Oy, Caramba! Page 3

  Leonardo Senkman, in his 1983 study Jewish Identity in Argentine Literature, discusses the various essays Gerchunoff wrote to articulate and explain his ideas. In response to Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to power in Germany, Gerchunoff’s arguments finally became clear in his brief prologue to a 1937 Argentine edition of Ludwig Lewisohn’s Rebirth: A Book of Modern Jewish Thought. Speaking out against a restriction imposed on Jewish immigration by the Argentine government, which limited the quota of immigrants to at least a third of the number in previous years, he openly defended the right of the Jews to live anywhere at any time without prohibitions.* It is not difficult to feel in his words a fear of the growth of anti-Semitic literature at the time of the invigorated Nationalist Party, which supported Yrigoyen, and its call for the expulsion or even annihilation of all Jews in Argentina. Yet Gerchunoff’s general passivity is palpable when placed in relation to the Zionist struggle for an independent Jewish state in Palestine that was taking place in those years. Though angry, he never advocated any kind of Jewish collective self-assertion. I translate:

  What should we do? Jews and Argentines, we can protest, fight, expose the hidden goals of the policy of cowardice and crime. And it would be proper to set a foundation for the right of the Jew to life, the right of the Jew to go on living exactly in the same place he was born or where he was left by fate, in the name of the following evidence:

  (1) No effort in history to get rid of the Jewish element has been successful, precisely because the Jew, anywhere, is irreplaceable when he performs on the stage of the human spirit, and ineradicable even when one tries to dissimulate his physical presence by means of alien dicta forced on him. . . .

  (2) It is positively useless to persecute the Jew, take away from him his goods, or place him in a ghetto, because he may accept that circumstance and will find a way through it. He will be resurrected when given the chance, because those same ones that are willing to beat him, eventually will protect him. . . .

  (3) When persecuted, humiliated, or molested anywhere on the planet, the Jew will expand his solidarity with other Jews, because precisely in that he finds his dignity. . . . And in that sense, the Jewish character and his diasporic pride will be confirmed when his attachment to other Jews is awakened.

  Gerchunoff calls at first for intellectual protests against anti-Semitic acts because he thinks he may persuade his enemy by intellectual means. That persuasion remained a hope, of course, not a reality. As time went on, he sank into disillusionment and silence, and eventually he isolated himself from his community. Although he became quite enthusiastic about certain Jewish topics, such as the Talmud, he remained evasive and ambivalent. When Jewish symbols appear in his late fiction, it is always in a remote and distant context, with reference to Heinrich Heine or Baruch Spinoza, never the current scene. His dream of a Promised Land in South America was slowly collapsing, along with other liberal values. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, about 218,000 Jews lived in Argentina. Yet only a decade later, the country turned into a nightmare for all integrationist hopes.

  Arguably the most horrific events in that nightmare took place in 1994, when the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, was the target of a terrorist attack that left almost one hundred people dead and many more injured. The event took place more than two years after another anti-Semitic attack in Buenos Aires, this one against the Israeli Embassy, in which twenty-nine people died and more than two hundred were injured.

  The investigation into the AMIA attack led to Iran, but President Carlos Menen, who was of Lebanese descent, impeded a thorough investigation. As a result, the wounds remained open. The AMIA attack was the first major terrorist incident against Jews not only in Argentina but also in Latin America. The outcome of that event left the Jewish communities in the region vulnerable, fearful of further aggressions. While Gerchunoff couldn’t have foreseen the atrocities, in his disenchantment he produced a litany that augured a time when Jews would become individualized as objects of animosity.

  A number of journalistic investigations as well as literary works and movies have dealt with the terrorist attack. A decade later, ten directors, including Daniel Burman and Alberto Lecchi, made a film anthology called 18-j (2004), after the date of the attack. Also, in 2009 Marcos Carnevale premiered Anita, about a young woman with Down syndrome who wanders Buenos Aires after her mother is killed in the AMIA bombing.

  Among others, Gustavo Perednik published a fictionalized chronicle called Matar sin que se nota (Killing without a Trace, 2009). And Marcelo Brodsky and I created a fotonovela about the preparations for the attack called Once@9:53am (2012).

  ARGENTINE ECHOES

  The history of Jewish Argentine literature includes many others considered to be Gerchunoff’s successors. Among them is César Tiempo (pseudonym of Israel Zeitlin, 1906–1980), a famous-in-his-time playwright, critic, and poet who had immigrated to Argentina from the Ukraine. He was highly esteemed as a man of letters and a travel writer whose poetry almost uniquely refers to one central metaphor: the Sabbath. This interest is reflected in some of the titles of his works: Book for the Break of the Sabbath, published in 1930, or Joyful Saturday, which appeared in 1955. He always willingly wrote for a gentile audience and, probably influenced by Israel Zangwill’s Dreamers of the Ghetto, used the vivid imagery of the Buenos Aires Jewish ghetto to draw an appealing distinction between the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths. As a liberal, Tiempo identified with the oppressed and humiliated and favored a multiethnic society. His two famous theatrical pieces, I Am the Theater and Creole Bread, staged in the thirties, dealt with the subject of assimilation and Jewish versus gentile justice.

  Like Gerchunoff, he was deeply depressed by outbursts of anti-Semitism; yet unlike him, he actively responded with written arguments and oral protests against the racist campaign inspired by the infamous writings of the propagandist Gustavo Martínez Zuviría. The director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, Zuviría, under the pen name Hugo Wast, in 1938 had written both The Kahal and Gold, inspired by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic tract immensely popular, even today, throughout Latin America. Yet despite Tiempo’s public complaints, nothing changed. At times even the national press, as if echoing his writing, denied the presence of racial tension in the country. As with Gerchunoff, the political events of course made him skeptical about Argentina’s democratic future, and they also frightened his young Jewish followers.

  Another important Jewish figure in Argentine literature is Bernardo Verbitsky (1907–1979), a prolific realist writer who published long novels dealing with Jewish identity in contemporary Argentina and the world at large. They include Hard to Start Living (1941), an essential text for understanding the cultural situation of Buenos Aires in the thirties. The critic and novelist David Viñas (1929–2011), whom I mentioned in reference to the Semana Trágica, in his 1962 novel Making a Stand argues for a nation that is at once multiethnic, democratic, and tolerant.

  Jewish writers and intellectuals of later generations suffered the horrors of military dictatorship, persecution, violence, and exile. Among them was Luisa Mercedes Levinson, half-Jewish and a close friend and colleague of Borges’s, who wrote “The Cove”; she is the mother of the Argentine-born New York experimentalist Luisa Valenzuela, author of The Lizard’s Tail. Another crucial name is Germán Rozenmacher (1936–1971), a talented young man who felt that the constant attempt to participate in the country’s everyday life created deep psychological scars among the Jews. The protagonists of his stories, collected in one volume in 1970, are lonely creatures, many of them failed artists with identity problems, who aspire to enter gentile society but are unable to do so.

  His tenacious belief in assimilation always brings the reader to the conclusion that for him no Jewish existence proud of its accomplishments could flourish in his native Argentina. In “Blues in the Night,” perhaps his best short story, Vassily Goloboff, a music prof
essor who once sang in the Moscow Opera and who rejected his Jewish name and identity after immigrating to Buenos Aires, returns to religion in his later years. In the tradition of the encounter between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, one day he has a sudden rendezvous with Bernardo, a young Jew, in which they share memories about broken families and talk about their enchantment with I Pagliacci. But no happiness comes to them in the end.

  In the same generation as Rozenmacher are the storyteller Gerardo Mario Goloboff (b. 1939), the author of a trilogy that includes the 1988 novel Pigeon Keeper, about rural life in the mythical town of Algarrobos; Humberto Costantini (1924–1987); Pedro Orgambide (b. 1928); Isidoro Blaisten (1933–2004); Alicia Steinberg (1933–2012); Marcos Aguinis (b. 1935); Ricardo Feierstein (b. 1942); Cecilia Absatz (b. 1943); Aída Bortnik (b. 1943); Nora Glickman (b. 1942); Mario Satz (b. 1944); Marcos Ricardo Barnatán (b. 1946); Mario Szichman (b. 1945); Ana María Shua (b. 1951), Marcelo Birmajer (b. 1966); and Andrés Neuman (b. 1977). Szichman, the author of At 8:25 Evita Became Immortal, is particularly interesting. In the late 1960s he tried to create a family saga that would encapsulate the diverse personalities and viewpoints among Argentine Jews and explore relevant issues such as the community’s response to Israel, assimilation, the world of business, and religion. It is quite obvious that not only the works of Gabriel García Márquez but also Yiddish novels such as I. J. Singer’s The Family Carnovsky made a transforming impression on him. He shows some of the stylistic elements of magical realism—a narrative style made popular after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which mixes reality with dreamlike components and uses as its setting the exotic Latin American landscape—but he is more concerned with genealogy and tradition within the family circle.

  In The Jews of Mar Dulce (1971), The False Chronicle (1969; revised in 1972), and At 8:25 Evita Became Immortal, the Pechof family is followed through their immigration in 1918, their rejection of gaucho agricultural life, and their transition to the urban life of Buenos Aires during the thirties and forties. Although the narrative moves back and forth in time, Szichman stops around 1952, when his characters discover their unacceptable status as Jews in Argentina and desperately struggle to assimilate by changing their surname to Gutiérrez Anselmi. By means of an ironic, self-hating point of view, mixing Yiddishisms with a convoluted Spanish, the author builds a vision of the impossibility of Diaspora life in Argentina as he re-creates the customs and idiosyncrasies of Jewish life in South America with astonishing detail.

  Unlike Gerchunoff, Berele or Bernardo (Szichman’s alter ego) is permanently searching for an answer to his father’s strange, political death in the city dump. And by deciphering his father’s last intentions, Berele discovers the cause of the entire family’s dilemma. What is interesting about Szichman’s fiction is the way it revises national history. By placing his characters in a variety of periods, from the Semana Trágica to the military coups in the forties and the defeated revolution in 1956 (when Berele’s father perishes), Szichman makes an unquestionable statement: no regime, no juncture, in Argentine history is good for the Jews because their historical presence on the River Plate is a mistake. If Gerchunoff at one time believed Argentina to be a heaven, Szichman sees it as hell.

  Two of the most engaging writers to emerge in the nineties are Shua and Birmajer. Unlike Szichman, they use humor—often caustic humor—to explore the identity of Argentine Jews. Shua is a master of the short story. She has produced a number of anthologies, among them some on Jewish humor. She also practices what has come to be known as flash fiction, short stories sometimes a paragraph long. Birmajer, a devotee of Isaac Bashevis Singer, is perceived as the chronicler of El Once, the Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires. His fiction is an attempt to understand, in subtle ways, the sociological components that shaped Argentine Jewish life.

  I have also included stories written in Yiddish by Samuel Rollansky, a man of letters resoponsible for sustaining Yiddish in Argentina, and José Rabinovich, whose writing explored poverty among Jewish immigrants.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Of the non-Jewish writers in Latin America who have considered Jewish images and themes, such as the Kabbalah, Israel, and the Holocaust, the first and most outstanding figure is Borges, a passionate lover of lo hebreo—things Jewish. Mention his name and you conjure up the ability to reduce everything to metaphysical mystery: toenails, much too insignificant for the poet to write about, suddenly become, in one of his odes, the only organic element that resists death; or the world itself, too large for anyone to understand, becomes, in some of the stories compiled in Labyrinths, a voluminous book that embraces all possible and impossible knowledge. At once a keen semiotician, a devotee of medieval philosophy, and an innovative homme de lettres who was able to invent a distinctive fictional universe, Borges had an important influence on the international literary scene. Three of his stories are included here, in the appendix.

  During the 1960s it was fashionable among Latin American writers to start every dissertation, essay, or short story with an epigraph taken from this Argentine fabulist. Only a decade later, one could discover remnants of his style between the lines or plot structures of Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes. In Europe and the United States, artists and writers such as Umberto Eco, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Updike, and John Barth adored him because of his prodigious knowledge and metaphysical brilliance; others, like Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer, complained that he was a monstrous iconoclast, an egotist and pseudoscholar with a dazzling command of erudition and logic but incapable of understanding the dilemmas of the modern world. Since 1961 when he shared the International Publisher’s Prize with Samuel Beckett and his oeuvre gained international acclaim, becoming more and more the subject of academic study, both sides of the love-hate controversy have been expressed in a fascinating showcase of opposites: Borges himself would have said that his detractors are substantially the same as his fans.

  Borges’s Jewish connection is well documented. Starting with the monumental literary biography of Emir Rodríguez Monegal and moving on to the works of Edna Aizenberg, Saul Sosnowski, and Jaime Alazraki, much has been written about his attraction to the golem, “the People of the Book,” Isaac Luria and Hebraic mysticism, Kafka, and Spinoza. Borges’s mother, Leonor Acevedo Haedo, believed she had some Jewish ancestors, probably conversos who came to the Americas after the 1492 expulsion from Spain. It was this possibility that made Borges the target of anti-Semitic attacks in the thirties. The magazine Crisol published an article asserting that he was a Jew, and Borges’s response in another periodical, Megáfono (April 1934), at once showed admiration and pride toward Judaism. “Statistically speaking,” he wrote,

  The Jews are very few. What would we think of someone in the year 4,000 who discovered everywhere descendants of the inhabitants of the San Juan province? Our inquisitors are seeking Hebrews, never Phoenicians, Numidians, Scythians, Babylonians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyans, Cyclops, and Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, Babylon, Carthage, Memphis have never succeeded in engendering one single grandfather: only the tribes of the bituminous Black Sea had that power.

  In the same article, he joked about his roots:

  Borges Acevedo is my name. In the fifth chapter of his book Rosas y su tiempo, Ramos Mejía lists the family names of Buenos Aires of that time to demonstrate that all, or almost all, “descended from a Hebrew-Portuguese branch.” Acevedo is part of that catalogue: the only document of my Jewish roots, until the confirmation of Crisol. Nevertheless, Captain Honorario Acevedo has made some research I cannot ignore. He indicates that Don Pedro de Azevedo . . . my great-grandfather, was irreproachably Spanish. Two hundred years and I don’t find the Israelite, two hundred years and the ancestor eludes me.

  Borges’s childhood had a duality of languages, English and Spanish (later enriched by Italian and French). He kept saying, even writing, that
he first read Don Quixote in Shakespeare’s tongue, and when a few years later he finally got to the original, he thought it was a lousy translation. His first literary attempts were made in 1914 in Switzerland, where his family had been spending some time. It was there that he enrolled in the College Calvin and developed a friendship with Maurice Abramowicz and Simon Jichlinski, who probably introduced him to Kabbalah. In Switzerland he also studied Latin and German, a language that led him closer to Judaism because it enabled him to read Martin Buber, Gustav Meyrink, and later Kafka in the original. In 1919, on their way back from Europe to Buenos Aires, his family went to Spain.

  It was in Madrid that Borges established his friendship with Rafael Cansinos-Assèns, an Andalusian who, according to the Argentine, founded ultraism, the aesthetic movement that tried to introduce into Spanish the innovations of the European avant-garde—Dadaism, cubism, surrealism, and expressionism. No doubt this was a major event in the writer’s life. Cansinos-Assèns wrote several books dedicated to Judaism. His cosmopolitanism sought out the universal resonance in every simple thing. While Spain stubbornly upheld its close ties to Catholicism at the time, he expressed himself openly against orthodoxy and dreamed of being ultra-national. In fact, he believed the Hebraic legacy of Spanish culture to lie precisely in the juxtaposition of races intending to abolish all differences. Even more, he thought that implicit in Judaism was an eternally antiestablishment posture. He wanted to do away with tradition, with canonical forms of art. Borges inherited from Cansinos-Assèns not only his rebellious attitude but also a desire to see the Jews in the abstract.

  * Leonardo Senkman, La identidad judía en la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Pardés, 1983).

  On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges read the long poem The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872–1879) by José Hernández, a book that deeply influenced him. Perhaps only three important Jewish names were known in the Argentine literary arena of the time: Gerchunoff, Tiempo, and Verbitsky. The first two also wrote for Proa and Martín Fierro, the two periodicals where Borges published his first pieces. During the Second World War, Borges maintained very good relations with the Argentine Jewish community. He was an antifascist and openly expressed his indignation over Nazi ideology. Zuviría, mentioned above, took advantage of Hitler’s rise to power with his infamous novels, published under the pseudonym Hugo Wast, in which he practically called upon the country to exterminate the Jews.