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  Another Brazilian Jewish writer of note is Carlos Heitor Cony (b. 1926), a well-known journalist in Rio de Janeiro who early in life studied in a seminary but became disenchanted with religion and turned to politics. His most famous novel, Pessach: The Crossing, published in 1967, deals with a novelist who suffers from personal and political doubts but begins to accept his Jewishness when he turns forty, just as he unexpectedly becomes a member of an urban guerrilla group. Cony is significant because he chronicles the plight of middle-class sophisticates, yet critics vehemently refuse to regard him as Jewish, and Cony himself is ambivalent about his ethnic identity.

  The most influential Jewish writer in Brazil, after Moacyr Scliar, is Clarice Lispector (1925–1977). Like Rawet and Cony, she was ambivalent toward Judaism. An engaging prose stylist born into a poor Ashkenazi family in Tchetchelnik, Ukraine, she lived first in the town of Recife, Pernambuco, and at the age of twelve moved to Rio de Janeiro. Her father, a farm laborer, eventually became a sales representative. A voracious reader, she began writing unconventional, unstructured children’s stories while still a child; many of them were sent to the Diario de Pernambuco but were rejected. In Rio she completed her secondary schooling at Joao Barbalho School and entered the Faculty of Law, from which she graduated in 1944, just one year after marrying a fellow student, who subsequently entered the foreign service. Her husband, Mauri Gurgel Valente, was first posted in Naples, and the couple moved to Italy. All together they spent many years abroad, living in Switzerland and England and spending eight years in the United States (from 1952 to 1960). Not until 1959 did they return to visit Brazil, where Lispector and her husband later divorced.

  The author of some twenty volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and literature for children, none of which deal openly with Jewish topics, she gained experience as a journalist, first on the editorial staff of the press service Agencia Nacional, then with the newspaper A Noite. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, published in 1944, when she was only nineteen years old, was an immediate critical and financial success. As translator Gregory Rabassa notes, Lispector’s style, deeply influenced by the European modernists, “is interior and hermetic”: the action, always subjective, is seen from the point of view of characters involved in the plot. Although critics believe her to be a better short-story teller than a novelist, Lispector continued to write long narratives, including The Apple in the Dark (1961) and The Passion According to G. H. (1964).

  How do we place her in this tradition of Jewish Latin American literature if only her origin, but not her themes and concerns, is Jewish? Similar questions are often asked about Kafka, a Jew who created a rich and culturally resonant fiction without ever referring to the word Jew. Scholars agree that Lispector’s distinctly European sensitivity and her worldview have Jewish overtones: the sense of family life and the value of individual existence; a glimpse of a small wealthy community, with unique religious customs, isolated from the rest of the country. Clarice Lispector is certainly a pillar, tutor, and promoter of the cultural openness following the Second World War, when women writers in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and other parts of the region emerged not as part of a formal movement but, collectively, as a major literary force. Understandably their themes have to do with their long history of silence and the ensuing struggle to regain their bodies, voices, and souls. Now considered a cornerstone of feminism in Latin America, Lispector recalls Virginia Woolf in her insistence on penetrating the inner life and in her views of domestic affairs from a women’s perspective. The piece selected here, from her 1960 collection Family Ties, explores the disturbing psychological consequences for a woman of her daily routine.

  ¡VIVA MEXICO!

  Although Argentina and Brazil have the most significant and sizable body of Jewish literature and are thus more represented in this anthology, other Latin American nations, such as Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru, deserve at least some attention. In the case of Mexico, although its Jewish community traces its roots to the conversos who accompanied and followed Hernán Cortés and his soldiers in the conquest of Tenochtitlán and the Aztec Empire, most of today’s Mexican Jews are Ashkenazim who arrived during the 1880s and went on to build a kehilah, the traditional Jewish communal framework, organize a sports and cultural center, and establish Yiddish schools with strong ties to the Bundist and Zionist movements. By 1910, there were some nine thousand Jews in the country, most of them in Oaxaca, Veracruz, Monterrey (a wealthy northern city apparently founded by Kabbalists, or so the legend claims), and the nation’s capital. By 1980 that figure had increased to 37,500.

  The first Jewish literary figures in Mexico wrote in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. They were immigrants such as Jacob Glantz, who shared the tastes and style of early Yiddish modernists such as Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Jacob Glatstein, and Itsik Manger. They published manuscripts, staged the plays of Abraham Goldfaden, and privately engaged a printer to publish and disseminate their work. But it was the second and third generations, already born on native soil, who, from the 1940s onward, emulated Gerchunoff by switching to Spanish, producing novels, essays, and stories that unequivocally belong today to Mexican letters. One of the compelling features of the literature created by Jews in Mexico is its lack of interest in realism. As the reader will soon find out, most of the Mexican writers included in this volume explore esoteric topics in an abstract style rather than their immediate surroundings or experience.

  Also of interest is the fact that the most outstanding Mexican men of letters with an interest in Jewish symbols and themes are gentiles, for example, Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), born in Panama and the country’s foremost novelist. The son of a diplomat in Washington, DC, and another true polyglot, he lived all over the world and was completely fluent in English, a talent enabling him to be deeply involved with North American culture. His passionate interest in Judaism is obvious in three of his books. A Change of Skin (1967) concerns symmetries of the struggle between Spaniards and Aztecs in Tenochtitlán and that of Nazis and Jews in Europe during the Second World War. In it a group of four young men and women travel in a Volkswagen from Mexico City to Cholula, a town that has 365 churches, one for each day of the year. As they progress on their journey, reminiscences of their pasts intertwine with the reality of the Mexican soul and its complex history. Two of these young people, Franz and Elizabeth (also called Betele), descendants of opposing groups, have links to prewar Europe and tragic reminiscences of the Holocaust.

  The Hydra Head (1978), another one of Fuentes’s novels involving Jewish themes, is what Graham Greene would have called “an entertainment.” In the literary spy tradition of John Le Carre and Robert Ludlum, it is set against the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the drama over Mexico’s oil. Its protagonist, a James Bond of sorts, is Félix Maldonado, alias Diego Velásquez, a bureaucrat and secret-police agent ready to defend the Mexican oil industry against its enemy, foreign (mainly Arab) invasion. His adventures also allow the author to comment on the insularity of the Jewish community in Mexico City. Finally Terra Nostra (1975), a volume celebrated by Milan Kundera as a “masterwork” in the tradition of Tristram Shandy and Hermann Bloch’s The Sleepwalkers, has the Spanish language as its major protagonist, and in a rather ambitious and nonchronological fashion it retells the entire history of Spain and the Americas from before 1492 until 1992. Among the Jewish characters are conversos and Kabbalists like Fernando de Rojas and Samuel ha-Nagid; some incidents of its plot deal with the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula just as Christopher Columbus was sailing out of the port of Palos toward the Bahamas.

  Homero Aridjis (b. 1931), a poet, novelist, and prominent environmentalist, in 1492: Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile (1985), describes in rich detail the persecution of Jews and conversos in seventeenth-century Spain and examines their hope of sailing to new lands. One of the more illustrious poets and writers in Mexico, himself not Jewish, is Jose Emilio Pacheco (b. 1939), the author of A Distant Death (1967; revised in 1
977), an avant-garde novel in the tradition of the French nouveau roman. It has an enigmatic protagonist modeled after Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician who committed atrocities in Auschwitz and who supposedly died near São Paulo in 1984. Although it is set in a downtown neighborhood of the Mexican capital, the novel’s Jewish allusions include Flavius Josephus as well as the Israeli secret intelligence. Pacheco is also the author of a famous novella, Battles in the Desert (1981), a re-creation of the metropolitan landscape in Mexico City during the sixties. While the narrative explores the naive love affair between a child and his friend’s mother, the larger historical setting intertwines the Six-Day War, Mexico’s xenophobia, and its overwhelming nationalism. When compared to other stories of Jewish childhood (“Inside My Dirty Head—The Holocaust,” for instance), Pacheco’s is interesting for its representation of Jewish childhood and communal life as perceived by a non-Jewish boy.

  Among the featured Jewish writers in Mexico are three women: Margo Glantz (b. 1930), Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (b. 1936), and Esther Seligson (1941–2010). The first, a daughter of Yiddish poet Jacob Glantz and the author of Genealogies (1982), is mainly a literary critic and memoirist, whereas the other two are best known as short-story writers. In 1986 Muñiz won the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for her collection Enclosed Garden (1984), translated into English in 1989, from which “In the Name of His Name” is taken. Her themes are metaphysical: an alchemist’s search for God; the inner sexual thoughts of Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, a nun of the colonial period who wrote poetry and about whom Octavio Paz published a masterful biography in 1982; and the redemptive quest of a man who is challenged to cross a river. Muñiz is a writer highly influenced by Borges but also by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. The author’s passionate, lifelong readings of the Zohar are evident in each of her resonant sentences. Esther Seligson, a theater critic and the translator into Spanish of the Paris-based philosopher Emile Cioran, is the author of House in Time (1982), an attempt to rewrite the Bible. Her narratives, an example of which is “The Invisible Hour,” are often metaphorical, obscure, perhaps evasive. Like the creatures of Frida Kahlo (a descendant of Hungarian Jews) and the surrealist painters, her characters are not bound by the physical laws of time and space; they perceive fantastic visions of eternity.

  I include myself among the Mexican writers in this anthology. My first attempt to define my literary style and expectations in English came in On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001). Since then Jewish themes recur in my work, from my studies on Yiddish and Hebrew to my explorations of Sephardic literature to my graphic novel El Iluminando (2012), about the plight of crypto-Jews in Mexico during colonial times. I have also written a dozen stories, including “Xerox Man,” part of The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories (2008). Some have been adapted into stage and film. My essays on the topic are collected in two volumes, The Inveterate Dreamer (2002) and Singer’s Typewriter and Mine (2012).

  OTHER VIEWS

  In 1982 Venezuela, with a population of over 14 million, had a Jewish population of twenty thousand, which under President Hugo Chávez was the target of anti-Semitic attacks. Two writers of excellence that ought to be listed here are Elisa Lerner (1932–2013) and Isaac Chocrón (1929–2011), a playwright and sometime novelist of Sephardic descent. One of the outstanding contemporary Latin American playwrights, Chocrón is the author of several collections of short stories and novels, including Break in Case of Fire (1981), about a young man’s search for his Jewish past in the Iberian Peninsula and Africa. Lerner, on the other hand, a lawyer and diplomat as well as a playwright, descends from a family of Romanian Jews that settled in the city of Valencia but moved to Caracas in 1936, when she was four years old. A frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, she is the author of A Smile behind the Metaphor (1973), the collection of plays Life with Mother (1975), and the book of criticism I Love Columbo (1979). The story included here, “Papa’s Friends,” like the art of Clarice Lispector, describes the inner life of a young woman, in this case the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman in Caracas; it also evokes the social life and foibles of the Russian Jewish immigrant community. In 1982 Peru had a population of about five thousand Jews, most of them living in Lima and a minimal fraction of the total national population of 18 million. Nevertheless, Peru has produced a well-known Jewish novelist, Isaac Goldemberg (b. 1945), the author of The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner, a novel about the conflicts of identity. With its many ups and downs, the career of Goldemberg, who was born in the small town of Chepen, in a way symbolizes that of most of these Jewish storytellers in Latin America.

  Having published a collection of poems with the Jewish Cuban writer José Kozer, Goldemberg published his first novel to wide acclaim in 1979, when he was thirty-four years old. Critics such as Jose Miguel Oviedo called it a tour de force, a gem. Yet, like Henry Roth after Call It Sleep and Felipe Alfau after Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, Goldemberg fell into silence until the nineties, when he regained his voice. Two other works are Life in Cash, a collection of poems, and Play by Play, an experimental narrative that has as its background a soccer match between the Peruvian and Brazilian national teams. Published in 1984 without much fanfare, it opens with the short story “The Conversion,” included here.

  In more than one way, Goldemberg’s life was re-created by Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936), the 1990 presidential candidate, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, and a novelist of international reputation who wrote classics such as Conversation in the Cathedral and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. His novella The Storyteller, published in its English translation in 1989, describes the adventures of Saul Zuratas, a middle-class Peruvian Jew, a brilliant yet unhappy anthropology student in Lima during the late fifties. Zuratas falls in love with his object of study, a band of Machiguenga Indians in the Amazon. He becomes intrigued with the role of the storyteller, the keeper of the tribe’s collective memory who travels through the deep jungle from one community to another, enchanting everyone with mythological and often iconoclastic tales. As the narrative begins, the starving Indians are declining as quickly as the Amazon forest, and their all-important storyteller has disappeared without leaving an apprentice.

  So after considerable soul-searching, Zuratas makes the Indians’ cause his own, abandons his graduate studies and his aging father, and marches into the jungle to assume the role of tribal bard. The symbolism is clear: a Jew, a member of a small Peruvian urban minority, is described by the narrator as “the last true redeemer of the Indians in Peru.” He takes upon himself the task of saving another minority, and his odyssey is marked by obstacles and defeat. Written in Florence and London between 1985 and 1987, The Storyteller contains two parallel stories: of the eight chapters, half are tales told by Zuratas to the Machiguengas, and the remaining attempt a realistic description of his existence prior to his voluntary disappearance in the Amazon—as perceived through the eyes of a mature, accomplished writer living in Italy, Vargas Llosa’s alter ego. There is a deceptive device in the book’s structure: Zuratas is nicknamed Mascarita, “Maskface,” because of a huge birthmark that covers almost half his face, from which grows unsightly hair.

  According to Vargas Llosa, the main character was inspired by Goldemberg, who voluntarily exiled himself from his native Peru and went to live first in Israel and then in Manhattan. Like Zuratas, he comes from a small town in Peru and traveled to Lima at an early age (as did Vargas Llosa himself). Both author and protagonist hold similar political views, and their lives must be understood as perhaps desperate attempts to come to terms with their art and identity; the options available to a Jewish storyteller in Peru result in the fictional protagonist’s disappearance into the jungle, an exotic fate that exaggerates, through art, the real novelist’s need to escape his country.

  Guatemala, which in 1982 had one thousand Jews, less than .01 percent of the total population, has three Jewish writers of importance. The civil war and urban violence have pushed most of them
out of the country, but fortunately that has not jeopardized their creative productivity. Guatemala is the original home of Victor Perera (1934–2003), a Jew of Sephardic descent who immigrated to the United States early in life. His stories appeared in major New York publications. His was a curious case because having lived most of his life north of the Rio Grande, he switched, as did Gerchunoff, from one language to another—in his case from Spanish to English. A former editor of the New Yorker, Perera was the author of The Conversion, a 1970 novel about a North American student living in Spain who tries to come to terms with his Sephardic Jewish identity.

  The story included here is part of the delightful Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood, published in 1986 and viewed by Alastair Reid, the poet, critic, and translator, as another fine example of how effectively an author can cross from one language into another, bringing all his insights with him. The book, a sum of fictionalized personal recollections of Perera’s childhood, is written in a precise, careful language that recalls that of Chekhov and Isaac Babel. The protagonists, their relatives, and their friends living in Guatemala City during the 1950s love, hate, dream about a better future, and engage in business, all in an atmosphere imbued with deeply felt nostalgia. The author’s decision to write in English, although perhaps unconscious, is quite meaningful.

  In the last twenty years, a handful of well-known Latin American writers, among them Fuentes but also the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, author of Three Trapped Tigers, and Manuel Puig, the Argentine playwright and novelist whose works include Kiss of the Spider Woman, have switched, occasionally and at times in a consistent manner, into English. Borges himself became all but an English-language author, using his English “translators” as coauthors and at times secretaries and scribes. A motivation behind this cross-cultural maneuver is the desire of writers to attract a wider audience and a more dynamic marketplace. Indeed, the fact that Perera published Rites in English, with a trade publishing house, gave the book the attention few others included in this anthology have had so far—or may ever receive.