Oy, Caramba! Read online

  Oy, Caramba!

  ALSO BY ILAN STAVANS

  FICTION

  The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories * The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories

  NONFICTION

  The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture * Dictionary Days * On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language * Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language * The Hispanic Condition: The Power of a People * Art and Anger: Essays on Politics and the Imagination * Resurrecting Hebrew * A Critic’s Journey * The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture * Octavio Paz: A Meditation * Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage * Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta * ¡Lotería! (with Teresa Villegas) * José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race * Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots * Singer’s Typewriter and Mine: Reflections on Jewish Culture * Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years, 1929–1970 * The United States of Mestizo * Reclaiming Travel (with Joshua Ellison) * Quixote: The Novel and the World * Borges, the Jew

  JUDAICA

  The New World Haggadah (with Gloria Abella Ballen)

  CONVERSATIONS

  Knowledge and Censorship (with Verónica Albin) * What Is la hispanidad? A Conversation (with Iván Jaksić) * Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations (with Neal Sokol) * With All Thine Heart: Love and the Bible (with Mordecai Drache) * Conversations with Ilan Stavans * Love and Language (with Verónica Albin) * ¡Muy Pop! Conversations on Latino Popular Culture (with Frederick Aldama) * Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art (with Jorge J. E. Gracia)

  CHILDREN’S BOOK

  Golemito (with Teresa Villegas)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature * Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers * The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays * The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature * Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge (with Harold Augenbraum) * Wáchale!: Poetry and Prose about Growin Up Latino in America * The Scroll and the Cross: 1,000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature * The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories * Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another * Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories (with Harold Augenbraum) * The FSG Books of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology

  GRAPHIC NOVELS

  Latino U.S.A.: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) * Mr. Spic Goes to Washington (with Roberto Weil) * Once@9:53am (with Marcelo Brodsky) * El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel (with Steve Sheinkin) * A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States (with Lalo Alcaraz)

  TRANSLATIONS

  Sentimental Songs, by Felipe Alfau * The Plain in Flames, by Juan Rulfo (with Harold Augenbraum) * The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela (with Anna More) * Lazarillo de Tormes

  EDITIONS

  César Vallejo: Spain, Take This Chalice from Me * The Poetry of Pablo Neruda * Encyclopedia Latina: History, Culture, and Society in the United States (four volumes) * Pablo Neruda: I Explain a Few Things * Calvert Casey: The Collected Stories * Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (three volumes) * Cesar Chavez: An Organizer’s Tale * Rubén Darío: Selected Writings * Pablo Neruda: All the Odes * Latin Music: Musicians, Genres, and Themes (two volumes)

  GENERAL

  The Essential Ilan Stavans

  Oy, Caramba!

  AN ANTHOLOGY OF JEWISH STORIES FROM LATIN AMERICA

  Edited by Ilan Stavans

  © 2016 by the University of New Mexico Press

  All rights reserved. Published 2016

  Printed in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stavans, Ilan editor.

  Title: Oy, caramba! : an anthology of Jewish stories from Latin America / Ilan Stavans [editor].

  Description: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015040297 | ISBN 9780826354952 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826354969 (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: Short stories, Latin American—Jewish authors—Translations into English. |

  Latin American fiction—20th century—Translations into English. | Jews—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ7087.E5 O95 2016 | DDC 863/.01088924—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040297

  Cover illustration courtesy of Pixabay, licensed under CC0 1.0

  Designed by Felicia Cedillos

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  ILAN STAVANS

  ARGENTINA

  Camacho’s Wedding Feast

  ALBERTO GERCHUNOFF, translated from the Spanish by Prudencio de Pereda

  In Honor of Yom Kippur

  SAMUEL ROLLANSKY, translated from the Yiddish by Alan Astro

  A Man and His Parrot

  JOSÉ RABINOVICH, translated from the Yiddish by Debbie Nathan

  Innocent Spirit

  ALICIA STEINBERG, translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger

  Celeste’s Heart

  AÍDA BORTNIK, translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel

  Remembrances of Things Future

  MARIO SZICHMAN, translated from the Spanish by Iván Zatz

  A Nice Boy from a Good Family

  ANA MARÍA SHUA, translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger

  The Closed Coffin

  MARCELO BIRMAJER, translated from the Spanish by Sharon Wood

  COLOMBIA

  Temptation

  SALOMÓN BRIANSKY, translated from the Yiddish by Moisés Mermelstein

  CHILE

  Solomon Licht

  YOYNE OBODOVSKI, translated from the Yiddish by Moisés Mermelstein

  Asylum

  ARIEL DORFMAN

  PERU

  The Conversion

  ISAAC GOLDEMBERG, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin

  MEXICO

  Genealogies (excerpt)

  MARGO GLANTZ, translated from the Spanish by Susan Bassnett

  In the Name of His Name

  ANGELINA MUÑIZ-HUBERMAN, translated from the Spanish by Lois Parkinson Zamora

  Like a Bride (excerpt)

  ROSA NISSÁN, translated from the Spanish by Dick Gerdes

  The Invisible Hour

  ESTHER SELIGSON, translated from the Spanish by Iván Zatz

  Xerox Man

  ILAN STAVANS

  URUGUAY

  The Bar Mitzvah Speech

  SALOMON ZYTNER, translated from the Yiddish by Debbie Nathan

  VENEZUELA

  Papa’s Friends

  ELISA LERNER, translated from the Spanish by Amy Prince

  Cláper (excerpt)

  ALICIA FREILICH, translated from the Spanish by Joan E. Friedman

  CUBA

  Jesus

  PINKHES BERNIKER, translated from the Yiddish by Alan Astro

  GUATEMALA

  Kindergarten

  VICTOR PERERA

  Bottles

  ALCINA LUBITCH DOMECQ, translated from the Spanish by Ilan Stavans

  BRAZIL

  Love

  CLARICE LISPECTOR, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero

  Inside My Dirty Head—The Holocaust

  MOACYR SCLIAR, translated from the Portuguese by Eloah F. Giacomelli

  APPENDIX | THE MYTHICAL JEW OF JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Emma Zunz

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, translated from the Spanish by Donald A. Yates

  Death and the Compass

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, translated from the Spanish by Donald A. Yates

  The Secret Miracle

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, translated from the Spanish by Harriet de Onís

  Acknowledgments

/>   Select Bibliography

  Contributors

  Introduction

  ILAN STAVANS

  All that they do seems to them, it is true,

  extraordinarily new,

  yet it is part of the chain of generations. . . .

  —FRANZ KAFKA

  OCTAVIO PAZ, THE Mexican poet and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in an essay entitled “The Few and the Many,” included in his volume The Other Voice, that the world is intolerant of the particular. The majority, he claimed, overwhelms and does away with the minority. Perhaps nowhere is this assessment more apt than in Latin America, where the massive population is ethnically mixed but is generally known, both at home and abroad, as a society that is homogeneously mestizo, that is, part Indian and part Iberian. For more than five hundred years, waves of diverse immigrants beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese after 1492 and continuing with the Italians, Germans, French, Dutch, and Asians have created a mosaic of racial multiplicity. But the coexistence of different groups hasn’t been a happy one, and pluralism has not survived without stumbling. The particular is continually being devoured by the monstrous whole.

  The Jews are also part of the particular. Since the time of the Inquisition, in spite of all odds, they have stubbornly remained loyal to their faith and tradition. They have assimilated symbols of their environment and have contributed, albeit silently, to the cosmopolitanism of the region. They have often been the target of anti-Semitic attacks, even violence; left- and right-wing regimes have used the Jews as a scapegoat, branding them a source of social and political distress. Yet their presence has also been valued by democratic, less aggressive forces as a reminder of how freedom can survive through the ages.

  Political and economic turmoil has stimulated them to create a literature that bears witness to their deep historical transformation in the Latin American environment. That literature, more abundant in the last hundred years, is virtually unknown to North American readers. The reason for this neglect is easy to understand: as a Eurocentric country, the United States did not pay attention to what was written south of the Rio Grande until the 1960s, when a boom of fresh new literary voices from Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia began to renew the genre of the novel, exhausted after the contributions of Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Robert Musil. But English-speaking readers failed to notice the less popular, more ethnically focused writers alongside Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. They saw the universal in Latin American literature but not the particular.

  The twenty-eight stories included here belong to various nations and four languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish, and English. The purpose of collecting them for the first time in one volume for North American readers is to show how these Jewish Latin American writers think, feel, and nurture their dreams: thus the objective is at once anthropological and literary. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg wrote in the introduction to their groundbreaking 1954 volume, A Treasury of Yiddish Literature, “We have no desire to make extravagant claims: Yiddish literature can boast no Shakespeares, no Dantes, no Tolstoys. But neither can many other widely translated literatures.” Latin America has indeed produced extraordinary writers, and the writers in this anthology, no doubt, have as much talent as many of their better-known colleagues, along with a distinctive ethos and a remarkable style very much their own. Readers who have never before encountered their work are in for a feast.

  The original version of this anthology was called Tropical Synagogues. About two-thirds of its content is featured in Oy, Caramba!, which is expanded with an assortment of stories originally written in Yiddish and others in Spanish and Portuguese. When released by Holmes and Meier in 1994, the previous edition was enthusiastically embraced, went through various printings, and was a staple of courses, book clubs, and other readers’ gatherings. I used the image of the tropical synagogue in the title because it characterizes the collective personality of this literary tradition. Imagine—somewhere in Patagonia, the Amazon, or a rain forest on the border between Guatemala and Mexico—a forgotten Jewish temple celebrating knowledge and a dialogue with God. The climate is that of magic and revolution. The place is populated by ancestral tribes predating the Spanish conquistadores and the coming of Christianity. Frequented by Jews in search of a collective identity, this fecund temple mixes Hebrew paraphernalia and pre-Columbian artifacts, sometimes of Aztec or Quechua origin. Its indefinite age and improbable location, elusive to historians and topographers, speaks to its exoticism; probably founded by Sephardic immigrants escaping the Inquisition or by Ashkenazi refugees settling in the region before the Second World War, it has lost its place in memory. Yet the syncretism of its architectural style and interior design is proof of a religious and cultural encounter too rich to ignore. A crossroad linking fantastic surrealism and traditional visions, its enigmatic presence is a unique symbol of the cultural and social experience of Jews in Latin America—an intertwining of the Old World and the New, European and aboriginal, natural and spiritual, primitive and civilized, lo hebreo (things Jewish) and the gentile milieu.

  Four essential concerns are mirrored in the work of these Jewish Latin American writers: assimilation and the struggle to retain the Jewish tradition in a modern, secular world; anti-Semitism and the difficulty of being considered distinctive and unequal, which ultimately has a strong impact on the collective Jewish identity; the violent political reality from 1910 to the 1990s and Latin America’s passive response to the systematic destruction of 6 million Jews by the Nazis; and the supernatural, what critics like Tzvetan Todorov call “the fantastic.” The very foundation of this last aesthetic approach may come from the surrealist movement in Europe, with its dreamlike images—but after a trip to Haiti in 1934, Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban musicologist and baroque writer, claimed that reality in the Caribbean was far richer, more colorful, and more imaginative than anything European surrealists could ever fantasize. In a 1984 interview in the Paris Review, García Márquez stated that he is nothing but a realist. “Foreigners may think I invent a lot in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said, “but that is because they don’t know Latin America.” And indeed, several stories here can be taken as examples of this exoticism: a few are set in jungles or decaying cities, while others take place in Prague or Buenos Aires but have a supernatural twist, a “fantastic” aura. They deal with God not as an object of devotion but as a miraculous force that can suddenly stop the universe’s pace. These texts, I foresee, will be retained longer by most readers precisely because this “supernatural” element is now the signature of all the literature produced in the region.

  For this new edition, I benefited from the research and translations—even the headnotes—included in Alan Astro’s volume Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing, released in 2003. The historical information and bibliography have been updated, as have the headnotes and authors’ bios in the back matter. It is my hope that Oy, Caramba! will once again attract a generation of readers eager to explore the vicissitudes of Jewish life south of the US-Mexico border.

  DEMOGRAPHICS

  Jews are but a tiny fraction of the non-Native population in Latin America. Argentina and Mexico, two countries that became independent from the Iberian Peninsula between 1810 and 1816, and, later, Brazil entered the twentieth century by accepting Jewish immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe, who arrived with the hope of finding prosperity and adapting to a new culture. Most of them were uneducated, Yiddish-speaking inhabitants of the shtetl, poor and persecuted. Their odyssey to Latin America proved to be partially successful, at least during the first decades of collective life.

  As Theodor Herzl was convening the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Baron Maurice de Hirsch was attempting to place human and financial resources in the agricultural region of La Pampa, thinking the zone would eventually turn out to be the true Promised Land. Actually, Argentina as Zion was for a while a real and conc
rete challenge to the Zionist dream of resettlement in Palestine. The very first immigrants who settled in colonies such as Moisés Ville in Santa Fe, near the border with Paraguay; Rajíl, in the province of Entre Ríos, at the northeastern border with Uruguay; and others in Rio Grande do Sul, may have both consciously or by pure chance chosen to travel to Palestine and even to North America, but they arrived instead at the River Plate with high hopes for an end to their diasporic wandering. The official census claims that in 1895 there were some 6,000 Jews in Argentina; by 1910 the number had risen to 68,000, and by 1935 it had increased astronomically, to 218,000. Compared to other parts of Latin America, the Pampas and Buenos Aires have always been the most populated centers of Jewish life. In 1910 Brazil had some 800 Jews and Mexico had 1,000; by 1930 there were about 30,000 and 16,000 Jewish immigrants, respectively, in these two countries. Although during the 1950s there was considerable demographic growth of the Jewish population in all of Latin America, since then political turmoil and violence have led many Jews to finally immigrate to Israel and the United States. According to the latest studies, by the late 1980s the Brazilian and Hispanic worlds outside the Iberian Peninsula had a total population of more than 450 million, of which only 1.2 percent or less were Jews. Argentina held the lead with a quarter of a million Jews, followed by Brazil with some 125,000 and then Mexico with some 40,000. Together, small countries like Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Peru counted barely 10,000. And compared to the world Jewish population, where the United States has 48 percent and Israel 26 percent, pushing the figures in the region doesn’t make them reach 4 percent, indeed a minimal number. These figures have remained steady in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The Jewish population has neither grown nor shrunk significantly, as a result of stable birth rates as well as migration. Demographers suggest that in 2010 the entire region had approximately 250,000 Jews.