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  Although most of the original Jewish settlers in Latin America were of eastern European background, quite a few Sephardim, whose roots in the Iberian Peninsula predated the expulsion in 1492, arrived in the Americas with and after the four voyages of Christopher Columbus. They were secretly supported, both financially and with crucial cartographic information, by wealthy conversos (also referred to as Marranos) who practiced Judaism in secret and by New Christian entrepreneurs like Luis de Santanguel, the Genoese admiral’s own economic backer and a close adviser to Queen Isabella of Castile, who had wholeheartedly renounced their original Jewish religion. Since 1492, the year of the so-called discovery of America, is also the date of the expulsion of the Jews from Spanish soil, a controversial theory supported by Oxford professor Salvador de Madariaga, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and historian Cecil Roth claims that the hidden agenda behind the search for a new route to the West Indies was the quest for new lands where the Iberian Jewish population could live in spiritual peace.

  Be that as it may, a considerable number of Spanish emigrants escaping the cruelties of Torquemada arrived in the Americas and for a while tried to regain control of their ancient biblical faith. Such is the case, for instance, of the famous Carvajal family in Nueva Espana, later known as Mexico, portrayed in great historical detail and accuracy by Alfonso Toro. But the church didn’t allow for much religious freedom in the colonies, and although researchers have found traces of their path in major capitals such as Lima, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, the Spanish Jews concealed their true identity and eventually vanished. By the time of the 1910 socialist revolution of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, south of the Rio Grande most of the original Sephardic settlers had disappeared. At most, in the New World, converso methods of secrecy managed to produce bizarre, anachronistic curiosities. In Venta Prieta, for instance, a small town near Toluca, Mexico, there is an Indian community that practices the Jewish faith and has a synagogue in which it keeps ancient scrolls—although its members cannot read Hebrew or Ladino—and most of the male constituency is circumcised. Discovered by a group of North American anthropologists a few decades ago, the Indians claim to be Jewish, although their lineage, as of yet not authenticated, has been put in question by the Ashkenazim.

  Another wave of Jewish settlers from the Mediterranean (mainly Syria and Lebanon), many of Sephardic ancestry, arrived in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela during the 1920s and onward. They chose Latin America because of the linguistic similarities between their ancestral languages (Ladino or Judezmo) and modern Spanish and because family cohesiveness meant more to them than the opportunity for upward economic mobility. Their contact with the Ashkenazim has not been easy: the two communities tend to live apart, attend different temples and schools, and rarely intermarry.

  The demographics of Latin American Jewry began a trend of decline in the 1960s, as a result of dictatorial regimes and repression. The changes in the sociopolitical fabric made exile and aliyah—immigration to Israel—concrete options. (Some sixty-eight thousand immigrants moved to the state of Israel between 1948 and 1983.) As the Jewish community in Latin America is generally a small, insular, self-contained population, proud of its separation from larger society, its overall input into the cultural mainstream has inevitably gone unrecognized or has not gained the recognition it deserves. Voluntarily or not, their different skin color and non-Hispanic physical appearance, their unique religion, and their educational and economic status have turned Jews into outsiders. A few of the writers included in this anthology were activists opposing their national governments, imprisoned or forced into exile in Europe, the United States, or even Israel, distant from their native soil and language, dreaming of a return, writing in a tongue (Spanish) alien to their more intimate milieu. That component of extraterritoriality constantly marks their fiction. Even the inattentive eye can see how their stories repeat, almost in an obsessive manner, a handful of metaphors and images that have to do with alienation: a woman trapped in a bottle; an unloved mother-in-law who prefers to spend her days alone rather than join her estranged daughter and her daughter’s new husband; a Jewish bride who runs away with a gaucho on the Pampas. Like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the identity of these Latin American Jews, judging by their fiction, is full of labyrinthine divisions, accompanied by guilt and anxiety. One gets the impression that a suffocating minority life has created a vacuum, a feeling of seclusion and exclusiveness. Borrowing the words of Danilo Kiš, the author of The Encyclopedia of the Dead, who himself was adapting a biblical phrase, these writers are “strangers in a strange land.” They inhabit a tropical synagogue both as individuals and as a collective; they are the particular in a continent where only the universal matters—at least up until now.

  Although the novel and poem are also favored genres (a bibliography at the end of this volume suggests further readings, including fiction, non-fiction, and criticism in Spanish, Portuguese, and English), this anthology presents a sample of the most memorable short stories created by Jewish writers in Latin America from 1910 to the present—a window through which we are offered a glimpse of their inner lives and cultural predicament. Although it is my belief that the Jewish experience in Latin America has been remarkably cohesive and interconnected throughout the continent, the particular context of that experience has varied in different countries. To suggest this diversity of environment and sensibility in the face of a generally cohesive ethnic identity, I have organized the volume according to the writers’ countries of origin. Since my approach is at once historical and literary, the stories are arranged chronologically within this framework.

  ALBERTO GERCHUNOFF

  When talking about Jewish literature in Latin America, one needs to start with the magisterial figure of Alberto Gerchunoff (1884–1950). He is at center stage because he is to this minority literature what Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh) was to Yiddish letters—a grandfather and a cornerstone. Before Gerchunoff, one can find sketches, poems, vignettes, and chronicles of immigrant life, written by Jewish refugees in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and at times a rudimentary Spanish. But it is his beautiful and meticulously measured Castilian prose in The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, translated into English in 1955 by Prudencio de Pereda, a book deeply influenced by Cervantes, that gave birth to the short stories included in this volume, as well as to novels by the same authors.

  Gerchunoff’s life and craft have to be understood in the context of the history of Jewish immigration to Argentina. In 1891, when the boy was seven, his father traveled from Russia to the Pampas, and the family followed him. Agriculture and cattle-raising were the jobs designated for the shtetl dwellers, and hard labor was their lot. As expressed in his 1914 autobiography, Entre Ríos, My Country, published posthumously in 1950, Gerchunoff admired the capacity for hard work of his fellow Argentines. His family was first stationed in the colony of Moises Ville, but when his father was brutally killed by a gaucho, or Argentine cowboy, they moved to the Rajíl colony. This tragic event and Gerchunoff’s later adventures in the new settlement were the inspiration for his early work.

  One of the admirable things about Gerchunoff is his polyglotism. Language, after all, is the basic vehicle by which any newcomer must begin to adapt to the new country. Most immigrants improvised a “survival” Spanish during their first Argentine decade. Gerchunoff, however, not only learned to speak perfect Spanish as a child, but by 1910, at the age of twenty-six, his prose was setting a linguistic and narrative standard. Reading him today, we discover in his writing stylistic forms that were later developed by his followers, among them Jorge Luis Borges. Simultaneously, Gerchunoff’s brief biographical sketches of such writers as Sholem Aleichem, Miguel de Unamuno, James Joyce, Max Nordau, and I. L. Peretz, which appeared in newspapers and magazines, and his deep and careful readings of British writers such as G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, influenced future artistic generations on the River Plate.

  Even if he did not fully
belong to the popular modernista movement budding at the turn of the century in Latin America, many moderns welcomed his literature. The Cuban activist José Martí, the Mexican sonneteer Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and other modernistas dreamed of reviving all literatures written in Spanish. So did Gerchunoff, although he did not quite share the aesthetic and political values of these contemporaries. His objective was to help Jews become Argentines, to be like everyone else. Following Gerchunoff’s death, after some two dozen books and innumerable articles, Borges himself praised him as “the writer of le mot juste.” Such a distinction, one should add, is seldom awarded to an immigrant. I can think of only a few others who have achieved it, among them Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, and Joseph Conrad.

  I began by speaking of Gerchunoff in relation to Mendele Mokher Sforim because, although the two belong to two different worlds and even different languages, both managed to create a sense of literary tradition and continuity absent before. Mendele was considered by Sholem Aleichem to be the grandfather of Yiddish letters, as Gerchunoff became a cultural mentor and compass for later Jewish writers in Argentina such as Gerardo Mario Goloboff, Mario Szichman, Alicia Steinberg, and Isidoro Blaisten. In fact, the comparison is a clue to the linguistic reality the Argentine had to face: by writing in Spanish, he subscribed to the chain of Spanish and South American letters; Yiddish, the language of most of the immigrants, was left behind after he began publishing and was replaced by Spanish, a cosmopolitan, secular vehicle.

  Indeed, one has to consider that very few Jewish writers, even if they had some knowledge of Yiddish, could write anything beyond a crude transliterated version. That’s why some, including Gerchunoff himself and his successor Mario Szichman, used transliterated Yiddish in dialogue. Besides, a Yiddish-reading audience today is practically nonexistent. Mendele found Yiddish the appropriate vehicle for communication with his people; for Gerchunoff, it was Spanish, the idiom of “exile,” that turned them into “normal” citizens of Argentina. The two were equally celebrated as speakers of the collective soul.

  During his youth, Gerchunoff had an acquaintance, Leopoldo Lugones, a representative of the modernistas in Argentina and paternalistically philo-Jewish and proimmigrant, who gained access for him to La Nación, a very influential newspaper in Buenos Aires. Yet Lugones’s last sour years and his own ideological odyssey are symbolic of the attitude of Argentina as a whole toward the Jews: at first a socialist and a liberal, in his mature years and up until his suicide in 1938 he was a fascist and a nationalist. By then the Jews, “alien” people in his eyes, were unacceptable to him as equals because they represented the unwelcome outsider. This hostility has its counterpart. Take the example of Rubén Darío, the modernista par excellence and famous Nicaraguan poet who in 1888 wrote Azul . . . (Blue . . .), a book whose impact on Hispanic letters was equivalent to that of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on English poetry. Darío saw the Jews as appealing citizens, paradoxically both symbolic of an eternal voyage and deeply rooted in the Argentine soil. In a beautiful poem entitled “Song to Argentina,” he celebrated the biblical heritage and bucolic present of the citizens of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe. Here is a rough, free translation of one of its stanzas:

  Sing, Jews of La Pampa!

  Young men of rude appearance,

  sweet Rebeccas with honest eyes,

  Reubens of long locks,

  patriarchs of white,

  dense, horselike hair.

  Sing, sing, old Sarahs

  and adolescent Benjamins

  with the voice of our heart:

  “We have found ZION!”

  The very same tone is to be found in the twenty-six stories collected by Gerchunoff in The Jewish Gauchos, the book to which he owes his fame, a parade of Spanish-speaking but stereotypical Jewish men and women from eastern Europe adapting to the linguistic and cultural reality of the Southern Hemisphere. The autonomous narratives that make up every chapter, some better than others, re-create life, tradition, and hard labor in this “new shtetl” across the Atlantic. The focus is on relations between Jews and gentiles, the passion to maintain the Jewish religion yet understand and assimilate new customs. What is most striking about the book to today’s reader is the political ideology it professes: 1910, one should know, was the centenary of Argentina’s independence. Gerchunoff meant his text to be a celebration of the nation’s friendly, tolerant, and multiethnic spirit.

  He had moved to Buenos Aires in 1895 and, beginning in August 1902, contributed regularly to many newspapers, among them La Nación. Even after the tragic loss of his father, he stubbornly went on believing that Argentina was a true paradise. He saw the province of Entre Ríos and the cosmopolitan Buenos Aires as a diasporic “holy land” of sorts, where the contribution of the Jews would always be welcome in shaping the national culture and where all manifestations of anti-Semitism would ultimately vanish. Needless to say, such optimism flourished for only a single generation. It evaporated even faster than the hatred it stood against.

  In the short story “Camacho’s Wedding Feast,” included as the first entry in this volume, Gerchunoff describes the sorrows of a Jewish family when their daughter, about to be married to a rich Jew, is suddenly carried off by her gentile lover, Camacho, on the very day of the wedding. To be sure, the motif of the stolen bride is universal, having been used by Boccaccio, Federico García Lorca, and Charles Dickens. Yet note Gerchunoff’s selection of the Argentine character’s name: Camacho was also part of the cast of Don Quixote of La Mancha. With his literary echoes, the author of The Jewish Gauchos is able to create a tale in a style that reminds us of oral storytelling. He does it by having a tête-à-tête with the reader and by shaping an unpretentious, colloquial prose that foreshadows the experimental techniques yet to come in Latin America. Here’s the illuminating passage:

  Well, as you can see, my patient readers, there are fierce, arrogant gauchos, wife stealers, and Camachos, as well as the most learned and honorable of rabbinical scholars in the little Jewish colony where I learned to love the Argentine sky and felt a part of its wonderful earth. This story I’ve told—with more detail than art—is a true one, just as I’m sure the original story of Camacho’s feast is true. May I die this instant if I’ve dared to add the slightest bit of invention to the marvelous story.

  I’d like very much to add some verses—as was done to the original Camacho story—but God has denied me that talent. I gave you the tale in its purest truth, and if you want couplets, add them yourself in your most gracious style. Don’t forget my name, however—just as our gracious Master Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra remembered the name of Cide Hamete Benegeli and gave him all due credit for the original Camacho story.

  And if the exact, accurate telling of this tale has pleased you, don’t send me any golden doubloons—here, they don’t even buy bread and water. Send me some golden drachmas or, if not, I’d appreciate a carafe of Jerusalem wine from the vineyards my ancestors planted as they sang the praises of Jehovah.

  Three things are evident from this passage: the author’s deep and honest love for his new country, Argentina; his parody of Don Quixote; and his sense of tradition, both Jewish and Hispanic. This last is crucial: by referring to Cervantes, Gerchunoff, as a member of a cultural minority, nevertheless placed himself in the grand tradition of Hispanic letters. While on the one hand he wanted to forge a link with the great master of Renaissance Spain, on the other he sought to relate himself to the Jewish past by referring to such biblical symbols as the wine “from the vineyards my ancestors planted as they sang the praises of Jehovah.” Thus two paths intersect in The Jewish Gauchos, and the encounter is dynamic and reciprocal.

  The Jews of Gerchunoff’s community of Entre Ríos behave like gauchos, and the gauchos, in turn, inherit from the Jews a set of ethical values. Writing at the moment of Argentina’s first centennial, the author sings to a new communion and to a fresh, hopeful love affair. This glorification of assimilation is puzzling. As Naomi Lindstrom cl
aims, “The [novel] assumes that the long-standing Hispanic population of Argentina are the hosts, whereas the new Argentines coming from eastern European Jewry are guests who must take care not to disrupt preexisting national life with their alien ways.” The goal for Gerchunoff’s patriotism is to dream of a democratic society where Jews share and actually contribute to the new culture. But was that the goal of the Jewish immigrants as a whole?

  Within a few years after 1910, things turned sour in Argentina. And Gerchunoff’s perception of the country as a new Zion was not left unchallenged. On the contrary, it was opposed and even repudiated by Jewish intellectuals and literati. More than that, his response to a major crisis for the Jews in Argentina was regarded as disappointing for a figure of his stature. Anti-Semitism reached its height in 1919 with the Semana Trágica, the tragic week, an explosion of xenophobic fear that amounted to a full-blown pogrom with numerous injured and dead. (David Viñas, a Jewish novelist born ten years after the tragedy, made use of this sad event, a reminder that the heart of the Americas was not untouched by the same hatred left behind in the old continent, in a novel published in 1966.)

  The intensification of negative feelings toward the Jews, generated by a wave of nationalism during the administration of Hipólito Yrigoyen, contributed to profound disappointment and skepticism regarding the future of a pluralistic society in Argentina. Though deeply affected, Gerchunoff did not publicly comment on the event. His silence was taken as a sign of cowardly passivity and perhaps self-criticism; some thought he might have come to the conclusion that assimilation was impossible in a country with such profound anti-Semitic feelings. The public would have to wait for a coherent statement. Of course, Gerchunoff was no politician; yet in Latin America the opinions of intellectuals are often the only channels through which deep political and ethical concerns are expressed.