russo-Jewish immigrants portrayed as latter-day Jesus folk, no longer works: after trying it in the earlier pieces of La estrella de David, he lashes out against Christian civilization for having prepared the ground for the extermination of the Jews. “El crematorio nazi en los cines de Buenos Aires,” published in Argentina Libre in May 1945, is the bitterest of these condemnations: it is non-Jews who have to watch these newsreels of the gas chambers and examine their conscience in the dark silence of the movie theaters, not Jews like Gerchunoff, because, he writes horrendously, “yo vivo siempre en un campo de concentración” [I always live in a concentration camp].11 What we have here, then, is a post-Holocaust work that begins to think through the question of the Shoah as a defining experience of the twentieth century from a perspective that is much closer to us, including the role of ordinary Christians, the inaction of the Western powers, the downplaying of the Jewish genocide, the relation of Jewish statehood to Jewish survival, and the forms in which the disaster can be represented. We also have a post-Holocaust work that accepts a homeland in Zion without compromising the right to be ‘Latin American’ or any other shade of Diaspora Jewish being. Gerchunoff speaks, in Spanish, as an Argentine and as a Jew; it is his unapologetic right. This position is more in synch with where we are today—taking into account inevitable differences—than with where we were at the dawn of the twentieth century. Jewish Latin Americans, authors included, take positions on Israel and on Argentina as Latin Americans; they can praise, but they can criticize; the time of grateful immigrant paeans is past.12

11 Alberto Gerchunoff, “El crematorio nazi en los cines de Buenos Aires,” Argentina Libre, May 24, 1945. On the Nazi period in Argentina, see Ignacio Klich, ed. Sobre nazis y nazismo en la Argentina ( College Park: Hispamérica, 2002). 12 For current attitudes of Jewish Latin American writers, see Amalia Ran, “‘Israel’: An Abstract Concept or Concrete Reality in Recent Judeo-Argentinean Narrative?” in Foster, Latin American Jewish Cultural Production, 24–39.

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Some closing thoughts. First: we need to stop regarding Gerchunoff as a one-book intellectual, frozen on the pampas circa 1910. He matured, evolved, reacted, always aware of complexities, yet always somehow true to a vision of a possible future. Despite all the changes and the falling of rose-colored veils, he constructed La estrella de David, too, as a narrative of liberation, moving upward from crematoria to hallelujah. Second, I believe that we should use this ‘late’ Gerchunoff as a model for twenty-first-century Latin American Jewish studies: What about the Shoah in Latin America? What about Holocaust representation in its writing? What about going beyond ‘belonging anxiety’ in southern ‘homelands’? The rumbling against identity fixation, a seeking out of local-colorist varenikes and bubehs, Ashkenazic ethnic foods and Old World grannies, and also Sephardic smells and aromas, perfumes de Cartago, has grown louder in the research and teaching community. Gerchunoff ’s is an intensely Jewish text without nostalgia. The problems of making available an unpublished work are real, but resolvable. My aim here wasn’t merely to introduce La estrella de David, but also to suggest that we constantly have to reread even the most canonical of our authors. Gerchunoff evolved, why shouldn’t we?

CHAPTER FIVE

HACER LA AMÉRICA: THE DIASPORIC IMAGINATION IN SAED’S TRIPLE CRÓNICA DE UN NOMBRE Joanna L. Mitchell “Diaspora” indicates the dispersal or scattering of a body of people from their traditional home across foreign lands; yet, like the agricultural sowing of seeds from which the word comes to us (from the Greek speirein), it also suggests an anticipation of root-taking and eventual growth. —Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora

A number of new critical works published in the last decade suggest that we are in the midst of a thorough reexamination of Jewish diasporic identity.1 Epitomized by the series Jewish Identities in a Changing World, the broad-reaching project proposes “to update what is meant by Jewish identity or, more precisely, what differentiates Jewish identities around the world.”2 One line of this discussion focuses on the meaning of Israel in global Judaism and the relationship of the Jewish Diaspora with the original homeland. And yet, as the passage from

1 See, e.g., Danny Ben-Moshe and Zohar Segev, Israel, the Diaspora, and Jewish identity (Brighton, England and Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2007); Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, Jews and Their Future: A Conversation on Judaism and Jewish Identities (London and New York: Zed, 2004); James R. Ross, Fragile Branches: Travels through the Jewish Diaspora (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000); Larry Tye, Home Lands: Portrait of the New Jewish Diaspora (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); and the series Jewish Identities in a Changing World, edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yosef Gorny, including the volume Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism: Latin America in the Jewish World, edited by Judit Bokser Liwerant et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008). 2 Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny, and Yaacov Ro’i. introduction to Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny, and Yaacov Ro’I (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 2.

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Nico Israel I quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, diasporic identity is equally characterized by its evolution and permutations in the other nations where Jews have lived. Accordingly, another line of study considers Jewish identities that are oriented toward these other homelands. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein’s influential collection of essays Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans falls into this second category. Lesser and Rein call for Jewish Latin American studies to become part of a new ethnic studies that would be comparative within regional and national contexts. Pointing out that “the relationship between nationaland immigrant-originated ethnic identity is not unique to Jews,” they emphasize the potential rigor and illumination a cross-ethnic studies framework brings to any consideration of the relationship among Jewish Latin Americans, their national identities, and their diasporic imaginary homelands.3 Lesser and Rein’s work reminds us that Jewish identity is molded by language, by generation, by gender, by ethnicity and ancestral homeland, and of course by nationality. Nationality and ethnicity are two aspects of diasporic identity that frame this chapter’s analysis of a recent novel by Jewish Mexican writer Ivonne Saed. Jewish Mexican literature requires its own specific analytical framework as, within Latin America, Jewish communities and their relationships to the larger national body vary. The largest Jewish communities of the region are found in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, countries where, as Judit Bokser Liwerant points out, “mass immigration changed the socio-ethnic profile of the populations [and] multi-ethnic societies were built with a de facto tolerance toward minorities.”4 The story of the small Jewish communities in Mexico is somewhat different. There, the rhetoric of an immigrant nation falls away, replaced by one that celebrates the autochthonous Mexican, who literally arises from the soil (from the Greek root chthon, meaning ‘earth’ ). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, national ideology enthroned a concept of homogenous mestizaje that “helped define who was in charge and in control of the new body politic. 3 Jeffrey Lesser and Ranaan Rein, “New Approaches to Ethnicity and Diaspora in Twentieth Century Latin America,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, ed. Jeffrey Lesser and Ranaan Rein (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 24. 4 Judit Bokser Liwerant. “Latin American Jewish Identities: Past and Present Challenges: The Mexican Case in a Comparative Perspective,” in Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism: Latin America in the Jewish World, ed. Judit Bokser Liwerant, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yossi Gorny, and Ranaan Rein (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 83.

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Mexico was for the mestizos and no one else.”5 Even as Mexican governments sporadically courted foreign immigrants, “[mestizaje] became a central criterion for evaluating the full incorporation of minorities” and a difficult criterion for a foreigner to satisfy, at least in the abstract.6 In the first part of the twentieth century, when the bulk of Jewish immigrants came to Mexico, the country was in the midst of a profoundly nationalistic, not to say xenophobic, phase: “Mexicans experienced great difficulty with the idea of and the possible intrusion of foreigners.”7 Jewish immigrants confronted the additional problems of latent anti-Semitism rooted in Mexico’s Catholic heritage and, in the 1930s, of overt fascist sympathizers. Although actual interactions with their Mexican neighbors were often benign, inconsistent immigration polices of the postrevolutionary governments in the 1920s and 1930s reflected an official ambivalence, at times limiting Jewish immigration on the basis of ‘undesirable’ national origin or ethnoreligious identity.8 Nor was Mexico an obvious (or first) choice for the immigrants from Europe and the Middle East who arrived in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite sporadic attempts by the Mexican government to attract immigration, the economic condition and infrastructure in the country were deemed inadequate by world Jewish organizations. Nor were many immigrants aware of Mexico as an option. The compilers of the photographic essay Imágenes de un encuentro: La presencia judía en México durante la primera mitad del siglo XX (Images of an Encounter: The Jewish Presence in Mexico during the First Half of the Twentieth Century) have demonstrated that Jewish immigrants possessed very limited information about their future country and continent.9 In the words of Liz Hamui Halabe, “América más que una tierra era una quimera” (America more than a country was a chimera).10 Immigration to Mexico, a process called ‘hacer la América’—literally, 5 Adina Cimet, Ashkenazi Jews in Mexico: Ideologies in the Structuring of a Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 18. 6 Bokser Liwerant, “Latin American Jewish Identities,” 83. 7 Cimet, Ashkenazi Jews in Mexico, 11. 8 Ibid., 12–13. 9 Judit Bokser de Liwerant, dir. 1992. Imágenes den encuentro: La presencia judía en México durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Mexico City: UNAM, 98–99. 10 Liz Hamui Halabe, “La tendencia hacia la religiosidad en la Comunidad Maguén David y la Alianza Monte Sinaí en México en los últimos veinte años,” public lecture given at the conference Los judíos sírios y su diáspora en América, Centro Social Monte Sinaí, Mexico City, 11 Sept. 2008. All translations are my own.

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doing or making America—meant imagining that new country and then imagining a space for themselves in it. For the majority of immigrants, for whom economic survival and adjustment to the new land were priorities, molding their new diasporic condition was undertaken unconsciously, but it was not an insignificant effort. Bokser Liwerant suggests that Mexico’s political and social discourse did not facilitate the acculturation process: “[ Mexico’s] original ethnic composition enhanced the conviction that a unified and homogenous society with a homogenous identity was both possible and desirable. . . . Correspondingly, limited integration and autonomy to preserve cultural, religious, and social differences further reflected and reinforced social differences and the well-defined frontiers of Jewish life.”11 In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Jewish communities established many of the social and religious institutions that have characterized their somewhat isolated existence in Mexican society. In his own consideration of diasporic memory, Andreas Huyssen suggests that in countries such as Mexico, where the national imaginary does not embrace immigrant communities’ narratives, the creation of a new diasporic identity may depend on interweaving their story into the larger foundational narratives of the host nation. And so the iconic photographs of Isaac Berliner and Jacobo Glantz found in Imágenes de un encuentro are significant not only because they show the two men engaged in the street vending that so many of the first generation undertook, but because these men, both poets, were instrumental in fostering a sense of a new Jewish space in the unknown land.12 Clearly, the reciprocal process, reimagining their own ethnic past, is equally necessary, along with the fact that the two processes happen simultaneously and interdependently. Esther Peeren describes these diasporic memories as distinct ‘chronotopes’: “Diasporic subjects are interpellated by more than one chronotope simultaneously. Subjected . . . by home chronotope, host chronotope, and the thirdspace chronotope of the journey between these two, it is this double or triple interpellation that produces the hybrid communal identity we call diasporic.”13 Here

Bokser Liwerant, “Latin American Jewish Identities,” 85. Bokser de Liwerant, Imágenes de un encuentro, 123. 13 Esther Peeren, “Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a SpatioTemporal Perspective on Diaspora,” in Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Art and Politics, ed. Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, and Yolande Jansen (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2007), 71. 11 12

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Peeren is borrowing Mikhail Bakhtin’s term ‘chronotope’ to describe “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.”14 Bakhtin proposes that every literary genre has its own chronotope, or conventional expression of the time-space. These literary conventions, for Bakhtin, are based on the social practices of the culture that produces the literature. Diasporic memory creates a home chronotope that is, as Peeren points out, “not only distant; it is also past or passed, left behind in space and time,” preserving a time-space construct of the former home that becomes part of the community’s self-narrative.15 Adapting and extending Bakhtin’s literary model, Peeren theorizes chronotopes as ideological systems that contain and to some degree determine social practices and meanings. Inasmuch as diaspora is experienced as a displaced attachment to a home that is distant in both time and space, the diasporic community negotiates its identity between the preserved home chronotope and that of the surrounding nation. It is in the journey chronotope that bridges the two places that the meaning of being Jewish is reinterpreted. Huyssen and Peeren highlight the role that the collective imagination plays in the integration of immigrant groups into their adopted nations. For Peeren, the home chronotope, or the community’s shared remembrance of their old home, is “continually reproduced between people,” building a community imaginary.16 Huyssen gives special emphasis to the literary imagination as a vehicle for that process. As “diasporic memory in its traditional sense is by definition cut off, hybrid, displaced, split,” its production and reproduction are characterized by narrative creativity that fuses the fractured remembrance. Moreover, he argues that diasporic memory is always “an act of recherche rather than recuperation.” Emphasizing the quest for a past, Huyssen underscores that this process of interpellating the community’s diasporic memory into the host nation’s history requires a creative reinterpretation of that communal memory.17

14 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 15 Peeren, “Through the Lens,” 77 (original emphasis). 16 Ibid., 69. 17 Andreas Huyssen, “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,” in Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Art and Politics, ed. Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, and Yolande Jansen (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2007), 85.

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The latter is at play in Triple crónica de un nombre, the 2003 novel by Ivonne Saed, a Mexican graphic designer and writer of Shami descent. The Shamis are descendents of Damascus’s ancient Jewish community, almost entirely dispersed into diaspora during the twentieth century. In her novel, Saed converts well-known images and indeed fantasies of Middle Eastern culture into the journey chronotope that transports her characters from the condition of foreigners to that of Mexicans. The ultimate repository of Middle Eastern folklore, One Thousand and One Nights, becomes a literary field through which first the immigrants imagine their new country and later their descendents imagine their ancestral lands. The journey motif occurs early in Saed’s novel, indeed on the very first page, with a woman’s dream of flying over Mexico in a plane. The character, a Mexican woman of Shami descent, experiences the journey as a space for creativity and change: Repasarás un libreto en tu computadora portátil y harás correcciones y anotaciones. . . . Al llegar al final, te asomarás por la ventanilla. Construirás en tu mente un escenario y visualizarás en el aire las tomas de una película que aún no existe. Sobre el lecho de algodones bajo tu vista montarás a los personajes con sus alegrías y angustias. . . . Todo el set se tambaleará frente a ti, la alfombra de nubes ondulará peligrosamente. . . . Leerás de nuevo la última parte del libreto y escribirás durante varios minutos para cambiar el final de la historia. . . . Reconstruirás la escena sobre la blancura exterior.18 [You will review a script on your laptop and you will make corrections and take notes. . . . When you get to the ending you will look out the plane window. You will construct a stage in your mind and visualize in the air the shots of a film that doesn’t yet exist. On the cottony bed before your eyes, you will arrange the characters with their joys and anxieties. . . . The whole set wavers before you, the carpet of clouds undulates dangerously. . . . You will read the last part of the script again and you will write for several minutes to change the ending of the story. . . . You will reconstruct the scene over the exterior whiteness.]

In her dream, the protagonist exercises her creative power to construct and change a story. The journey provides her with the opportunity, a blank slate of white clouds on which to cast her imagination, and despite the risks inferred from the wavering set and undulating clouds,

18 Ivonne Saed, Triple crónica de un nombre (Mexico: Editorial Lectorum, 2003), 11–12.

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the woman is content with her endeavor: she smiles. Implicitly, the dream conveys that she has the ability to change not only the script on her laptop but the story of her own life. In the novel, she and her Damascan Jewish ancestors will likewise take advantage of journeys to remake and retell the family’s story. As the family emigrates from Syria to Mexico, the chapters follow the lives of women in each generation: Regina, the mother whose determination not to starve takes her with two young daughters into the unknown; Rebeca, who marries Regina’s youngest son and strives with him to fashion a life for their family as Diaspora Jews; and then Rebeca’s daughter, who confronts the deepest crisis about what it means to be Jewish in Mexico. Her story is further divided into three as she experiences three possible fates determined by the choice of her name: Ferdose, Sofía, or Lorena. These three names represent three reproductive choices that themselves mirror the ability or inability to produce creatively. Thus, in her recounting of the different possible fates for this third-generation Mexican Shami woman, Saed shows each one as more or less capable of telling her own story. Ferdose, recipient of a traditional name, is trapped in a likewise traditional marriage. She remains isolated and misunderstood by her large family and essentially voiceless (her story is the only one told with absolutely no dialogue). Sofía, whose name means ‘end’ in Hebrew, stagnates between her family’s values and her own rebellion and voluntarily has herself sterilized, effectively ending the family’s history. Although she becomes a successful professional photographer, her capacity for expression is limited by her frustration with her own nonconformity. Lorena, endowed with the most modern and least Jewish name, moves from photography to filmmaking and in both mediums is the narrator of the images of her own life. She is the character best able to imagine a future for herself and her family and, not incidentally, to reimagine their collective past. The model that assists Lorena and her relatives in telling their story comes from their Middle Eastern past, with hints of their Hispanic future. The family’s richly illustrated Spanish translation of One Thousand and One Nights serves as the first symbol of their collective history, so much so that its fantastic tales become part of the family stock of stories. The Great Book (“Gran Libro”) is their good-luck charm, received as a gift from a soldier whose life the family patriarch saved in Constantinople. Although the soldier is never identified, he presumably speaks Spanish, establishing the family’s first link with their future

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home, Mexico. The book’s guiding role in imagining that future lies in its being “una especie de magneto . . . hacía otro mundo, hacía una vida distinta” [a kind of magnet . . . toward another world, toward a different life].19 Rafael, the first to migrate from Damascus to Mexico, takes the unwieldy volume among his scanty baggage at the insistence of his mother. As in the airplane dream, his journey provides him with an opportunity to reimagine his life, which he does with the aid of the Great Book. When he finally beholds the landmark that tells him he is about to reach America, the white tower of a fortress guarding the port, he opens the book’s pages, looking for a memory of his old home and a key to the language of his new one: “Recordaba la despedida mientras sus ojos se inundaban de la blancura del castillo. . . . Se sentó en el piso de la cubierta, de espaldas al mar y, con América en enfrente, se puso a hojear nuevamente el enorme amuleto encuadernado en piel” [He recalled his leave-taking as his eyes flooded with the whiteness of the castle. . . . He sat down on the deck, with his back to the sea, and with America before him, began once again to page through the enormous, leather-bound amulet].20 Imitating the white clouds the earlier character had viewed from the airplane window, the transitional moment of the journey presents Rafael with a blank slate, in the form of the tower’s white walls, on which to cast his imagination. His resource for filling that blankness is One Thousand and One Nights. The book’s brightly illustrated and illuminated pages enlighten his lonely existence in a strange land, and presumably aided by the cultural familiarity of the stories, Rafael learns Spanish and passes this linguistic skill on to his relatives when they follow him. Providing an introduction to Spanish and Mexico is not the book’s only role. For later generations of the family, the book serves as their only image of the land of their forebears, a two-way looking glass of national and ethnic identity formation. Januslike, the book is a door between two worlds, something indicated by its origin in Constantinople, the gateway between Europe and Asia, where the Spanishspeaking soldier and Rafael’s father met. One Thousand and One Nights has long served as a lens through which the West sees the East. One of the best-known works of Arabic literature, it introduced the ‘Orient’ through exotic, erotic, and romantic tales and remains even today the

19 20

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 41.

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source for popular images of “Syria of Araby and the great Levant.”21 Ulrich Marzolph goes so far as to claim that “no other single work of Oriental literature (besides the Bible) has had such a long-lasting and deep impact on world culture,” especially on European and Middle Eastern relations.22 As a result the book is tightly woven into the discourse of Orientalism that Edward Said critiqued. However, as Ignacio López-Calvo argues, a Latin American perspective on the Middle East originates not from the same Orientalist position of colonial power, but from a parallel history of colonization and marginalization. The reception of Middle Eastern texts in Latin America frequently places the emphasis on “transculturation, hybridity, liminalty, double consciousness, and cultural identity.”23 This is even truer when we speak of Latin Americans of Middle Eastern origin. For the descendants of Syrian Jews in Mexico, One Thousand and One Nights is not necessarily an exotic foreign text, but part of their own cultural patrimony.24 Its multicultural, plurivocal, folkloric origin, incorporating Hindu, Persian, Arabic, Greek, and Jewish source tales, authored by many over the centuries, promises to facilitate the Arab-Jewish-Mexican condition of the characters in Triple crónica de un nombre. Translation and transculturation are defining characteristics of One Thousand and One Nights, both in its origins as a folkloric text and in its influential translations into European and Asian languages. In Saed’s novel, the direction of the cultural interchange is reversed, and the book introduces the Damascus family to “lugares aún no vislumbrados o sospechados . . . en el Nuevo Mundo, en América, en el lugar del gran mito del bienestar y la fortuna” [places never seen nor imagined . . . in the New World, in America, in the place of the great myth of wellbeing and fortune].25 Here, the New World is Mexico, as unknown

21 Robert Irwin, quoting the intellectual historian Paul Hazard in his preface to The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Pespectives from East and West, ed. Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), vii. 22 Ulrich Marzolph, “The Arabian Nights in Comparative Folk Narrative Research,” in Yamanaka and Nishio, Arabian Nights and Orientalism, 3. 23 Ignacio Lopez-Calvo, ed., Alternative Orientalism in Latin American and Beyond (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), ix. 24 Indeed, some of the most substantial textual sources of the first European translations of One Thousand and One Nights, in French by Galland, seem to have come from Syria (Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, London: Allen Lane, 1994, 46). However, as I will discuss below, the text’s cultural plurality is a greater asset in the family’s acculturation in México. 25 Saed, Triple crónica de un nombre, 30.

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and mysterious to Rafael and his family as the mythical Araby was to European readers of the first translations of One Thousand and One Nights. As Western readers have long done, the family projects their expectations, fallacies, and hopes onto the pages of One Thousand and One Nights. Although Triple crónica features scenes of family members reading from the book, these have less impact than their other interactions with the volume. A little girl in Syria, too young to know what words are (much less words in a Latin alphabet), tries to grasp its illuminated letters in her hand. An old mother presents it to her son as a talisman when he emigrates, knowing she will never see him again. A woman crazed by her nonconformity, torn between Jewish and Mexican cultural expectations, rips its pages out and tries to write the names that represent her Jewish and Mexican selves into its stories. One of the thousand and one stories becomes a family folktale, retold by Mexican-born Rebeca, who freely remakes it into a family parable where each of her three daughters becomes a character. Thus, returning the book’s text to its oral origin, the family opens it up to further cultural hybridization. Although the book’s tale comes to be firmly woven into the family’s own story, to the point of standing in for the family (“significaba una clara identidad con su familia”), it provides only an insubstantial, fantastical image of Syria, and after first drawing the family to Mexico, One Thousand and One Nights provides no strong link back to their land of origin.26 The second and third generations of the family identify their story less and less with Damascus and more and more with Mexico City, with enchiladas every Saturday and walks in Chapultepec Park. The first ones to attempt this acculturation, with mixed success, are the first ones born in Mexico. The youngest nephew of the original immigrant, also named Rafael, and his wife, Rebeca, suffer from un deseo ambiguo de transformación: por una parte deseaban romper las jerarquías que ellos tanto habían sufrido con sus respectivas familias y por otra parte pretendían que las niñas continuaran aferradas a las zonas de la tradición que ellos dos consideraban pertinentes. Una de éstas, quizás la más importante, era la cuestión del judaísmo. Tanto Rafael como Rebeca trataban de inculcarles su ideal del ser judío moderno en la diáspora, a pesar de las dificultades que se podrían plantearse con el tiempo. Ellos apostaban por una vida coherente con el lugar donde

26

Ibid., 141.

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les había tocado nacer, sin tener que sacrificar por ello sus creencias y tradiciones.27 [an ambiguous desire for transformation: on the one hand they wanted to break the hierarchies that had caused them to suffer so much with their respective families, and on the other hand they intended that the girls would remain attached to the areas of the tradition that the two of them considered pertinent. One of these, perhaps the most important, was the question of Judaism. Rafael and Rebecca both tried to inculcate in them their ideal of the modern Diaspora Jew, despite the difficulties that could arise with time. They were gambling on living a life in sync with the place they had happened to be born, without sacrificing their beliefs and traditions on account of it.]

The novel doesn’t suggest that Rafael and Rebeca have a clear idea of what a “modern Diaspora Jew” is, or which traditions are pertinent, or that they can foresee the difficulties that will arise. Rather they cobble together a working compromise where the only fixed family reunion on Saturdays is not at the synagogue, but at a local restaurant for a weekly, undoubtedly non-kosher breakfast. Their ad hoc negotiation of modern Jewish Mexican identity leaves them without a common understanding of where its limits lie. It is only when their daughters transgress those traditions that the parents decide that the border must become brutally clear; on one occasion they mourn an errant daughter as if she is dead. While Rafael and Rebeca at times regret raising their girls with more freedom than their generation was accustomed to, the daughters themselves struggle against the perception that they are destined to continue the family and the family traditions. Although Rafael and Rebeca’s dilemma was experienced by other Jews of their generation, Shami and otherwise, in many countries, Saed articulates the question of acculturation through a trope that seems drawn directly from One Thousand and One Nights, the attenuation of what we might call the family curse. Regina starts the curse in Damascus, when, in an attempt to end her line of daughters, she names the second one ‘Sofía,’ hoping that the syllable sof, or ‘end’ in Hebrew, will end the female births and lead to male offspring. Her action, while reinforcing patriarchal misogyny, breaks with the Shami tradition described in the novel of naming children after their ancestors. Subsequently, she indeed bears sons in the new country, but her daughter and every other Sofía in the family die without 27

Ibid., 142 (original emphasis).

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offspring. Saed suggests a turning point in the acculturation process when Rebeca not only rejoices in the birth of her third daughter but refuses to name her for an ancestor now dead and buried in Syria, instead opting for the non-Jewish name ‘Lorena.’ Lorena will distance herself the most from the traditional path, entering an unusual threeway relationship with her best friend and her friend’s husband, with whom she has a son. Conscious of her grandmother Regina’s and her mother Rebeca’s life choices, Lorena speculates, “Si me llamara Ferdose, ¿algo de esto estaría sucediendo?” [If I were called Ferdose, would this be happening?]28 As a final blow to tradition, Lorena chooses to name her son Mauricio, “en honor de nadie en particular. Lo llamamos así sin ningún especial significado, sin querer predestinarlo nada” [in honor of no one in particular. We called him that without any special meaning, not wanting to predestine him for anything].29 Lorena’s success in breaking Regina’s ‘curse’ depends on her ability to manipulate the family talisman, the One Thousand and One Nights, and all of the family history. For her and her sisters, born in Mexico with only faint memories of their immigrant grandparents and great-uncle Rafael, the tales of ‘Arabia’ become fairy tales. The book offers them a chance to “ingresar en un mundo de la fantasía” [enter a world of fantasy], not the world of their forbearers, characterized by deprivation, insecurity, and especially repression, epitomized by their grandmother Regina’s bitter self-hatred.30 Increasingly, the family members in Triple crónica become authors of their own destiny, and the ‘Great Book’ loses its place as the family’s main text. As characters take on creative professions (photography, filmmaking), it is displaced by an album of photographs and documents that recounts the history of their immigration and existence in Mexico across three generations. Lorena initiates the new book after an accidental visit to the government’s immigration archives while on a trip to Veracruz, an act that starts her on her way to a renewed appreciation of her family’s history, now that she can subject it to her creative direction. Upon reading “en los grandes libros de registro los nombres de toda la gente que conocía . . . desde mi infancia” [in the great registration books the names of all the people I had known . . . since my childhood], she realizes that this is the story

28 29 30

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 130.

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that she had once rejected as “sin importancia” [unimportant] to her Mexican life.31 Lorena’s awestruck fascination before the ‘great books’ in Veracruz closes the circle between her and her great-aunt, who as a little girl played with the family copy of One Thousand and One Nights in Damascus. It is not, however, a closed circle. Where that little girl could only attempt to grasp the letters of the story in her hand, Lorena can photograph, edit, and order the new story. Moreover, since Lorena herself has little time to dedicate to the book, she does not try to make it only her own. Taking up the multiauthored nature of the first Great Book, the family becomes the plural author of the new book: “Todos hemos seguido alimentando ese archivo con imágenes de todo tipo: fotos, invitaciones, boletos de avión, diplomas” [We’ve all continued feeding that archive with all kinds of images: photos, invitations, plane tickets, diplomas].32 Although the resulting archive ends up as “un desordén casi total” [nearly complete chaos], like the labyrinthine interpolated stories of its antecedent, it provides the family with a coherence that Lorena’s parents had not been able to provide. The book that represents the lost past and the album that represents the continuing present hold the family together: “Ese acervo fotográfico y el libro del tío Rafael son nuestros dos objetos más respetados por unanimidad” [ That photographic patrimony and Uncle Rafael’s book are our two most respected objects, unanimously].33 Created by Lorena, as the most Mexicanized of the third generation, the family album becomes a new way of imagining their path in Mexico. Having served as a diasporic chronotope, One Thousand and One Nights assumes a lesser role once the family’s acculturation is Mexican society is solidified. As an unlikely representation of the familial history (Regina’s life in Damascus and Rafael’s immigrant adventures in Mexico in no way resemble the folktales), its fantastical stories preserve a magical, exotic past that, with the passing generations, is displaced by an interest in a new imaginary, the family’s photographic archive. The latter volume nonetheless shows the influence of the former in its near chaos of intersecting stories and its multiple authorship. Their journey complete, the family can transfer their identity from one chronotope to another, one of their own making and completely Mexican. By starting

31 32 33

Ibid., 163. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 164.

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the new book out in the archives of Veracruz, historically México’s most important port, Saed interpellates her Shami story directly into the national imaginary. As narrators of one possible Mexican history, her Jewish characters remake their Latin American identity, haciendo América in a new image.

CHAPTER SIX

JUDAISM, SEXUALITY, AND THE NATION IN FRANCISCO GOLDMAN’S THE DIVINE HUSBAND Ariana Vigil Set in mid-nineteenth-century Guatemala, Francisco Goldman’s 2004 novel The Divine Husband introduces important issues of sexuality and reproduction alongside considerations of immigration, nationalism, and liberal politics. The novel purports to tell the story behind the year that José Martí spent in Guatemala and behind the love affair that inspired Martí’s Verso Sencillo IX—“La niña de Guatemala.”1 Between 1878 and 1879 Martí lived in Guatemala City, where, among other things, he taught composition classes at the academia de niñas de centroámerica. One of his students was the daughter of the ex-president of Guatemala, Maria García Granados, who had an unrequited crush on Martí and, if you believe that she is ‘la niña de Guatemala,’ died of heartbreak. Despite the role that Martí and his poem played in Goldman’s inspiration for the novel, Martí “does not emerge as the central figure” of The Divine Husband.2 Instead, Goldman uses this historical background and adds to it, making the fictional character of María de las Nieves Moran also Martí’s pupil and telling the story of Martí, Granados, and another historical figure—Francisca ‘Paquita’ Aparicio—through their interactions with Moran. To these fictional and historical figures Goldman adds a host of other characters—including several suitors of Moran; her eventual husband, Mack Chinchilla; and half a dozen minor characters, many of whom are Jewish. In using fictional characters to tell the life stories of historical figures and vice versa, The Divine Husband challenges the boundary between history and literature, while exhibiting a commitment to telling the stories of those

See José Martí, Versos sencillos, trans. and intro. Manuel A. Tellecha (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997). 2 Caleb Bach, “Francisco Goldman: Writing Astride Two Worlds,” Américas 57, no. 4 (2006): 18–19. 1

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most often overlooked by history—women, immigrants, working-class subjects, and ethnic and racial minorities. The following essay explores how the relationship between Jewish characters and issues of familial and national reproduction present a unique perspective on Jewish sexuality, heteronormativity, and national and transnational identity. As I will illustrate, male Jewish characters support the strengthening of heterosexist ideas and institutions (male sexual privilege and marriage, respectively) while themselves never fully participating in or reaping the benefits of these institutions. This simultaneous convergence and divergence is linked to Jewish characters’ relationship to the Guatemalan nation-state. That is, the novel links the consolidation of political power in the nation with the consolidation of sexual power in marriage and scripts Jewish male characters in such a way that they support these consolidations yet never fully participate in them. As such, The Divine Husband presents a uniquely nineteenth-century perspective on the ways in which Jewish male identity moves between insider and outsider status in relation to the nation-state. While this perspective reflects anti-Semitic characterizations of Jewish people as insidiously, intangibly ‘different,’ Goldman’s decidedly transnational text also challenges traditional notions of citizenship and belonging to suggest that those individuals who live outside recognized political and geographic boundaries have nonetheless significantly impacted national and transnational developments. Sexuality, Ethnicity, and the Nation: Don José In introducing issues of sexuality and ethnicity alongside important moments in the formation of the nation-state, The Divine Husband speaks to how gender and sexual politics are interwoven with issues of nationalism. National groups construct themselves in relation to the other and, “despite the national discourse of internal unity,” stratify the national ‘us’ along lines of gender and sexuality.3 Pointing to the sexual and gender politics behind Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community,’ Adi Kuntsman writes, “Nations are often imagined and constituted through normative femininities and

3 Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London: Routledge, 2006).

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masculinities, positioning heterosexuality at their core.”4 Indeed, ethnic or racial difference is often expressed via sexual difference or ‘abnormality.’ Discourses of sexuality thus serve “racial, ethnic, and nationalist agendas of various sorts,” including “reproducing the nation or ethnic group.”5 The promotion and institutionalization of normative heterosexual behavior and desire via social, religious, and political structures enforce not only sexual but also ethnic, racial, and national boundaries. In a similar vein, Doris Sommer explains how Latin American national novels, or “foundational fictions,” used heterosexual unions to create a cohesive national body during important moments of political independence and consolidation in the nineteenth century. Foundational fictions are sentimental and romantic nineteenth-century Latin American texts that utilize both “local history” and “literary pride” alongside a heterosexual union to reflect the independent, unified, nation.6 These works utilize marriage, reproduction, and miscegenation to incorporate male soldiers into the nation-state, while setting the stage for women and indigenous people to become productive citizensubjects.7 The ways in which Jewish characters in The Divine Husband are linked to issues of sexuality and reproduction, then, must be evaluated in light of these historical and current considerations. In Goldman’s novel, the characters of Don José and the Nahón brothers interact closely and consistently with patriarchal sexual and familial traditions and the liberal state. The nature of these interactions suggests that Jewish characters develop alongside, yet distinctly outside, the developing Guatemalan nation. In Don José’s relationship to expanding male sexual privilege and the Nahóns’ quest for a male heir, the characters embody the changing norms and desires of the state, pointing to the intertwining of heterosexism and nationalism. However, the characters’ failure to pass on their fortune to male heirs and their eventual migration outside of Guatemala sever their ties to the nation-state and the nuclear family, opening up the possibility for

4 Adi Kuntsman, 2008. “Between Gulags and Pride Parades: Sexuality, Nation, and Haunted Speech Acts,” GLQ. 14, nos. 2–3 (2008): 264. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2003). 5 Joane Nagel, “Ethnicity and Sexuality,” Annual Review of Sociology, no. 26 (2006): 118. 6 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4. 7 Ibid., 23.

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the expression of Jewish life and identity via alternative familial and (trans)national structures. Readers are introduced to Don José Przypz, the “Polish-EnglishHebrew immigrant from Manchester,” and his umbrella-cum-condom shop in a way that situates Don José and his products alongside the growing power of President Justo Rufino Barrios. Barrios, who replaces Granados as president of Guatemala shortly after the novel opens, was a liberal reformer; a rabid anti-cleric (he ordered the closing of the convents in order to marry his child-bride, Paquita); and, in Goldman’s words, “incredibly corrupt and murderous.”8 “The contemporary Guatemalan state,” Goldman tells us, “is the fruit of Justo Rufino’s brutality.”9 Staying true to its focus on those less remembered by history, the novel uses Barrios and his government as a backdrop to introduce a changing social and political climate that would significantly alter the lives of its characters. The narrator explains how Barrios’s liberal government impacted the everyday practices, specifically sexual practices, of Guatemala City’s residents: “With the Liberal Revolution had come an extraordinary brothel boom, but also, among progressive and scientific types, an unprecedented enthusiasm for public hygiene.”10 In this context, Don José introduces a new product, rubber condoms, which have an easily recognizable place within the new liberal republic—they simultaneously support the extramarital sexual exploits of men and the growing interest in public health. With only a small amount of advertising, the salesman establishes himself as a purveyor of goods now in high demand in Guatemala City: “Mounting the display in his shop window for one day only, he succeeded in attracting enough of a clientele to not ever, he was sure, need to advertise again. By day he plied his respectable trade and by night sold his condom sheaths to those who knocked at the door of his darkened shop between the hours of ten and midnight only.”11 Don José’s condoms are linked not only to a more liberal political and social climate but also to expanding male sexual privilege. The clientele that Don José attracts is exclusively male, and the condoms are marketed specifically to men. Moreover, the condoms are marketed

8 9 10

135. 11

Quoted in Bach, “Francisco Goldman,” 19. Quoted in ibid., 19. Franciso Goldman, The Divine Husband (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004), Ibid., 135.


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to married men so that they may avoid bringing home diseases to their wives. Alongside the rubber condoms, a sign reads: “Protect yourself and your wife. You may grow old and weak before she does, and upon whose gratitude and mercy shall you depend then.”12 In their marketing as a tool to increase male sexual freedom, Don José’s condoms allow men to move outside the sexual bounds of marriage without challenging the place and function of women or the institution of marriage. Wives are still expected to sleep with their husbands, as well as to care for their spouses later in life; moreover, the choice to use protection is granted entirely to men. Paradoxically, women are cared for only so that they may continue to care for their male spouses. Through Don José and his products, the novel establishes a parallel relationship between liberal politics and male heterosexual power, painting the nation-state as soundly patriarchal and heterosexist. Despite Don José’s facilitation of the growing power of the state and heterosexuality, he does not fully participate in the institutions of either marriage or citizenship. When he left Manchester he left behind a wife who “deceived him” and a son he never sees again; in the “new world” his Jewish heritage continues to mark him as an outsider in Guatemalan society. He tells Chinchilla that Guatemala City “is . . . the best city I’ve found in which to be a Jew” but then adds, “at least a nonworshipping one, Mack, because since our great Liberal Revolution, everybody is equally welcome here, and everybody despises everyone else equally.”13 While Don José claims that he prefers Guatemala City to Europe, he does so in a way that suggests that in Guatemala everyone is equally rejected, rather than equally accepted. Moreover, he fails to integrate fully into either the Guatemalan nation or the heterosexual family; his plans to reunite with his son are never fulfilled, and he eventually migrates, along with Chinchilla and Moran, to the United States. Thus, Pryzypz is linked to the consolidation of national and sexual power in the hands of men, but his status as a religious minority prevents him from fully participating in either the nation or marriage. Don José’s apparent insider/outsider status vis-à-vis the Guatemalan state reflects centuries-old concerns about Jewish identity and citizenship. In the U.S. context, Daniel Itzkovitz explains that “Jewish

12 13

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 135.

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male identity was represented as both a disruption and a limit in the anxious construction of [ U.S.] notions of nationality, class, whiteness, masculinity, and culture.”14 The possibility that Jews could ‘pass’ as white contributed to this anxiety, making the Jewish male “American, but foreign; white but racially other, consuming but nonproductive.” Moreover, the apparent ability to cross the color line between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ meant that “the more ‘the same’ the Jew was, the more there was to fear.”15 Finally, the ability to ‘pass’ threatened to “[explode] the category of race itself” since the ability to distinguish racial difference rests on the ability to ‘see’ race.16 When Don José displays the condoms in his shop window for a few hours only, his character flirts with these issues of visibility and invisibility. The necessity of attracting business for perpetuity with only a few hours of advertising reflects the hypervisibility of ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual ‘others.’ When Don José himself is never shown using his own products or entering into any heterosexual unions, his character speaks to the insider/outsider status of the racialized immigrant—in which immigrant labor and ingenuity contribute to the growth of a nation while that labor remains invisible and the laborers never fully reap the benefits of their own work. Don José’s relationship to heterosexuality is also important in light of ideas about Jewish male sexuality and the link between Jews and another social group whose members can ‘pass’—homosexuals. As discussed earlier, sexual regulation often stands in for the regulation of ethnic and racial boundaries. For example, the description of Jews as ‘sexual degenerates’ uses nonnormative sexuality to denote racial or ethnic difference.17 Don José’s links to normative male sexuality may be a rebuttal to such anti-Semitic depictions, even while his failure to engage in sexual relationships gestures toward his continual ‘outsider’ status. Once again, issues of passing and visibility/invisibility play an important role, for just as fears about the inability to decisively recognize Jewish difference contributes to white racial anxiety, the inability to ‘see’ sexual difference contributes to heterosexual anxiety.

14 Daniel Itzkovitz, “Secret Temples,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 178. 15 Goldman, Divine Husband, 178. 16 Ibid., 184. 17 Nagel, “Ethnicity and Sexuality,” 119.


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As Linda Schlossburg explains, “The ways in which Jews and homosexuals . . . share the dubious honor of being largely invisible or unreadable . . . leads, in the cultural imagination, to paranoid fantasies of stealth queers taking over higher education, or powerful Jews secretly controlling the federal government.”18 Don José’s connection to, and yet exclusion from, heterosexual marriage and the visibility and simultaneous invisibility of his condoms illustrate the connection between sexual and ethnic identity and the extent to which such identities rely on the ability to ‘see’ difference. By placing his character outside of both the Guatemalan state and marriage, Goldman requires that readers recognize Don José’s otherness. At the same time, the narrative never stigmatizes or pathologizes Don José’s identity, nor does it present the false choice between complete assimilation and perpetual alterity. Don José remains outside the institutions of marriage and nation in both Guatemala and the United States, thus refusing to paint the United States as the site of progressive hybridity and racial mixing while still pointing to the possibilities of alternative familial and national communities. As I will discuss later, the novel’s description of Don José’s relationship with the Moran-Chinchilla family and his contribution to a significant legacy in the United States suggest that a third path exists between assimilation and ostracism. Patriarchy, Patrilinearity, and the Nation: The Nahón Brothers Like Don José, the three Nahón brothers are also Jewish immigrants, and like the umbrella salesman, their characters are linked to, but not fully immersed in, the politics of nationality and heterosexuality. The Nahón brothers—Moisés, León, and Fortunato—emigrate from Morocco and establish a small business in Cuyopilín, Guatemala. In their time in Guatemala, the brothers do not marry, but rather father numerous children with indigenous women in the area. While their fortune remains modest, the brothers dream of a prosperous future for their heirs. However, they determine that the large number of

18 Linda Schlossburg, “Introduction: Rites of Passing,” in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossburg (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 2.

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illegitimate children and the unavailability of a local mohel would make choosing an heir from among their existing children too difficult. In his characteristic storytelling style, Salomón Nahón explains to Mack Chinchilla the problem his father/uncles faced in designating an heir: “All my little half brothercitos and half sistercitas? Choose one to be Salomón Nahón from so many? And circumscribe where, how? With machete? Jaja. Pues, you see this problems, Mack.” Moreover, the brothers’ business is not prosperous enough to support three heirs: “Even if all three of the brothers were to marry and each produced a legitimate heir, there would not be nearly enough money to buy three coffee fincas.”19 The brothers decide to together produce one male heir; the youngest brother, Fortunato, returns to North Africa to find a wife and a year later returns with Estercita. According to the brothers’ arrangement, the older two Nahóns “would never marry, but would continue to seek satisfaction and comfort from the local women in their accustomed manner.”20 Estercita soon gives birth to Salomón (who is circumcised in Mexico City), but shortly after she gives birth to a second child, a girl, both she and the baby girl die. The Nahón brothers’ quest for a male heir for their business suggests the fusion of patriarchy, capitalism, and the nation, here literally reproduced through patrilinearity. At the same time, the brothers’ decision to collectively produce “one prodigal young Nahón, who would inherit all three brothers’ life savings,” denotes a distinctly nonheteronormative family structure.21 Moreover, the untimely deaths of both Estercita and later Salomón disrupt the fusion of reproduction and marriage. Years after they became friends in New York, Mack decides to take Salomón up on his offer that they go into business together in Cuyopilín, but when he arrives in the remote town of Salomón’s birth, Mack is informed by Salomón’s fathers that the young man has been mysteriously murdered. Dispassionately, Fortunato describes how he found his son’s body: “They had found him in the morning just over there . . . his cleanly severed head resting inside this helmet. . . . Well, you know how it sometimes goes here, Señor Mack. If it isn’t fever it’s bandits, or some jealous son of a whore. Perhaps we will never know. Perhaps, someday, we will.”22 Although the narrator tells us that it 19 20 21 22

Goldman, Divine Husband, 147. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 164.


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is Fortunato, Salomón’s biological father, who is speaking to Mack, the use of the plural pronoun ‘they’ reiterates that all three Nahón brothers are in fact Salomón’s fathers. Just as all three of the brothers witnessed Salomón’s birth, all three ‘found him’ after his death. In the composition of their family—three fathers, one son—the brothers challenge patriarchal and patrilineal norms while also supporting male privilege, particularly in terms of property. The brothers don’t object to having an heir of mixed indigenous-Jewish blood; rather, they claim this option is impractical for other, albeit circumspect reasons (too many heirs to choose from and no mohel ). Also, by collectively raising one heir, the brothers appear to give up individualistic claims of fatherhood. Still, the solution that they come up with completely conforms to notions of male primogeniture—they want to produce an heir, and a female child will not do. Perhaps like Don José’s condoms, then, the Nahón brothers’ atypical approach to producing an heir reflects a stretching of the boundaries of the marriage union, although only in the service of the continued strength and existence of male privilege within this union. While Don José’s status as outsider to the nation/family rests on his status as a racialized, religious minority and immigrant, the North African Nahóns introduce a slightly different racial context. As North African immigrants, the Nahóns likely cannot ‘pass’ in the way that Don José can. In addition, their origins in North Africa suggest that they are a part of a Jewish and Muslim Diaspora that has its roots in Spain’s 1492 expulsion of the Jews and the Moors. Here Goldman introduces a Spanish racial and religious hierarchy that, from his own experiences, still exists. In a thoughtful discussion of his racial, linguistic, and national identity, Goldman discusses the racial profiling he experienced in Spain in the mid-1980s. His essay “Moro like Me” recounts the author’s experience of constantly being asked if he is moro, or North African, over a six-month period spent in Spain. While he often responded, “No tengo nada de moro,” he admits to readers that this, “strictly speaking, probably isn’t even true.”23 To these uncomfortable experiences, Goldman adds another one, involving a high school acquaintance who, after seeing the author described

23 Francisco Goldman, “Moro like Me,” in Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural, ed. and intro. Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 52.

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as ‘Guatemalan American’ in a newspaper, faxed the newspaper to say that she remembered Goldman from high school as “a Jewish kid.”24 Goldman understands the woman’s need to ‘correct’ the newspaper as stemming from her inability to believe that one can be Guatemalan and Jewish. However, while he asserts that “I am not going to spend my writing career justifying to Americans how you can be half-Jewish and latinoamericano, too,” his experiences with his recognizably Jewish last name and misrecognizably moro face also lead him to acknowledge that “like a last name, your facial features, what you look like, precede you through the world in another way.”25 Here, then, Goldman acknowledges that some Jews, like himself and possibly the Nahón brothers, cannot pass. The fact that the Nahón family meets a decidedly more tragic fate than that of Don José points to hierarchies within immigrant communities and speaks to the uneven experiences of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. While the brothers promote patrilinearity, their attempt to pass on their business fails. Salomón, the appointed heir of his father and two uncles, dies suddenly and tragically in Guatemala, murdered by unknown assassins. The possibility of a Jewish Guatemalan identity is then removed from the narrative. However, as I will discuss below, the existence of Jewish and Guatemalan identity lives on via the Nahóns’ illegitimate children, one of whom moves to New York and marries Moran’s daughter, Mathilde. Sexuality, Citizenship, and Immigration While the previous sections looked at the relationships among Jewish male identity, heteronormative sexuality, reproduction, and the nation-state, this section will consider how immigration alters or solidifies these relationships. All of the novel’s principal characters, and all of its Jewish characters, are immigrants, and many undertake multiple acts of migration throughout the course of the narrative. Paquita and her children move to New York after the death of Barrios, followed by María and her daughter, Mathilde. In New York, María reunites with Chinchilla, and the two eventually marry. Don José and several

24 25

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 62, 63.


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of the Nahón brothers’ children from Cuyopilín also move to the United States, and one of the latter marries into the Moran-Chinchilla family. These moves rupture the relationship between Jewish identity and the Guatemalan nation; by the novel’s end all of the named Jewish characters are living in the United States. This migration renders Jewish characters as divorced from a specific national context, while opening up possibilities for a more fluid, transnational representation of Jewish identity. The end of the novel takes place in the United States, where the novel’s principal historical and fictional characters—María, Martí, Don José—have moved. María and Mack have found a prosperous familial and entrepreneurial legacy via a rubber plant and a large extended family. In The Divine Husband, Goldman’s hometown of Needham, Massachusetts, becomes Wagnum, and the Tillotson Rubber Factory, located near his childhood home, becomes the Cody Rubber Factory, run jointly by María, Mack, and Don José.26 The three continue Don José’s earlier work with rubber, eventually creating rubber balloons that are displayed at the World’s Fair. Members of the Nahón family also make their way to the United States, and one of the half-Indian sons of the brothers, Max Nahón, marries María’s daughter, Mathilde. The characters live on via landmarks in Wagnum, the narrator tells us, mentioning how the street on which his house is located runs into Pryzpyz Circle. He recalls “smoking marijuana and gazing out over Moran Pond” during high school.27 While the narrative’s end in the United States suggests a progressive movement from South to North, in which the United States becomes a site of racial mixing and ‘success,’ I would like to suggest that the complex portrayal of issues of nationality, sexuality, immigration, and reproduction urges readers to continue to focus on these issues in a more nuanced manner. Specifically, if normative heterosexuality is linked to ideas of ethnic, racial, religious, and national purity, then the reverse may also be true—nonnormative and queer families and relationships play a role in the construction of transnational communities and identities. It is, after all, an illegitimate half-Indian, half-North African Jewish son who marries into the Moran family, a family that is itself marked by nonnormative unions (Moran’s children are not

26 27

Bach, “Francisco Goldman,” 18. Goldman, Divine Husband, 455.

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fathered by her eventual husband, Chinchilla, nor are the fathers’ names ever revealed throughout the narrative). Thus, while Don José and the Nahón brothers suggest that ethnic and religious minorities cannot fully integrate into normative social and political institutions (marriage, the state), these figures do have a place within alternative familial and (trans)national structures. Similarly, the novel’s ostensible focus—the year José Martí spent in Guatemala—subtly references the relationship between the transnational and the national and the complex relationship between ethnicity and national belonging. Martí is known for both his role in the struggle for Cuban independence and his articulation of a pan-American identity, painting him as a profoundly national and transnational figure. For Cuban Jews, Martí represented a ‘paragon of cubanidad ’ and a link to their patria. Caroline Bettinger-López explains: “The interest Martí, a non-Jew, expressed in Jewish culture and the Hebrew language brought him even closer to the island’s Jews, who found numerous avenues through which they could relate to this ‘Cuban Apostle.’”28 One of the avenues through which Cuban Jews related to Martí was via the latter’s “acceptance of and support for religious, racial and ethnic diversity.”29 In using Martí’s life as a backdrop for a fictional story in which Jewish characters play a prominent role, The Divine Husband recuperates Jewish history in Latin America and Martí’s own engagement with Jewish communities in a way that further complicates national identities and histories. Conclusion The relationship among sexuality, ethnicity, and national identity illustrated through Don José and the Nahón family points to the ways in which sexuality and ethnicity are implicated in national political projects. While these characters point to the impossibility of racial and ethnic minorities ever fully becoming part of the national landscape, the novel does not paint these characters as being without a community. Rather, The Divine Husband points to the existence of flourishing

28 Caroline Bettinger-López, Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home and History in Miami (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), xxxiii. 29 Ibid., xxxiii.


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nonnormative sexual and national unions. In fact, the Nahón and Moran-Chinchilla families and Don José present an alternative perspective on citizenship, suggesting that citizenship is based not on membership in a state, but rather membership in a community.30 For religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, as well as for subjects whose citizenship has historically been denied or challenged, this formulation of citizenship has the ability to open up new relationships between and across national and transnational boundaries. The Divine Husband requires that readers pay attention to those figures most excluded from history and to consider the impact that immigrants, and specifically Jewish immigrants, have had on the Western hemisphere. When introducing the Nahón brothers, the narrator tells readers that the blood of the descendants of conversos is “ubiquitous in our hemispheric DNA—much more so . . . than Washington, or Franklin, or Jefferson, or anyone like that.”31 When the narrator references specifically North American historical figures to make a point about the place of Jewish descent in the Western hemisphere, he not only suggests that the nation-state is marked by the presence of racial and religious minorities, but he also poses a challenge to accepted geopolitical boundaries, painting the Western hemisphere in its entirety as marked by Jewish immigrants. At the same time, the privileging of male historical figures in this quote parallels the privileging of the stories of Jewish men in the novel. This stark absence of female Jewish characters draws attention to the lack of such women in the history of the Americas and reinforces two of the central concerns of the novel— the relationship between narrative and history and the importance of listening for those voices that have been excluded. If the stories of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson are not sufficient to tell the story of the Western hemisphere, neither are the stories of Don José and the Nahón brothers. In a conversation between María de las Nieves Moran and Don José, the young woman tells her friend that Martí had spoken of the power of the words of ‘Hebrew mystics’: “He told us that the Hebrew mystics have a belief that he likes very much, and that is that the power of the spoken word is such that it can awaken sleeping hearts and souls and allow you to converse with God.”32 Later, Moran Nira Yuval-Davis, “Women, Citizenship, and Difference,” Feminist Review, no. 57 (1997), 5. 31 Goldman, Divine Husband, 146. 32 Ibid., 208. 30

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helps write a passionate argument against limiting Jewish immigration to Guatemala; her report ends “with a paragraph devoted to the virtues of the Hebrew Heroines of the Old Testament, the purity of Sara, the beauty of Rebecca, the sweet piety of Esther, the humility of Raquel.”33 These last moments then, may remind us not only of the importance of words but also of the importance of bringing to light the stories that may be missing from literary and historical discourse.

33

Ibid., 315.

PART THREE

JEWISH AND LO LATINOAMERICANO IN THE ARTS

CHAPTER SEVEN

BORGES AND THE KABBALAH: PRE-TEXTS TO A TEXT Saúl Sosnowski Todas las cosas son palabras del Idioma en que Alguien o Algo, noche y día Escribe esa infinita algarabía Que es la historia del mundo. (. . .) Borges, “Una brújula”1

I. A Navigational Chart An iconic picture of Borges (1899–1986) shows him kneeling down on the floor looking for a book. Shot by Sara Facio in 1968 at the Biblioteca Nacional [“National Library”]—and simply and sufficiently titled “Borges”—it is at the most basic, ‘portrait of a man looking for a book.’ By focusing on the intensity of his face and imagining the searching hands hidden from view by three rows of books, we also understand it as an allusion to the heresiarcas, who spent their lives seeking access to the secrets of the library that is the world and to the unfathomable being that launched it all. Once readers penetrate beyond the initial semblance of order that defines Borges’s universe; when readers, moreover, also engage sources anchored in Jewish tradition and mysticism, a system begins to orbit both worlds and a dialogue across speculative inquiries is inevitably forged. The earliest scholarly entry that links Borges and the Kabbalah can be found in a special issue of L’Herne dedicated to Borges. In “Fascination de la Kabbale,” Rabí briefly noted the shared motifs of the labyrinth, the Golem, and of God’s Ineffable Name.2 Several years later,

“Una brújula,” in El otro, el mismo [1964], Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé editores, 1974), 875. Unless otherwise noted, all Borges quotes refer to this edition marked OC. 2 Rabí, “Fascination de la Kabbale,” special issue, L’Herne, (1964): 265–71. 1

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Jaime Alazraki elaborated on these motifs and added, among others, direct references to Kabbalistic terms and their presence in Borges’ texts.3 Since then a number of publications have addressed how Jewish motifs in general, and Kabbalistic motifs in particular, appear in Borges’ works.4 Over the years, some well- (or evil )-intentioned readers speculated about his Jewish origins—a pointless inquiry to which he responded, tirelessly, about a possible remote connection through his mother’s Acevedo branch. His articles and pronouncements during World War II against Nazi atrocities, numerous references to Jews and Judaism, as well as poems dedicated to Spinoza and in 1967 to Israel, led some to believe that perhaps there was, after all, some closer connection than his more than justified interest in esoteric doctrines and theology—a godly matter that he considered a branch of fantastic literature. The Kabbalah—Borges said in his lecture on “La Cábala”—is “a sort of a metaphor of thought.” Had that been the sum total of Kabbalah, it would have sufficed for Borges. Referring to the “extraña ciencia” [“odd science”] that the Kabbalists began to apply in the south of France, northern Spain (Cataluña), moved on to other countries and then everywhere, he summarized the basic idea as follows: “el Pentateuco, la Torá, es un libro sagrado. Una inteligencia infinita ha condescendido a la tarea humana de redactar un libro. El Espíritu Santo ha condescendido a la literatura, lo cual es tan increíble como suponer que Dios condescendió a ser hombre. Pero aquí condescendió de modo más íntimo: el Espíritu Santo condescendió a la literatura y escribió un libro. En ese libro, nada puede ser casual. En toda escritura humana hay algo casual.” [“The Pentateuch, the Torah, is a sacred book. An infinite intelligence has condescended to the human task of writing a book. The Holy Spirit has condescended to literature,

Jaime Alazraki, “Borges and the Kabbalah,” TriQuarterly, no. 25 (1972): 240–67. Alazraki continued to elaborate on this connection in later texts. Cf. Borges and the Kabbalah: And Other Essays on his Fiction and Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4 A sample, in chronological order, includes among others, my own “Borges y la Cábala: La búsqueda del Verbo,” Nuevos Aires [ Buenos Aires], no. 8 (1972): 37–47; “ ‘The God’s Script’: A Kabbalistic Quest,” Modern Fiction Studies 19, no. 3, (1973): 381– 94; “El verbo cabalístico en la obra de Borges,” Hispamérica 3, no. 9 (1975): 35–54; and Borges y la Cábala: la búsqueda del Verbo (Buenos Aires: Hispamérica, 1976), rev. ed, (Buenos Aires: Pardés, 1986). Also, Edna Aizenberg, El tejedor del Aleph: Biblia, Cábala y Judaísmo (Madrid: Altalkena, 1986) and the recent Lyslei Nascimento’s book, Borges e outros rabinos (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2009). 3

borges and the kabbalah: pre-texts to a text

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Figure 1: La Biblioteca Infinita/The Infinite Library. Mirta Kupferminc, digital print-impresión digital, 70 × 100 cms. 2008. Image from the exhibition Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access, with Saúl Sosnowski. Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2008.

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which is as puzzling as assuming that God condescended to be human. But in this case in a more intimate way: The Holy Spirit condescended to literature and wrote a book. In this book nothing is accidental. In any human writing there is something accidental”].5 While it may not be appropriate to analyze an oral statement in the context of a general lecture with the same rigor Borges himself would have expected of a written text, it is noteworthy that he repeated time and again “condescender.” It implies a grant bestowed on man and, at the same time, a will to dialog. Furthermore, it constitutes a challenge to decipher a text in which nothing is casual, a map with hidden signs that only the chosen few will be able to recognize. Borges acknowledged that the Kabbalists’s modus operandi went against his mindset, for their assumption of the appearance and significance of letters goes counter the Western historical understanding of their development from sound to graph. After explaining the meaning of the word (reception, tradition), he adds that the Kabbalah “supone que las letras son anteriores; que las letras fueron los instrumentos de Dios, no las palabras significadas por las letras. Es como si se pensara que la escritura, contra toda experiencia, fue anterior a la dicción de las palabras. En tal caso, nada es casual en la Escritura: todo tiene que ser determinado” [“assumes that the letters preexisted creation; that the letters were God’s tools, and not the words signified by their letters. It is as if writing itself, against all experience, would have preceded the diction of words. In that case, nothing is accidental in Scripture: everything has to be determined”] (130). He then proceeds to list some of the Kabbalists’s exercises and, in an apparent aside that marks his own distance from allegiance to a theological tenet and his firm adscription to “literature,” he indicates “Se llega así, mediante esa criptografía, mediante ese trabajo que recuerda el del Escarabajo de oro de Poe, a la Doctrina” [“Thus, by means of this cryptography, by this exercise that reminds us of Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug,’ the Doctrine is reached”] (131). The dialogue, Borges’s own response to the challenge posed by an alternate view of the origin of language, centers on the very notion of the absolute, a notion that is absent from anything human and, certainly, from any literary endeavor: “No hay textos absolutos; en todo caso los textos humanos no lo son. En la prosa se atiende más al

5 Jorge Luis Borges, Siete noches (México: FCE, 1980), 128–29. All references are to this edition.


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sentido de las palabras; en el verso, al sonido. En un texto redactado por una inteligencia infinita, en un texto redactado por el Espíritu Santo, ¿cómo suponer un desfallecimiento, una grieta? Todo tiene que ser fatal. De esa fatalidad los cabalistas dedujeron su sistema” [“There are no absolute texts; at any rate, human texts are not absolute. In prose, more attention is given to the meaning of words; in verse, to sound. However, in a text written by an infinite intelligence, in a text written by the Holy Spirit, how would it be possible to assume a flawed weakness, a fault? Everything has to be definitive. From this, the Kabbalists deduced their system”] (131). In this lecture Borges navigates a path that allows him to absorb into his own rational system God’s will to engage by condescending to articulate a language accessible to man. Moreover, far from disparaging the esoteric, and while incorporating the Gnostics’s and later in his presentation adding Max Brod, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Basílides, and literary references to Shaw, Wells and Goethe, he states: “No se trata de una pieza de museo de la historia de la filosofía; creo que este sistema tiene una aplicación: puede servirnos para pensar, para tratar de comprender el universo” [“This is not a museum piece from the history of philosophy; I believe that this system has an application: it can help us think in order to try to understand the universe”] (133). Towards the end, after mentioning Gershom Scholem, the Sefer Yetsirah and the Zohar, Borges seems to conclude: “En cada uno de nosotros hay una partícula de divinidad. Este mundo, evidentemente, no puede ser obra de un Dios todopoderoso y justo. Tal es la enseñanza que nos deja la cábala, más allá de ser una curiosidad que estudian historiadores o gramáticos” [“In each one of us there is a divine particle. Evidently, this world cannot be the work of an almighty and just God. This is a lesson drawn from the Kabbala, beyond being a mere curiosity studied by historians or grammarians”] (139). A couple of additional observations are in order by linking these last citations, for they serve to understand further Borges’s own literary a-systemic system, as well as his nexus to the Kabbalah and to some of its most evident notions and esoteric practices. First, Borges’s emphasis on the rational, precisely when we know that the Kabbalists take off from that very platform to launch into their mystical forays. Such a stand follows the literary comfort one may find in the rationally knowable. When in “La escritura del dios” Tzinacán, “mago de la pirámide de Qaholom, que Pedro de Alvarado incendió” [“sorcerer of the pyramid of Qaholom, which Pedro de Alvarado burned down”]

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gains access to the writing, he sheds all other modes of knowledge— including the magic that defined his previous practice—to proclaim: “¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o sentir!” [“Oh, joy of understanding, greater than the joy of imagining or feeling!”].6 It is again, as always, reason and understanding that rule his days. Second, beyond the joy that reason (partial and inadequate as it may be) brings to a puzzling universe, the lesson that Borges draws from the Kabbalah has both a Divine and human quality. At once he seeks to absolve God from the burdens of an imperfect and unjust world, and to make the world´s inhabitants accountable for, after all, they do possess a divine particle. It is a partnership of sorts that brings Borges closer than he may have imagined to the Jewish notion of man’s responsibility to the universe and to its Creator. As the other six lectures in the series (“La Divina Comedia,” “La pesadilla,” “Las mil y una noches,” “El Budismo,” “La poesía” and “La ceguera”), the one on Kabbalah, delivered at the Teatro Coliseo (Buenos Aires) on July 26, 1977, built on motifs recognized as integral to Borges’s cartography. Much earlier, for instance, in “A Vindication of the Kabbalah,” pondering how Judaism views the God-given Torah, he wrote: “A book impenetrable by contingency, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of revelations that lie in wait, of superimposed lights . . . How could one not interrogate it to the level of the absurd, to numerical excess, as the Kabbalah has done?”7 In this case, to vindicate means to justify and defend a belief, a process, and a way of being. In a similar vein, Borges also wrote and included in Discusión (1932) two other vindications (“Una vindicación del falso Basílides” and “Vindicación de ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’ ”) that deflect from any exclusive focus on Jewish mysticism. As always, the emphasis is placed on understanding a text—an effort that in itself reverts back to the relation text-reader that was one of Borges’s transformative contributions to the literary act. As I have tried to show, whenever we approach the space where “Borges” and “Kabbalah” are joined, it is imperative to underscore fundamental differences between a literary quest and the way of life and goals sought by Kabbalists in their numerous iterations. It is

6 “La escritura del dios,” OC, 599. The pyramid´s name, “Qaholom,” bears a striking proximity to “ ‘olam” which in Hebrew means ‘world’ or ‘universe.’ 7 “Una vindicación de la Cábala,” in Discusión [1932], OC, 212.


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Figure 2: La Escritura del Dios/The God’s Script. Mirta Kupferminc, aguafuerte, aguatinta- etching, 40 × 60 cms. 2004. Image from Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word, with Saúl Sosnowski. This image hides in its shape, the words “El Secreto”.

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equally mandatory to accept the distance that separates faith and theology from literature and art, the Kabbalists from those who indulge in exercises to mark the passage of time. Then and only then, when cognizant of the difference, human imagination may feel empowered to reveal alternate views of the world, and make inroads into history’s sobering chronicles—chronicles that include tracing the origins of the various schools, belief systems and practices, that are carelessly lumped together under the single rubric of “Kabbalah.”8 At that point, and as with all approaches to art and literature, armed with their irreverent heterodoxy, readers and other explorers will begin to question, probe, provoke, see through falsehood, reveal truths, and point to open paths and future options that, in the end, may or may not be less atrocious (or less festive) than those we fear or await. Or simply proceed with strands of literary merriment. The differing attitudes and approaches are as radical as those that separate the mystic who walks a path mined with life and death decisions and the risk of plunging into insanity’s depths, from the writer who revels in the pleasure he draws from playing (simply or not) with similar motifs. To speak of “Kabbalah” is to enter the sacred space of Jewish mysticism, rooted and codified in principles and age-old practices; it is to launch from and to arrive at the Text, the Torah: the origin and blueprint of the universe, a nation’s chronicle and guide, the key to a people’s history and the hidden secret that holds within its innermost chambers every version of every possible future. When set in a historical context, in the shifting geographies of Jewish history, does the Kabbalah not also provide a unique way to respond to ceaseless persecutions by creating, through its intricate explorations, a space where hope and freedom may finally reign? Does the Kabbalah not intimate an exodus from oppression towards the realm of the Divine? An exit

Cf. among his many major contributions on specific aspects of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem’s classic books, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [1941] (New York: Schocken, 1961); On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism [1960] (New York: Schocken, 1969); Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition [1960] (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965); The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971). See also Moshe Idel’s brilliant Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); and, given many of Borges’s own questions on Christianity, Idel’s particularly challenging and enlightening Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (New York: Continuum, 2007). 8


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from ghetto alleys—whether in Gerona or Safed or elsewhere—to the heights were the Word’s origins and galaxies come together to search for a desired end? Borges knew and practiced in literature, and in his reenactment of monumental or seemingly casual historical events, what for Kabbalists (and for other believers) is a guiding principle: nothing just is and nothing is by chance; nothing is or can be deemed to be only fortuitous. It is a matter of discipline or a core belief that it is so, even when what we face is a literary artifice, even when all that is left is to recognize and acquiesce to the limits of our inevitably all too human imagination. In addition to the texts already mentioned, a number of Borges’s short stories, essays and poems have explicit references to the Kabbalah, to the Zohar and Sefer Yetsirah, or allude centrally or in passing to Kabbalah-Jewish related motifs. Among them: “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” “Del culto de los libros,” “El espejo de los enigmas,” “Historia de los ecos de un nombre,” “La biblioteca de Babel,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “La busca de Averroes,” “El aleph,” “La luna,” “El golem,” “Ajedrez,” “El milagro secreto,” “La muerte y la brújula,” “Rafael Cansinos-Asséns,” “Spinoza,” and several poems dedicated to Israel. This list, incomplete as it is, purposefully mixes genres and ignores their publication sequence, for Borges’s incorporation of such motifs was both sustained and sporadic in books published since the 1930s, to which we should add a number of texts published in Sur. This does not mean that their frequency is higher than his transit through labyrinths, mirrors, or other motifs codified as ‘Borgesian;’ it does reflect, though, on a commonality of interests, on a dialogue that surges from the desire (playful or otherwise) to invoke with the drive and strength that passion exerts, to name with precision that which is and should be. II. Beyond Chartered Waters, Another Reading . . . To recognize, identify, and weave; to name and to draw; to represent and present; to build and to say and to arrive at the core of what strives to come forth: this sequence somehow reenacts part of what (perhaps imprecisely) describes a “creative act.” It does reflect, at any rate, some of the steps that led from the 1976 publication of my Borges y la Cábala: la búsqueda del Verbo to the work Mirta Kupferminc and I produced

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Figure 3: Página del libro Borges y la Cábala: Senderos del Verbo/Page from the book Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word. Mirta Kupferminc, etching, 40 × 60 (open) cms. 2006. Page from the book with Saúl Sosnowski.


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over a four-year period beginning in 2002. Since we decided to work together, time has responded to what we now recognize as integral to the forces unleashed at the crossroads of art and literature; to what, for lack of rational or other reasonable explanations, we attribute to chance. What continues to be at play are those forces that day in and day out affect our weaving of the tapestry of knowledge, the enrichment that is still to come from viewers-readers-participants willing to accept and engage in what we offer with a semblance of order. As Borges’s “Una oración” also stated: “Desconocemos los designios del universo, pero sabemos que razonar con lucidez y obrar con justicia es ayudar a esos designios, que no nos serán revelados.” [“The universe’s purposes are unknown to us, but we know that to reason with clarity and act justly aid such plans, which won’t be revealed to us”].9 In the course of our collaboration, dialogue became a “trialogue” when quotes from Borges, from Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources prompted our own search for some organizational principle. A chronological approach following Borges’ works was readily discarded; the bookends became the creation of the universe and access to privileged knowledge as told in the Talmudic story of the four who entered “PaRDeS”—an acronym (P’shat, Remez, D’rash, Sod ) for the pursuit of knowledge and the requirements to advance and reach the highest level of meaning. On the literary side of the argument, the interpretative layers that cut across the text remain subject to the reader’s ability, training, and readiness. In art, as for the believer also in faith, one sees and obtains inasmuch as the inner sight provides. From the onset of the learning enterprise, then, a warning and a challenge for those daring to recognize and transgress limits, each according to his/her ability and willingness to go one step beyond. Facing it all, signs that weave together knowledge and hope, paths of light that glide along the limits imposed on man’s design: limits that are an alibi that almost prevents being, being someone else, a something-someone closer to the infinite Everything;10 the Everything that indicates the access to nothing, to the No-one who remains unreachable by man, by bodies with a stamped skin, a navel, an expiration date. And yet: it is impossible to accept that the obvious and revealed suffice. Beyond the apparent, the clear and polished surface of P’shat

9 10

“Una oración,” Elogio de la sombra, OC, 1014. Mandatory reference: “De Alguien a Nadie,” Otras inquisiciones [1952], OC, 737–39.

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(the literal ), lies the key that grants access to other ways. Then the time is right to thrust into the text’s intimacy: to strive cautiously for access through folds and crevices, and read the lines, be read by them, reach past them. To invoke and intone the prescribed love song that interprets every word, every name and every verse. To go across the treasure chambers that beckon our gaze and still push ahead, move forward, inward to the innermost, to the next sphere, right through to an upheaval where sanity, faith, and life are on the line. And then, nothing remains evident: P´shat-D’rash-Remez become one in the simultaneous joy of understanding and feeling upon reaching the Sod: the most intimate, hidden Secret that may (or may not) shed barely a Spark of the Emanations that come from and lead to Ein Sof: to the endless infinite, to the prime Majesty that now (perhaps) will acquiesce to a dialogue, to an encounter, to joy, to a partial reading of the grammar of the universe; to weaving love as letters feel colors and the hue of pleasure, and triumphantly show themselves in the cosmic scheme of our shared universe. III. Designed to Order The book that Mirta Kupferminc and I produced is titled Borges y la Cábala: senderos del Verbo/Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word.11 The hand crafted and boxed edition is not just a book, though it is also a book. To define it, or even to describe it as an “object” is correct, accurate and precise; but it does not account for what it is, can be, and will be, as other readers/viewers accept the challenges it poses and craft their own paths across images and texts. To date, it generated a number of presentations and two major exhibits. While anchored in the same roots and having the book itself as the core, the exhibits were essentially different. Held a couple of years apart, the first took place at the Centro Cultural Recoleta 11 The colophon records the following: “Borges y la Cábala: Senderos del Verbo/Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to The Word: Images by Mirta Kupferminc, Texts by Saúl Sosnowski, Quotes from Jorge Luis Borges and from Kabbalistic Sources.“ This edition is limited to 25 copies printed on Archés 300 gram paper, and numbered in both Arabic numerals and Hebrew letters. The number of copies corresponds to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the period, comma, and the space between letters—an interstice that may hold other languages and innumerable options. “The 29 prints were created by Mirta Kupferminc and printed in her studio. The texts were composed and printed by Rubén Lapolla under Samuel César Palui’s supervision.”


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Figure 4: Después del Golem/After the Golem. Mirta Kupferminc, digital print-impresión digital, 70 × 100 cms. 2008. Image from the exhibition Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access, with Saúl Sosnowski. Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2008.

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(Buenos Aires) and the second at the University of Maryland’s Art Gallery (College Park). In addition to showing select pages and images of the glass-encased book, we offered prints, texts, installations, lights, and a video for visitors to enter a world of appearances, of truths, and of veiled secrets. A labyrinth is usually a system designed to confuse and lose the daring in its midst;12 in the exhibits it had an order (of several sequences) that was both complete and open to multiple options and interpretations. Borges through literature and the Kabbalah through its sanctified multiplicity of subjects and objectives lead us to paths of never ending journeys. Upon entering this universe, visitors were invited to be open, to query every meaning and every feeling, to play, to bet and risk it all; to accept that “this,” what we know and live, cannot be all there is; that beyond our waking hours other versions of the real lurk about and incite us to search, to grasp what must be perceived, assimilated and named (forever and again) one more time. Every presentation and variation on the theme led us to revisit ‘a book that isn’t just a book.’13 To us, it continues to come across as a perpetual pilgrimage, an insatiable search. Therein, sounds and letters and voices are thrown about in search of a spatial design . . . Images and words will a dialogue to begin, and an encounter to occur. Respect for the word and for the art of interpretation set the tone. The ability to affirm, to record, and to engrave without breaking down, begins to filter through. And it all comes together as either slowly, or in a whirlwind, we get closer and closer to what will be cast open at every turn of every page. This “experience” is about having learned to read and decipher, to see and feel texture and the text’s hidden patterns; it means to understand and enjoy (finally) beyond the ready-made levels of comprehension and pleasure, the intimacy of every letter, of every shape, of every line that slides down the skin to find its home. It is to discover it right here: in a shared space of paper and ink.

“Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos,” El Aleph [1949], OC, 607. This is once again the case as we prepare a third exhibit. It will open August 2011 at the Centro da Cultura Judaica, São Paulo, Brazil. 12 13


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Figure 5: Hechos de Barro/Made of Mud. Mirta Kupferminc, digital printimpresión digital, 55 × 45 cms. 2008. Image from the exhibition Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access, with Saúl Sosnowski. Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2008.

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Art and physics may at times come together in an attempt to capture energy, to bring forth that which awaits and may coalesce to define an artist’s craft. Attention to minutiae and to the infinite; a godlike desire to capture at once all that is precious, for nothing exists without a purpose nor outside the realm of the possible. The voice from Sinai and the screams from airtight chambers and bloodied streets; childhood games and severe justice; the defining signature of some figures and access to the still unknown… Everything that is Mirta Kupferminc’s art alludes to a creative whirlwind, to unlimited possibilities. Stemming, perhaps, from a childlike (but knowing) fascination with life, her prints, objects and installations, each in their own way, gallantly enter our innermost spaces to tweak a complacent gaze, to search out the intimacy of feeling, and challenge the preeminence of reason. As with the most provocative expressions of art, we enter her world cognizant of risks. Appreciation, admiration, and the puzzled look at how is it possible do not begin to define that experience. In time, we learn that since gaining access to that dimension we have acquired a new and different way to ponder knowledge and history and to celebrate (or at times bemoan) humanity’s imprint on this scarred earth.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MUSIC OF THE UNDERDOG: SOCIOLOGICAL AND MUSICAL SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MUZIKA MIZRAHIT AND SALSA Moshe Morad During my fieldwork among undocumented labor migrants from Latin America in Tel-Aviv in 2002, I discovered that muzika mizrahit (or simply mizrahit), Israeli ‘oriental’ pop music identified with Sephardic Jews who migrated to Israel from Arab countries, for many years considered inferior to ‘Western’ Israeli pop and rock, was the Latinos’ favorite local genre.1 In parties I went to, attended by Latino labor migrants, the dominant salsa music soundtrack was peppered with muzika mizrahit. I was also surprised to find mizrahit in the private cassette/CD collections of many of the Latino migrants I met. Perhaps the most obvious explanation for this phenomenon is exposure. The area most Latino migrants inhabited and socialized in, the streets around the old central bus station in Tel-Aviv, have been the home of muzika mizrahit since the early 1970s, sold in pirate cassette stalls and therefore nicknamed ‘bus station music’ or ‘cassette music.’ Those cassette (now CD) stalls still play loud recorded mizrahit to attract customers, making it the dominant sound in the cacophonous soundscape of the old central bus station area. One of my main fieldwork locations, a Latino migrants’ bar called Cantina Andina, was located just opposite such a mizrahit stall, and the sounds of salsa from the cantina were many times overshadowed by the competing mizrahit. Another opportunity for exposure to mizrahit comes in the workplaces of many of the Latinos, including construction sites, where mizrahit is played on the radios and sound systems carried by Israeli and Arab coworkers.

1 My research was published in Polyvocia SOAS Journal of Graduate Research 1 (2005): http://www.soas.ac.uk/research/rsp/rss/journalofgraduateresearch/editon1/file 58316.pdf.

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However, regular exposure to the music is not the only explanation for Latino enthusiasm. Many of the Latinos I met and interviewed, who were also exposed to other local musical genres through the media or local friends, still preferred mizrahit. In a small survey I carried out in 2002, I played different popular Israeli genres (pop, disco, electronic/trance, guitar rock, folk, mizrahit, and Arabic music) to thirty Latino labor migrants and asked them to indicate their favorite genre. Twenty-three out of thirty (or 76 percent) chose mizrahit.2 This prompted my decision to identify musical and sociological similarities between salsa and muzika mizrahit, the two favorite musical genres of my research group. Looking into sociological, anthropological, aesthetic, stylistic, narrative, and structural aspects typical of both genres, I found many common factors that may explain the parallel patterns of development and evolution in distinct cultures and locales and the fact that one marginalized community has developed an attraction to the music of another marginalized community that has a different cultural background but a similar social one. The results of this examination will be divided into two parts: a social/anthropological comparison and a musical/stylistic comparison. The two are connected and interrelated, and music will spill into the social/anthropological investigation and vice-versa. I also examine three ‘scenes’: salsa in the United States, muzika mizrahit in Israel, and the ‘microcosmic’ scene that prompted this research—undocumented Latino labor migrants in Israel, among whom both genres are enjoyed and ‘promote social integration.’3 2 Out of the two ‘oriental’ musical genres included in the survey, Arabic music (maqam) and muzika mizrahit, mizrahit, combining Western and Eastern musical elements and a ‘diluted’ Arabic music influence (‘Arabic lite’) was chosen as the favorite genre, described as ‘fun’ and ‘accessible,’ rather than the ‘hard-core’ Arabic maqam music, which was described by most of the participants as ‘too hard’ and ‘too strange.’ 3 In Israel the presence of labor migrants, among them Latino labor migrants, became notable during the early 1990s, when the government began recruiting foreign workers to replace the Palestinian workers who were stopped from coming into the country after the first intifada (Palestinian uprising, 1987–93). Some Latino migrants started coming in legally as part of this operation, soon joined by many undocumented migrants entering the country as tourists/pilgrims and illegally overstaying after their visas had expired. Their social activity evolves around football, religion, and salsa. See Adriana Kemp, Rebecca Raijman, Julia Resnik, and Silvina Schammah-Gesser, “ ‘Making It’ in Israel? Non-Jewish Latino Undocumented Migrant Workers in the Holy Land,” Estudios Interdisciplinarions de America Latina y el Caribe 11, no. 2 (2000): 113–36; David V. Bartram,” Foreign Workers in Israel: History and Theory,” in International Migration Review 32/2 (1998) :303–25; Zeev Rozenhak, “The Political

music of the underdog

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Sociological Similarities Background: Marginalization, Rich Heritage, Social Uprising The evolution of salsa in the United States and of muzika mizrahit in Israel followed a similar social pattern. Both were historically identified with minority migrant groups, both developed in similar social backgrounds where they provided badly needed cultural identity spaces, and both later were embraced and absorbed by the ‘mainstream’ pop scene of the hegemonic society. Furthermore, both genres became signifiers of newly created ‘pan-identities’ in more or less the same time frame, following the late-1960s global counterculture ‘revolution’ and the evolution of new social and human rights movements and ideologies empowering the ‘underdog’ (people of color, minority ethnicities, women, gays, students, etc.). Both salsa and muzika mizrahit emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s among migrant communities in working-class neighborhoods of large urban centers: salsa among Latino immigrants in the barrios of New York and muzika mizrahit among Jewish immigrants from the Muslim world (collectively called mizrahi’im, or ‘orientals’) in the southern shchunot (neighborhoods) of Tel-Aviv, especially Shchunat Hatikva (the Hope Quarter), then considered the poorest part of the city, mostly occupied by Yemenite Jews. Both immigrant groups suffered from marginalization, humiliation, and discrimination, and the musical genres they created, imbibed from their rich cultural heritages, evolved as part of cultural resistance to the tendency of acculturation and assimilation in the hegemonic (‘white’/European) culture, but at the same time provided a ‘way into’ it and an interface for acceptance.

Dynamics of the Israeli Labor Market: Israeli Palestinians, Palestinians from the Palestinian Authority, and Wage Earners from Foreign Countries.” Workshop on wage earners from foreign countries, Tel Aviv, 8 May 1998, sponsored by Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Israeli Institute for Economic and Social Research; Yitzhak Schnell, “‫יפו‬-‫ עובדים זרים בדרום תל אביב‬Ovdim Zarim Bi’Drom Tel Aviv-Yafo” [ Foreign Workers in South Tel-Aviv-Jaffa]. Jerusalem: Florsheimer Institute for Policy Research (in Hebrew); Adi Azov, social worker at Mesilah, the Center for Assistance and Advise to the Foreign Community in Tel-Aviv, personal interview with the author, Aug. 2002 (in Hebrew); Yehiel Mahdon, director of the South Division, Social and Welfare Services Department, Tel Aviv Municipality, personal interview with the author, Aug. 2002 (in Hebrew).

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Salsa emerged during a period when Latinos in the United States “were inspired by the civil-rights and black-power movements, and by the very economic progress they had recently made, which at once empowered them and heightened their sense of ongoing discrimination.”4 Peter Manuel describes this new kind of social consciousness in the barrios, where “Latinos on a mass scale came to reject the Anglocentric assimilationism which had led so many to feel ashamed of their language and culture,” and the evolution of salsa in this context: “The new social consciousness called for a new musical movement, which could at once embrace Puerto Rican tradition and capture the spirit of the barrio in all its alienated energy and heightened sense of self-awareness.”5 A similar process took place in Israel during the same time period. As in the United States, assimilationism (the ‘melting pot’ ideology) was the cultural, social, and political policy of Israel, and the model was European. This led ‘oriental’ Jews, like Latinos, to “feel ashamed of their language and culture.”6 As for the music, the emergence of muzika mizrahit in Israel was part of the social ‘uprising’ of ‘oriental’ Israelis ‘lifting up their heads,’ politically, socially, and culturally. By changing only two words, Manuel’s words quoted above could just as well apply to muzika mizrahit: “The new social consciousness called for a new musical movement, which could at once embrace [oriental] tradition and capture the spirit of the [schunot] in all its alienated energy and heightened sense of self-awareness.”7 It is interesting to note that both genres were initially nourished by and associated with two corresponding specialized record labels, headed by pairs of local ‘neighborhood’ guys, the ‘bad boys’ of the established music industry, which dominated the markets of the respective genres for a few years, before the music started crossing over and diffusing into the mainstream. In the case of salsa, the legendary Fania Records was founded in New York City in 1964 by the Dominican-born musician Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, an Italian American lawyer. In the case of mizrahit, ‘Ha’achim Re’uveni’ (the Reuveni Brothers), a local independent label, was founded in Tel-Aviv in the mid-1960s and dominated the mizrahit market for many years. 4 Peter Manuel, “The Soul Of The Barrio: 30 Years Of Salsa”, NACLA Report on the Americas. 28/2 (1994), 22. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Ibid., 22. 7 Ibid., 22.


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Music as ‘Shelter’ During my fieldwork among undocumented Latino labor migrants, I noticed that one of the first instinctive reactions to news about a police raid or a friend who had been deported was to turn on the cassette or CD player and listen to salsa music. Does music have the power to help overcome fear and perhaps even provide a false sense of security? Twenty-five out of thirty undocumented Latino labor migrants I spoke with said that listening and dancing to salsa helped them ‘psychologically’ overcome the fear of deportation, strengthened them, and helped them feel more secure and less threatened. Luís Fernandez, a Cuban-born salsa percussionist living in Harlem since 1965, describes a similar ‘scene’ there in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Many Latinos were harassed by the police, searched for drugs, crime and other things sometimes just out of racism. They knew they better get off the backs of the blacks (which will be considered ‘real’ black/white racism), so harassing Latinos was the thing. We had these clubs where we started playing and listening to salsa, and it was like an ‘escape,’ a ‘shelter’ from the streets and from the discrimination outside. A place where we also feel the safe shelter of a community. In the streets each one was for his own, fighting for survival, sometimes involving some illegal things, but in the bars, clubs and fiestas we were together, a community, connected by the music.8

Likewise, muzika mizrahit in its early years was associated with a sense of ‘security’ and combating fear. Ahuva Carmeli, a fifty-eight-year-old resident of Kerem Ha’teimanim (the Yemenites’ quarter) in Tel-Aviv, told me: I remember that we used to listen to mizrahit in the neighborhood not only as a matter of taste, but also as a kind of psychological reassurance, comfort, for people who were discriminated by the Ashkenazim [European Jews]. It gave us pride and security. My son was once arrested during a demonstration of ‘Ha’Panterim Ha’Sh’chorim’ [the Black Panthers, a social protest movement of oriental Jews in the 1970s that adopted the name of the black U.S. movement], and told me how muzika mizrahit cassettes helped them in prison to regain their pride and power and not to feel so humiliated and threatened by the Ashkenazi prison guards.9

8 9

Luís Fernandez, personal communication with the author, 2007. Ahuva Carmeli, personal communication with the author, 2009.

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The socio-psychological role of music as provider of security, comfort, and ‘a home away from home’ was mentioned by Alan Lomax nearly fifty years ago: “The primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work—any or all of these personality shaping experiences.”10 An Interface for Acceptance by the Hegemonic Society In both cases music has created an interface for acceptance and even respect between the marginalized group and the ‘hosting’ hegemonic society: In the United States, salsa, which was born as resistance to white cultural dominance, has been a musical trend among white Americans since the late 1970s and is “one of the most dynamic and significant pan-American musical phenomena of the 1970s and 1980s.”11 In Israel, Israelis have long favored salsa music, with many salsa dance clubs and specialized radio programs operating throughout the country. The phenomenon is part of a global salsa trend, but it “was particularly amplified in Israel due to the fact that different countries in Latin America became popular travel destinations for tens of thousands of young Israelis after their release from obligatory military service.”12 During these trips, usually lasting a few months, young Israeli travelers (nicknamed muchaleros) absorbed local culture and music and “upon their return to Israel . . . sought to re-live the Latino experience in salsa Clubs.”13 Since the mid-1990s, several salsa clubs have opened in Tel-Aviv, where the Latino migrants have become ‘guests of honor.’ Having visited many Israeli salsa clubs and parties, I can confirm Barak Kalir’s observation that the “Latinos’ supremacy on the dance floor and their familiarity with Latino music and style were well appreciated and even admired by many Israelis. It even became quite ‘cool’ among some Israelis in the salsa scene to have a relationship with a Latino migrant.”14 Alan Lomax, “Folk Song Style” American Anthropologist 61, no. 6 (1959): 29. Peter Manuel, Popular Music of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46. 12 Kalir Barak, Latino Migrants in the Jewish State: Undocumented Lives in Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 146. 13 Ibid., 146. 14 Ibid., 147. 10 11


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Kalir concludes that salsa music provides Latino migrants “a way to regain some sense of normalcy in their undocumented lives.”15 A similar phenomenon is occurring in Israel nowadays with muzika mizrahit. Young Israelis (age twenty to thirty) of European background and high social level, rather than ‘looking down’ at the genre as their predecessors did, are frequenting muzika mizrahit clubs, ‘loosening up’ by belly dancing, dancing on the tables, and joining the hafla (party). Just as in the United States salsa entered mainstream pop and rock (with the music of Carlos Santana, for example), so in Israel muzika mizrahit has entered the mainstream, becoming acceptable at wedding parties, at events, and even in the CD collections of Israeli ‘yuppies,’ creating an interface for the acceptance and integration of mizrahi’im into the ‘elite’ segments of Israeli society. Until the late 1990s, radio and other media in Israel were ruled by the hegemony of European culture, while the culture of the oriental Sephardic Jews was marginalized, considered either ‘ethnic’ or inferior. In 1998, as the head of Israel’s leading major record company, NMC, I decided to sign top mizrahit artist Zehava Ben—the first time a mizrahit artist was directly signed to a major record label. In the following years, mizrahit crossed over into the Israeli mainstream, and now it virtually dominates it. In the 2010 annual Hebrew song chart of Israel’s top radio station, Reshet Gimmel, and the TV music channel Arutz 24, the top four entries were all from the mizrahit genre.16 Another musical factor in the acceptance of mizrahit by the ‘elite’ was the development of ‘elitist mizrahit’ music (e.g., by artists such as Shlomo Bar, Amir Benayun, Dikla)—more sophisticated musically, better produced, legitimized and sponsored by the cultural establishment, and considered ‘hip’ among trendsetters and ‘yuppie’ audiences.17 ‘Pan-Oriental’ and ‘Pan-Latino’ Identities Both genres are the cultural expressions of newly created collective identities of immigrant groups, a counterreaction to social ‘labeling’ Ibid., 147. 1. Dudu Aharon—“Tagidu La” (Tell Her); 2. Lior Narkis—“Erev Tov” (Good Evening); 3. Eyal Golan—“Mi She’ma’amin” (The One Who Believes); 4. Dudu Aharon—“Kesef Ve’alcohol” (Money and Alcohol). See http://www.charts.co.il/article .asp?id=2197#. 17 André Levy, ‫ [ לקראת פוליטיקה של זהויות‬Towards a Politics of Identities], Panim Journal 10, nos. 32–40 (1999): http://lib.cet.ac.il/pages/item.asp?item=17186. 15 16

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and discrimination by the hegemonic society and a way to consolidate some sort of social, cultural, and even political power to ‘fight for their rights.’ Furthermore, both play a major role in the creation and consolidation of these identities. Eliezer Moshe Finegold explains that the European Jews’ prejudices against ‘oriental’ Jews led to the creation of a pan-oriental social, political, and cultural identity and that muzika mizrahit is the musical expression of this collective identity.18 Since the major waves of immigration from Arab countries in the 1950s, Jews from different ‘oriental’ origins (and in some cases very different musical origins), such as Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, and even Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria, have been looked upon by Ashkenazi/ European Jews—already established in young Israel—as mizrahi’im (orientals) and soon identified with this pan-identity. Edwin Seroussi claims that this ‘pan-oriental identity’ (mizrahiyut, ‘orientality’) came as a counterreaction to the derogatory ‘official’ labeling of Jews of North African and Middle Eastern as edot hamizrah (communities of the orient) by the media and the establishment, then dominated by Ashkenazi Jews.19 In fact, the three main countries of origin of Israeli mizrahi’im— Morocco, Yemen, and Iraq—are very distinct geographically and culturally, just as Chile, Cuba, and Mexico are, for example, in the case of Latin America.20 Still, both groups of migrants acquired and cultivated a ‘pan-identity’ based on the prejudices of the hegemonic society. Both these invented ‘pan-identities’ were also supported by orientalist stigmas casting the new immigrant groups arriving from different cultures as the ‘other’: “ ‘The orient’ was portrayed by the orientalist approach as sensual, mysterious, tempting, primitive, lacking

18 Eliezer Moshe Finegold, Musika Mizrahit—From the Margins to the Mainstream (Cambridge: Harvard Judaica Collection, Harvard College Library, 1996), 6. 19 Edwin Seroussi, “Yam Tikhoniyut: Transformations of Mediterreananism in Israeli Music,” in Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, ed. Goffredo Plastino (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 20 Internal stigmatization and discrimination are typical of such ‘pan-identities,’ newly created out of resistance and subversion. Kalir describes the tension among Chilean, Venezuelan, and Colombian migrants and the fact that one group’s behavior and violence (that of Colombians in this case) reflect on the image of all ‘Latinos’ in the eyes of the ‘hosting’ society. This internal conflict and the stigmatization of one particular group for being ‘violent’ and ‘lower class’ also exists among the mizrahi’im in Israel, in reference to Moroccans. Just like Colombians, they were the largest group of immigrants and were stigmatized with violence and vulgarity both among the mizrahi’im themselves and in the view of outsiders.


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sense, and dangerous,” writes André Levy in the context of mizrahi’im in Israel.21 These characteristics were likewise attributed to Latinos in the United States. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, some of these characteristics are also used to describe both salsa and muzika mizrahit, the musical expressions of these ‘pan-identities’: ‘sensual,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘mysterious.’ Identity politics, born in the civil rights movement of the 1960s,22 played a big part in the formation of these ‘pan-identities’ in both societies, in both cases leading to political power. Much has been written about the Latino population in the United States as a political power.23 In Israel, the political struggle of ‘oriental Jews’ has been significant in Israeli politics since the 1970s, culminating in the formation of Shas (1984), a strong religious party that emphasizes its mizrahiyut and is part of the current coalition government (2011). Musical Similarities Hybridity Both salsa and mizrahit are hybrid genres blending the hegemonic culture’s ‘Western’ pop with ‘ethnic’ music from the ‘homeland’ and with influences from neighboring cultures and musical traditions from smaller groups of immigrants that are culturally and socially related to the largest immigrant group. Salsa emerged as a hybrid genre in the 1960s and 1970s among Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants in New York City. Its main origin is Cuban son, but it has many other influences born from different genres, mostly the Caribbean and Central America (cumbia, merengue, bomba, plena, etc.), blended with Western pop, rhythm and blues, and jazz. Western pop instruments are used (drums, bass, keyboards, guitars, brass section, sometimes even flutes and violins), as well as ‘ethnic’ instruments, mostly percussion, such as conga, bongos, maracas, güiro, claves, and so on. Muzika mizrahit emerged from the communities of Sephardic Jews of Yemenite, North African, and Middle Eastern origin, in the Levy, “Towards a Politics of Identities.” L. A. Kauffman, “The Anti-Politics of Identity,” Socialist Review 20, no. 1 (1990): 67–80. 23 Kim Geron, Latin Political Power (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005). 21 22

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shchunot (working-class neighborhoods) of Tel-Aviv mostly inhabited by these communities. It mixes Arabic music influences with Greek laïko, Turkish pop, and Western pop. It is performed on Western instruments according to Western pop harmony and structural rules, with the ‘flavoring’ of Middle Eastern and Balkan instruments (bouzuki, baglama, oud, darbukka, and frame drums). Its vocal expression is characterized by a typical melismatic style of singing (mawwal ) and a nasal timbre. It is interesting to note that in both cases the largest immigrant group among whom the genre developed initially adopted musical influences from similar cultures and based the new hybrid genre on a ‘related’ culture, but not necessarily their own. In the case of salsa, in spite of most musicians being Puerto Rican, Manuel notes that “the chosen musical vehicle was neither stylistically new nor distinctively Puerto Rican; rather, it was essentially Cuban-style dance music— a modern version of the son.”24 In the case of muzika mizrahit, the ‘pioneers’ were musicians of Yemenite origin who looked at Turkish and Middle Eastern (not necessarily Yemenite) popular music as their prototypal influence and blended it into contemporary Israeli pop to create the first mizrahit songs.25 Rhythmic Patterns Both salsa and muzika mizrahit use mostly the traditional ‘Western’ 4/4 meter, but are strongly identified and based around a ‘timeline,’ a constantly repeating rhythmic pattern with a strong syncopated feel, played on a typical percussion instrument. The clave is the timeline and heartbeat of all thing salsa, serving as “the structural basis for the rest of the composition’s rhythms and melodies.”26 There are many clave patterns, but the most used one in salsa (and in Cuban son) is the son clave, which consists of a five-stroke pattern in two measures (2+3 or 3+2). Likewise the wazn, colloquially/onomatopoeically known as dum tak, is the rhythmic pattern typical of Arabic music, which “consists of a regularly recurring sequence of two or more time segments.”27 The wazn beats are “represented by one or two types of drum stroke: 24 25 26 27

Manuel, The Soul of the Barrio, 1994: 22. See http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/‫ מוזיקה‬.‫מזרחית‬. Helio Orovio, Cuban Music from A to Z, (London: Tumi Music, 2004), 54. Habib Hassan Touma, The Music of the Arabs (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996), 48.


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dum, which is produced at the centre of the drumskin, or tak, which is produced at its edge.”28 The wazn repertoire, like the clave repertoire, includes many cycles (approximately one hundred, according to Habib Hassan Touma), varying in length and complexity, but in muzika mizrahit, only the less complex wazn patterns are used, similar in complexity and length to the clave pattern used most in salsa—the son clave. Both timeline patterns are played on typical instruments: the clave is usually (but not always) played on the claves (two wooden sticks), and the wazn is usually played on the darbukka (a handheld drum) or riqq (frame drum).29 Here are two typical timeline patterns used in salsa and mizrahit. Both are in 4/4 meter and consist of a cycle of two bars/segments:30 Son clave (in salsa):

Wazn ma mūdī kabīr (in Arabic music and in muzika mizrahit):

Improvisation Sections: Taqsim and Montuno In spite of, or perhaps as a complement to, the tight rhythmic nature of both genres, both dedicate special sections within the structure of a piece to an improvisational section, where solo instruments improvise, especially in live performances, when these sections can be extended to long periods and create a kind of ‘call-and-response’ dialogue.

28 29 30

Ibid., 48. Ibid., 46–54. See ibid., 50.

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In Arabic music taqsim is the instrumental presentation of the maqam (the tonal-spatial mode of the piece).31 It is usually played in free rhythm and allows the player to show his musical/emotional virtuosity. “In the hands of a gifted musician,” Touma tells us, “no taqsim peformance is musically the same as the other. . . . Nevertheless . . . [it] is not purely improvisational,” abiding by the rules of the particular maqam it is played on.32 Touma describes the taqsim as an interface of communication between audience and musician, where the audience commonly ‘reacts’ to the solo parts by calls of appreciation.33 Muzika mizrahit, especially when performed live, often incorporates such taqsim parts (although less sophisticated and less maqam-oriented than in Arabic music), played on the oud, the bouzuki, or even the electric guitar. In salsa the montuno—the improvisation part—usually comes at the end of the piece, a ‘conclusion’ rather than an ‘introduction.’ It can sometimes extend so far that it becomes longer than the unimprovised part of the song. Vocalists and instrumentalists “improvise on short . . . repeated phrases that feature relatively simple harmonies.”34 The montuno part often incorporates call-and-response singing between singer and chorus, while the soloists improvise. Vocal Style: Nasal Timbre The vocal style of muzika mizrahit is distinguished by a nasal timbre.35 Artists such as the veteran Zehava Ben and the younger-generation Kobi Peretz and Idan Yaniv are known for their nasal timbre. In salsa vocals, we also often find a distinctive nasal timbre, such as in the singing styles of Hectro Lavoe and Oscar de Leon, as well as younggeneration salsa and reggaetón singers.36 Interestingly, Alan Lomax’s cantometrics theory connects nasality in vocal production to restrictive female sexuality and to societies where children have to be independent and work at an early age.37 Both societies under discussion—

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 99. 33 Ibid., 98. 34 Orovio, Cuban Music from A to Z, 141. 35 Finegold, Musika Mizrahit, 7. 36 Reggaetón (blending dancehall, salsa, rap/hip hop and techno) is the latest ‘craze’ in Latino popular dance music. 37 Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1968), 195–96. 31 32


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oriental-Jewish migrants to Israel and Latino migrants to the United States—were traditionally patriarchal, infected with machismo, restricting female independence and sexuality, and in their early years of migration characterised by youth and even children working, in comparison to the hegemonic society, where children and youth working was not normative. Dance and Sensuality Both genres are strongly characterized by a typical way of dancing, with a strong sensual/sexual feel, using the belly and torso areas as the ‘focal point.’ Salsa is danced ‘from the torso,’ and muzika mizrahit uses belly dance movements (originally performed by a solo female dancer, but in muzika mizrahit also by men and couples). Interestingly (but not surprisingly), ‘suppressed sexuality and taboos on sensual dancing are deeply rooted in the histories of both cultures. In many regions in the Americas, dancing was viewed by the colonials as a ‘sinful’ activity, associated with African slaves and their presumed lack of morality and high sexual appetite. The colonial authorities and the Catholic Church saw music and dance as “a threat to the established political and moral order.”38 Likewise, in various stages in the history of the Muslim world, belly dancing was considered a sinful, immoral activity, and belly dancers were considered ‘prostitutes.’ Belly dancing is still considered ‘sexually arousing’ and is therefore banned by fundamentalists.39 Furthermore, in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the mere singing voice of a woman is considered sexually arousing and should not be heard by men. The Talmud says, “Kol ba’isha erva” (The voice of a woman is like her sexual organ). Both the Muslim and the Jewish traditions have of course influenced the cultural world of Jews who emigrated from Muslim countries. Narrative: Lyrics of Longing and Escapism Both genres are characterized by lyrics of melancholic longing (to a loved one, to the homeland, etc.) on one side and pure escapism on the other. Many salsa songs have the same function as telenovelas (TV Peter Wade, Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21–22. 39 Habib Hassan Touma, personal interview with the author, 1998. 38

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soap operas) in Latin America, with stories of love, sex, drama, diamonds and yachts, dance and romance.40 Others are songs of longing (especially, but not only, in salsa romántica). In muzika mizrahit there is an even clearer dividing line between two kinds of songs: shirey dika’on (songs of depression)—slow and melancholic, with sad and often dramatic lyrics—and shirey hafla (party songs)—up-tempo and rhythmic, with naive and escapist lyrics. The Genres’ Mythology: Royalty and Tragedy There is a similar pattern in the status of the ‘heroes’ of both genres and in the myths surrendering their life stories. Both salsa and muzika mizrahit ‘superstars’ have achieved a legendary status, sometimes beyond any kind of ‘superstardom’ known in the pop world. According to the Rough Guide to World Music, the status of salsa stars in Latin America is similar to the status of football players in England.41 Artists become ‘queens’ and ‘kings’ in the terminology of both salsa and muzika mizrahit. For example, Celia Cruz was known as ‘la reina de la salsa’ (the queen of salsa), and Zohar Argov was known as ‘hamelech’ (the king) in the muzika mizrahit world. The fact that both musical cultures originated in marginalized ethnic groups with a low economic status emphasizes the status of their ‘royals’ even more: local superstars can be spotted riding in flash cars through the streets of the barrios or shchunot, wearing designer clothes and heavy gold jewelry. Also, in both cases some of the greatest heroes of the genre entered its mythology with tragic life stories, encapsulating in a dramatic fashion the social problems both minority groups were facing—drugs, crime, discrimination, displacement, a quick rise to fame, and a tragic end. Héctor Lavoe, ‘the king of salsa,’ was born in Puerto Rico, moved to New York when he was seventeen years old, became a salsa hero, and got addicted to drugs. He suffered from deep depression, tried rehabilitation but relapsed, attempted suicide, and died in 1993 at the age of forty-seven from complications of AIDS. Zohar Argov, ‘the king’ (hamelech) of muzika mizrahit, was born to a poor family of Yemenite origin in Rishon Lezion; moved to the big city, Tel-Aviv; became

40 Sue Steward, “Salsa,” in World Music: The Rough Guide, vol. 2, ed. Simon Broughton and Mark Ellingham (London: Rough Guides, 2000), 495. 41 Ibid., 496.


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addicted to drugs; went in and out of rehabilitation and prison; and in 1987 committed suicide in prison. Both Lavoe and Argov had outstanding voices that reflected beauty, endless romanticism, and very deep sadness, and both became legends after their death.42 Into the Mainstream: Diffusion and Dilution As I mentioned above, muzika mizrahit has seen a strong change in status in recent years. Musically, it has been further ‘westernized’ and, some claim, ‘diluted.’43 At the same time, it has been technically upgraded—its production quality improved drastically as the genre moved from ‘bus station’ labels to mainstream record companies. Yet in spite of its growing popularity, as a whole, muzika mizrahit still bears the image of ‘cheap,’ unsophisticated music, identified with ‘oriental’ Jews. Edwin Serrousi writes about the diffusion of muzika mizrahit into Israeli mainstream pop and about how, in a marketing twist, its title was changed from muzika mizrahit (oriental music) to muzika yamtichonit (Mediterranean music), a mellower term, disassociating it from Arabic music and winning it more radio exposure and allowing it to cross over into the mainstream. Unlike the first-generation hardcore mizrahit artists (e.g., Zohar Argov, Ahuva Ozeri, Eli Luzon, and Zehava Ben), the new generation of muzika yam-tichonit stars (e.g., Eyal Golan, Sarit Hadad, and Kobi Peretz) has managed to penetrate the Israeli mainstream, becoming the best-selling stars in Israel. The same process happened with salsa, which started as ‘hard-core’ Latino music aimed at the Latino and Hispanic market in the United States, with artists such as Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Hector Lavoe, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Oscar de Leon. and Willie Colon, but since the late 1990s crossed over and evolved into a more diluted ‘Latin sound’ pop music with ‘superstars’ of Latino origins, who, by incorporating Latino elements into rock and pop, managed to cross over (e.g., Ricky Martin, Gloria Estefan, Shakira, and Jennifer Lopez). Seroussi, like many other purists, claims that the muzika mizrahit that has evolved since the 1980s (and has managed to cross over into Both tragic biographies were immortalized in films that became iconic in their respective communities: Zohar, dir. Eran Riklis (Israel, 1993), about Zohar Argov; and El cantante, dir. Leon Ichaso (United States, 2006), about Héctor Lavoe. 43 Seroussi, “Yam Tikhoniyut,” 179–98. 42

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the Israeli mainstream) “basically became Western popular music with distinctive features; quality of voice emission (specifically Yemenite Jewish singers), use of particular instruments (especially the bouzouki), the disproportionate use of the Phrigian mode, and loci in free rhythm (defined by the Arabic concept of muwwal).”44 He also cites, as part of this ‘dilution’ process, the extensive repertoire of mizrahit ballads in the “Italian San Remo festival style,” which emerged in the mizrahit world during the mid-1980s with singers such as Zohar Argov, Shimi Tavori, Haim Moshe, and others.45 This can be compared to the salsa romántica genre, which emerged during the same time period (the mid-1980s) in New York City and Puerto Rico, with artists such as Eddie Santiago, La India, Luis Enrique, Willie Gonzalez, Lalo Rodríguez, Tito Nieves, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Tito Rojas, and Jerry Rivera bringing a ‘softer,’ ‘lighter’ ballad sound, aimed at giving “the music broader commercial appeal,” and that indeed became “the most commercially successful form of salsa in the last 20 years, despite criticism that it is a pale imitation of ‘real’ salsa, often called ‘salsa dura.’ ”46 Seroussi regrets this evolution in muzika mizrahit and says that “the cultural ‘cost’ of this success . . . has been, besides the watering down of the mizrahi sound, a dilution of the sense of identity that has long been associated with it.”47 He sees the appropriation of muzika mizrahit by “dominant Israeliness and its accommodation to the patterns and interests of mainstream Israeli popular music . . . as a ‘failure’ of the original subversive aim” of the genre.48 To present a balancing view, taking into consideration that this ‘sense of identity’ has itself been— as claimed in the previous section—a somehow artificial ‘pan-identity’ created and fueled by social conditions of discrimination and exclusion, and that muzika mizrahit as described in this paper was born as a cultural expression associated with resistance and subversion, some may think that, if not musically at least socially, such a ‘dilution of a sense of identity’ is perhaps artistically regrettable, but socially somehow welcome and a symptom of a more integrated society.

44 45 46 47 48

Ibid., 188–89. Ibid., 189. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa_rom%C3%A1ntica. Seroussi, “Yam Tikhoniyut,” 192. Ibid., 192.


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The same purist ‘nostalgic’ and ‘anti-dilution’ approach can be seen among many salsa aficionados, scholars, and musicians. Javier Leon, a Miami-based salsa DJ, says, “Ricky Martin and Shakira are Latin pop, not real salsa like Hector [Lavoe] or Celia [Cruz] . . . It’s Latin music for white people [non-Latinos]. Of course Ricky knows real salsa and bomba [Puerto Rican style], but to get the Grammy and become an American pop star he needs to ‘dilute’ the Latin-ness of his music and put more pop elements in it, in the rhythm, the orchestration, even in the singing style.”49 Conclusion “Music is bound up with identity and memory in a special way, for music is not only a ready means for the identification of different ethnic or social groups, it has potent emotional connotations and can be used to assert and negotiate identity in a particular powerful manner.”50 This essay shows the sociological/anthropological and musical/stylistic similarities between two relatively new hybrid musical genres, born in the 1960s; gaining social significance in the 1970s; and spreading, evolving, and achieving mainstream status since the 1990s. They are both connected with the formation of new ethnic identities, affected by migration, discrimination, and marginalization and associated with resistance and protest (in contradiction perhaps to their ‘naive’ and escapist lyrical character). Musically, both genres originate from and are fed and influenced by proto-genres from their countries of origin and the rich musical heritages of the migrants groups among which they developed, yet both are ‘Western’ in nature and as such sometimes dismissed by ‘purists.’ Just as American-born salsa differs from the traditional genres from which it imbibes, such as Cuban son, so muzika mizrahit ‘departs’ from the traditional music of the Jews from Islamic countries that, in modern Israel, was either “museumized,”

Javier Leon, personal interview with the author, 2009. John Baily, “The Role of Music in the Creation of an Afghan National Identity, 1923–73,” in Music, Ethnicity, and Identity: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 48. 49 50

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“ethnicized,” or, in the early years, “plainly rejected”.51 This brief comparison, I hope, will shed some light on the role of music as a space for identity formation among marginalized groups, an outlet for resistance and social protest, and a cultural ‘shelter’ from fear, social exclusion, and insecurity. I hope it will raise some questions about the connection of musical taste to social conditions and evolutions and perhaps will encourage someone to begin a cross-cultural investigation of the phenomenon—a new kind of ‘cantometrics’-style investigation into the sociological and political ingredients of music and the way the social conditions of a certain group are reflected in its music and in the music it favors and how this music resonates with that of other groups living under similar conditions. In 2001, when I worked at EMI, we discussed an idea to create a compilation CD called “Music from the Axis of Evil,” with songs from Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and so on. Will there be any musical connection between the genres, or is this just a marketing gimmick? we asked ourselves. One thing I am sure of is that in a compilation called “Music of the Underdog,” at least two genres will have more in common than just a social/thematic connection—salsa and muzika mizrahit.

51 Seroussi, “Yam Tikhoniyut,” 190; Eric Cohen and Amnon Shiloah, “Major Trends of Change in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music,” Popular Music 5 (1985): 199–223.


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The ‘Kings’

Figure 6: Album cover of Héctor Lavoe, “the king of salsa” (photo used with permission from Codigo Music/Fania Records).

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moshe morad The ‘Kings’

Figure 7: Album cover of Zohar Argov, “the king of muzika mizrahit ” (photo used with permission from Reuveni Productions/Reuveni Brothers).


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Traditional Drumming Both salsa and muzika mizrahit have a distinctive rhythmic/percussive character originating in the traditional drumming in both “mother” cultures, African-Cuban music in the case of salsa and traditional Arabic music in the case of muzika mizrahit.

Figure 8: Drumming in a religious African-Cuban ceremony in Havana (Photo: Moshe Morad, 2006).

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moshe morad Traditional Drumming

Figure 9: Drumming in a Bedouin hafla in the Jordanian desert (Photo: Moshe Morad, 2008).

CHAPTER NINE

JEWISH PUBERTY IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA: CONSTRUCTING JUDEO-LATINIDAD Tzvi Tal Translated from the Spanish by Amalia Ran Introduction The return to democratic regimes in Latin American societies during the 1980s was characterized by a new phenomenon: the presence of Jewish themes and protagonists in films that were distributed and exhibited in commercial circles. While this novelty may have been noticed at first almost exclusively in a few Argentine films produced after Pobre Mariposa (“Poor Butterfly,” by the director Raúl de la Torre, 1986), it was to be rapidly multiplied in the following decade. Not long afterwards films from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay were added to this growing list of works. It should be noted that it is not ethnic films made by Jews about Jewish topics, for Jewish audiences’ consumption, which I will be discussing here. Instead, it is about a new kind of representation of the Jewish experience in cinematographic texts: such representation allows any type of viewer to identify with the medium and with the inherent catharsis produced by pleasure and gratification, and without it cinematography would not have converted into one of the places of reinvention of collective identities and historic memory. This new phenomenon is the center of scholarly attention from diverse perspectives. Ilene Goldman proposes analyzing simultaneously the process of national identification, the vicissitudes of cinematographic production, and the representation of Jewish experience, but she offers an analysis of a film created by a non-Jewish director that coincides only with her third point. Carolina Rocha studies the Jewish experience in documentary films and motion pictures directed by Jews in an ethnocentric prism, yet not an essentialist one.1 Theresa

1 Ilene Goldman, “To Be(come) Jewish and Argentine: Cinematic Views of a Changing Nation,” EIAL, no. 2 (1999): 151–7; Carolina Rocha, “Jewish Cinematic

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Alfaro-Velcamp compares the image of Arab and Jewish immigrants in two Mexican films and concludes that mexicanidad is a dynamic and flexible concept, and deduces further that Mexico is essentially a multicultural nation. Alfaro-Verlcamp’s article puts forth a vision that accommodates the state’s ideological hegemony, whilst the Zapatista movement called on marginalized and oppressed groups to fight for the rights of the original peoples of the land and their descendants. In this way Mexican multiculturalism is revealed much less flexible than suggested by the author. At the same time, Nora Glickman points out that the abundant exhibition of Jewish rites and customs in a recent Mexican-American coproduction is a product of syncretism, incorporating comparisons with Gentile habits and associated with the conjugation of Fantastic Realism’s motifs with Jewish Kabbalistic and mystical ones. On the other hand, Inara de Amorin Rosas and Luis Antonio Mousinho emphasize the respect for alterity in one of Sao Paulo’s neighborhoods inhabited by Jewish, Italian, Greek, Arab, and Brazilian immigrants.2 Continuing this brief survey of scholarly commentary, we may note that Gonzalo Aguilar comments in regard to the so-called New Argentine Cinema and maintains that these movies represent the decomposition and dysfunctionality of the institution of the family, while in the narratives of Jews the family serves as a reference for a stable world in which reunification is possible and meaningful. They thus indicate a Jewish posture toward the family experience, such as Marshall Berman has proposed. Finally, Tamara Falicov adds that the Jewish experience is represented in New Argentine Cinema movies from a previously unexplored juvenile standpoint, in search for new answers to old dilemmas, such as preserving traditions, facing exogamic marriages,

Self-Representations in Contemporary Argentine and Brazilian Films,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, no. 1 (2010): 37–48; “Identidad masculina y judía en la trilogía de Daniel Burman,” Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura, no. 2 (2007): http:// letrashispanas.unlv.edu/Vol4iss2/RochaF07.htm; “Reconstruyendo el pasado a través de imágenes: documentales judíos argentinos,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2010): http://nuevomundo.revues.org/59923. 2 Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, “Reelizing: Arab and Jewish Ethnicity in Mexican Film,” The Americas, no. 2 (2006): 261–80; John Ross, Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible Chronicles of Resistance 2000–2006 (New York: Nation Books, 2006); Nora Glickman, “My Mexican Shivah,” Chasqui, no. 1 (2007): 192–5; Inara de Amorim Rosas, and Luis Antonio Mousinho, “Perspectiva narrativa, tempo e representaçãoes da amizade em ‘O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias’,” Anais do XXXI Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação, 2008.

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generational distancing, relating to the dominant culture and community, and dealing with personal neurosis.3 My own approach to the diverse representations of Jewish themes and protagonists in Latin American cinema is in line with the historical view of Latin America, discussed by researchers such as Raanan Rein, Jeffrey Lesser, and Jerry Dávila, who interpret the insertion and significance of minority groups’ processes of identification within the general cultural context. I adopt Stuart Schoenfeld’s proposal concerning the study of Jewish identity in the postmodern society, which offers to see it as a cultural problematic, instead of a merely sociological one, highlighting this way a new research subject, named by Judah Cohen as judeolatinidad (“Judeo-Latinity”). Amalia Ran offers a similar perspective in her analysis of contemporary novels written by Jewish Argentine authors, which deal with Jewish protagonists. Ran suggests that these texts examine the conflict between collective and personal memory, and proposes modes to break free from official memory.4 My work tends to produce allegoric interpretations that are sustained by the analyzing of the cinematographic language and by the knowledge of the concrete world outside the limits of the silver screen. At the same time, I consider these films as esthetic testimonies of the social changes during the moment of production and as participants in the construction of imaginaries, memories and identities.5 3 Gonzalo Aguilar, Otros mundos: Ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor, 2006), 41–42; Marshall Berman, “A Little Child Shall Lead Them: The Jewish Family Romance,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, edited by Linda Nochlin, and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 253–75; Tamara Falicov, The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 133–7. 4 Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines: Essays of Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora (Laiden: Brill Press, 2010); Jerry Dávila, “Ethnicity, Identity, and Nationality in Latin America,” Jewish History, no. 18 (2004): 95–113; Stuart Schoenfeld, “Theory and Methods in the Study of Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Survival: The Identity Problem at the Close of the Twentieth Century, edited by Ernest Krausz, and Gitta Tulea (USA: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Judah M. Cohen, “The Ethnic Dilemmas of Latin American Jewry,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser, and Raanan Rein (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 266–81; Amalia Ran, “Hechos de orillas: Nuevas expresiones de la identidad judeo-argentina contemporánea,” PhD. Dissertation, submitted at the University of Maryland, 2007. 5 Ismail Xavier, “Allegory and History”, A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Robert Stam, and Toby Miller (Oxfor: Oxford University Press, 1998), 333–62; Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1986); Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980); Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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The frequency of Jewish experiences’ images in contemporary Argentine films varies from that of other Latin American film industries. The narratives of Jewish Argentines manifest the rupture with the ethnic past, marked by the sign of alterity, and the civic naturalization of Jewish identity, hence negotiating its particularities with the Argentine identity, which is no longer homogeneous, but a multicultural and fragmented one. In a medium in which new alterities are visualized, such as those of immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Korea; that remembers the undiscriminating victimizer of the terrorist attacks against the Israeli embassy and the Jewish center of AMIA; a medium in which participating in the fight for human rights and against impunity gave new significances to the intervention of the Jew within the public sphere; in this domain both the self-image of ethnic groups’ members, as well as their perception by non-Jews, has been modified. Jewish Argentines are now more similar to “us” than to the “others,” and the Jewish migratory past is recuperated as an epic tale, in which the previously denominated rusos (“Russians,” often used to refer to Jewish immigrants in Argentina) showed the ability to overcome hardships and poverty; a skill that the Argentines need now in order to overcome the neoliberal system crisis, particularly after 2001. Hence the cinematographic image of the Argentine Jew became a symbol of Argentinesness.6 This chapter analyses the films Cara de Queso: Mi primer ghetto (“Cheese Head,” directed by Ariel Winograd, Argentina, 2006), O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (“The Year My Parents Went on Vacation,” directed by Cao Hamburguer, Brazil, 2006), and Acné (“Acne,” directed by Federico Veiroj, Uruguay, 2008), which represent the transition between infancy and adolescence, focusing on Jewish protagonists. These films include in their plots several autobiographical elements from the directors’ lives, as well as conventions of the coming-of-age film genre, which originated in the bildungsroman literary model. Thus, these movies construct an image of the age in which adults’ infallibility begins to be viewed with distrust, in which sexual curiosity is awakened, and in which the social world is revealed beyond the primordial ties and the familiar ones.

6 Tzvi Tal, “Terror, etnicidad y la imagen del judío en el cine argentino contemporáneo”, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2010): http://nuevomundo.revues.org/ index58355.html.


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While in real life the passage to adolescence is marked by social control and expressions of resistance, these films’ protagonists are physically and/or emotionally detached from their progenitors. Instead of family dilemmas between fathers and sons, the protagonists are faced directly with the social control mechanism, with discourse, and with ideology, ascribing to them at once an assumed standpoint of innocence. The narratives that focus on children or teenagers aggravate these conflicts—which could have been no more than an anecdote—, since these characters are constructed as unarmed victims, facing incomprehensible problems. This is the case, especially given the fact that their state of psychosexual development is one of the most powerful metaphors of the coming-of-age genre, since the discovery of sexuality and of the complexity of adult life’s emotional relations may function as a key to understanding the social world.7 Consequently, this analysis refers to the cinematographic conventions of the genre as textual artifacts, which allegorize the processes of awareness and loss of innocence by certain sectors of society that constitute the consumption market of cultural products, without neglecting to note that the capacity of films to promote social conscience is limited. The genre’s contribution consists in the images in which society may be seen, identified, moved, and confronted with “that which nobody talks about”; the social discourse about these movies is the one which may mobilize processes of realization and awareness. Despite the fact that the films’ narratives occur in the past, all these movies carry the social and cultural processes’ imprints of the period in which they were produced. Ariel’s summer adventures in a countryclub in Cara de Queso: Mi primer ghetto (which presumably occur during 1993) constitute an allegory that wishes to break the norms of silence and the impunity given to corruption in the neoliberal era. Similarly, Mauro’s discovery of the Jewish experience during the 1970 World Cup football championship, in O Ano em que meus pais saíram de ferias, allegorizes the hegemonic means of constructing memory and oblivion about the dictatorship years in Brazil. In contrast, Rafael’s growing 7 Sara McNamee, “Foucault’s Heterotopia and Children Everyday Lives,” Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, no. 4 (2000): 479–92; Tzvi Tal, “Alegorías de memoria y olvido en películas de iniciación: Machuca y Kamchatka,” Aisthesis, no. 38 (2005): 136–51; Tzvi Tal, and Julia Tuñon “La infancia en las pantallas fílmicas latinoamericanas: Entre la idealización y el desencanto,” Historia de la infancia en América Latina, edited by Pablo Rodríguez, and María M. Manarelli (Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2007), 649–68.

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pains in Acné take place in 1990’s Montevideo, without any political context that can be perceived. Rafael’s growing manifests the actual filmmakers’ vocation of constructing and consolidating the film industry in Uruguay. The Jewish Ghetto Is Neoliberal Argentina The protagonist of the feature film Cara de Queso: Mi primer ghetto is Ariel, whose namesake points out the naiveté, with which the character confronts traumatic experiences during the summer of 1993, while his family spends the vacation in the Jewish country-club “El ciervo” (“The Deer”). This was a historical moment in which the neoliberal reforms introduced by President Carlos Menem’s government were at their peak. The main dilemma in the film is the protagonist’s confrontation with impunity—treated only in the first scene that insinuates it and during the last scene, in which the theme explodes—, in a plot filled with comic characters that interact in a setting of adolescent pranks, while attending to the learning process of adult life and sexuality. The worry-free life of the Jewish Argentine middle class that enjoys the benefits of the neoliberal economy constitute a microcosm marked by the impunity problematic and the way the protagonist has to face it in the voluntary Jewish enclosure in the club. The film also alludes to the problem of what should be the attitude of Argentines thirteen years later, when the movie comes out in 2006. Thirteen is the age which signals the passing from infancy to adulthood according to Jewish tradition; it is an event celebrated by the ceremony of the Bar-Mitzva, in which the young male receives the responsibility of completing the religious obligations and the right to read the sacred texts in front of the whole congregation. Analogically, the film invites the audience to confront with an adult attitude of responsibility the pact of silence and corruption within society. In the first scene, Ariel witnesses the country-club’s strongest and most popular teenager—paradoxically named Alma (“soul” in Spanish)—, who is in the public toilet and urinating on the weakest and leastappreciated child, kneeling at his feet. This situation reproduces within the infant world the economic and social violence institutionalized by neo-liberalism. The strong ones rule and humiliate those who cannot resist, while the aggressor’s name suggests that a double discourse exists: behind or alongside the benevolent appearance represented


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by the aggressor’s name, lies concealment of crime. The scene setting in the public toilet symbolizes the corruption of social norms in a popular mode. In order to further emphasize this symbolism, the aggressor’s father appears in the film wearing a shirt of Menem’s presidential reelection campaign of 1995. Ariel/Cara de Queso must testify in front of the country-club members’ commission that meets in the last scene, in order to judge the act of aggression. Before inviting him into the room, the director in charge of youth activities, Vercovich, warns the protagonist that it is not advisable to tell what really happened, and that the truth is useless. Immediately following this warning, Vercovich holds forth in front of the meeting’s participants in order to “shed light” on the events under review. Thus the double discourse of corruption is unmasked. In these moments, the camera focuses on Cara de Queso, leaning on a column behind him as if he were a prisoner condemned to execution. Nevertheless, the film ends with Ariel opting to tell the truth and seeming to be part of the column that sustains the building, thus suggesting that he has broken the pact of silence which permitted impunity. The titles at the beginning of the film reproduce a schematic plane of the country-club, offering a simplistic and superficial infantile standpoint in regard to social life’s complexities. All at once, the soundtrack reproduces some Klezmer tunes, creating a playful atmosphere which is later contradicted by the theme of impunity. The film’s casting deconstructs the nexus between the protagonist and his ethnicity, otherwise assumed as practice of authenticity in the representation of minorities: along with recognized Jewish actors appear non-Jewish ones playing the role of Jews. For instance, Ariel is interpreted by Sebastián Montagna, a young non-Jewish actor from the north-western city of Salta, whom a phonetics expert managed to teach the protagonist’s original accent of Buenos Aires.8 The most suggestive casting is that of the actor Daniel Hendler in the role of Vercovich, who is in charge of the youth activities. Vercovich does not have a first name; he is a flat and unidimensional character with no physiological depth, which represents paradoxically the double discourse of concealment. Hendler’s cinematographic personality was previously built as a Jewish character in Daniel Burman’s films; in three of them he carries the same name

8 Press Interview of the director Winograd, in La Voz, November 23, 2006, http:// archivo.lavoz.com.ar/06/11/23/secciones/espectaculos/nota.asp?nota_id=20681.

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“Ariel.” In Cara de Queso, however, the names as well as their significance are transmuted: Ariel “Cara de Queso”/Montagna will learn the lesson about Argentina in his encounter with Vercovich/Hendler, a lesson which Ariel/Hendler did not receive in Burman’s films that focus on the question of identity, leaving aside the social dilemmas as a non-conflictive background.9 Winograd’s characters expose the sense of the ephemeral that the Menemista economic growth induced, for example, when Ariel’s parents decide instantaneously and thoughtlessly to sell their property and to emigrate to Israel, not because of their Zionist conviction, but as a gregarious reaction in face of a possible crisis. Ariel discovers the importance of money in his grandmother’s perception of the world. This eternal card-player recommends with insistence that her grandchild accumulate dollars and have his passport ready, revealing in this way her preference for monetary capital, over cultural and symbolic inheritances with which past Jewish emigrants have begun their lives in other places. Other examples are the female teenager who sells her kisses with no consideration other than her wish to earn money, and the way some female teenagers determine the different criteria of coexistence for their future marriages. The film refers with a parodic and cynical postmodern tone to the notion of truths and ideologies. The “El ciervo” country-club’s logo is a Star of David—symbol of Judaism—decorated with ostentatious antlers, parodying to the point of paroxysm the traditional anti-Semitic belief that Jews have horns like the Devil. Jewish identity is reduced to a postmodern pastiche, with Spanish language, interspersed with words in Yiddish and Hebrew and Israeli folk dances replacing the typical aerobics classes around the pool in summer camps, while remaining grounded in the daily experience of the Argentine middle class. Between playful lessons on sexuality and the frustration felt because of his Jewish family, Ariel’s grandfather clarifies the difference between an identity based on memory and that which is constructed upon oblivion and economic success, by comparing the reclusion within the countryclub—symbol of the middle class’ success—with the reclusion in the concentration camp, in which he survived during the Holocaust. The

9 Mariela Coudannes, “Convivencia cultural y retornos familiares: Una imagen no conflictiva de la Argentina en crisis,” EIAL, no. 2 (2007): 133–5.


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country-club “El ciervo” is an allegory of contemporary Argentina, in which Jews, voluntary enclosed, represent the Argentines trapped in a corrupted system that symbolically exterminates them, and to which they must face and for which they must assume responsibility in opposing impunity, as Ariel “Cara de Queso” eventually does. We Are All Brazilians, also the Jews Mauro, the protagonist of O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias is a boy in Sao Paulo, whose parents must leave in a rush out of fear of the military repression. He is left alone some days before the beginning of the World Cup series in May 1970, in front of his grandfather’s building in the Bon Retiro neighborhood of Sau Paulo, not knowing that the grandfather has just passed away. Though the building is inhabited by Jewish families and elderly Jews, the neighborhood is a space in which multicultural tolerance and mutual acceptance reign among European and internal immigrants, Jews, Arabs and Christians, Blacks, Whites and Mulatos; all in the midst of the most intolerant environment of the dictatorship, whose propaganda demands that one loves the country or abandons it. Only a graffiti, some random signs, and a brief vision of Mauro’s home interior turned upside down as though it had been inspected by the police, remind the audience that these are the harshest moments of the repression. As told by his parents before their departure, Mauro is convinced that they have left for a short vacation and that they will return to pick him up in a few days; the interval is prolonged until the mother’s return, alone, at the end of the football championship. The plot focuses on the relationships among Mauro and an old religious Jew, Shlomo, his grandparent’s neighbor, and the neighborhood’s other characters, particularly Hana, the neighbors’ daughter. Remaining in the neighborhood symbolizes the end of innocence on various levels: Mauro discovers the Jewish ethnicity abandoned by his father for Shlomo reveals to him a world of customs, traditions, believes and rites, presented as an exotic, but non-threatening alterity. Hana introduces Mauro to other children of his age and to the world of sexuality, while she permits him to spy on the women trying on clothes in her mother’s seamstress’s workshop. The audience discovers that Shlomo collaborates with the opponent student activist Italo, thus

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contradicting the Marxist axiom of religion as a block to revolutionary change. The football game between the chosen Jewish and Italian immigrants configures another space of ethnic confraternity. At the end of the film, Mauro has gained friends, has a notion of his ethnic hybridity, and has participated, along with other inhabitants of the neighborhood, including the old religious Jews, in the popular congregation around the televised transmission of the football game— one of the most fundamental rites of Brazilian identity—, a game in which Brazil wins the world cup. In the film, the colors of green and yellow of the national flag predominate, symbolizing the verde-amarelo discourse of boastful nationalism of the traditional elites. Mauro has transformed into a Brazilian Jew, whose subjectivity includes traditional and secular ethnicity, as well as Brazilianness. Nevertheless, the audience has undergone collective amnesia, promoted by the Brazilian hegemony that to this day does not investigate or bring to trial the crimes against human rights committed by the dictatorship. Brazil remains one of the most unjust societies on the continent.10 The Uruguayan Cinema in Aspirations of Growth If the two films previously discussed here arrive from countries with a century-long cinematographic tradition and a volume of annual production of dozens of movies, the Uruguayan film industry has frequently been described as a sporadic phenomenon lacking tradition due to the reduced internal cultural market and restraints imposed by the civic-military dictatorship between 1973 and 1985. Despite the cinephilia culture and the democratic liberties that until 1973 permitted exhibition of the most novel European films, as well as Hollywood productions and Soviet ones, in Montevideo’s theatres, the availability of capital was minimal and the technology was simple and rudimental. The films were the fruit of the artistic and artisan labor of a small number of intellectuals committed to left-wing movements; 10 Rosas, and Mousinho, “Perspectiva narrativa, tempo e representaçãoes da amizade em ‘O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias’,”; Sheylla Franca de Souza et alium, “Brasil e Chile: Fronteiras, dialogos e perspectivas multiculturalistas a traves de representações cinematográficas latinoamericanas,” Anais do XXXI Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação, 2008; Edison Gastaldo, “Ritos da Nação Uma videoetnografía da recepção coletiva da Copa do Mundo no Brasil,” Revista Brasileira de Ciencias de Esporte, no. 1 (2009): 209–22.


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their framework was that of Third World film festivals and the Third World Cinematheque. Different critics have pointed out that is was more than a decade following the return to democracy in 1985 before a new generation of filmmakers emerged and tried to find a basis for the reconstruction of the film industry in Uruguay. Even today, the relatively small dimensions of the internal market condemns Uruguayan cinematographic production to dependence on exterior economic support, such as that of the Fondo Ibermedia or that of regional productions and co-productions.11 Similar to Brazil, but unlike Argentina, Uruguay has not tried those guilty of crimes against human rights during the dictatorship years, despite the fact that power is in the hands of the leftist coalition of Frente Amplio and of president José Mujica; a veteran of the urban guerrilla Tupamaros. Only in 2011, and against the president’s will, did the Uruguayan senate annul the Law of Caducity, which had granted a de-facto amnesty to the repressors; it was a measure which the majority of voters had rejected in two previous referendums (during 1989 and in 2009).12 This collective wish for amnesty reduces the return to the past in the film Acné to various indefinite moments during the 1990’s. If the previously discussed films provide some historical reference points, and locate the social circumstances against the background of historical events, in this way promoting an allegoric reading, Acné describes only Rafael’s daily life, that of a teenager trapped between the imminent divorce of his parents, an emerging sexuality that marks social life in a Jewish school providing a comprehensive education, two cultures, three languages, and the traumatic acne. Different scholarly works have commented on the influence of postwar Italian neo-realism (1945–1954) as a source of ethic and esthetic

11 Tzvi Tal, “Cine y revolución en la Suiza de América: La Cinemateca del Tercer Mundo en Montevideo,” Araucaria, no. 4 (2003): 70–92; Idem., “The Prostitution of the Images: Latin American Immigrants in Films from Spain and Uruguay,” forthcomming publication, edited by Silvina Gesser, and Raanan Rein, El otro en la España Contemporánea: Prácticas, discursos y representaciones (Sevilla: Fundación Tres Culturas, 2011); Marina Moguillansky, “El cine en el Mercosur: El proceso de integración regional y las asimetrías de la industria cinematográfica,” Temas y debates, no. 18 (2009): 95–108; David Martin-Jones, and Soledad Montañez, “Cinema in Progress: New Uruguayan Cinema,” Screen, no. 3 (2009): 334–44; Alvaro Casal, “Mas allá del video, un cine con vocación internacional,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, no. 632 (2003): 75–78. 12 “Uruguay anula la Ley de Caducidad y abre la polémica por juicios de la última dictadura,” Perfil, April 13, 2011; http://www.perfil.com/contenidos/2011/04/13/ noticia_0006.html.

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inspiration for the Latin American political cinema of the 1960’s and 1970’s. A similar comment refers to contemporary Uruguayan films, especially those produced by Control Z company, such as Acné, 25 Watts (directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, 2001), and Whisky (directed by Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, 2004). These films portray the daily life of characters from the social peripheries and some of them represent Jewish ethnicity through plots in which the dramatic conflicts are minimal and the solutions do not change radically the protagonist’s situation. Nevertheless, while Italian neo-realism promoted, in the aftermath of World War II, both a moral conscience and de facto oblivion of the fascism’s crimes, without dictating to the audience a definite posture considered by the filmmakers as ideologically correct, most of the films produced by Control Z seems to lack any social transcendence. More than anything else, these productions express the desire to establish an economic and organizational platform to realize cinematographic projects in Uruguay, to produce films of Uruguayan authors, and to offer production services to foreign feature films.13 Accordingly, I claim that Acné is a film that resists the allegorical interpretation of the processes of Uruguayan identity. However, it represents the quest for maturity of contemporary Uruguayan cinema. Rafael, whose original Hebrew name suggests healing, suffers the daily Jewish experience at school, in which personal relations with the State of Israel are a touristic option, extra-curriculum activities inculcate a paranoid historical memory, and the exhibition of a documentary film about the Holocaust carries sexual insinuations for the classmates. The piano classes are moments of frustration for Rafael; the sounds he extracts from the instrument symbolize with precision the disharmony which characterizes his life. His best friend emigrates to Israel and his parents are divorcing without any emotional manifestation on their own behalf or that of the children. The monothematic and obsessive coordinate in Rafael’s life is his growing sexuality, expressed 13 Jorge Sanjinés, “Neorrealismo y Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano: La herencia, las coincidencias y las diferencias,” Seminar Presentation, “La influencia del Neorrealismo Italiano en el cine latinoamericano,” Festival Cinesur, Rio de Janeiro, June 2002, http://sergiotrabucco.wordpress.com/2007/06/21/jorge-sanjines-1/; Oribe Irigoyen, “La película ‘Acné’: una puesta a prueba,” La onda digital, http://www.laondadigital .com/laonda/laonda/404/A1.htm; Adrian Singer, “Influence of the Italian Neorealism on Uuruguyan Contemporary Cinema,” Iberoamerica Global, no. 1 (2010): 36–52, http://iberoamericaglobal.huji.ac.il/vol3num1/pdf/Art_Singer_4.pdf.


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through masturbation or by paying the domestic maid or the prostitute in the brothel in order to have sexual relations. In search of being understood and of identity, Rafael wonders if sex with a Jew is more pleasant, but the maid’s reply is a simple categorical negation. This way, the film constructs a notion of Judeo-Latinity, in which Jewish aspects are limited to the Bar-Mitzva ceremony, tourism to Israel, and summer camps organized by the school, in order to preserve ethnic cohesion coercively. During the whole film, Rafael attempts to kiss and is rejected, until a certain point in the final scene, when he meets a non-Jewish girl of his age who kisses him spontaneously, without either feeling repulsed by the acne or rejecting the intimacy, as did the prostitute before her. It could be said that Rafael’s conflicts are analogical to those of Uruguayan cinema, which lacked a consistent past and an esthetic tradition relevant to the present, but which seeks to exist as well. Like Rafael in the Jewish school, the Uruguayan filmmakers have been formed in film schools and are familiar with the histories and theories of the medium. Nonetheless, they do not produce films according to these theories, nor do they care to distance themselves from the political motivations of their precursors in the Third World Cinematheque. Despite the fact that the proportion of Jews among these contemporary Uruguayan filmmakers exceeds the percentage of Jews in the general Uruguayan population, the appearance of Jewish topics within the films only exploits personal biography without offering any proposal concerning Jewish ethnicity or the future in Uruguay. My final remarks concern the end used by classic cinema, the inscription “The End,” which signaled the limit between the imaginary world and reality. Unlike these old films, the movies of contemporary cinema do not end this way. These films allow the audience’s reality and the characters’ imaginary world to mix symbolically in a process of hybridization, analogical to the mode in which identities are constructed. Cara de Queso: Mi primer ghetto, O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias, and Acné expose the forms of representation of the past and of allegorization of the present. At the same time, they represent Judeo-Latinidad in images that could move us or bore us, make us smile or leave the audience indifferent. Nonetheless, they all manifest the never ending evolution of a white ethnicity, which has a place in the multicultural mosaic of Latin American societies. To be continued

PART FOUR

THE NOTION OF OTHERNESS AND THE QUESTION OF INTEGRATION

CHAPTER TEN

“THE BOOKS THAT SHOULD NOT BE MISSING IN ANY JEWISH HOME”: TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL POLICY IN ARGENTINA, 1919–1938 Alejandro Dujovne For much of the twentieth century, the city of Buenos Aires was the main center of translation into Spanish of ‘works of Jewish interest’ written in different languages. As such, it emerged as the primary bridge of contact between the Jewish cultural world and Spanish-speaking readers in Latin America, Jews and non-Jews. This role was the result of the endeavors of intellectuals, cultural entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and institutions, as well as some commercial companies that invested time, energy, and money in publishing work. This article explores the initial stage of development of the translation and publishing of books ‘of Jewish interest,’ as defined by the actors involved in these tasks. It further identifies the people and institutions behind early publishing projects and explores their notions of ‘translation’ and ‘books’ in order to understand what led them to undertake their endeavors. The period 1919–38 comprises the first attempts at publishing Jewish-themed books in the Spanish language. The beginning of this period is marked by the publication of the first translation of a Yiddish volume, Isaac Leib Peretz’s Los cabalistas, the end by the birth of the first modern publisher exclusively devoted to Jewish issues, Editorial Israel. In political and cultural terms, this stage of Jewish publishing history was characterized by the ideological predominance of a liberal or—in Ezra Mendelsohn’s words—integrationist position.1 According to Mendelsohn, those in the Jewish integrationist camp were defined

1 See Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), 6–17. For a general approach to the liberal ideology in the Argentine Jewish community, see Leonardo Senkman, “Ser judío en Argentina: Las transformaciones de la identidad nacional,” in Identidades judías, modernidad y globalización, ed. P. MendesFlohr, Y. T. Assis, and L. Senkman (Buenos Aires, Lilmod, 2007), 403–54.

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by their willingness to participate as citizens and full members of their nation of residence. This position was based on a liberal conception of society, politics, religion, and the state. This general framework adequately defines the general outlines of the local Spanish-speaking Jewish elite who were behind this period’s different publishing endeavors. The period’s end coincides, not incidentally, with the crisis of the liberal consensus, both within and outside Jewish life, and the concurrent expansion of the Zionist perspective.2 The first part of this essay analyzes the meanings this sector of the Jewish elite gave to the tasks of translation and publishing within the broader context of their considerations about culture. After that, it examines two publishing experiences that shaped this period: on the one hand, the translation, publishing, and essay work of Salomón Resnick; on the other, the editorial work of the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina. The Youth, the Spanish, and the Books A Distance “. . . For Now Only Idiomatic” The pages of the Spanish-language Jewish weekly Mundo Israelita provide us with a key point of view to understand the concerns regarding the transmission of Jewish culture held by a particular sector of the Spanish-speaking Jewish intellectual elite. On the one hand, and in general terms, the editors and writers of this journal, from its founding in 1923 until at least its ending in the 1930s, were firmly committed to the ideas of liberalism, secularism, and the Spanish language as means of aiding cultural integration into the country, while they kept, as part of the same position, a cautious distance from Zionism, which lasted until the mid-1930s. On the other hand, some of the journal’s main contributors were also at the forefront of the country’s first forays 2 For the development of the Zionist parties in Argentina and their ‘conquest’ of central Jewish institutions, see Lawrence Bell, “Bitter Conquest: Zionists against Progressive Jews and the Making of Post-war Jewish Politics in Argentina,” Jewish History, no. 17 (2003): 285–308, Silvia Schenkolewski, “Las relaciones entre el Movimiento Sionista y la sociedad mayoritaria en Argentina, 1935–1943,” Indice, no. 2 (Buenos Aires: DAIA, 1989): 47–82; and Silvia Schenkolewski, “La conquista de las comunidades: El movimiento sionista y la comunidad ashkenazí de Buenos Aires (1935– 1949),” Judaica Latinoamericana 2 ( Jerusalem: AMILAT, 1992): 192–202.

“the

books that should not be missing in any jewish home” 161

into translation and editing, such as Salomón Resnick and Leon Dujovne. For these reasons, examining Mundo Israelita treatment of ‘books of Jewish interest’ implies not only to review the various events and processes linked to this sort of books through the pages of the Spanish-language paper most attentive to Jewish cultural life, but also offers a clear view of the concerns and aspirations of the cultural elite who promoted these early literary endeavors. The article “The Orientation of Cultural Activity,” published on 1 March 1924, set up the framework through which the problem of transmission of Jewish culture to young people would be defined during this period: It must be acknowledged, first of all, that for the Jewish community, or better, for Jews in general, there is a large number of issues, problems, and questions of various kinds that concern them particularly. There are historical, religious, social, cultural, and economic problems that it will be difficult for them to learn deeply about outside their own institutions. Thus, it is important that each Jewish entity with cultural aims defines and devotes its work to these concerns. . . . The ignorance of the historical role played by the people of Israel in the development of mankind; the lack of knowledge of the social moral value bequeathed by the Hebrews, which is the axis on which the world turns in the path toward perfection, is the main cause of the malaise, struggles, and misfortunes that have hit the Jews. And if the ignorance of strangers is fatal because it causes setbacks in this march toward a better humanity, ignorance of Jewish ideals is even worse when those who suffer are the Israelites themselves, especially the youth.3

The text criticizes the lack of Jewish content in the programming of the community’s cultural institutions and identifies youth as the main victims of this absence. Like the successive pieces that refer to this problem, this first article was not merely intended as an impartial assessment of the future of ‘Israelite’ life in the country, but on the contrary was clearly meant to influence the direction of Jewish institutional cultural policy. Later articles repeated this criticism of institutions, blaming them for the alienation of youth. The piece “Distance, Not Assimilation,” published on 16 August of same year, states:

3 “La orientación de la actividad cultural”, Mundo Israelita, 1 March 1924. All translations are my own.

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alejandro dujovne The Israelite youth have for their people the best feelings; unfortunately, an erroneous education has led them astray from direct knowledge of the sources of their national culture. Let us not make them guilty for that, but strive to repair the evil speech in a language that is accessible to them. . . . The distance that separates [the young generation] from their people is not, generally, very great; it is for now only idiomatic. . . . It would be worse if their national sentiments were atrophied.4

As can be seen in these quotes, the question of the transmission of Jewish culture to the younger generations born and raised in Argentina has been considered a serious problem for Jewish intellectuals and community activists since at least the 1920s. The widening cultural gap between the generations and the youth’s disinterest in Jewish topics, as it was perceived by these intellectuals and activists, were to a great extent the result of the increasing shift from Yiddish to Spanish as the daily language of the Jews, the more or less widespread ignorance of Hebrew, and the attraction of the non-Jewish environment. As we will see, the lack of translations of Jewish-themed books into Spanish was understood as a central aspect of this problem. The Commitment to Books On 28 June 1924, Mundo Israelita echoed a debate published in New York’s Jewish press about the sharp decline in sales for the Jewish Publication Society of America, the pioneer publisher of Jewish-themed books in the English language in the United States, in order to address the issue of Spanish-language ‘Jewish books.’ The underlying problem was the same in both countries: how to provide Jewish-themed literature for youth who no longer spoke the “father tongue sufficiently to use it as an instrument of culture.”5 But the question of declining sales in the United States was somewhat paradoxical, and its local reverberations were worthy of attention: the increasing diffusion of the English language among young Jews not only did not mean an increase in book sales, but was in fact paralleled by a decline in sales. In response, the article endorsed the argument of one of the participants in the American debate: “The narrow and outdated criteria through which the works are selected, which is not adapted to modern modalities of thought, explain the decline in 4 5

“Alejamiento, no asimilación”, Mundo Israelita, 16 August 1924. “Una cuestión cultural” Mundo Israelita, 28 June 1924.

“the


demand for books.”6 Thus, according to this point of view, the problem now was not only the translation of books and their publication in Spanish, but the kind of books that were to be published. This opinion served the agenda of the local columnist, who was trying to introduce and justify the translation and publishing project that the Asociación Hebraica was launching: “Among us there is also the problem of Jewish culture among young people raised in the country, and it is fair to say that an institution in Buenos Aires is preparing to make, with a criterion which may not be regarded as retrograde, a work similar to the one in New York.”7 Although the catalog of the Jewish Publication Society of America included various genres and many contemporary authors, it can be inferred that the American polemist understood as narrow and outdated the insistence on a reprint of the translation of the Hebrew Bible and the catalog’s lack of relevant representatives of modern Jewish political, cultural, and philosophical thought.8 However, Mundo Israelita’s columnist did not seem too worried about defining the kind of works to which the American polemist referred, ultimately appealing to the criticism only to justify the series of volumes that would be inaugurated in Buenos Aires with the first translation of a book by the historian Simon Dubnow. Toward the end of 1929, more than five years after the publication of the first translation of Dubnow’s work, the weekly published a summary of what had been accomplished up to that point in terms of translation, returning to the argument about the transmission of culture to youth, while adding other considerations: The publication of these works [books in Spanish on ‘Jewish themes’] has shown to our youth and to Argentine intellectuals the existence of an interesting kind of literature, revealing a world that was until now almost unknown . . . Since the first book of this variety appeared . . . a large contingent of young people eager to learn about Jewish culture who can only access cultural works in Spanish has emerged.9

Ibid. Ibid. 8 See “Report of the Thirty-seventh Year of the Jewish Publication Society of America, 1924–1925,” in American Jewish Year Book Vol. 26 (1924–1925) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1925), 617–21. 9 “Ediciones Judías en Castellano,” Mundo Israelita, 7 Dec. 1929. 6 7

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The author of the article, probably Salomon Resnick, one of the people engaged in the translation task, identified in these lines the two audiences at whom the ‘Jewish works in Spanish’ were aimed: ‘young Jews’ and ‘Argentine intellectuals.’ However, rather than these claims being based on actual knowledge of those who bought and read these books, ‘young Jews’ and ‘Argentine intellectuals’ instead constituted the ideal audiences whom the publishers wished to approach; behind these categories lay two of the major concerns of Buenos Aires’s Spanish-speaking Jewish cultural activists: the transmission of culture (in addressing the Jewish youth) and the legitimacy of the Jewish presence in the country (in addressing intellectuals). These were the two central functions that the publishing of translations was expected to meet. New Times: Nazism, the Left, and Zionism With Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, the question of the transmission of culture gained new strength and drama. This was clearly expressed by the first editorial published in Judaica, the cultural monthly Salomon Resnick founded that year after resigning the coeditorship of Mundo Israelita: The fateful events in Germany and the spread of xenophobia everywhere—even in an environment that, like the Argentine one, should be totally foreign to this hatred—logically provoke in Israelite youth a desire to reassert their historical feelings by asserting racial consciousness. . . . The Spanish-speaking Jewish youth longs more than ever to enter the cultural maze of his people, to connect to their fundamental problems, to be impregnated with Jewish knowledge; this is ultimately our only and most effective weapon in the fight against adversity.10

In the context of the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Argentina, the issue of youth alienation was no longer only a concern; remedying it had now become politically urgent. This is revealed by the tone of Mundo Israelita toward the end of the period covered here, its criticism of the cultural orientation of Jewish life becoming even more vehement. To the writer of a March 1937 note titled “Jewish Collective Action Must Be Channeled in a New Direction,” the balance of the cultural activity undertaken by Jewish institutions since the arrival of

10

“Presentación,” Judaica, July 1933, 1.

“the


immigrants in the late nineteenth century was negative, and its effects could be seen in the younger generations: In Judaism there are eternal values that our youth must learn in order not to be ashamed to belong to the race. . . . [ It] is necessary that they know that our own case, now that the Jews are persecuted all over the world, is as worthy of attention as any other social and political demand. . . . Is the Jewish people less worthy of solidarity than Spain, for example? At least it shouldn’t be for its own children. Moreover, the Jews are not only engaged in a simple defensive struggle. They are also shaping their national fate through a great constructive work, both material and cultural. Palestine today is not merely a country of immigration and colonization, but a true spiritual homeland of Israel.11

The cultural and political alternative of the left emerged in this approach as a clear adversary that diverted the interest of young people from ‘Jewish options.’ The defense against the persecution of European Jewry, on the one hand, and Zionism, on the other, were the Jewish political causes for which young people should struggle, according to the author. Thus, in this cultural and political context, the problem had become more complex: the ‘gap’ between youth and ‘Jewish peoplehood’ was no longer ‘only linguistic.’12 This shift in the understanding of the problem of cultural transmission coincided, not incidentally, with fundamental changes in the kinds of Jewish editorial projects being undertaken. Without being completely abandoned, the more celebratory liberal stance promoting integration gave way to the affirmation of Jewish particularism in Jewish publications, both in Zionist (the Israel and Candelabro publishing houses) and religious terms (Sigal and Yehuda). The birth of these changes marks the end of the period covered here, while opening a different stage in the history of ‘Jewish books’ in the Spanish language. Let us proceed now to consider the two publishing experiences that set the tone for the period under analysis.

11 “Debe encauzarse por nuevos rumbos la acción colectiva judía,” Mundo Israelita, 6 Mar. 1937. 12 On 3 Sept. 1938, Mundo Israelita reproduced the article “Nuestra juventud avanzada y el judaísmo” [Our Progressive Youth and Judaism], by Chany Niguer, originally published in the American Jewish press, indicating that it was doing so because the situation of the youth in Argentina was very similar to that of youth in the United States, each day coming closer to the left and increasingly further away from Judaism.

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alejandro dujovne Salomon Resnick and the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina

The Translation Work of Salomón Resnick Salomón Resnick was born in Russia in 1894. In 1902, when he was eight years old, he arrived in Argentina with his family. He settled first in Carlos Casares, a town close to a Jewish agricultural colony in the province of Buenos Aires, and then moved to the city of Buenos Aires, where he lived until 1946, the year of his death, developing a prolific body of work as the figure who introduced Yiddish literature and culture to the Spanish-speaking world. His journalistic road in the Spanish-speaking Jewish world followed the series of publications that made up the liberal-integrationist axis: Juventud, Vida Nuestra, Mundo Israelita, Judaica, and—through a couple of articles—Davar.13 He cofounded and codirected Mundo Israelita from 1923 to 1933, expressing his cultural and political concerns through anonymous articles in its pages. After leaving this weekly, he launched what could be considered the greatest work of his life, the literary monthly journal Judaica. This publication presented a wide range of topics, featuring not only Yiddish but the history and the literary and artistic production of the Judeo-Spanish world, including ancient and modern Hebrew and articles on contemporary political issues. His name was listed among the founders of the Asociación Hebraica in 1923 and of its successor, the prestigious Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (SHA), in 1926. During this institution’s early years, Resnick directed its library. After leaving the SHA in 1929, he took part in various cultural projects; acted as a representative of the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO), whose center was first in Vilnius and then in New York, chairing its local branch between 1938 and 1940; and

13 Resnick was one of the founders of the Yiddish daily Di Presse and participated in various Yiddish-language publications from abroad. According to his daughter Rosa Perla Resnick, he collaborated from Buenos Aires in 1916 in the anarchist Yiddish journal Rudolf Rocker published in London. For more information about Resnick’s trajectory, see Rosa Perla Resnick, “Salomón Resnick, pionero de la cultura judía en lengua castellana en Latinoamérica,” Noaj, Revista Literaria, nos. 12–13, special issue in tribute to Salomón Resnick (1997): 4–12. For the list of articles and notes published by Resnick in the journals noted above, see Ana Weinstein and Miriam Gover de Nasatsky, Escritores judeo-argentinos. Bibliografía 1900–1987, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1994).

“the


in the last years of his life served as a representative of the nonprofit organization the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.14 His prolific work as a translator of Yiddish literature was embodied in journals and newspapers, as well as in books. In 1919 he published his first translated book, I. L. Peretz’s Los cabalistas, a work that was in fact the first book in the country translated from Yiddish.15 This selection of stories was followed by other translations of narratives, as well as history, literary criticism, and political essays. Resnick introduced the most important modern writers in Yiddish to the Argentine publishing market, and most probably also to the Spanish-language market in general: I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Schalom Asch, and—except for a small book published, previously, in 1933 by the label Sem—Joseph Opatoschu. Along with translations, he published substantial journalistic contributions that dealt mainly with Yiddish literature and culture. These ranged from the presentation of authors and their works to literary criticism and historical essays about Yiddish language and literature. These endeavors worked as an ‘importing device’ that encouraged and channeled the reading of the translated works.16 The number of both his translations and his critical works makes him even today the most fecund translator and introducer of Yiddish literature in the Spanishspeaking world. Besides literature, the other main genre in which Resnick was particularly interested was history. His interest materialized in the translation of four books of the Russian historian and political thinker Simon Dubnow. One of this author’s volumes was translated in collaboration with Leon Dujovne, who for his part also played an important role as a translator and promoter of publications. From a certain point of view, it can be said that Salomon Resnick’s literary choices, even his most eminently literary ones, had a political 14 His name shouldn’t be confused with the name of the engineer whose last name was written slightly differently (Resnik) and who joined the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina in Mar. 1931, subsequently occupying various positions on its executive boards. 15 As Resnick says in his introduction to the volume, some of the stories he selected and translated had appeared earlier in Juventud and Vida Nuestra and in other nonJewish publications as Nosotros, Fray Mocho, La Vanguardia, La Obra, and Renovación. 16 According to Patricia Willson, the ‘importing device’ consists of the series of books in which the translated work is included—the set of reviews, critical notes, etc.—which functions as a way to ensure the effectiveness of the translation’s incorporation into the target literature. See Patricia Willson, La constelación del sur (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004), 229–68.

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dimension. However, some of his translations and essays had a definite and obvious political character. The publication of his translation of Chaim Zhitlowsky, Ensayos sobre la nacionalidad Judia (Essays on Jewish Nationality), in 1931 by the ephemeral Federación de Instituciones Culturales Hebreas de la Argentina (FICHA) appears as a clear commitment in this regard.17 In the same year he published through the same label the little thirty-one-page book Dos formas del nacionalismo espiritual: Ahad Ha’am and Simon Dubnow (Two forms of spiritual nationalism: Ahad Ha’am and Simon Dubnow), but this time as an author and not as a translator. Over a decade later, in 1943, he gathered many of his own texts that had been published in Judaica and edited Cinco ensayos sobre temas judíos (Five essays on Jewish themes). This volume was released under the Judaica label in honor of the tenth anniversary of the monthly. Through his recovery of Yiddish culture, Resnick added a unique national cultural nuance to the creed of liberal integration, which distinguished him from other cultural entrepreneurs and Spanishspeaking Jewish intellectuals. Books Translated by Salomón Resnick Year

Author

Title

Publisher

1919

I. L. Peretz

Los cabalistas

La Cultura Israelita

1920

AAVV

Cuentos judíos: Antología de los mejores escritores israelitas

Juventud

1922

I. L. Peretz Rudolf Rocker

Adán y Eva Artistas y rebeldes, escritos literarios y sociales

Vida Nuestra Editorial Argonauta

1925

Simón Dubnow

Historia contemporánea del pueblo judío, tomo I (1789–1815) (translated with León Dujovne)

Sociedad Hebraica Argentina

1926

Pedro Kropotkin

Los ideales y la realidad en la literatura rusa

M. Gleizer

1927

I. L. Peretz

Adán y Eva y otros cuentos (probably a reprint from 1922)


17 The book comprises the following texts: “The Theory of Nationality: Religion and nation”; “Nationality and Progress: Moses Hess, the Philosopher, the Socialist, the Jew”; “Ancient and Modern Nationalism: ‘Own” and ‘Foreign’ Culture: Progressive and Reactionary Nationalism”; “Jewish Genius: Max Nordau and Political Zionism”; “Job, a Free-Thinking Jewish Poem.”

“the


Table (cont.) Year

Author

Title

Publisher

1928

Schalom Asch

Una hija de Israel y otros relatos


1931

Jaim Zhitlowsky

Ensayos sobre la nacionalidad judía

FICHA

1932

Simón Dubnow

Manual de la historia judía (desde la edad media hasta nuestros días)

M. Gleizer

1934

Simón Dubnow

Manual de la historia judía (desde la hegemonía de Grecia hasta la edad media)

Judaica

1937

Simón Dubnow

Judaica

Iser Guinzburg O. Perelman

Manual de la historia judía (época bíblica) El Talmud Una excursión a Biro-Bidyan

1938

Abraham Coralnik

Gentiles y judíos

M. Gleizer

1939

AAVV

Cincuenta años de colonización judía en la Argentina Viajes de Benjamin III (El Quijote judío)

DAIA

Méndele Mojer Sforim

M. Gleizer Sociedad pro Colonización Israelita en Biro Bidyán

Ateneo “Buenos Aires”

1940

AAVV—Redacción H. Triwaks

50 años de vida judía en la Argentina: Homenaje a El Diario Israelita con motivo del XXV aniversario, 1914–1939

Comité de homenaje a “El Diario Israelita” (Di Idishe Tzaitung)

1941

AAVV

Raschi. Glosador de la Biblia y del Talmud. 1040–1940

Comité de homenaje a la memoria de Raschi

1942

Sholem Aleijem

Estampas del ghetto

Judaica

1943

Joseph Opatoschu

Razas. Relatos de la vida cosmopolita en los Estados Unidos

Judaica

1949

Simón Dubnow

Manual de la historia judía (desde los orígenes hasta nuestros días)

Sigal

1971

Julius Brutzkus

Los judíos montañeses del cáucaso

Congreso Judío Latinoamericano Biblioteca Popular Judía (Ejecutivo Sudamericano del Congreso Judío Mundial)

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Year

Author

Publisher

1931

Dos formas de nacionalismo espiritual: Ajad Haam y Simón Dubnow La literatura judía de la post-guerra

FICHA

1933

Esquema de la literatura judía

M. Gleizer

1943

Cinco ensayos sobre temas judíos

Judaica

FICHA

The fact that Salomón Resnick did not channel his editorial activity through a single label has hampered understanding of his work as a whole. However, since we know that he was at the helm of many of the endeavors that published his translations and his own works, it is possible to get closer to his translations not only in a narrow sense, as the shift of a text from one language to another, but as a central aspect of his cultural and political beliefs and stakes. Indeed, Salomón Resnick’s performance exceeded the works that bear his name as author or translator. His figure and imprint were present at the foundational moment of the publishing project of the SHA, as we will see next. The Sociedad Hebraica Argentina The SHA was founded in 1926 out of the merger of three similar cultural institutions: the Asociación Juventud Israelita Argentina, the Asociación Hebraica, and—joining them a few days later—the Ateneo Estudiantil Israelita. The leaders of this new society formed a social and cultural elite within the Buenos Aires Jewish community. Along with the young lawyers, engineers, doctors, architects, and accountants who made up the board of directors during the institution’s early years, there were key actors in the Jewish and nonJewish cultural fields, such as Alberto Gerchunoff, writer and journalist; Leon Dujovne, a law student with a degree in philosophy; Samuel Glusberg, writer and editor; and Matías Stoliar, a Yiddish journalist. The goals of the new entity were promoting Jewish culture and— though not explicitly—providing a space of sociability for this cultural elite. In defining its sphere of action, the SHA’s founders explicitly excluded politics and religion. Regarding the particular concerns here,

“the


editorial activity was pointed out as one of the organization’s main aims.18 However, the SHA’s first publishing experiences preceded its own existence. In July 1924, the Asociación Hebraica had issued a statement noting the upcoming publication in Spanish of one volume of Simon Dubnow’s Jewish history: The publication of several books by Jewish authors and the publication of journals and newspapers that spread different views on Jewish issues have contributed to the understanding and assessment of the Israelites’ intellectual work. . . . What is necessary now, and the need can be perceived daily, is to publish a good history of the Jews, expansive in its information and unbiased in its criteria, that will be able to educate our youth and serve as an example to them.19

These lines, most likely written by Salomón Resnick, who at that time was codirector of Mundo Israelita, responsible for organizing the library of the Asociación Hebraica and one of the driving forces behind this edition of Dubnow’s book, highlight the importance of this work’s translation as a means to fill a void: Jewish history is identified as a ‘vacant area’ that needs to be addressed. Therefore this pioneering translation task sought to fill a specific role in beginning to fill an empty space in the Spanish-language publishing field. The Asociación Hebraica’s first publishing endeavor was the 1924 printing of the booklet El cristianismo precristiano, by Alberto Gerchunoff, which was taken from a lecture that Gerchunoff read to the association on 7 June of that year. However, it was with the publication of Dubnow’s work in early 1925 that the group gathered at the Asociación Hebraica actually began their publishing activity in earnest. The magnitude of this publication involved a degree of planning and resource mobilization higher than any institution or individual in the Jewish community had made in relation to publishing translations.20 The completion of the undertaking was made possible, in part, thanks to

18 Memoria y balance correspondientes al período 11 de mayo de 1926–12 de octubre de 1927 (Buenos Aires: Sociedad Hebraica Argentina, 1928), 13. 19 “Asociación Hebraica. Por la Historia contemporánea del pueblo judío de S. Dubnow,” Mundo Israelita, 19 July 1924. 20 Perhaps the only task that exceeded the difficulty of this one was Albert Einstein’s visit, also organized by the association in 1925.

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the financial support of the grain merchant and philanthropist Jacobo Saslavsky.21 Between El cristianismo precristiano of 1924 and Tres ensayos sobre judaísmo of R. Marcus, A. S. Halkin, and S. Schechter of 1959, the SHA reported publishing thirty-seven titles.22 Some irregularity in the number of publications per year, including several years in which no book was published, shows the difficulties of following a systematic plan over time—or, probably, the lack of a plan. One example of this is the low number of books published during the first half of the 1930s, a period during which the association went through a long crisis of leadership and underwent marked fluctuations in the number of its members. With the departure of Resnick in 1929, León Dujovne became the main promoter of the SHA’s publishing activity until at least 1940. Titles Published by the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina Year

Author

Title

Translation

1924

A. Gerchunoff

El cristianismo precristiano (Asociación Hebraica)

1925

Simón Dubnow

Historia contemporánea del pueblo judío— I Parte: 1789–1815

X

1928

Simón Dubnow

Historia contemporánea del pueblo judío— II Parte: 1815–1881

X

1928

Schalom Asch

Una hija de Israel y otros relatos

X

1929

Jaim Zhitlovsky

La teoría de la relatividad de Einstein

X

1933

A. Gerchunoff

Los amores de Baruj Spinoza (en idish) (Borukh Spinosa’s libe)

X

1935

AAVV

Maimónides 1135–1935 (edición homenaje)

1936

Robert Beauplan

El problema judío

X

1938

AAVV

El legado de Israel

X

1940

Israel Abrahams

Valores permanentes del judaísmo

X

1941

Luis Furman Sas

¿Quiénes son los arios?

1942

Boleslao Lewin

Los León Pinelo

21 The second volume of Dubnow’s history, published in 1928, was also made possible by the financial support of Jacobo Saslavsky. In both cases, the support seems to have covered an important part of the cost, though not all. 22 In some of the lists the SHA included thirty-eight titles. This is because it included a work published in 1922 by Vida Nuestra (Adán y Eva y otros cuentos, by I. L. Peretz, 1927). It is impossible to figure out whether this was a reissue or a transfer of rights made by this journal, which was closely linked to the SHA.

“the


Table (cont.) Year

Author

Title

Translation

1942

Bernardo Verbitzky

Significación de Stefan Zweig

1944

Hugo Bergmann

Pensadores judíos contemporáneos

1944

James Darmesteter

Los profetas de Israel

X

1944

Jaim Zhitlovsky

Páginas escogidas

X

1946

Hermann Cohen

Heine y el judaísmo—El sábado y su significación histórico-cultural

X

1947

I. L. Peretz

La herencia y otros cuentos

X

1948

Lázaro Schallman

Valoración de Max Nordau

1949

L. S. Pérez

El pacto roto

1950

Baruj Spinoza

Epistolario

1950

Boleslao Lewin

El Santo Oficio en América

1950

Abraham Rosenvasser

Los manuscritos descubiertos en el Desierto de Judá

1952

Philip Friedman

Auschwitz

1952

A. Gerchunoff

El pino y la palmera

1953

Jaim Najman Bialik

Poesías

1953

Abraham Rosenvasser

Sukenik (Eliezer Sukenik 1889–1953, su contribución a la arqueología bíblica)

1954

Abraham Rosenvasser

Yahvé en Jerusalem

1954

Marcos Satanowsky

El renovado pueblo de Israel

1955

Martin Buber

En la encrucijada: Tres conferencias sobre el judaísmo

X

1955

Boaz Cohen

El arte en la ley judía

X

1955

Josef Klausner

Compendio de literatura hebrea moderna (1781–1953)

X

1956

AAVV. 17 autores judíos y no judíos

Los judíos. Su historia. Su aporte a la cultura

X

1957

Ajad Haam (Asher Guinzberg)

Epistolario y reminiscencias

X

1958

Jehuda Bergmann

El judaísmo, su esencia y su vida

X

1958

Rabí Sem Tov de Carrión

Judaísmo: Proverbios morales (traducido del español antiguo)

X

1959

R. Marcus A. S. Halkin, and S. Schechter

Tres ensayos sobre judaísmo

X

X

X X

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In the thirty-five years between the first and the last titles, the series alternated among three different types of works that corresponded to different sizes. The smaller format, which was closer to the size of a booklet than a book, included at least nine titles that were generally printings of lectures delivered by local authors at the SHA. The midsized ones, between ninety and three hundred pages, were generally translations from Yiddish, English, or Hebrew. Among these is the only book published by the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina in a language other than Spanish, the 1933 translation into Yiddish of Los amores de Baruch Spinoza (Baruch Spinoza’s Loves), by Alberto Gerchunoff.23 Finally, there are four books over four hundred pages. Besides the second volume of Dubnow’s Historia contemporánea del pueblo judío ( Jewish History), published in 1928, the other three were collected works composed by texts from foreign and, in a few cases, local authors. These included an homage to Maimonides (1935), and the compilations of essays El legado de Israel (1938) and Los judíos, su historia, su aporte a la cultura (1956). Beyond this irregularity, the series maintained a consistent culturalpolitical line, followed over the years. Indeed, a quick look through the list of the SHA’s publications reveals that, despite the profound historical changes experienced by Jews around the world, first with the Holocaust and later with the creation of the state of Israel, and the ways that these events impacted the local political and cultural scene, a line shaped its catalog over the years. In a 1966 article, the current president of the institution, Jacobo Kovadloff, offered a definition of the institution’s general cultural position that accurately describes its editorial policy in retrospect: Jewishness [ lo judío], the Argentine [ lo argentino], and universal [ lo universal], are the three events that find [in the department of culture] their just expression: a symbiosis designed to combine the spirit, art, national and universal intellect, thinking, ethics, and Jewish traditions, seeking reciprocity that will allow us to externalize the humanistic character that the SHA has as its core principle and as the goal of its cultural activities.24 23 The publication of this translation into Yiddish within a catalog oriented to Spanish can perhaps be explained by the Sociedad Hebraica’s greater openness to Yiddish during the early 1930s. But of course, it is not the translation of the work of any author; it is the work of Alberto Gerchunoff. 24 Jacobo Kovadloff, “La Sociedad Hebraica Argentina de Buenos Aires,” in Comunidades judías de Latinoamérica (Buenos Aires: Comité Judío Americano—Instituto de Relaciones Humanas, 1966), 81.

“the


The capability of institutions to serve as disseminators of Jewish culture, a responsibility frequently stressed by Mundo Israelita, found its limit in the editorial task. Thus, the newspaper did not hesitate to criticize the SHA harshly when it observed that publishing activity had stopped and that the books already printed had not been sold. Therefore, less than a year after the weekly underlined the unique way in which the SHA would lead the publishing activity, it judged severely what had been accomplished up to that point.25 Although the SHA’s editorial activity existed beyond the years in question here, its cultural policy belongs, in form and in content, to the first stage of Jewish publishing. Indeed, in many ways, that first stage was actually defined by the SHA. First, the liberal and integrationist conception of Jewishness found its place in the SHA, especially in historical essays and scholarly studies. Second, the SHA’s books combined the views of local intellectuals who identified themselves with a liberal perspective on integration into Argentine culture and society and the translations of foreign representatives who held a similar universalist vision of Jewishness. Even in the few cases when authors represented different national conceptions of Jewishness, the cultural dimension predominated over the political one in the types of works chosen. Third, there was a preponderance of translation over local contributions. This feature can be seen not only in the ratio of works published in translation to those from the local realm, but also in the difference of size between them. Finally, the publishing endeavor of the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina, as in the case of Resnick’s individual one, failed to become organized as a systematic and defined project. Whether because of the absence of a plan, the replacement of committee leaders, or the financial and political vicissitudes of the institution, the publishing project of the SHA found a limit to its potential development.

25 The note “Las ediciones de la Hebraica” in Mundo Israelita, 8 Sept. 1928, says, “Now, no other collective body is in better condition than the Hebraica to unfold a vast action in this area [the editorial]. It counts for this with the necessary resources, intellectual and material, and nothing else; it must take advantage of both elements as broadly as possible.”

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alejandro dujovne Conclusion

During the period studied, a handful of intellectuals and cultural activists identified the existence of a language gap between Jewish cultural heritage and the new generations of Argentine Jews, perceiving this as an obstacle to the transmission of culture. At the same time, their liberal search for social and cultural integration within Argentine life encouraged them to develop cultural practices that would allow them to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Jewish presence within Argentine society. In both cases, the absence of a Jewish literary tradition in Spanish was considered a serious problem. Given this fact, they imposed upon themselves the responsibility of creating just such a tradition. To comply with this duty, they undertook the translation and publication of books in Spanish and the development of an ‘importing device’ (series, forewords, reviews, advances, advertising, etc.) that could accompany and facilitate the local circulation of these works. This process involved testing different publishing experiences. In this sense, the period under consideration is defined by the birth and development of specific types of editing projects. The closing of this initial stage occurred in 1938, with the emergence of a company of a different type, Editorial Israel, even though this did not mean the conclusion of the endeavors analyzed here. The publishing projects examined here stand in contrast to the private publishing endeavor exclusively focused on Jewish-themed titles that appeared in 1938 with the creation of Editorial Israel. This contrast allows us to understand the period under study as a stage of the gestation of local publishing projects that neither organized themselves as specialized companies nor managed to define a clear plan that could be actually followed in a consistent way. The kinds of titles published, and the ways of conceiving and appealing to the Jewish reader, were the other two dimensions that distinguished the publishing endeavors of this first stage from the works published in the period that started with the foundation of Editorial Israel. Within the context of a modern and secular view of Jewishness, two main lines were followed in the cases analyzed here: history and modern literature, mainly Yiddish. By contrast, religion and Zionism—topics that would gain strength in the next stage—did not occupy a prominent place. Despite editors’ and translators’ desire to impose certain meanings on their translations and to guide their cultural effects, the functions

“the


that these translations finally filled did not always coincide with their initial aspirations. It was expected that they would serve as a bridge to the younger generation and as a way to legitimize the Jewish presence within Argentine society, especially in the eyes of the representatives of local high culture. It is difficult, and beyond the aim of this article, to establish to what extent these claims were reached through books or to what extent the desire/mandate that (in the words of an advertisement) “these books should not be missing in any Jewish home” was fulfilled. However, what should be pointed out is that this set of cultural experiences put into circulation not only new topics, authors, and titles within the Spanish-speaking book market, but also an array of ideas and concepts that helped shape the representations of readers, both Jews and non-Jews, about Jewishness.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BEYOND IDENTITY: CLARICE LISPECTOR AND THE ETHICAL TRANSCENDENCE OF BEING FOR THE OTHER Nelson H. Vieira I should have liked to be other people first in order to know what I was not. Then I realized that I had already been those others and found it easy. My greatest experience would be to be the other of the others: and the other of the others was me. —Clarice Lispector, “The Greatest Experience,” in The Foreign Legion (1964/1986) The Torah is given in the light of a face. The epiphany of the other person is ipso facto my responsibility toward him—seeing the other is already an obligation toward him. A direct optics—without the mediation of any idea—can only be accomplished as ethics. Integral knowledge or Revelation, (the receiving of the Torah) is ethical behavior. —Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (1990) In the modern world, the cruelest thing you can do to people is to make them ashamed of their complexity. —Leon Wieseltier, Against Identity (1996)

Clarice Lispector’s acute sensibilities toward her experience of quest and alterity, as well as her often articulated sense of responsibility to the other, point to uncanny affinities between her literary persona and the ethical and existential inquiries developed by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, particularly in his Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961) and his Nine Talmudic Readings (1990), among other works. Born in the Ukraine and as a Jewish refugee dislocated to Brazil with her family when she was just a baby, Clarice Lispector (1920–77) is today regarded as the premier Latin American female author, who, since her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (1944) [ Near to the Wild Heart] (1990), has garnered a national and international reputation among both male and female readers, and writers and critics, for her moving, ontologically driven narratives that manifest the processes of quest and otherness. These manifestations permeate her signature novels such as The Passion According to GH (1964), An Apprenticeship, or, The Book of Delights

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(1969), The Stream of Life (1973), and The Hour of the Star (1977).1 The relentless search to answer the question “Who am I?”—for Levinas via philosophy and for Lispector via literature—becomes the underlying yet frustrating impulse to reach, through language infused with the human spirit, an unattainable answer explaining the inscrutable human condition and an unfathomable God. Becoming a naturalized Brazilian in her early twenties and living in a discretely imagined multiracial and multiethnic society of marginalized others (racial, ethnic, or gendered), whose vulnerable realities began to challenge the ever-expanding Brazilian myth of racial democracy since the 1930s and 1940s, Clarice Lispector was sensitized early on to issues of alterity. Her concern about unfair treatment or lack of consideration toward others, economically impoverished or socially marginalized, emerged symbolically, psychologically, and covertly in her work, despite her open acknowledgment of her incapacity to compose traditional social realism.2 This proclivity for evoking otherness and dramatizing its embodiment in doubly conscious and piercing narratives suggests an incisive prophetic vision on her part about social injustice in Brazil at a time when such heightened awareness was overshadowed by strong nationalism and an increasing national image of a harmonious multiracial society. In addition, as deftly underscored in two of the above epigraphs, the ethical stance of ‘being for the other’ is reflective of the mindsets of the philosopher and the writer, whereby their ethical perspectives represent a humane position beyond self-satisfaction and materialist acquisitions or—as Levinas entitled one of his books—Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), that is, toward the “going outside oneself that is addressed to the other, the stranger.”3 My continuing interest in the iterations of alterity4 evident in Clarice Lispector’s writings stems from her recognition of alterity’s primordial 1 Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1992). 2 In the collection of stories and chronicles The Foreign Legion (1964/1986), Lispector explains very clearly her personal preoccupation with the ‘social problem.’ See The Foreign Legion, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1986), 124. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 97. 4 Emanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). This present study is part of a longer work on Lispector and the impact of diverse Jewish thinkers upon her writing. In the

beyond identity

181

role within the process of ethical behavior, one developed by Levinas and lucidly exemplified in his readings of Judaic hermeneutics and Talmudic precepts.5 Clarice Lispector’s decision not to identify herself overtly in her writing with Jewish culture, ethnicity, and society is explained, on the one hand, by her inability to write realist ethnic fiction and, on the other, by her ability to sublimate all forms of otherness into existentially driven narratives of search and interrogation. Her omission of overtly descriptive or referentially ethnic or obvious Jewish themes in her literature, for which she was frequently and unjustly chastised, nevertheless does not cancel out the discreet presence of these themes or concepts within her narratives. Another reason for this omission rests with her family’s traumatic experience as refugees fleeing the pogroms, a history well documented by Benjamin Moser in the first English biography of Clarice Lispector.6 This stance of overt omission has always represented a conscious aesthetic decision on her part, with the exception of the socially minded The Hour of the Star. As alluded to above, she was uninterested in writing literature about cross-cultural realities by depicting, in a naturalist style/mode, deterritorialized, dispersed, immigrating, or geographically dislocated summer of 2008, I spent two months at the Moreira Salles Institute in Rio de Janeiro, doing research on Lispector’s own book collection, which had recently been released by her family and donated to that institution. My initial findings disclose numerous titles on philosophy and various religious ideologies both Jewish and Christian. However, a considerable number of these texts were written by Jewish thinkers and writers such as Baruch Spinoza, Martin Buber, Michael Bruckner, Alberto Dines, Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig. Her collection also reveals her interest in Jean-Paul Sartre and his thesis on the ‘Jewish question.’ To date I have found no direct biographical link between her and Levinas, even though they were both in Europe during the 1940s and 1950s. Nonetheless, my reading of her work indicates strong parallels between her ethical approach to the other and the views of alterity as manifested in writings by Levinas. Publications by Helene Cixous (L’heure de Clarice Lispector (1989)/Reading with Clarice Lispector) (on alterity and gender); Joseph Ballan (“Divine Anonymities: On Transcendence and Transdescendence in the Works of Levinas, Celan, and Lispector,” Religion and the Arts 12, no. 4 (2008): 540–58); and other scholars have addressed a link between the writings of Levinas and Lispector, but my interest lies specifically in the Jewish features of her thinking and its implications for Brazilian literature and culture. 5 Levinas’s claim for the unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the other is mapped out in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). 6 Moser’s work, Why This World, a Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), addresses traumatic vestiges of the pogrom massacres and in particular her mother’s increasing illness as a result of that calamity, which ultimately led to her premature death and Clarice’s profound sense of abandonment at the age of nine.

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protagonists and their soulful need or arduous struggle to belong to a new culture, region, or nation. Yet the theme of belonging, not circumscribed to a particular ethnicity, is repeatedly evoked in her writing. In the “Literature and Justice,” she vociferously states her position on social-realist writing and forgives herself: “My tolerance in relation to myself, as someone who writes, is to forgive my inability to deal with the ‘social problem’ in a ‘literary’ vein (that is to say, by transforming it into the vehemence of art). Ever since I have come to know myself, the social problem has been more important to me than any other issue.”7 While Clarice Lispector was indeed preoccupied with the concept of belonging, she was obviously also very sensitive to the experience of displacement (see The Hour of the Star), but not in the way frequently associated with ethnic testimonies or bicultural dilemmas. As the daughter of a refugee and the wife of a diplomat, Lispector was well acquainted with travel and dislocation, experiences that became repeatedly inscribed throughout her life, evoking a sense of groundlessness and suspicion that often occurs with serial border crossers. Belonging and displacement incite endless questioning and in so doing reveal an inner compulsion to transcend the self, to move beyond a sole identification and inevitably toward the other. This process, pathway, or impulse in her work is movingly manifested in a famous newspaper chronicle, “Pertencer” [“Belonging”] (1968), where she states: If I have always wanted to belong, why then have I never joined any club or association? Because that is not what I mean by belonging. What I want and cannot achieve, is to be able to give the best of myself to whomever or whatever I might belong. . . . Belonging does not simply come from being weak and needing to unite oneself to something or someone stronger. An intense desire to belong often comes from my own inner strength—I wish to belong so that my strength will not be useless and may serve to strengthen some other person or thing.8

7 Lispector, Foreign Legion, 124. This chronicle, which appeared in A legião estrangeira (The Foreign Legion), not only stressed Lispector’s opinion about writing ‘ethnic’ or social literature but firmly upheld her strong sense of social justice: “The problem of justice for me is such an obvious and basic feeling that I am unable to surprise myself on its account—and unless I can surprise myself, I am unable to write. Also, because for me, to write is a quest, I have never considered any feeling of justice as a quest or as a discovery, and what worries me is that this feeling of justice should not be so obvious to everyone else” (124–25). 8 Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World, trans. and introduced by Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992), 148–49.

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Clarice Lispector’s view of belonging to life and her concern for the well-being of the other, as I will argue, tallies with Levinas’s views on ethical philosophy, as well as with many of the teachings of Torah and the Talmud. In light of this focus, allow me to make a disclaimer at this juncture: I am not trying to essentialize Clarice Lispector by defining or identifying her solely as a writer of Jewish literature; certainly we can discover many instances within her writings where she challenges Judeo-Christian principles and myths or, as mentioned above, points to her inability to write ethnic fiction. Rather, I want to compare her thinking with that of Levinas in his writings and in his own reading of the Talmud in order to signal one of the many dimensions of her work and thus to defy many unjust criticisms directed at her writing and her literary persona. Her focus on the other elucidates for us not only one of her many influences or sources of inspiration, such as the Bible and Talmud, but also one that sheds light upon her evolving novelistic voice and, for Brazilian culture, its manifestation of justice in the form of an ethical transcendence for the sake of the other and, perhaps indirectly, for the sake of the self in the process, which in part explains why readers find her narratives so compelling. These others may be women, marginals, subalterns, and the dispossessed or unenlightened males or females who are often trapped or blindsided by their noumenal self vis-à-vis a phenomenal world. Other critics have offered definitions of the alterity of the other as a form of or means toward refreshed perception. For example, Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, sees the other as “initially a structure of the perceptual field,” which, beyond the ego, makes perception possible.9 In view of Deleuze’s observation, I read Clarice Lispector as a voice striving beyond identity or the ego, in order to enable other perceptions to surface, outside the self. By signaling this approach to ethics via the other, I also want to call attention to the fact that scholars have already critically interpreted the role of ethics in existential readings of Clarice Lispector’s works, such as the individual stories in Laços de família [Family Ties] (1960) and the existential struggle of the antihero in A maçã no escuro [The Apple in the Dark] (1961), as well as other pieces that reveal her Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constatin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 59; Nelson H. Vieira, Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 20. 9

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understanding of ethics and authenticity to be synonymous with the acceptance of responsibility.10 Existential critical readings (based frequently upon Sartrean or Kierkegaardian principles) of Clarice Lispector abound, as do feminist, phenomenological, and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The purpose here is to take another approach, not to devalue these other readings, but to highlight how the role of responsibility for the other, from a Jewish perspective, represents an ethical act, but one that ultimately challenges the sense of the egological supremacy of self-identity, ergo the first part of my title—“Beyond Identity,” drawn from Levinas’s essay “Without Identity.” Or as the protagonist/narrator of The Passion According to GH, known only by her initials, states toward the end of her metaphorical and metamorphic narrative journey toward consciousness after facing the other: “But now, through my most difficult fright I am finally moving toward the opposite path. I am moving toward the destruction of what I have constructed. I am moving toward depersonalization. . . . I now know a modality that dispenses with everything—and also with love, with nature, with objects. A mode that dispenses with me.”11 The underlying thesis here rests with Lispector appreciating not only what it was like to operate ‘beyond identity,’ but, above all, how the experience of ‘depersonalization’ is intimately linked to an ethical transcendence toward the other. In Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, in the former’s Writing and Difference, he calls attention to Levinas’s terminology of ‘ethical resistance,’ defining it as that which “escapes the concept of power, therefore, is not existence per se, but the existence of the Other.”12 For Levinas, this path represents an ethical self-surpassing and thereby incites a break with the whole/totality of an overdetermined world via the encounter with the other—indicating that neither the self nor the world is a closed, organic unit or order, even though the self and the social world may manifest proclivities toward that goal or aim. In other words, the alterity of the other cracks the shell of self-delusion or illusion of totality and the essence of being, thereby weakening the

10 Clarice Lispector, Family Ties, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960), and The Apple in the Dark. 11 Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to GH, trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 167. 12 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans and introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 104.

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total sense of the self ’s egoist power and potential for injustice and violence, be it violence douce or otherwise, and consequently serves as a perceptual spark that ignites an awakening toward consciousness and propels the self toward ethical considerations and responsibility, that is, toward a “good of the infinitely more,” as GH realizes toward the end of The Passion According to GH: “I then understood that, no matter the situation, living is a great good in relation to others. All one has to do is live, and that in itself brings about that great good. He who lives totally is living for others, he who lives his own vastness is giving a gift, even if his life takes place in the cloister of a cell. Living is so great that thousands of people benefit from every lived day” (162). GH recognizes the role of alterity in the process of her metamorphosis as she further defines her transformation as ‘depersonalization’ toward the end of her retrospective journey: Depersonalization as the great objectification of oneself. The greatest externalization one can attain. Whoever is touched by depersonalization will recognize the other in any guise: the first step in relation to the other is to find in oneself the man of all men. Every woman is the woman of all women, every man is the man of all men, and every one of them could appear wherever humankind is judged. But only in immanence, because only a few people reach the point of recognizing themselves in us. And then, in the simple presence of their existence, revealing our own.13

Levinas regards immanence as the stage prior to transcendence that may only occur through a face-to-face encounter with the other, which, in GH’s case, takes place through the face-to-face encounter with the imagined interlocutor/narratee of “give me your hand” and when GH faces and ingests the white mass of the crushed cockroach in the maid’s room, symbol of otherness. Here, embedded within the narrative, lie obvious intimations of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for Lispector is in fact here ‘eating Kafka,’ anthropofagically, in order to evoke GH’s bodily state of transcendence, which Gregor Samsa, as victim, does not experience since his state remains one of immanence.14

Lispector, Passion According to GH, 168. Antropofagia, or cannibalism, stems from the modernist Oswald de Andrade and his 1928 manifesto, which points to how Brazilian culture ‘gobbles up’ foreign cultures and digests them in order to ‘regurgitate’ something new and authentically Brazilian. In this case, Clarice uses Kafka’s roach in order to go beyond the ego’s angst toward a greater understanding of the human process. 13 14

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The ethical self-surpassing, an ethical transcendence freeing the self from itself and thereby allowing it to be for the sake of the other, emerges repeatedly in Lispector’s work, often as an epiphany, a high point—the “coup-de-grâce (“golpe de graça”) that is called passion in The Passion According to GH, intensely sustained over the novel’s last ten pages.15 As GH awakens from a bad conscience to a consciousness of her injustice toward the other, in her treatment of her former black maid as invisible, or even toward herself, as an overcommitted ‘I’ in an overdetermined and materialized world, she perceives how her past life of worldly necessities precluded her ability to ‘see’ the other. As the reader follows GH’s retrospective path from her own living space in the direction of her former maid’s space, we see that GH first dwelled in the realm of what Levinas calls l’il y a, the existence of a preconscious beingness—a beingness in the world, but one deprived of a full-bodied consciousness of its own interior and the world’s exterior existence—“reasoning power kept me fast inside my own skin”— reason prevailed, not faith or committed passion.16 Subjected to her own compulsions, her frivolous nature and vulnerability, GH, prior to entering the maid’s room, which she unexpectedly finds to be clean and luminous, has not been made/maid aware of how her past choices or behavior have impacted upon the black empregada Janair. The maid’s room, the other’s space and not GH’s, will act as a catalyst, setting the stage for awakening toward the alterity of the other, which Levinas calls illeity, a life force inciting the birth of the ethical self and thereby surpassing l’il y a. In order to begin her spiritual journey through the maid’s room, GH is in need of an other to whom she must speak: “During the time I’m writing and speaking, I’m going to have to pretend that someone is holding my hand.”17 While this initial need for another ‘other’ implies dependence on her part, as the narrative slowly climbs toward the apex of GH’s consciousness of the other’s alterity, she more confidently affirms: “And now I am taking your hand in to my own. I am the one who is giving you my hand. I need your hand now, not so I won’t be afraid but so you won’t. I know belief in all this will, in the beginning, be a great solitude for you. But the moment will arrive

15 16 17

Lispector, Passion According to GH, 165. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 10.

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when you will give me your hand, no longer in solitude, but as I do now: in love.”18 The presence of this imagined interlocutor exists as a metaphoric alter-entity, as an other who, according to Levinas’s early essay “The Ego and Totality” (1954), from his Collected Philosophical Papers, inspires belief.19 In short, Levinas points to how this encounter with an other is ultimately based upon faith/belief. As Levinas’s reading of the Torah underscores, “seeing the other is already an obligation toward him,” and one founded upon faith: One can only find one’s bearings in all this phantasmagoria, one can inaugurate the work of criticism only if one can begin with a fixed point . . . [which] cannot be some incontestable truth . . . [ but] can only be the absolute status of an interlocutor, a being, and not be some truth about beings. An interlocutor is not affirmed like a truth, but believed. This faith or trust . . . is presupposed by every theoretical statement. Faith is not the knowledge of a truth . . . it is the face to face encounter with an (a hard and substantial) interlocutor.20

This faith is fervently manifested at the close of GH’s narrative journey, when she states, “Life is itself for me, and I don’t understand what I am saying. And, therefore, I adore.”21 Ever since her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1944), Lispector’s writing has revealed an intuitive openness toward spiritual reception, as mystics practice, but in her case it comes predominantly via language, not meditation, that is, via a daring openness to the hidden meanings of words and letters: “Energy? But where is my strength? In vagueness, in vagueness, in vagueness . . . and investing it with life, not the reality, but merely the vague impulse forward.”22 This impulse forward also entails a going-forth intuitively out of ego toward the other, which Lispector implies in her 1973 novel, The Stream of Life: “What saves you then, is to write absent-mindedly.”23 Writing ‘absent-(mind)edly’ signifies writing by boldly plunging forward without ego and preconceived knowledge—in order to know

Ibid., 164. Emanuel Levinas, “The Ego and Totality,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 25–45. 20 Ibid., 41. 21 Lispector, Passion According to GH, 173. 22 Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, trans and introduction by Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1990), 134. 23 Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 14. 18 19

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‘what’ to see instead of merely seeing what one already knows, to paraphrase Abraham Heschel in Man Is Not Alone. Levinas believes that an egological approach (i.e., of writing mindedly), associated with much Western intellectual thinking, is challenged by an ethical one of acting upon, surrendering to our responsibilities, even before we know what we are doing.24 In Nine Talmudic Readings, Levinas criticizes an egological way of thinking: “We do not want to undertake anything without knowing everything. . . . We want to live dangerously, but in security, in the world of truths.”25 This critical commentary recalls the Hebraism versus Hellenism comparison, in which the ideal man of Hebraism is the man of faith, while the ideal man of Hellenism is the man of reason.26 For Levinas, ethical transcendence constitutes ‘otherwise than being’ and furthermore implicates language as the open vehicle toward transcendence and eventual social solidarity, including that for one’s own sake: The generality of the Object is correlative with the generosity of the subject going to the Other, beyond the egoist and solitary enjoyment, and hence making the community of the goods of this world break forth from the exclusive property of enjoyment. To recognize the Other is therefore to come to him across the world of possessed things, but at the same time to establish, by gift, community and universality. Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general, because it offers things which are mine to the Other. To speak is to make the world common, to create commonplaces . . . [ laying] the foundation for a possession in common.27

The linguistic path via openness to the free play of signifiers, and for Levinas leading to transcendence via the other, also implies an interdependence toward ‘repair’ and mutual respect that considers the I and the other as a mutually beneficial ‘we.’ At the very end of GH’s

24 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1951). 25 Emanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 34. 26 See William Barrett’s chapter “Hebraism and Hellenism,” in his Irrational Man: A Study of Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 69–91 (quotation at 77), as well as Susan A. Handelman’s essay “Jacques Derrida and the Hebraic Hermeneutic,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 98–129. 27 Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 76.

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discourse, she acknowledges the following: “I finally extended beyond my own sensibility. The world interdepended with me—that was the confidence I had reached: the world interdepended with me.”28 This interdependence can also be viewed as what Levinas calls ‘respect,’ which for him is the condition for ethics. Above all, this process is of inter-dependence as well as “independence of me” in which the other commands me to acknowledge the ethical path. Despite GH’s leave-taking of immanence toward ethical transcendence, the reader questions the sustainability of GH’s consciousness or awareness, despite its apparent sincerity, since there exists in the narrative no evidence of her actually ‘performing’ ethically toward others, despite the fact that her narrative ends with an epiphany. Although she has reached awareness and experienced transcendence, will she act upon her newly found consciousness? The reader wonders especially when she predicts what she’ll do later, after her narrative journey: “Tonight my regular life will be starting again, the life of my common happiness, I’ll need for the rest of my days my slight, sweet, good-humored commonness, I, like everybody, need to forget.”29 Interestingly, a different development occurs with the protagonist Lori, from the parodic An Apprenticeship, or, The Book of Delights (1969), who, after happily experiencing a state of grace upon taking a bite of a real, not a mythical, red apple, symbolizing her spiritual awakening, recognizes that such a happy feeling cannot be sustained because becoming accustomed to happiness could pose a danger. We would become selfish because happy people are; they are less sensitive to human pain. We would not feel the need to try to help those who needed it—all because we would find the meaning of life summed up in grace. . . . She had experienced something that seemed to redeem the human condition, although at the same time the narrow limits of that condition were marked. And exactly because after grace the human condition was revealed in its dire poverty, one learned to love more, to expect more. One began to have a kind of confidence in suffering and its often intolerable ways.30

Lispector, Passion According to GH, 173. Ibid., 154. 30 Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship, or, The Book of Delights, trans. Richard A. Mazzara and Lorri A. Parris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 99–100. 28 29

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As one of Lispector’s few novels that engage a sustained dialogical discourse, here with the face-to face amorous relationship between the schoolteacher Lori and her future lover, the professor Ulysses, The Apprenticeship focuses primarily upon Lori’s apprenticeship during the platonic phase of her relationship with the somewhat pretentious Ulysses. However, because of their spiritual and eventual carnal intimacy, Ulysses does not actually represent her other. On the other hand, she does learn to become more involved with the world by selfsurpassing herself via a mature relationship, but one that goes even beyond the relationship itself. It is evident that Lori has become more conscious of her surrounding world of Brazilian reality, not because Ulysses is to be her lover, but because, by going beyond her self, she has become more socially aware and sensitive. As she reviews her spiritual evolution, she states: “I withdrew into myself which if I hadn’t been careful could have become a hysterical or mystical isolation. What always saved me was my pupils, the children. You know, Ulysses, they are poor and the school doesn’t require a uniform for that reason. During the winter I bought them all red sweaters. Now for the spring I’m going to buy the boys blue shirts and pants and blue dresses for the girls.”31 And later: “I’m a different woman. . . . I’m becoming very fond of teaching. I want to clothe, teach and love my students and prepare them for a way of life that I was never prepared for.”32 Lori’s ethical transcendence for the sake of the other goes from an apprenticeship toward an awakening to spiritual delights and social action, which, in another narrative, Lispector herself is inspired to do with the figure of the inept, poor, uneducated, displaced, but steadfast ( firmeza/steadfastness) northeasterner Macabea of The Hour of the Star (1977), who finds herself in a Rio de Janeiro of falsidade/falseness.33 Lispector’s audacious attempt to capture the alterity of the other via the lower-class protagonist Macabea (read Maccabee), without condescension, is ‘narrativized’ via her own masked face-to-face with Macabea and with the masculine writer/narrator, who tries to surpass his own self but becomes the introspective but overdetermined voice/text

Ibid., 102. Ibid., 114. 33 For folkloric principles maintained by northeastern culture and manifested in the chapbooks of popular troubadours (literatura de cordel ), see Candace Slater, Stories on a String. These terms are also developed in the context of Lispector’s writing in Vieira, Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature, 143–44. 31 32

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through which Lispector’s palimpsest voice emerges as she deconstructs the motives for the violence and injustice that the male narrator and society inflict upon Macabea. In reaching out to the other, beyond her own ego as a female writer, Lispector chooses to have a masculine narrator/writer (less sentimental, as she wryly and ironically states in her preface) tell Macabea’s story. By opting to evoke Macabea, Lispector’s other, via a male narrator, Lispector’s choice simultaneously discloses her own ‘depersonalization’ as a writer/narrator and constitutes an esthetic move toward an ethical transcendence of responsibility that the reader intuits in the flickering spark of life we sense within Macabea’s frail existence, via Lispector’s undeniable linguistic presence. Macabea’s fragile and marginalized existence is eventually stifled, crushed, and doomed by the male narrator, since he is ultimately compelled to place her on a collision course with death. In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Levinas reminds us that “pluralism implies a radical alterity of the other whom I do not simply conceive by relation to myself, but confront out of my egoism.”34 In The Hour of the Star, behind the mask of the male narrator, Lispector is attempting the difficult task of confronting the other out of her egoism, that is, by acting beyond her own ‘egoism’ in trying to avoid condescension or pandering to the poor. Regarding ethical transcendence toward others and an understanding of the self as the other within, Clarice Lispector clearly understood one of her paths to be alterity and, by extension, to be beyond rigid or hierarchical identity rubrics or classifications—such as Jewish ethnicity. Interestingly, in her chronicle “Pertencer,” Lispector’s conscious and aesthetic evocation of the need to recognize alterity, to go beyond one’s ego, even beyond one’s ethnicity or nation, beyond an ironwilled conception of self-identity toward complex identities, implies her stance regarding the question of a fixed identity that originates with her ethical positioning and intuitive reading of the other, including her early traumatic experience as an abandoned child/self that she embodied as other. While recognizing the existence of the continuing need for some groups to affirm their identity in a multicultural world, it is enlightening to read Edward Said’s observations about the Jewish conductor Daniel Baremboim, whom he defines as “an artist concerned not so

34

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 121.

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much with the articulation of the self, but rather with the articulation of other selves,” which he clarifies as “projecting one’s self outward,” in turn echoing Lispector’s and Levinas’s visions.35 In light of our focus upon Lispector’s concept of alterity, it is fascinating to contextualize her experiences with collective identity, alterity, belonging, and displacement. The attitudes toward Lispector’s foreignness, her different or unique style, her manifestation of a mysterious personality, her being a nonjoiner, and her resistance to confining rubrics—all point to her repeated personal experience with the human condition of alterity and her being challenged repeatedly by the existing Brazilian social order, an ‘ordem existente,’ a nationalist imaginary that during her lifetime did not suffer well diverse forms of cultural strangeness. Lispector’s existential positioning also calls to mind the stance of another famous woman of the recent past, the controversial philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt, particularly on the topic of collective identities. While thinking of Lispector’s newspaper piece “Pertencer,” it is uncanny/unheimlich to compare its contents with what Hannah Arendt wrote to the Zionist Gershom Scholem in defense of her opinion about Zionism as being ‘extremist,’ along with her refusal to declare publicly her love for Israel or her sense of belonging to the Jewish people: “I’m independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, I do not belong to any organization and I always speak only for myself.”36 Earlier in her letter, Arendt is more specific: You’re quite right—I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort [ love of the Jewish people—(Ahabath Israel)], and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something

35 Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. and with preface by Ara Guzelimian (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 11. In Parallels and Paradoxes, on the occasion of the famed Carnegie Hall Talks between Baremboim and Said, the experience of otherness is manifested in the bringing together of Arab/Palestinian and Israeli musicians for a musical project in Weimar, Germany, in 1999. 36 The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. and introduction by Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 395.

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rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person.37

Arendt’s worldlessness and statelessness do not compare to Lispector’s overt declaration of being happy to belong to Brazil and to be part of Brazilian literature; nevertheless, both women, seasoned travelers and, in different ways, familiar with dislocation, reveal affinity with their reluctance to be claimed by collective identities.38 For all of Arendt’s intellectual and philosophical deliberations and Lispector’s literary manifestations of alterity, both recognized the significance of ethical responsibility in diverse fashions. In conclusion, Clarice Lispector’s literary vision, evoking Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical conceptualizations, adds to an understanding of how the transcendence of the self toward a better world evokes the ethical spirit of a woman writer like Lispector, who, even before Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (1949), with its focus on woman as man’s other, was already exploring in 1944 the profound complications of alterity—an exploration, in terms of social responsibility for Brazil, that was ahead of its time. All the more reason to appreciate Levinas and his stance on alterity and its application to Clarice Lispector’s work: “All thought is subordinated to the ethical relation, to the infinitely other in the other person, and to the infinitely other for which I am nostalgic.”39 In another essay that relates to our title of “Beyond Identity,” Levinas states the following: “No one can remain in himself: the humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility for the others, an extreme vulnerability. With them he rends the essence. . . . A uniqueness without inwardness, an ego without rest in itself, a hostage for everyone, turned away from itself in each movement of its return to itself—man is without identity.”40 Lispector’s spiritual prose of ethical transcendence searches for answers and meanings that are usually elusive. For this reason Lispector relies upon the nonrational means of love and faith (not traditional religious faith, but an ethical and linguistically spiritual one) in order

Ibid., 392. As the wife of a diplomat until their separation in 1961, Lispector lived in different parts of Brazil, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. The recently published and lush photo-biography of Clarice Lispector by Nádia Gotlib illustrates her extensive experience of living abroad. 39 Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other,” in Alterity and Transcendence, 97–98. 40 Levinas, “No Identity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers. 37 38

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to lift the self “beyond itself toward the other,” in so doing evoking a better world while also pointing to the imperfections of the human condition. Her approach to existence went beyond self-identity toward the presence of the other, an approach that she describes as a lifelong quest, deftly stated in the following passage from the “In Search of the Other”: It is not by chance that I understand those who are trying to find their path in life. How I struggled to find mine! And how I go on relentlessly searching for the better part of my nature, anxiously looking for a short cut, since I no longer dare speak of a path. I who wanted that PATH in capital letters. I frantically keep searching for a path to follow without obstacles. But so far I have failed to find any short cut with cool shadows and reflected light among the trees, where I might be myself at long last. But one thing is certain: When I can fully sense another’s presence, I will be safe and think to myself: here is my port of call.41

41

158.

Clarice Lispector, “In Search of the Other,” 20 July 1968, in Discovering the World,

CHAPTER TWELVE

PLAUSIBLE ALTERNATIVES IN THE JEWISH ARGENTINEAN INTEGRATION GAME Lourdes Barranco-Cortés Analyzing the conditions of immigrants and their descendants in a new country is not only complex but also captivating, even more so when the diverse Argentinean environment that offers a mestizaje cultural is taken into account. The aforementioned context can be either positive or negative depending on the social, historical, and political moment in the country’s history. The Jewish Argentinean writer Ricardo Feierstein conceives the ideas explored in his novels from the cultural, ethnic, and religious variety that structures the actual Argentina, especially since the majority of its population consists of immigrants’ descendants. Based on these facts, tackling the subject of Jewish Argentinean identity and interactions between majority and minority groups is not an easy task. It is precisely this process that Ricardo Feierstein undertakes in his collection of novels, beginning a quest not only for a specific place but also for recognition as equals of individuals in Argentinean society. This idea is the bottom line that guides his characters. In his novel La logia del umbral (2001), the author narrates the hundred years of history of the Schvel (a name signifying ‘threshold’ in Yiddish) Jewish immigrant family in Argentina.1 This family, despite sharing a common past with the rest of the immigrant community that arrived at the same time as they did, cannot avoid the feeling of foreignness and the stigma of differing from the mainstream. It is precisely this inconvenient situation that transmits to them the eternal feeling of living on the margin (the threshold, as indicated by their last name) and motivates them to form a lodge. With the lodge, they start a journey to vindicate the Jewish community’s right to be incorporated as an integral part of the Argentinean nation, just like

1 Ricardo Feierstein, La logia del umbral (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2001). The closest English translation would be “The Threshold Lodge.”

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other immigrant groups before them. In spite of this, the process of self-reassurance about their identity is not experienced in the same way by all the members of the family. In consequence, the novel offers different options, or attitudes, for approaching their specific situation that are illustrated within the metaphor of the ‘Game of Integration,’ something that makes up the core of this study. The author creates a board game with various boxes that serve as a guide to present the crucial historical moments lived by Jewish people in the Argentinean community.2 The game is also composed of possible paths or detours (called desvíos by the author) that ironically represent the way in which the main characters face their personal and social lives. The names of these paths can be identified with the experiences of assimilation, integration, isolation within the group, or emigration. Hence, before entering in depth into the study of the novel, these terms need to be defined. Taking into account the relevance of the concepts of assimilation and acculturation in the novel, it is necessary to underline the relationship between these two terms. Both concepts are defined by Emilio Willems and Henrique González Casanova as “The assimilation process consists of the emergence of new attitudes emotionally associated to cultural values with which the immigrant starts relating.”3 This notion agrees with the definition of acculturation that is offered by the Argentinean sociologist Gino Germani, when studying the process that took place among immigrants arriving to Argentina, resulting in an “Identification with the new country and the vanishing of their previous identification.”4 When specifically analyzing Jewish immigrants and their descendants in Argentina, it is evident that the environment facilitates a more rapid production of the aforementioned processes. Acculturation and assimilation take place particularly in those generations that suffered the consequences of discrimination during the

2 He uses as a reference a Hispanic game popular among Argentinean children: ‘juego de la oca.’ 3 Emilio Willems and Henrique González Casanova, “Asimilación y Aculturación,” in Revista Mexicana de Sociología (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1944), 293. “el proceso de asimilación consiste en la aparición de actitudes nuevas emocionalmente asociadas a valores culturales nuevos con que el inmigrante va estableciendo contacto.” All translations are my own. 4 Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición. De la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidos, 1966), 200. “identificación con el nuevo país y la pérdida de la identificación anterior.”

the jewish argentinean integration game

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military dictatorship (1977–83) and also as a reaction to manifestations of anti-Semitic sentiment within the community. The most plausible option for these minorities was to leave aside the most identifying features of their culture, religion, and linguistic characteristics and to blend into the mainstream culture. Accordingly, they do not have to struggle or suffer the consequences of a society that does not tolerate differences. Isolation implies a “confinement in the ghettos.”5 This attitude generates an imprisonment of minorities, or others, in groups where they feel protected and surrounded by people whom they can relate to, people like them. On the other hand, the more minorities isolate themselves, the fewer possibilities they have of belonging and vindicating their right to be legitimate members of their society. Marginalization inside a closed community implies the need neither to stop belonging to the nation as a whole nor to cut the strings with the obligatory participation that citizens have in their public lives. Moreover, as Feierstein explains, “the history of confinement and isolation of the European ghettos, [is the] first phase of the destructing Nazi experience. Public safety must be demanded from the government.”6 The passive attitude of self-exclusion, far from solving the problem, actually promotes the segregation of the minority group. In contrast with the two posed alternatives (which are unsatisfactory due to their consequences), integration is presented as the option that best fits in with the lodge’s ideals. Laura Kitzis and Enrique Herszkowich define this concept as “the process by which a minority group may achieve, without renouncing to the vicissitudes associated with the minority group, equal rights and identical access to material and symbolic societal goods.”7 This proposal assembles its own characteristics, taking into account the composition of the Argentinean

Ricardo Feierstein, Contraexilio y mestizaje: Ser judío en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Milá, 1996), 167. “reclusión en los guetos.” 6 Ibid., 167. “la historia de reclusión y aislamiento de los guetos europeos, [es la] primera fase de la experiencia destructora del nazismo. La seguridad pública se debe exigir al gobierno nacional.” 7 Laura Kitzis and Enrique Herszkowich, “La identidad de los judíos argentinos en el segundo milenio: De la pregunta en el exilio,” in Encuentro: Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo, ed. Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow (Buenos Aires: Milá, 2002), 105. “el proceso por el cual un grupo minoritario puede gozar, sin renunciar a sus particularidades en tanto grupo minoritario, de iguales derechos e idéntico acceso a los bienes de la sociedad, tanto materiales como simbólicos.” 5

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population, which includes a great number of immigrants who arrived in consecutive waves of immigration and altered the preexistent social makeup. This resulted in the creation of a new cultural type, a new citizen who needed time to define him- or herself and to change the sociological and political ruling structures. J. L. Romero defines the population as a mass “hybrid in character, resulting from foreign and local elements which coexist without the prevalence of any one of them over the others”8 However, the notion Romero expressed is a generalization that must be taken with caution, meriting consideration of its particularities to evaluate the efficiency of its application. As seen in the novel, this idea of a harmonious integration often leads to a utopia, given that at any moment the process of immigration is shown, as evident in the ‘Game of Integration,’ as representing a back-andforth struggle that impedes achievement of the goal. The game poses the question of whether or not it is possible to reach an ending, an ‘arrival.’9 Or is the game merely an endless circuit? If the answer to these questions is affirmative, the detour will always be the rule, and the supposed ‘arrival’ will be no more than another beginning until there is another terrorist attack, similar to the one perpetrated on the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) on 19 July 1994—an event that returns the game to its beginning. In order to clarify the author’s change of perspective, it is relevant to mention his previous work Mestizo (1988), in which he takes a different approach to this same concept.10 This change is reflected in the way he portrays his characters’ attitudes in the Argentinean context and the vicissitudes that they encounter. In Mestizo, the author already refers to the possible alternatives that the Argentinean Jew may have. Hence, the main character, David Schnaiderman, who is located on the margin, progresses in the search for his identity and the assumption of his condition as ‘the other.’ David has lost his memory and needs to reconstruct his personal and family history. It is precisely because of this recognition that David’s sense of otherness disappears, for he assumes that he is in a world ruled by social unfairness. In accordance with this, the name of the novel acquires a new relevance due

8 Quoted in Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición, 210. “de carácter híbrido, resultante de los elementos extranjeros y criollos que la constituyen y coexisten en ella sin que exista predominio de uno sobre el otro.” 9 In the game, ‘arrival’ is the name given to the last box that ends the game. 10 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizo (Buenos Aires: Milá, 1988).


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to David’s proud acceptance of his condition of mestizaje. At this point, the narrator’s voice changes from the first-person-singular ‘I’ into the plural ‘we’ that: “talks about solidarity between equals, of a collective entity that is not a shapeless mass, but a common action and shared responsibility.”11 According to Edna Aizemberg this voice change may corresponds to what: “Feierstein calls ‘dialect equilibrium’ between a ‘centered’ majority and a ‘decentered’ and rebellious minority.”12 However, this theoretical equilibrium has seriously deteriorated in La logia, where the crisis that conditions Feierstein’s writing is shown to have already been captured in his book Contraexilio y mestizaje (1996). It is probable that this change is due to transformations in the situation of the country, especially after the terrorist attack on the AMIA. This event publicly brought back a dark side of Argentinean society that not only the Jewish community but probably the author of Mestizo thought was part of the past. This unlucky circumstance definitely made the grieving process more painful as it reawoke within the Jewish minority a feeling of not belonging. In La logia the terrorist attack is presented as a flashback that opens and closes the narration and the possibility of the Jewish Argentinean community’s vindication, desired by the family members. It is not by chance that the dreams, ideals, and projects of the Jewish community are left in a haze due to the effects of the terrorist attack, which retrospectively returns to the original question asked and answered by the author in Mestizo: “How will an integration game end where not only we participate but the others do as well?”13 Once more, the idea leads back to the notion of the threshold, which is transmitted from the very name of the book to represent an indefinite and uncomfortable place. However, this time it is an unacceptable space that must be overcome. Accordingly, the threshold is what defines the Jewish Argentinean situation as it is deduced from Salomon’s translation, when Mauricio, the grandfather, says, “The metaphor of Judaism, the one defining us, is “to be somewhere else”. We are and we are not. That is why we

11 Feierstein, Contraexilio y mestizaje, 208. “habla de solidaridad entre iguales, de sujeto plural que no significa masa amorfa, sino acción en común y responsabilidad compartida.” 12 Edna Aizemberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and ArgentineJewish Writing (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002), 39. 13 Feierstein, Mestizo, 304 (my emphasis). “¿Cómo terminará un ‘Juego de la Integración’ donde no sólo participamos nosotros, sino también los otros?”

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are the metaphor of the threshold, the boundary between parts, what communicates and yet awaits. That’s what we are.”14 This scenario directs the study of the novel by considering the diverse paths and the quest illustrated by the ‘Game of Integration’ as different ‘detours’ that lead to assimilation, integration, isolation within the group, or emigration. The attitudes assumed by each person in the game are very relevant because they imply plausible and different answers to the abovementioned question. Each member of the family must explore the different alternatives to find the one most suitable to them. After all, it will be necessary to identify whether, among the strategies used by the family members, there is room for integration or whether the ‘detours’ are the only feasible paths. To put the circumstances of Feierstein’s characters in context, it is necessary to analyze his work Historia de los judios argentinos (1993), where the author shows how the Jewish presence in American soil can be traced all the way back to colonial times.15 One of the most relevant moments for Jewish immigration to Argentina is marked by the arrival of the Wesser to the port of Buenos Aires in August of 1889. The first immigration wave was a failure and a disappointment since the families were tricked, left with no land, and sent to provinces that were scarcely populated. However, subsequent groups enjoyed a brighter fate, thanks to the organization provided by groups like the Jewish Colonization Association, founded by Baron Hirsch in 1891. The association facilitated the smooth immigration of Jews to America, which coincided with major waves of immigrants to Argentina from other parts of Europe. This shared past with the rest of the immigrants who arrived in Argentina at that time impelled the Jewish community to fight for their recognition and a legitimate, equal space in society. As a result, the Jewish community is one of the many parts constituting the Argentinean nation in its present form. This is clearly what the novel tries to highlight by describing the Schvel family’s one-hundred-year history on Argentinean soil. It is within the context of this first group of Jewish immigrants that a clear sense of nostalgia appears, with each memory from the past reflecting an old dream of an Argentina with the promise of civil equality for all. The likelihood of such equality resided not Feierstein, La logia del umbral, 44. “La metáfora del judaísmo, la que nos define, es ‘estar en otra parte.’ Estamos y no estamos. Por eso somos la manifestación del ‘umbral,’ el límite entre partes, lo que comunica y espera a la vez. Eso somos.” 15 Ricardo Feierstein, Historia de los judíos argentinos (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1993). 14


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only in the diversity of the immigration waves but also in the overall potential of Argentina to become a great and pluralistic nation. The Judaic Argentinean Dilemma Taking into account the aforementioned discussion of plurality in Argentinean society, the Schvels are not willing to assume a state of otherness without a fight. As a result, the family members decide to celebrate a ritual in order to authenticate their belonging to the Argentinean nation, thereby achieving their recognition as a group of immigrants. They depart from Moiseville, the family’s first place of residence in the country, with the goal of placing a little box with a piece of the Torah and Moiseville’s soil in La Pirámide de Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires.16 In order to accomplish this mission, the Schvels begin to have regular meetings where they share their fears, dreams, and feelings about their perceptions of Argentinean Judaism. The reunion that takes place on 8 April 1994 is particularly interesting. Every member of the family speaks of the dilemma of being Jewish and Argentinean at the same time and of the difficulty of reconciling both aspects of their identity. Several interpretations come up, but none of them seems to be satisfactory; therefore, many questions about the subject remain. For instance, Myriam, José, and Salomón think that their identity within the Argentinean context is related to anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, for Edith and Mariano, who belong to a younger generation, to be Argentine is “to be and feel part of a minority, illegitimate children, ‘neighbors of the threshold’ ”17 On the other hand, Bernardo, one of the ‘cousins’ who is very attached to the Jewish faith and traditions, believes the problem is being a minority in a country where the main religion is Catholicism. Their disagreement shows the complexity of the area under discussion and at the same time the impossibility of finding only one possible answer for everyone, because every individual has his or her own perceptions and experiences of how it feels to be Jewish.

16 Feierstein, La logia del umbral, 117. La Pirámide de Plaza de Mayo is where the independence of Argentina was declared. 17 Ibid., 225. “ser y sentirse una minoría, hijos ilegítimos, ‘vecinos del umbral.’ ”

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The problem with defining one’s identity is not only exclusive to different generations within a family or to the Jewish community; it is a problematic issue for Argentinean society as a whole, for reasons that were already explained. Argentina is very different from other Hispano-American countries that are able to trace their roots to indigenous ancestors, and as a result, Argentineans are the mockery of many countries that claim that Argentineans “descendants of the ships.”18 Therefore it is logical to assume that Argentinean distinctiveness is the result of “a creative and enlightening cultural mixture, naturally integrated into a unique experience that borderlines utopia: accumulate without losing features.”19 Their lack of definition as a group of individuals is not their only identity conflict. What is more, the Argentinean people are famous for aspiring to be something they are not. As Borges said, Argentineans are “Italians who speak Spanish, educated by English and who want to be French.”20 Feierstein uses this idea to describe the Argentinean Jewish dilemma: “speak Spanish and dream in Yiddish, with a foot in Europe and growing up mestizo without shame in America.”21 Considering the particular case of Jewish Argentinean identity, the inquiry Kitzis and Herszkowich propose is essential to understanding the dilemma suffered by the generations that followed the Jewish gauchos: “Was it even possible to be Jewish and Argentinean?”22 Precisely this question is crucial to understanding the problem of the characters in the novel, and it is what motivates Mariano to seek integration through the lodge: “Our threshold Schvel is not an edge, that one can fell out off and separate from the object, but a border: something

Quoted in Feierstein, Historia de los judíos argentinos, 12. “descienden de los barcos.” Feierstein, Contraexilio y mestizaje, 123. “un mestizaje cultural creativo y enriquecedor, naturalmente integrado en una experiencia única que araña los límites de la utopía: acumular sin perder particularidades.” 20 Quoted in ibid., 123. “italianos que hablan español, educados por los ingleses y que querían ser franceses.” 21 Feierstein, Mestizo, 330. “hablar castellano y soñar en ídish, apoyar sus extremidades en Europa y en América crecer mestizo sin vergüenza.” 22 Kitzis and Herszkowich, “La identidad de los judíos argentinos,” 105. “¿Era posible acaso ser judío y ser argentino?” 18 19


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susceptible of change and shifting to the center. And that is what we are working on. To us, uncle, Judaism is actual action. Facts.”23 As implied, the idea of reconstructing identity is not something permanent, but rather something that can be shaped according to personal desires. In order to succeed, it is necessary to combine the pieces of memory and reshape them into a hope and willingness for the generation to come. This positive and active attitude is missing in the generation that suffered the persecutions of the military dictatorship, although the change is plausible for the new generation. The Idea of the Two Argentinas In Argentina, immigration politics emerge with the aim of fulfilling Alberdi’s idea of ‘To rule is to populate.’ As a result, the Argentinean population became more European, while the preexistent citizens were being replaced. The consequence of this phenomenon was the battle of two groups, one elite criolla, or bourgeoisie, which tends to preserve the past and traditions, and the other made up of immigrants and their descendants. This second group, which includes Jewish immigrants, believed in the possibility of building a plural and multicultural future for everyone. The previously mentioned confrontation defines the relationship between majority and minority groups in a socially fragmented context that is still reflected in the Argentina present in La logia. The idea of the two Argentinas was earlier mentioned by Feierstein in his book Contraexilio y mestizaje, where the duality is reflected not only at the level of the Jewish community but also at the personal level that affects each individual’s lifestyle. Within the binary and complex background, the majority group developed a very deep notion of belonging, which ends up in a reaction against a communal enemy: the ‘other.’ In the particular case of La logia, the others are the Jews. That is precisely the connecting thread of the whole plot, which shows the experiences of marginality and discrimination suffered by the family members in a country that belongs to them too. Feierstein, La logia, 238. “Nuestro ‘umbral’ Schvel no es un ‘borde,’ desde el cual puede caerse afuera y separarse del ‘objeto,’ sino una ‘frontera’: algo susceptible de modificaciones y deslizamiento hacia el ‘centro.’ Y es sobre eso que estamos trabajando. Para nosotros, tío, judaísmo es acción concreta. Hechos.” 23

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The strong sense of belonging to Argentinean soil is emphasized when Marcelo declares, “Because this is a country of immigrants, of mixture, and that allows the opportunity of cultural mestizaje and pluralism of ideas, points of view and gastronomical tastings, fashion and traditions.”24 It is easy to empathize with Marcelo’s point to view, since it makes no sense for Marcelo to have to live as a foreigner in a country that he and his ancestors have long claimed as their own. This struggle does not take place in Villa Pueyrredon, Manuel’s childhood neighborhood, which points to a transformation of the Argentinean scenery, a past and a present. The Past and Nostalgia The Argentina that protected Manuel and allowed his integration when he was a child exists only in memory and, as he states, “because that neighborhood was the place of a safe, multiple and plural childhood.”25 He recounts how all the immigrants used to live in perfect harmony, with different groups acquiring new traditions from their social context while at the same time preserving their own traditions. The language, new and different for newcomers, while complicating understanding among residents, was far from preventing communicative exchanges. Fernando Devoto discusses the salad-bowl model to describe the situation observed in Argentina at that time. Devoto deemed this description more appropriate than the melting-pot model, the latter implying the adoption of traditions from the new land and hence the assimilation of immigrants into the New World. The salad-bowl model evokes a situation in which there is neither a loss of identity nor a conflict with others due to cultural differences.26 This scheme allows for the desirable possibility proposed by the ‘Game of Integration,’ in which there is no loss of the social group, but a complete harmony with others. This model creates a place in which the plurality observed in each community is respected and treasured. From this model a new 24 Ibid., 186. “Porque este es un país de inmigrantes, de mezcla, y eso es lo que otorga la posibilidad del mestizaje cultural y pluralismo de ideas, puntos de vista y sabores gastronómicos, modas y costumbres.” 25 Ibid., 128. “porque ese barrio fue el lugar de la infancia segura, acogedora, múltiple y plural.” 26 Fernando Devoto, Historia de la inmigración en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2004), 320.


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type of individual emerges, the Argentinean descendant of immigrants born in these lands who has absorbed the sum of influences from different cultures: “This creates in Argentineans the necessity of considering themselves as a cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity.”27 However, the distance between this new individual and what is shown by the novel proves that this idea of integration and harmony is in many ways utopian, as reflected by the advances and step backs involved in the ‘Game of Integration.’ This inspires the nostalgic feeling exemplified by Myriam’s words: “All that network of infinite connections that was the life in the neighborhood is responsible for what we are today. That is the life that, nostalgic, we sometimes miss in the middle of the postmodern and selfish world surrounding us.”28 It is possible to identify the type of nostalgia suffered by the family members with the definition of reflexive nostalgia Sveltana Boym gives in The Future of Nostalgia: “Reflexive nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and the human finitude. . . . Reflexive nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory.”29 In this way, the family realizes that the present is not as promising as they had thought, and this produces the impotence of feeling like strangers in their own country. Dreams The eternal dilemma of ‘double identity’ and living on the threshold is reflected in the dreams of the Schvel family, the reality of being Jewish imposing a stigma that cannot be impeded. Being and feeling are perceived as two diametrically opposed experiences. The negative aspects of living as an other are also expressed in the novel through dreams that serve as a vehicle for the free manifestation of the unconscious, everything that one represses. At the same time, dreams serve to discharge the tensions and frustrations experienced by the family.

27 Feierstein, Contraexilio y mestizaje, 151. “Esto crea en los argentinos la necesidad de asumirse como diversidad cultural, étnica y lingüística.” 28 Feierstein, La logia, 187. “Toda esa red de hilos infinitos que fue la vida barrial, esa que hoy constituyó en lo que somos. Y que, nostálgicos, solemos extrañar en medio del mundo posmoderno y egoísta que nos rodea.” 29 Sveltana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49.

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This condition is reflected in Edith’s dream, in which her unconscious reveals the feeling that her life is comparable to a deteriorated theater seat. In this way, the reader perceives the spatial representation of marginalization that Edith feels within her country, converting her into ‘the other’: “I must choose, then: should I stay where I am, enjoying the movie anyway I can (and nobody bothers me) or should I push my seat forward. Or, better yet: I stand up, leave this place and I blend, somehow, into this central audience scattered across the room, filling shiny seats.”30 Facing such lack of definition, Edith searches for viable ways to change her situation; even though she is not completely uncomfortable in that theater chair, she has the option of fighting for her right to find a better position. It is precisely the lodge that proposes that the family fight to better their situation, presenting a new possibility to choose and participate actively in their own destiny. The Lodge’s Proposal The conduct adopted by the Schvel family is influenced by the fragmented social context of the nation that shelters them, which forces them to choose a path. Mariano’s proposal highlights the various paths available to them in his explanation of the game: “There are three possible paths that summarize our history: the first is the “Assimilation”: erase identity, change last names, blend into the majority. The second is the “Ghetto”: meaning isolation. . . . The third path is “Emigration”: when, tired or hopeful some Jewish decide to leave the country, to Israel or United States.”31 The ‘Arrival’ would occur in the Plaza de Mayo, along with the symbolic offering that would supposedly vindicate the Jewish Argentinean community. However, the offering never takes place, due to the terrorist attack on the AMIA, which reinstates

30 Feierstein, La logia, 206 (my emphasis). “Debo elegir, entonces: me quedo donde estoy, apreciando la película como puedo (y nadie me molesta) o adelanto mi asiento. O, mejor aún: me levanto, abandono este lugar y me incluyo, de alguna forma, entre este público central diseminado por el salón, ocupando butacas relucientes.” 31 Ibid., 219. “Hay tres ‘Salidas’ posibles que reúnen nuestra historia: la primera es la ‘Asimilación’: borrar la identidad, cambiar el apellido, diluirse en el montón. La segunda es el ‘Gueto’: es decir el aislamiento. . . . La tercera salida es la ‘Emigración’: cuando, cansado o con esperanza algunos judíos deciden irse del país, hacia Israel o Estados Unidos.”


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the question of how history will continue after such a violent aberration. On the other hand, it is possible to perceive a degree of optimism through the crisis when Mariano affirms, “I was not mistaken with my integration game. Now my picture is complete. We must abandon the edges, shake the dices in the cup and make a bet.”32 Such an advance is exactly what the lodge proposed when presented with the new possibility of participating actively in their own future beyond current obstacles. Manuel also redefines his position in the ‘Game of Integration,’ establishing what his role will be from now on, which has to do with his last name, causing him to “accept the edge, vindicate it, relate to the world from there.”33 The novel’s ending shows something different. The margin is not a viable option; rather, the family must leave it behind in order to integrate themselves into society and to assure that future generations maintain this state of integration. This is precisely the main difference between La logia and Mestizo. Evidence of Acculturation or Assimilation Evidence of acculturation or assimilation can be seen in various family members, something that causes other relatives to reproach them for their new behavior. This is manifested when the family celebrates Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) in the house of their parents, Ester and Abraham. Sofia, Ester and Abraham’s daughter-in-law, attends a yoga class on the holy day, generating Ester’s discontent and recrimination. Moreover, Sofia and Tobias (Ester’s son) bring bakery cookies to the celebration, something considered inappropriate for the occasion—yet another action revealing their acculturation. Their behavior explains why Sofia and Tobias are not included in the formation of the lodge. This same day an argument arises between the siblings about their lack of adherence to Jewish customs and the shame that they feel as Jews in a society where they are the minority. Estela expresses this idea: “He says what many think but no one dares to declare. You yourself pointed out a while back (says Sofia), in the kitchen, that Ibid., 297 (original emphasis). “No me equivoqué con mi juego de la integración. Ahora mi gráfico ha quedado completo. Nosotros debemos abandonar los márgenes, sacudir los dados en el cubilete y avanzar la apuesta.” 33 Ibid., 130. “aceptar el margen, reivindicarlo, relacionarse desde allí con el mundo.” 32

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carrying a “different” sign in your skin is not cause for pride.”34 The siblings begin to question who among them is the most or least Jewish, according to their knowledge about the proper food with which to celebrate Rosh Hashana. Each of the siblings relates his or her convictions on the subject, until Luis (another brother) finally admits that, like Tobias, he is not raising his children according to Jewish tradition: “I am a modern father; I don’t live in an inexistent past like you do, you who still have your spirit stuck in Eastern Europe.”35 This reveals the feeling that their culture and religion are not relevant within the society in which they live, especially because being Jewish creates a disadvantage for them. In this way, the problem of fourth-generation Jews in Argentina is reflected in the decline of many customs, sometimes for lack of practice and at other times voluntarily. While in the past, Jewish institutions took it upon themselves to promulgate activities to celebrate festival days, nowadays the responsibility falls upon families, as the novel shows. As a result, it is more difficult to maintain Jewish traditions in a context that is not shared by the majority of society. Many Jews find it easier to simply accept acculturation in order to avoid being denominated as an ‘other.’ Immigration to Israel or Isolation with the Group Salomon (a member of the family’s fourth generation), one of those most loyal to Jewish traditions and religion, who still knows how to speak Yiddish (like Bernardo), is also the only family member who goes to live in Israel. Unfortunately, his decision to move is not voluntary, but the only alternative that he finds to protect his life and family after having been tortured and persecuted for being a Jew during the military dictatorship. For this reason, Salomon’s response to his cousins’ proposal that he join the lodge is interesting. In a letter to his cousins, he reflects on their request:

34 Ibid., 79. “Él dice lo que muchos piensan y nadie se atreve a declarar. Vos misma señalaste hace un rato (dice a Sofía), en la cocina, que no es ningún orgullo llevar esa marca de ‘diferente’ en la piel.” 35 Ibid., 82. “Yo soy un padre moderno, no vivo en un pasado inexistente como ustedes, que tienen todavía el espíritu anclado a la Europa oriental.”


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What you are trying to do is important: re-built the Jewish-Argentinean identity, define the centenary presence there. . . . But I am already here. With my socialist Zionism that aimed at building a Jewish State different to the existing one. . . . With my conscience of a transitional generation, like all immigrants, destined not to be able to spread our wings completely.36

Impotence, resignation, and the loss of faith in the possibility of producing change can be noted in Salomon’s tone. He adopts a passive attitude, caused by the effort it took him to realize that the ideals and dreams of his youth would never materialize. Isolation can be seen in Bernardo, another cousin who lives in the Once neighborhood, given that his interaction with non-Jewish people is kept to a minimum. The rest of his activities stay within his family and his religious group. His concept of Judaism is reduced to the smallest possible meaning, which implies nothing more than his religion and his language (Yiddish). Aside from his strong convictions, it is strange that he cannot imagine himself living far away from Buenos Aires, admitting that this is his city. However, he clearly establishes that his heart belongs in Israel and that he dreams that someday his grandchildren will live there. This is another excellent example that the author gives to show the dichotomy produced by this undefined threshold. Within this fragmented context, the only space possible where one can feel safe and find one’s own space is in the family circle. When speaking about the lodge, Manuel says, “That is why there has always been an urging need to gather with our equals, hidden from extraneous looks.”37 The barrier between this attitude and isolation is very small. A Model of Integration? The Jewish Gaucho Kitzis and Herszkowich maintain that during the Argentinean centennial, the gaucho became a mythical figure of excellence. Jewish 36 Ibid., 157. “Es importante lo que tratan de hacer: reconstruir la identidad judeoargentina, definir la presencia centenaria allí. . . . Pero yo ya estoy aquí. Con mi sionismo socialista que quería construir un Estado Judío diferente al que es ahora. . . . Con mi conciencia de ser una generación de transición, como la de todos los inmigrantes, destinada a no poder desplegar las alas totalmente.” 37 Ibid., 161. “Por eso ha habido siempre una necesidad imperiosa de juntarse con los iguales, escondido de las miradas ajenas.”

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Argentinean intellectuals found that the best way to demonstrate the integration of Jewish immigrants was by adopting the romantic image of the gaucho, showing that Jewish immigrants were willing to establish themselves in peace and harmony. This tradition is taken up again in the novel, seen in the personification that Feierstein establishes of the emblematic country man and his roots, which form part of Jewish Argentinean culture. Thus, when Edith relates the story of her ‘uncle’ Anastasio Duarte, illegitimate son of her grandfather Mario, she says, “That is really an example of integration between a native and a gaucho. Pure mixture of cultures and traditions: speaks Yiddish better than we do and nobody can beat him on a horse or driving cattle.”38 On many occasions, the text makes a mockery of this idea, perceived through the illegitimacy of the character, a situation that is paralleled by the lack of recognition of the members of the Jewish community as legitimate constituents of Argentina. In conclusion, after having analyzed the possible options that can be taken by the Jewish Argentinean community, it is relevant to return to the question posed at the beginning of this study: How will the Integration Game end where not only we participate but also the others do?” The question obviously seeks to generate reflection and compromise from everyone, transcending the reduced circle of the Schvel family to extend itself to the entire nation. As long as prejudices and social stigmas that try to emphasize differences between groups as something negative still exist, it will not be possible to overcome this crisis and reach peaceful coexistence. The ‘other’ is a fictional and arbitrary social creation that generates confrontation. Since the notion of the ‘other’ is not a fixed one, each societal group is perpetually in danger of falling into this category, because every individual is different from the rest. This takes us to the idea of the threshold presented by Feierstein, that intermediate or indefinite situation that provokes the uncertainty of being or not being, belonging or not belonging. As always, finding a balance is difficult, a utopian idea, given that there will always be something in the way that makes it difficult to advance without taking steps back, as the ‘Game of

38 Ibid., 209. “Ese sí que es ejemplo de integración entre gaucho y criollo. Mestizaje puro de culturas y tradiciones: habla ídish mejor que nosotros y no hay quien lo supere arriba del caballo o arreando ganado.”


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Integration’ illustrates. The idea of the dream and/or delirium is very well represented in the chapter called “Arrival?” which to a certain point recalls Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Life is a dream, which leads to the question of whether it is really possible to dream up a change in the Jewish Argentinean situation. The answer might possibly be found in the last chapter, “The shared dream of the Threshold Secret Society,”39 and the disillusion is none other than an “Temporary relief, but it does not solve the essential,”40 This is a discussion that should be continued in a subsequent study.

39 40

El sueño compartido de la Logia del Umbral. Ibid., 304. “alivio transitorio, pero no resuelve lo esencial”.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

OTHERNESS IN EL ÁRBOL DE LA GITANA Dayana Soto y Caballero de Galicia In her novel El árbol de la Gitana, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz makes use of autobiographical and fantastic elements to piece together the story of her voluntary exile in Paris and the rovings of her various ancestors. It is through narrating her own story and re-creating the imagined stories of several of her family members that the author attempts to redefine the family origins of the Dujovnes and the Ortizes, resulting in a reformed vision of what it means to be Argentinean for a particular sector of citizens who, like her, are of Jewish origin. This essay explores the text by Dujovne Ortiz with the intention of drawing attention to at least three aspects of otherness. First, the condition of exile, of physical distance from the place considered one’s own: this condition detonates into various questions, among them how to define one’s identity and place of membership as an immigrant. Second, ethnic, cultural, and religious fusion: membership in groups that are traditionally antagonistic, in this case Catholics and Jews, is a distinctive element of otherness that creates an ambiguous identity— an identity that disables the identification of a categorical membership and at the same time emulates the history of Argentina. Third, the narration itself: being a feminine piece of writing, it creates distance from the canon to compose an intimate and unique discourse. The Condition of Exile The creation of this story emerges as a palliative toward the immigrant condition of both author and protagonist. The state of otherness in a new geographical location creates the prevailing necessity to define oneself, instead of simply accepting the adjectives and taxonomies that the ‘hospitable’ society chooses to assign. This process of selfidentification takes the protagonist down unforeseen paths. It is through the morality stories that her alter-ego, the Gypsy, tells her that she

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dayana soto y caballero de galicia

discovers the innate destiny she has inherited, since both branches of her family tree are full of characters (leaves) that have led lives in constant motion. The wanderer condition becomes an inescapable pattern. Nonetheless, once the infinite pilgrim condition is assumed, of both predecessors and descendents, the character of Alicia learns to live in her own skin. As has been noted, this is a novel of autobiographical nuances. Therefore, the reality of its author finds resonance in the fictional narration. In a couple of interviews, Dujovne Ortiz has commented on her perception of her exiled condition, not just outside Argentina but also within it: “Me sentía no perteneciente pero la verdadera nopertenencia empieza cuando uno se va, y es un renacimiento y es un dolor absoluto. Yo creo que no conocí la experiencia del dolor hasta que no me separé de mi país. Y curiosamente después eso se convirtió en una lección” [I felt as if I did not belong, but the real nonbelonging starts when one leaves, and it is a rebirth and it is an absolute pain. I do not believe I had experienced such pain until I became separated from my country. Curiously, soon after, this turned into a lesson].1 Similarly, the character of Alicia realizes her apparent nonmembership in her city of origin when she indicates that since she was the daughter of an immigrant and a Creole, her link to Buenos Aires was a mixture of fixed memories. Two examples are her memories of her maternal grandparents’ home and the unfulfilled dreams of Fata Morgana, her father’s imagined house. In the end, however, both are memories with nonnexistent physical conditions: “Mi herencia consistió en esas dos casas ausentes y se enriqueció luego con un departamento perdido. ¿Podía pesar tanto tener bienes raíces en el recuerdo o el futuro? Los acontecimientos se encargarían de demostrar que sí” [My inheritance consisted of those two absent houses and was enriched afterward with a lost apartment. Could it weigh so much to have real

1 Jason Weiss, “Alicia Dujovne Ortiz,” Hispamérica 28, no. 82 (1999): 45–58, quotation at 51 (all translations are my own). Besides Weiss’s interview, excerpted here, additional interviews can be consulted regarding the author’s perception of her condition as an immigrant and an inheritor of multiple cultures, namely “Entrevista a Alicia Dujovne Ortiz: Las tribulaciones de un centauro argentino exiliado en París,” Noah: Revista Literaria 1, no. 2 (1988): 87–95; and Carolina Rocha, “Entrevista a una gitana: Alicia Dujovne,” Mester 31 (2002): 32–39.

otherness in EL ÁRBOL DE LA GITANA

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estate made of past memories or set in the future? Events would prove this right].2 The idea of the Alicia character’s lack of roots as a condition of her exile becomes acute when she points out that upon arriving in her new city of residence, but more specifically upon establishing a new house, she realized that her feeling of nonbelonging stemmed from living in places that did not represent personal memories, thus becoming mere structures where one lives in the present: “Resultaba evidente que si había un sitio en el mundo que no surgía de ningún recuerdo personal ni familiar, ese sitio era Meudon” [ It was quite evident that if there was a place in the world that did not emerge from personal or family memories, that place was Meudon].3 While neither the character Alicia nor the author Dujovne Ortiz makes definite distinctions between being an immigrant and being an exile, it is clear that anyone who departs from his or her place of birth or original residence becomes an immigrant in the new place of residence. Furthermore, it should be noted that the exiled condition could be of two kinds, imposed or voluntary. Both are caused by hardships of various sorts: persecution due to ethnic, religious, or political affiliation, but also for economic reasons, as for recent exiles to European countries and the United States. In any case, migration, whether voluntary or imposed, may create ambiguous perceptions of one’s identity and consequently the need to search into one’s past, as is the case for the Alicia character. Through her exploration of imagined memories, the character becomes aware of the condition of otherness, the state of one who possesses a fluctuating identity. Certainly, this experience does not seem to discriminate against anyone: Christopher Columbus, in the Alicia character’s story, comments to Micer Nicolò Oderigo, one of the protagonist’s ancestors, on the sentimental dichotomy he experiences as a seaman: “—¡Ah!—suspiró un pelirrojo.—Cuando estoy embarcado extraño el nido, y cuando vuelvo, me ahogo—” [“Ah!” sighed a redhead, “when I am on board, I miss my nest, but when I return, I drown”].4 This inconsistency in Columbus increases as his lack of hope worsens, and his disdain for his homeland becomes acute: “Génova era su antigua piel, que recordaba olores y gustos, que 2 3 4

Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, El árbol de la Gitana (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1997), 15–16. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 25.

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briznas de memorias le arañaban el pecho pero que honradamente no podía admitir” [Genoa was his old skin; it reminded him of scents and tastes resembling threads of memories scratching his chest, but that he honestly could not admit].5 These quotes illustrate how some individuals, in order to incorporate themselves, must cut the string that bonds them to their original past; in this way, the European “toca tierra Americana y corta el hilo” [sets foot on American soil and cuts the string].6 Even so, others, such as the Jews, accept their new condition stoically: Al marcharse perdían su familia y su país pero también su nombre. Nadie más los llamaría Dujovne con el matiz exacto de la e, esa e tan ambigua, de origen tártaro, que se desliza entre la e y la y, mientras la lengua, casi pegada al paladar, deja pasar el aire. Lo sabían tan bien, que ya apartaban de sus rostros, como espantándose una mosca, la tentativa de explicar como se pronunciaba el apellido, admitiendo de entrada que Dujovnie se volviera Dujovne, con una e castellana sosa y desabrida como matse sin té.7 [Upon leaving, they would lose their family and country, but also their name. No one else would name them Dujovne, with the exact variation of the letter ‘e,’ that ambiguous ‘e’ of Tartar origin that glides between the ‘e’ and the ‘y,’ while the tongue, almost stuck to the palate, lets the air through. They knew it so well, they removed from their faces, as if blowing off a fly, any attempt to explain how the last name was pronounced, admitting from the onset that Dujovnie would become Dujovne, with a tasteless and dull Castilian ‘e’ like Matzah without tea.]

The Jew, as a sensible and realistic character, has gained from his or her own European pilgrimage the awareness, upon arriving in Argentina, that exile supplants identity and demeanor, reforming the individual forever: Los inmigrantes habían dejado atrás sus viejas ropas porque, desde el momento de emprender viaje, ya se habían parado de otro modo. Ahora, para ponerse las nuevas, tenían que acentuar el cambio de postura. La actitud esquinada del cuerpo los arraigaba en esa tierra físicamente chata pero de ánimo oblicuo.8 [ Immigrants had left behind their old clothes. Since the start of their journey, they had stood in a new way. Now, to put on the new clothes, 5 6 7 8

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

43. 170. 192. 202.


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they had to accentuate the new posture. That hellacious body position rooted them to a new land, which was physically flat but of oblique mood.]

For instance, the Alicia character’s daughter, being just an adolescent, finds clear distinctions among immigrants and the natives of a given place: “Los extranjeros caminamos como si levitásemos y . . . los naturales del país pisan con fuerza sobre su tierra” [ We foreigners walk as if we levitate, while . . . the natives of the country walk with force over their land].9 Additionally, there are the immigrants who, like the Alicia character’s ancestors, integrate while maintaining memories of their homeland, at the same time fostering new hopes for the future. Dujovne Ortiz has noted in an interview, “Encontré en todos estos antepasados una orden de viaje hacia algo, un vamos a, todos están en busca de la Tierra Prometida y en todos hay el regreso de una ilusión y una curva de fracaso” [I found in all these ancestors a type of voyage toward something, a ‘let’s go to . . .’; they are all in search of the Promised Land, and in all exist the return of hope and a curve of failure].10 In search of the Promised Land, characters such as Nena, Carlos Ortiz, and Alicia migrate backward. Contrary to Columbus and the Europeans who “cortan el hilo” [cut the string], Nena does not renounce her geographical origin and roots. Rather, she goes in search of her ancestry: “Mi Nena se marchaba a los trópicos porque ni su país de nacimiento ni el mío de elección le daban arraigo” [ My baby girl was leaving for the tropics since neither her country of birth nor the one I elected for us gave her roots].11 In the same way, Carlos Ortiz travels to Russia “porque el viaje de los padres le parecía un error . . . [y debía] reparar volviendo” [because for him, his parents’ voyage seemed like an error . . . [that he had to] repair by returning].12 As if the words of European Jews from the past were being regurgitated in Carlos’s blood and brain, he also does not wish to forget. The journey of Carlos’s parents through all of Europe and across the Atlantic, with the intention of establishing themselves in the Argentinean pampa, has minute effects on Carlos. Suddenly, the legend about the king destined for madness who helps Akiba recover 9 10 11 12

Ibid., 83. Rocha, “Entrevista a una gitana,” 88. Dujovne Ortiz, El árbol de la Gitana, 90. Ibid., 244.

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his own sanity has resonance for Carlos, telling him, “Buenas gentes, no hay que olvidar, es importante para nuestra vida, para nuestra supervivencia, no hay que olvidar, no hay que olvidar” [Good people, we should not forget, it is important for our lives, for our survival, we should not forget, we should not forget].13 In this continued and self-inflicted search, the life in “capas de cebolla” [onion layers] that Carlos leads shows him that the Promised Land is only an imagined place, a place in memory, as Pierre Nora notes, which some, like the Jewish collectivity, hold on to in order to create a bond to the land, although not to the history, since the latter was written by hegemonic groups, not by marginal collectivities.14 Despite the fact that all the stories of her ancestors end in deception, the character of Alicia learns from the teachings of her Gypsy that exile is not a punishment imposed by the military dictatorship of Argentina—after all she was never really persecuted. Nor is it a mission with the purpose of defining each and every leaf and branch of her family tree. Exile, whether mandatory or intentional, is a lesson and a renovating act contributing to individual progress and growth. All the characters in the novel learn from exile: Carlos Ortiz, through his active participation in labor syndicates and the creation of his communist gazette; Nena, through the creation of her own tree of life in Colombia, with new roots made of yucca; and finally Alicia, who inherits the losses of her ancestors: ¿Micer Nicolò? Perdí mi carta. ¿Akiba? Mi razón. ¿María Teodora? Mi limpieza de sangre. ¿Giuseppe? Mis barcos. ¿Manuel? Mis tierras. ¿Samuel? Mi vida. ¿Carlos, al borde de la muerte? Mi comunismo. Y Alicia Ortiz Oderigo, tan neutral, también ella, que parecía casi difunta:—Mi novela. . . . La historia de mis antepasados que vinieron al Río de la Plata. No la hice. Perdí. Ojalá ganes vos.15 [Micer Nicolò? I lost my letter. Akiba? My reason. María Teodora? My purity of blood. Giuseppe? My ships. Manuel? My land. Samuel? My life. Carlos, on his death bed? My communism. And Alicia Ortiz Oderigo, so natural, she too, who seemed almost dead: My novel. . . . The story of my ancestors who came to the River Platte. I did not write it. I lost it. I hope you will win.]

13 14 15

Ibid., 79. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 280.


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The character of Alicia takes charge of the memories of her ancestors, and these help her create her own story/novel: they assist her in redefining herself once she has assumed her historical baggage as the descendent of immigrants. The Alicia character experiences what Nora has noted: Those who have long been marginalized in traditional history are not the only ones haunted by the need to recover their buried pasts. Following the example of ethnic groups and social minorities, every established group, intellectual or not, learned or not, has felt the need to go in search of its own origins and identity. Indeed, there is hardly a family today in which some member has not recently sought to document as accurately as possible his or her ancestors’ furtive existences.16

Hybridism As for the cultural fusion, it can be stated that in some way the history of the Alicia character’s family emulates the official history of Argentina during its epoch of conformation as a nation-state. Hispanic culture was the first to arrive in Argentina as a nation. As a consequence, this collectivity proclaimed itself superior with respect to other groups, such as the indigenous, the Irish, and the Jewish communities, all of which the character Alicia descends from. In an eager and uncontrollable desire to define themselves, the Creoles aspire to purity of blood, an unattainable chimera, as the cultural and racial hybridism of contemporary Argentina demonstrates. In the same way, the Alicia character reveals her family’s history when she reinvents ancestors of debonair extraction and exhibits them as inheritors of turbid lineages. Despite all her efforts to eliminate stains of the impurity of blood and race in her family tree, genes reveal themselves through physiognomy against historical iniquity through the evocation of a gypsy, Irish, Jewish, or indigenous past. Furthermore, the character of Alicia exhibits her family in a twofold fashion, first by displaying her Spanish origin, linked to converted Jews from Toledo, then by revealing how her Creole ancestors fused with indigenous people from South America. In addition, she presents her paternal family as not being of full Jewish origin, given that Besarabia,

16

Ibid., 15.

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according to her own narration, alienated herself from the Jewish faith in an act of conversion. Also, Akiba the Jew breaks the rules of purity of blood when he fathers a child with Belka, a gypsy woman. Dujovne Ortiz examines these worries regarding collective identity in both her novel and in interviews: Yo he sufrido bastante mi condición de centauro (o de sirena), ser medio judía. Ser medio judía nacida en Buenos Aires—que es de por sí un lugar de exilios—es lo que te permite comprender la herencia judía y hasta el antisemitismo de mi madre; puedo entender muchas opciones y actitudes pero a la vez esto me convierte en la que no pertenece a nada.17 [ I have deeply suffered from my condition of centaur (or mermaid), being partially Jewish. Being partially Jewish in Buenos Aires—itself a place of exile—is what allows me to comprehend my Jewish heritage and my mother’s anti-Semitism; I can understand many options and attitudes, but at the same time, this makes me the one who belongs nowhere.]

The dichotomy of the source and origin of Argentina is a constant question, one that does not intrigue Argentineans of Jewish origin exclusively. As Dujovne Ortiz mentions, Buenos Aires, and the Argentinean nation as a whole, is a place of exiled persons; at the same time, it is a place of persecutors and victims, as the character of Alicia notes. The power systems of the nation-state, throughout Argentina’s history, have constrained certain collectivities, while at the same time glorifying others, so that that, as Tzvetan Todorov postulates: “La recuperación del pasado es indispensable; lo cual no significa que el pasado deba regir el presente, sino que, al contrario, éste hará del pasado el uso que prefiera. Sería de una ilimitada crueldad recordar continuamente a alguien los sucesos más dolorosos de su vida; también existe el derecho al olvido” [Recuperating the past is indispensable; this does not mean the past must rule the present. Rather, it should make of the past the use it prefers. It would be an inadequate cruelty to continuously remind someone about those events most painful in his or her life; there also exists the right to forget].18 The need to search racial, cultural, or religious origins in the Argentinean context can be explained using a topographical image. The cartography of Argentina is not self-contained within its official demarcation under the so-called political division. Given its condition as a country composed of immigrants, Argentina inevitably expands

17 18

Rocha, “Entrevista a una gitana,” 88. Tzvetan Todorov, Los abusos de la memoria (Barcelona: Paidós, 2000), 25.


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beyond preestablished borders, extending itself throughout remote parts of the globe. In consequence, this condition of expansion beyond borders generates a question within each collectivity regarding its own origin. At the same time, these collectivities try to find their membership within their local communities. Todorov explains this need: Hay que señalar que la representación del pasado es constitutiva no sólo de la identidad individual—la persona está hecha de sus propias imágenes acerca de sí misma—sino también de la identidad colectiva. Ahora bien, guste o no, la mayoría de los seres humanos experimentan la necesidad de sentir su pertenencia a un grupo: así es como encuentran el medio más inmediato de obtener el reconocimiento de su existencia, indispensable para todos y cada uno. Yo soy católico, o de Berry, o campesino, o comunista: soy alguien, no corro el riesgo de ser engullido por la nada.19 [ It must be noted that the representation of the past constitutes not only individual identity—a person is made of his or her own images about his- or herself—but also a collective identity. Now, like it or not, most human beings experiment with the need to belong to a group: this is how they find the most immediate means to obtain the recognition of their existence, indispensable for each and every person. I am Catholic, or from Berry, or a peasant, or a communist: I am someone; thus, I do not run the risk of being gobbled up by nothingness.]

Independent of collective origins or questions about individual identity, Argentineans, and specifically Argentineans such as the character of Alicia, are capable of recognizing themselves within their national context once they begin to accept that they are inheritors of debris, of fragmented stories, of fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams, and finally of torn-apart hearts, as the Gypsy indicates in her last intervention: “¿Quién mueve de su sitio un corazón entero? El corazón, para avanzar, ha de estar en pedazos” [Who moves a whole heart from one place to another? The heart, in order to move on, must be in pieces].20 Feminine Narration The narration of this novel itself situates it away from androcentric discourse. The characteristics of this new way of writing include changes

19 20

Ibid., 51. Dujovne Ortiz, El árbol de la Gitana, 293.

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to the concept of time, the written re-creation of oral narratives, and the reinvention of family stories. Regarding time, it can be stated that there is harmony among the narration of the protagonist’s lived experiences and the intercalated stories she re-creates about the different characters who form her genealogy. In this regard, the notion of time Julia Kristeva suggests can be applied. Kristeva indicates that women live in three times: cyclic, monumental, and linear time, linked respectively to maternity and reproduction and to the political and historical time of men.21 In Dujovne Ortiz’s narrative, the Bulgarian critic’s worries regarding the conscious role women have played as unequal subjects of the canon established by men’s discourse, as well as the ways in which women have learned to live in parallel times (i.e., linear and intimatecircular time), are crystallized. Dujovne Ortiz narrates, in a linear fashion, the lived experiences of the Alicia character as an immigrant in Paris, assuming the chronological order of masculine writing. Nevertheless, when it comes to re-creating the history of the men in the family, she employs an imaginative richness that has no time limits. Dujovne Ortiz shows a high level of self-consciousness with respect to the masculine discourse: she re-creates her own legends imitating the style of history, but at the same time, she reinvents herself within the canon by forging stories that have little to do with the dominant discourse, given that they are not official historic narrations. With respect to the written re-creation of oral narrations, it is evident that the act of writing for Dujovne Ortiz is a prevailing necessity. Her condition as an immigrant, aside from creating uncertainty about identity or membership, also sharpens the vagueness about her affiliation to the archives of memory, archives that exist provided that a physical trace follows them. The character Alicia, like Dujovne Ortiz, assumes the task of putting into writing the lived experiences of those ancestors who, in the Old World as well as the New, converged, as if their only mission were that she could reinvent them and put them in writing for the fist time ever. In a fashion analogous to Scheherazade’s performance, the Alicia character writes to liberate herself, in this case from her own phantoms of the past.

21

Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 13–35.


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In her text The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous incites women to free themselves from the hegemonic discourse through writing: “It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence.”22 By narrating the story of her life during her youth in her parents’ home, the character of Alicia applies the metaphor of the weaving spider to explain her birth as a writer and her incipient creative process, the moment at which, like the spider at night, she pieces together poems while she observes the dawn. It is during this process that the main character finds her inner voice, her wealth of creativity emerging from her Gypsy: “¿Cuándo apareció la Gitana? Calculo que habrá sido por la época de las arañas y la hermosa respiración del patiecito. . . . La cortina del alma se levantó de pronto para dejar pasar a un personaje más real que yo misma: el resto de la vida me la pasaría preguntándome quién era copia de quién” [When did the Gypsy appear? It must have been during the time of the spiders and the beautiful inhalation in the little patio. . . . Suddenly, the curtain of the soul was lifted to let a character more real than myself pass by: the rest of my life, I would spend questioning who was a copy of whom].23 The character of Alicia is that woman whom Cixous describes as imaginative and inexhaustible, full of visions and torrents of creative luminosity. All in all, this wealth of imagination is not new to her, given that the women in her family have passed on their language to her. Additionally, she finds in her Gypsy a phantom of “más añejo paladar” [more ancient palate], who narrates stories that she will shape for posterity: Sus cuentos fueron producto de dos lenguas, la gustadora y la parlante. Conocía los viajes de mis tatarabuelos y me los fue cocinando desde siempre, en el patio de Flores y en los castillos del exilio, mostrándome los mapas, rodeando con pinturita colorada los nombres mágicos, Cáucaso, mar Caspio, Crimea, Besarabia o Moldavia, Kamenev-Podolski, Génova, Toledo, Jerez de la Frontera, Islas Canarias, Entre Ríos.24

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–92, quotation at 81. 23 Dujovne Ortiz, El árbol de la Gitana, 21. 24 Ibid., 23. 22

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dayana soto y caballero de galicia [Her tales were a product of two languages, the one that tasted and the one that talked. She knew the voyages of my great-great-grandparents, and she cooked them for me from the beginning, in the flower patios and the castles of exile, showing me the maps, circling with red lipstick the magic names: Caucas, the Caspian Sea, Crimea, Bessarabia or Moldavia, Kamenev-Podolski, Genoa, Toledo, Jerez de la Frontera, the Canary Islands, Entre Ríos.]

Dujovne Ortiz through her protagonist displays the courage to rummage within her own self, to listen free from fear to her own voice and to the voices of all those women who are part of her family history. Against the preestablished discourse, she has not been afraid to expel her flow of ideas or the flow of her fragmented stories. In Cixous’s words, her language has not constrained but liberated her, allowing the voices of her ancestors, both masculine and feminine, and her own voice to transform and take charge of life through the act of writing. Conclusion Dujovne Ortiz, like many of her contemporaries, such as Sergio Chejfec, Gabriela Avigur-Rotem, and Andres Neuman, has given voice to a collectivity through creative works.25 In doing so, these authors have also allowed new approaches to Argentinean history, not by going against official history, but rather by presenting additional accounts that are equally entitled to shape the official Argentinean chronicle. Dujovne Ortiz is an author capable of searching exhaustively the various branches that constitute her genealogy and the official history, to reinvent herself but also to bring justice to her immigrant ancestors who went into exile. In a positive manner, making use of legends and creating her own mythologies, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz has redefined the identity of today’s Argentinean Jews, giving them a new place in the collective memory and official history.

25 Thematic details and approaches to Jewish-Argentinean identity in these authors’ works can be found in Amalia Ran, “Hechos de orillas: nuevas expresiones de la identidad judeoargentina contemporanea” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2007).

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INDEX

El abrazo partido, 22. See also Burman, Daniel acculturation, 2, 12, 34, 78, 83n24, 84, 85, 86, 87, 123, 196, 207, 208. See also integration, social Acné, 146, 148, 153, 154, 155. See also Veiroj, Federico alterity. See Otherness AMIA. See Asociación Mutua Israelita Argentina O ano em que meus país saíram de férias, 146, 147, 151, 155. See also Hamburguer, Cao anti-Semitism: in Argentina, 7, 10, 27, 67, 164, 197, 201, 220; in Brazil, 27n22; in Europe, 10, 71; in Latin America, 6, 26–27, 28, 29, 31; in Mexico, 77; anti-Semitic belief, 150; anti-Semitic characterization, 90, 94 An Apprenticeship, or, The Book of Delights, 179, 189. See also Lispector, Clarice Arab immigrants, 29, 144, 151; Arab-Israeli conflict (see Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict); Arabic, language, 33, 42, 42n43, 45, 51, 83, 116n11, 136; Arabic literature, 82, 84, 86; Arabic music, 122, 122n2, 130, 131, 132, 135–36, 192n35 El árbol de la Gitana, 13, 213. See also Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia Argentina: culture, 12, 34, 175, 210; Dirty War, 7, 58 (see also Argentina, military dictatorship); history (see history, of Argentina); Jews, 7, 9–10, 10, 12, 18, 22, 23, 24, 28, 59, 65, 149, 151, 162, 164, 176, 203, 207, 208, 213, 224; military dictatorship (1976–1983), 197, 203, 208, 218; Sephardic community (See Sephardic Jews, in Argentina); Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (See Sociedad Hebraica Argentina); society, 13, 176, 177, 195, 199, 201, 202. See also Jewish community, in Argentina; immigration, to Argentina Argentineanness, 22, 57, 146

argentinidad. See Argentineanness Ashkenazi: Ashkenazim, 18, 34, 35, 40n30, 44, 45, 46, 51, 125; community in Argentina, 10, 33, 36, 38n17, 39n25, 44, 45, 45n62, 45n63; community in Latin America, 2, 29, 30, 31; European Jews, 4, 128; food, 74 Asociación Mutua Israelita Argentina (AMIA): terrorist attack, 8, 146, 198, 199, 206 assimilation, 2, 4, 12, 13, 35, 59, 95, 123, 196, 200, 204, 206, 207; assimilationism, 124 Babel, 2, 3; Babylonian story, 2, 3 Barrios, Justo Rufino, 92 Borges, Jorge Luis, 11, 23, 58, 70, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 118, 202 Brazil: belonging, 193; culture, 181n4, 183, 185n14; film, 12, 143; football, 152; Jews, 8, 12, 23, 24, 31, 152; military dictatorship (1964–1985), 147; myth, 180; politics, 8, 152; society, 144, 152, 180, 192, 193. See also Jewish community, in Brazil; immigration, to Brazil Brazilianness, 152 Burman, Daniel, 6, 22, 149, 150 Cara de Queso: Mi primer ghetto, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155. See also Winograd, Ariel Chejfec, Sergio, 10, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 224 chronotope, 78–80, 87 La clínica del Dr. Mefistófeles, 68. See also Gerchunoff, Alberto Collected Philosophical Papers, 187. See also Levinas, Emmanuel Columbus, Christopher, 3, 215, 217 Contraexilio y mestizaje, 199, 203. See also Feierstein, Ricardo Cuba: Cuban immigrants in the United States, 12, 125, 129; independence, 100; Jews, 8, 100; music, 129, 130,

238

index

137, 138, 141. See also immigration, to Cuba; Martí, José Cubanidad, 100 Diaspora, notion of, 9, 10, 30, 75, 79; diasporic condition, 78; Jewish, 1, 25, 73, 75, 80, 97; Jews of ( Jewry), 70, 71, 81, 84, 85 Dirty War. See Argentina: Dirty War dislocation, sense of, 5, 182, 193 displacement, sense of, 21, 79, 134, 182, 192. See also exile The Divine Husband, 11, 89, 90, 91, 99, 100, 101. See also Goldman, Francisco double identity. See identity Dujovne, Leon, 161, 167, 170, 172 Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia, 13, 213, 214, 215, 217, 220, 222, 224 Eichmann, Adolf, 7 Ein Sof, 116 emigration: European, 3n3; Jewish, 3, 4, 4n3, 30, 81, 84, 95, 133, 150, 154, 196, 200, 206. See also immigration, Jewish La estrella de David, 66, 66n2, 70, 72, 73, 74. See also Gerchunoff, Alberto ethnicity, 1, 9, 10, 22–26, 28, 30, 76, 90, 100, 149, 181, 182, 191; ethnic boundaries, 91, 94; ethnic cohesion, 155; ethnic communities, 25–26, 28, 29; ethnic difference, 29, 59, 91, 94, 127; ethnic film, 143; ethnic heritage, 11; ethnic ‘homeland,’ 25; ethnic literature, 181, 182n7, 183; ethnic minority, 23, 24, 90, 98, 100, 101, 123; ethnic music, 129; ethnic purity, 99; ethnic relations, 30; Jewish, 51, 151, 152, 154, 155, 191; multiethnic, 10, 36, 46, 76, 180; transnational, 23; ‘white,’ 12, 19, 26, 94, 123, 155. See also Identity, ethnic; racism exclusion, 3, 9, 26, 66, 95, 136, 138, 197. See also dislocation, sense of; marginality, sense of exile, 5, 13, 66, 70, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 220, 224 exodus, 56, 61, 66, 112 Feierstein, Ricardo, 13, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203, 210 Los gauchos judíos, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72. See also Gerchunoff, Alberto

Gerchunoff, Alberto, 4, 10, 65–74, 170, 171, 174 globalization, 19 Glusberg, Samuel, 4, 170 Goldman, Francisco, 11, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 99 Guatemala: history (see history, of Guatemala); migration (see immigration, to Guatemala; emigration); national formation, 90, 91, 92, 93, 99; ‘La niña de Guatemala,’ 89; society, 93. See also Martí, José; Barrios, Justo Rufino Hamburguer, Cao, 12, 146 Hebraism, 188 Hebrew, language, 2, 6, 8, 18, 34, 38, 39, 40, 40n30, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 61, 66, 81, 85, 100, 110n6, 116n11, 150, 154, 162, 166, 174 heteronormativity, 11, 90, 96, 98 heterosexuality, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99. See also sexuality Hirsch, Maurice de (baron), 44, 200. See also Jewish Colonization Association Historia de los judíos argentinos, 200. See also Feierstein, Ricardo history, notion of, 79, 89, 90, 101, 112, 120, 167, 176; of Argentina, 49, 195, 200, 206, 207, 213, 220, 224; collective, 81; family, 81, 86, 87, 195, 198, 219, 222, 224; Jewish, 3, 8, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 27, 30, 36, 41, 56, 57, 100, 101, 112, 159, 165, 166, 171, 174, 181, 197, 218; of Guatemala, 92; of Latin America, 9, 11, 13, 20, 30, 83, 91, 101; of Mexico, 88; modern, 8; new, 27; official, 13, 219, 224; traditional, 219 Holocaust, 6, 31, 54, 56, 57, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 150, 154, 174 The Hour of the Star, 180, 181, 182, 190, 191. See also Lispector, Clarice hybridism, 83, 95, 129, 152, 219 (See also mestizaje); hybrid culture, 8; hybrid genre, 12, 129, 130, 137; hybrid language, 65; hybridization, 84, 155 hybridity. See hybridism identity, notion of, 3, 11, 13, 21, 23, 56, 60, 74, 128, 136, 137, 138, 145, 150, 155, 183, 184, 191, 193, 194,

index 196, 198, 201, 202, 203, 213, 215, 216, 219, 222; Argentinean, 25, 60, 146, 195, 201, 202, 209, 221, 224; Brazilian, 152, collective, 5, 22, 25, 127, 128, 143, 192, 193, 220, 221; cultural, 12, 83, 123, 128; diasporic, 10, 75, 76, 78, 79; ‘double identity,’ 5, 205; ethnic, 25, 26, 50, 76, 77, 82, 95, 137; Guatemalan, 98; hyphenated, 66; identification, 2, 36, 45, 137, 143, 145, 182, 196, 213; immigrant, 35; Jewish, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 17, 22, 24, 26, 45, 51, 58, 59, 60, 75, 76, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 145, 146, 150, 191, 195, 201, 202, 209, 224; Latin American, 9, 10, 17, 24, 30, 31, 58, 88; loss of, 34, 204, 206; Mexican, 78, 85; national, 23, 24, 26, 50, 76, 82, 90, 97, 100; pan, 123, 128, 128n20, 129, 136; pan-American, 100; panoriental, 128; racial, 97; sexual, 95 (See also sexuality); transnational, 11, 90, 99 (see also transnationalism); Uruguayan, 154 imagined community, 90. See also nation immigration, notion of, 11, 13, 66, 89, 98, 99; to Argentina, 24, 55, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 220; to Brazil, 4n3, 179; to Chile, 4n3; to Cuba, 4n3; to Europe, 19; European immigrants, 1, 3, 151; to Guatemala, 102; immigrant communities, 98; to Israel, 17, 18, 19, 30, 121, 128, 133, 150, 165, 206, 208, 209; Jewish 1, 2, 5, 19, 23, 24, 27, 33, 50, 51, 56, 73, 77, 86, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 123, 144, 146, 150, 152, 165, 196, 200, 203, 209, 210; to Latin America, 2, 11; Latino, 122n3, 123, 128n20, 129, 133; mass, 3n3, 30, 76; to Mexico, 4n3, 77, 78, 80–82, 86; to the United States, 4n3, 19, 93, 99, 206; to Uruguay, 4n3. See also emigration; Cuba: Cuban immigrants in the United States integration, social, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13, 78, 79, 93, 122, 127, 160, 165, 168, 175, 176, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204, 205, 207, 210. See also acculturation isolation, 13, 42, 190, 196, 197, 200, 206, 209 Israel, modern state of, 1, 5, 6, 7, 19–20, 24, 25, 30, 31, 50, 50n75, 66,

239

70, 71, 73, 75, 106, 113, 128, 137, 154, 155, 165, 174, 192; immigration (see immigration, to Israel); IsraelLatin America relations, 6, 7, 8, 146; Israeli-Arab conflict, 7, 8, 71; Israeli culture, 1; Israeli film, 18; Israeli folk dances, 150; Israeli music, 11, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126–27, 130, 135–36, 192n35; mizrahim (‘oriental’ Jews), 123, 124, 128, 128n20, 129, 135; people of, 6, 70, 71, 161; society, 30, 122n3, 124, 127. See also muzika mizrahit Israeliness, 136 JCA. See Jewish Colonization Association Jewish Agency for Israel, 6, 70 Jewish agricultural colony, 2, 5, 166. See also Jewish Colonization Association Jewish Colonization Association ( JCA), 39, 44, 200. See also Hirsch, Maurice de Jewish community: in Argentina, 13, 34, 36, 40, 44, 49, 50, 76, 161–62, 170, 171, 195, 199–200, 202, 203, 206, 210, 219; in Brazil, 5, 76; in Latin America, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 25, 26, 29, 76, 100; in Mexico, 76, 78, 81, 83; in the United States, 20, 27; in Uruguay, 76; in Venezuela, 8 Jewish diasporas. See diasporas, Jewish Jewish gaucho, 65, 66, 202 Jewish identity. See identity, Jewish Jewish history. See history, Jewish Jewishness, 10, 11, 22, 26, 59, 174, 175, 176, 177 Judeo-Latinidad ( Judeolatinidad), 12, 145, 155 Kabbalah, 11, 62, 105, 106, 108–10, 112, 113, 118; Kabbalistic motif, 106, 113, 144; Kabbalistic source, 115; Kabbalists, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113 Laços de família [ Family Ties], 183. See also Lispector, Clarice Ladino, 2, 8, 33 Latin-ness, 137 Lenta biografía, 10, 54–58, 60, 61. See also Chejfec, Sergio Levinas, Emmanuel, 13, 61, 179, 180, 181, 181n5, 183–89, 191–93

240

index

Lispector, Clarice, 5, 13, 179–94 La Logia del umbral, 13, 195, 199, 203, 207. See also Feierstein, Ricardo A maçã no escuro [An Apple in the Dark], 183. See also Lispector, Clarice marginality, sense of, 5, 8, 54, 66, 126, 127, 203; social marginalization, 12, 83, 122, 123, 126, 127, 134, 137, 138, 144, 180, 197, 206 Martí, José, 89, 100 memory, 8, 30, 57, 58, 71, 82, 137, 143, 145, 147, 150, 200, 203, 204, 215, 217, 218, 222; collective, 1, 5, 13, 224; diasporic, 78, 79; historical, 154 Menem, Carlos Saúl, 28, 148, 149 mestizaje, 76, 77, 195, 199, 204. See also hybridism Mestizo, 198, 199, 207. See also Feierstein, Ricardo mexicanidad, 144 Mexico: film, 143–44; history (See history, of Mexico); Jews, 83; national imaginaries, 78, 88; political disourse, 77–78. See also immigration, to Mexico; Jewish community, in Mexico mizrahit. See muzika mizrahit multiculturalism, 19, 144; multicultural future, 203; multicultural mosaic, 12, 155; multicultural nation, 144, 146; multicultural tolerance, 151; multicultural world, 191 muzika mizrahit, 11, 12, 121–25, 127–38 nation, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 21, 24, 25, 30, 36, 49, 60, 76, 78, 79, 94, 95, 96, 97, 112, 144, 160, 182, 191, 197, 201, 206, 210, 219; deconstruction of, 21; national belonging, 100; national identity (see identity, national); national loyalty, 2, 5, 8, 10, 36; national reproduction, 11, 90; national purity, 99; nation-state, 90, 91, 93, 98, 101, 219, 220. See also imagined community; nationality nationalism: in Argentina, 51, 68; in Brazil, 152, 180, 192; in Guatemala, 11, 89, 90, 91; ‘Jewish,’ 51, 71; in Mexico, 77; nationalist agenda, 51, 91; sentiment of, 11, 89, 90; spiritual, 168

nationality, 2, 9, 76, 94, 95, 99; Jewish, 168 Nazism: in Europe, 10, 70–72, 106, 164, 197; in Latin America, 27, 164. See also anti-Semitism Nine Talmudic Readings, 179, 188. See also Levinas, Emmanuel Neo-realism, Italian (1945–1954), 153, 154 nostalgia, 5, 74, 200, 205 One Thousand and One Nights, 80, 81–84, 85, 86, 87 Other, notion of, 13, 21, 58, 94, 128, 146, 179–88, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 203, 205, 206, 208, 210, 216; sexual, 94 Otherness, 1, 2, 5, 12, 13, 21, 57, 58, 61, 66, 95, 144, 146, 151, 179, 180, 181, 181n4, 183–86, 190–93, 198, 201, 213, 215 PaRDeS, 115–6 The Passion According to GH, 179, 184, 185, 186. See also Lispector, Clarice patria, 24, 50, 70, 100 Perto do coração selvagem [Near to the Wild Heart], 179, 187. See also Lispector, Clarice Los planetas, 10, 58, 59, 60. See also Chejfec, Sergio Portuguese, language, 1, 2, 8 promised land, 4, 66, 217, 218 racism, 26, 125; racial agenda, 91; racial difference, 91, 94; racial diversity, 100; racial identity (see identity, racial); racial minority, 90, 97, 98, 100, 101; racial mixing, 13, 95, 99, 219 (see also mestizaje); racial purity, 99; racist attitudes, 6; racist discourse, 26, 28, 67, 72 Resnick, Salomón, 160, 161, 164, 166–68, 170, 171, 172, 175 Saed, Ivonne, 10, 76, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88 salsa, 11–12, 121–27, 129–38 Scholem, Gershom, 109, 192 Sefer Yetsirah, 109, 113 Sephardic: community in Argentina, 10, 33–49, 51; community in Latin America, 2, 4, 29, 30, 74; Sephardic Jews in Israel, 11, 121, 127, 129; origin, 4; Sephardim, 9, 18, 33–36,

index 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46. See also Jewish community sexuality, 11, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 132, 133, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154; sexual minority, 29, 101 Simmel, Georg, 2, 2n2 Shami, 80, 81, 85, 88. See also Sephardic, community in Latin America Shoah. See Holocaust Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (SHA), 160, 166, 170, 171, 172, 172n22, 174, 175 Spanish, language, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, 41, 45, 47, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 66, 70, 73, 81, 82, 150, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 174, 176, 177, 202 The Stream of Life, 180, 187. See also Lispector, Clarice Thirdspace, 11, 78 Tiempo, César, 4 Torah (Sefer), 18, 47, 65, 106, 110, 112, 179, 183, 187, 201; Talmudei Torah (schools), 33–35, 38–40, 42–46, 48, 51 (see also Sephardic: community in Argentina) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 179, 184, 191. See also Levinas, Emmanuel transculturation, 83 transnationalism: transnational boundaries, 101; transnational communities, 99; transnational

241

ethnicity (See ethnicity, transnational); transnational identity (see identity, transnational); transnational movements, 2; transnational representation, 99; transnational text, 90; transnational ties, 19 Triple crónica de un nombre, 10, 80, 83, 84, 86. See also Saed, Ivonne Veiroj, Federico, 12, 146 wandering Jew, figure of, 8, 71, 73 Wesser, 200 Winograd, Ariel, 12, 146, 150 World War II (1939–1945), 106, 154. See also Nazism xenophobia, 164; xenophobic attitudes, 6, 77 Yiddish, language, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65, 68, 150, 159, 162, 166, 167, 168, 170, 174, 174n23, 176, 195, 202, 208, 209, 210; Yiddish literature, 166, 166n13, 167; Yiddish Pen Club, 68; Yiddish scholars, 18 Zion, 24, 73 Zionism, 5, 10, 24, 25, 31, 72, 160, 165, 176, 192, 209; Zionist ideology, 6, 19, 24, 29, 71, 150, 160; Zionist institutions, 24; Zionist parties, 25, 160n2; Zionist rhetoric, 50, 165 Zohar, 109, 113

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