Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  Three years later, important Argentine Jews and non-Jews formed the Anti-Defamation Committee against Racism and Anti-Semitism. Borges was one of its strongest supporters. In his fiction, his attitude toward Nazism appears in “The Secret Miracle”; toward anti-Semitism in “Deutsches Requiem.” The first is a tribute to Kafka; the second a dissertation on the evils of Nazism. Similarly, in the forties he openly expressed antimilitary views with regard to the Peronist regime. It is said that as a result, while Borges’s corpse was waiting to be buried at the Plan Palais cemetery in Geneva in 1986, neo-Peronist groups were actively defaming the author’s reputation in his own country.

  From 1948 on, Borges showed great sympathy for the state of Israel. He traveled there twice, first in 1969 and again in 1971, to receive the Jerusalem Prize. He was an outspoken supporter during the Six-Day War and afterward lectured on the theme of Jewish longing for the Promised Land based on readings of the Bible and Talmud. But his attitude is less sentimental than philosophical and moral: he believed that Israel might be the answer to ancient national goals and desires but that it could also transform the Jew into a simply material being. According to Borges, the Jew has been a polyglot through the ages, a self-made rationalist, a persistent fighter for his right to exist as an extraordinary citizen; he has won a place beyond history and therefore has become almost parahistorical. Israel as a nation may damage the esoteric qualities that have long flourished in the individual; this return to history, he once said, may steal the distinctiveness of the Jews and transform them into politicized creatures, with the same trivial habits as everybody else.

  One can analyze Borges’s oeuvre and argue that, influenced by Cansinos-Assèns, he loved only the ideal image of the Jew: the cosmopolitan, the philosopher, the Kabbalist, the polyglot, but never the simple person. Whenever Borges portrayed Jewish characters in his fiction, they were always heroes of the supernatural, champions on a theological and philosophical scale. He never wrote about ordinary people concerned with mundane problems. Something similar happened to his intellectual interests: in reading Spinoza, Borges never let the argument of the Amsterdam Jewish community get in his way; he wanted to see Spinoza purely as a philosophical hero.

  There is another example of how Borges preferred the spiritual to the material. Influenced by Gershom Scholem, the foremost contemporary scholar of Jewish mysticism, Borges in his sixties became interested in the Hasidic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yet he never quite understood the theological and social reform it achieved; he saw the Baal Shem Tov only as the master in love with his magic and esotericism, never as a rebel who, like Luther, broke with the medieval conception of the rabbi as an untouchable intellectual genius. Here and there Borges mentions Hasidism but never in relation to the way the movement brought ordinary people to the center of the historical arena, replacing the Maimonidean image of the wise man, half prophet and half philosopher. Borges does not mention these features because he was never interested in the actual circumstances of ordinary people. On the contrary, he preferred to look for the metaphysical element, the unseen.

  The same thing happens to his view of Israel. After 1971, he never commented publicly on Israeli politics, as he did on other international subjects; neither did he show any interest in literary or intellectual trends emerging from the young state. Yes, he tried to learn Hebrew, but as with Kafka and Walter Benjamin, the attempt proved unsuccessful; the only words that remained in his mind were Kabbalistic concepts from the Sefer Yetzirah or the Zohar. Nevertheless, one should be careful not to read into this a change of feeling: while Borges idealized the abstract Jew, he never felt uncomfortable among Jews, as his friendships with Abramowicz, Jichlinski, and later Gershom Scholem proved.

  In relation to the Kabbalah, there are many instances where symbols or references appear in Borges’s work. Several times he pointed to Meyrink’s novel The Golem (1915) as a book that attracted him to the world of Jewish esotericism. On his second trip to Israel, he learned from Scholem about such archetypes as the Ein-Sof and the Shekhinah. He even refers to the author of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in one of his poems, “The Golem.” On a more down-to-earth level, Borges contradicts Gerchunoff’s mystique of the gaucho as an authentic part of the Jewish experience in Argentina in his short story “The Unworthy Friend,” included in Dr. Brodie’s Report of 1970, as well as in “The Forms of Glory,” written by Borges and his friend and colleague Adolfo Bioy Casares (published in 1977).

  Argentine writers have long worshiped the original gaucho as a national idol, a courageous peasant of the Pampas, everywhere carrying his guitar, his poncho, and his vengeful spirit. Lugones and Ricardo Güiraldes celebrated the gaucho as the quintessential national folk myth, and Borges came close to doing so in “Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874).” Although Borges found in The Gaucho Martín Fierro the clearest expression of Argentine identity and a fountain of personal creativity, he viewed the phenomenon of “Jewish gauchos” as a complete anachronism. The term gaucho judío achieved prominence with Gerchunoff, yet Borges openly denies that such characters ever existed in real life. Jews were businessmen, merchants, and storekeepers, not cowboys, he argues, and the age of the horseman in the Pampas preceded the Jewish immigration. According to Borges, Gerchunoff portrayed chacareros, peddlers descended from the gaucho; thus he confused poor immigrant workers with national heroes like Martín Fierro.

  MOACYR SCLIAR

  Up until now, I have discussed along somewhat general lines the art of two Argentines, one Jew and the other gentile, both cornerstones in the literary tradition represented in this anthology. There is a third writer, much younger than Gerchunoff and Borges, who is equally important in disseminating and shaping things Jewish in Latin American letters: the Brazilian novelist and fabulist Moacyr Scliar. His fiction owes a lot to his compatriots Jorge Amado, João Guimaraes Rosa, Mario de Andrade, Samuel Rawet, and the Ukrainian-born Clarice Lispector, but it is also a direct descendant of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, and the traditional Yiddish folktale. His characters and settings are Brazilian, but his concerns are the continuity of Judaism, God’s relationship with his creatures, and the universe as a sacred space.

  Born in 1937 in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, the son of a businessman who emigrated from eastern Europe, Scliar was the author of at least ten novels and seven collections of stories, including The Carnival of the Animals (1976). His work earned him major international literary prizes, such as the Casa de las Americas. Although retired since 1987, he worked as a public health physician and, like William Carlos Williams and Anton Chekhov, divided his time between literature and medicine (he died in 2011). His joyful, humorous characters, at times endowed with supernatural powers, are wanderers, soul-searching Marranos, political activists, or half-Jewish, half-animal centaurs. Love, mental disorder, redemption, and the coming of the Messiah are frequent themes. What is Jewish about his writing? His intellectual comedy, his passion for storytelling, his affinity with Yiddish.

  In The Strange Life of Rafael Mendes, for instance, a converso, discovering that both the prophet Jonah and the philosopher Maimonides are among his ancestors, immediately takes it as his duty to continue the tradition of wisdom, excellence, and ethics. In The One Man Army, an anarchist tries to build a large communist colony, New Birobidjan (after the so-called Jewish state created by Joseph Stalin near Siberia in 1932) near Porto Alegre, but his adventure turns into disaster because of Brazil’s deep devotion to capitalism. Meyer Guinzberg, the central character, reacts to his defeat by transforming his redemptive fantasy into a frantic love for pigs and horses. Scliar’s other creatures indulge in pagan rituals or belong to antinomian sects like that of the pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. They are discontented with civilization, unhappy yet looking for answers in philosophies and ideologies that are either outmoded or alien to life in South America.

  Published in 1978, The Gods of Raquel is one of Scliar’s
best novels and also the most outstanding work in the literary tradition represented in this anthology. An artfully constructed yet stylistically uncomplicated narrative, it tells the story of Raquel, a Jewish girl with existential and religious doubts. Her parents are Hungarian immigrants who arrived in Brazil thinking it would be the Promised Land. The setting is Parthenon, a district of lunatic asylums in Rio Grande. Raquel’s father, an unsuccessful Latinist, opens a hardware store called Vulcão, named after the Roman god of metalwork. In the context of his business and him sending his daughter to a convent school, Raquel’s odyssey in search of her own identity takes place.

  She is introduced to Christianity by friends and teachers, and so strong is this religious influence on her, so omnipresent the church’s rituals and paraphernalia in her daily activities and conscience, that after a few years Raquel is ready to convert. But her leap from one faith to another is not easy: as a Jew, she suffers religious persecution and is often victimized by the nuns in the convent. Besides, eternity frightens Raquel. She believes a choice must be made between Christ and Jehovah, and, unable to make up her mind, she denies herself participation in either religion. In her journey, she befriends Isabel, a gentile, who soon becomes a partner in her quests but later turns into a rival when both girls fall in love with the same boy, Francisco. Christianity and Judaism thus become competitors, enemies. Isabel eventually marries Francisco, and Raquel engages in an extramarital affair with him. To stress his powerful allegorical message, Scliar inspirits every object in the book, turning it into a pagan deity.

  His protagonist intelligently concludes that to fully assimilate into Brazil’s society, a Jew needs to renounce his or her true beliefs. Raquel refuses to do so, and her voyage takes a rather fascinating turn: Miguel, a worker at Vulcão of Native origin, introduces her to sex, and through it to idolatry. His existential dream, we soon find out, is to build a tropical synagogue—a sacred altar where Judaism, Christianity, and a number of pagan cults coexist. Raquel helps him in his endeavor. In a final scene that is at once haunting and unforgettable, she is seduced by Miguel and persuaded to perform bizarre primitive acts involving a variety of religious symbols and terrifying rituals. To my mind, no other Latin American writer has so far managed to describe as successfully as Moacyr Scliar the religious turmoil and confused identity inhabiting the mind of a Jew living in the Southern Hemisphere.

  Perhaps Scliar’s most famous work is The Centaur in the Garden (1980), a novel in the tradition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Like Gregor Samsa, Guedali Tartakovsky, the protagonist, is a peculiar creature, half-human, half-animal. Yet in his case the grotesque physical appearance, an amalgamation of human and animal features, is meant to create not surprise or terror but laughter. After all, in the tradition of those monsters found in Ovid and Kabbalistic bestiaries, or the compelling demons of Isaac Bashevis Singer, he’s a centaur—but a fully circumcised, Yiddish-speaking centaur who is also a devoted reader of Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. Not knowing whether to kill him or have him disappear into the forest, his family hopes to educate Guedali into “a respectable Jew.” But they are ashamed of him. Feeling frustrated and hurt, he flees his home to become independent. Escape is here the key word: divisive internal forces are so strong in Scliar’s creation that they ultimately tear him apart.

  At first, to support himself, Guedali works in a circus, where he falls in love with a female centaur. They marry and have children. Their dream, of course, is to achieve normality; that is, they hope to lose their distinctiveness. Soon after, they both travel to Morocco, where Guedali undergoes a surgical operation performed by a charlatan. To everyone’s astonishment, he becomes human—or almost human; except for his cloven hooves, he’s the same as others. But whatever kind of normalcy he achieves, the transformation turns into such a boring and vacuous routine that he struggles to become a centaur once again, and on his return to Brazil he loses all sense of identity. The novel clearly explores the deep and unequivocal desire by the Jewish minority in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America to assimilate into the milieu, a move that sooner or later destroys its uniqueness and self-esteem. But the story is more than an allegory: the fantastic elements acquire a life of their own as the bizarre is approached in a realistic context.

  A satirist, Moacyr Scliar had a marvelous narrative touch that recalls Lewis Carroll as well as Borges. Like the Argentine, he took upon himself the task of reappraising major historical events with an intellectual inquisitiveness, but also with a joie de vivre absent in the author of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” What is most interesting is that, although Scliar chronicled in historical detail the range of Jewish experience in Brazil, his treatment of the Holocaust is relatively spare. Robert Di Antonio, the author of Brazilian Fiction, who has studied the novelist’s contribution to Latin American literature, was also puzzled by silence on such a critical event in contemporary Jewish history. Scliar’s “novels and short fiction,” he claims,

  have incorporated various, and little known, aspects of Judeo-Brazilian historiography: the settling of Baron Hirsch’s agricultural communes in Quatro Irmaos; the Jewish gauchos; the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s attempt to establish a Jewish state in Birobidjan; the world of the Jewish Mafia, the Zewi Migdal; an anachronistic accommodation of the life of Sabbatai Zevi, the charismatic false messiah; the long history of Brazil’s Sephardim; and the Jewish white slave trade in Rio Grande do Sui. However, Scliar, one of Brazil’s leading writers and one who has a large and devoted international following, wrote little on the subject of the Holocaust. Perhaps in response to the Yiddish admonition M’ken nisht (one cannot), he felt the subject too tragic to be dealt with. He deals with it only tangentially and from a very unique perspective.

  The best example is “Inside My Dirty Head—The Holocaust,” a story by Scliar in The Enigmatic Eye (1986) and reprinted here. Told from the point of view of a young boy whose father is a traditional eastern European immigrant, it describes his puzzlement about Mischa, a Holocaust survivor found sleeping in doorways in Porto Alegre. The boy sees Mischa as an alien figure and sees the numbers tattooed on his arm as imbued with a perverse magical potency: he dreams of the Holocaust survivor winning the lottery with the number tattooed on his arm yet losing the prize once the number is surgically removed. According to Di Antonio, “The childlike reasoning is a narrative device to express tangibly the sense of guilt of many Brazilians who were personally unaffected by the events in Europe.” Scliar suggests that the Holocaust cannot be written about in a literal or conceptual way, perhaps because it is beyond meaning and comprehension.

  Other Brazilian writers, like Rubem Fonseca (Vastas emocoes e pensamentos imperfeitos, 1988) and Zevi Ghivelder (As seis pontas da estrela, 1969), have written about the Holocaust and its consequences. While in North America the theme has become an attractive and sometimes lucrative topic, a sort of unifying, rallying point in the country’s Jewish culture, writers in Latin America seldom deal with it. Although the United States had a fundamental role to play in the Second World War, the countries south of the Rio Grande either remained silent and impartial or their dictatorial governments gave political asylum to ex-lieutenants and ex-soldiers of Adolf Hitler—as well as to Jews. It was often the case that in cities like Asunción, São Paulo, or Montevideo, refugees from Auschwitz or Buchenwald would encounter their German victimizers walking on the street. Yet those horrific encounters never really captivated the national consciousness. The fictional treatment of Holocaust issues in Latin American literature is often apologetic, detached, or sentimental. More often than not, these works explore the aftermath of the massive extermination but not its causes or specific details. Moacyr Scliar’s “Inside My Dirty Head—The Holocaust,” which focuses its attention on the mental aftershocks in the mind of a Jew in Porto Alegre, differs from the accounts of survivors such as Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel in its preoccupation with post-Holocaust trauma.

  The list of writers in this literary tradition in Braz
il, with a population of about 160,000 Jews in 1980 and around 150,000 in 2010, most of them in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, is not as long as that of Argentina, but it is distinguished. Samuel Rawet (1929–1985), an engineer born in Poland, is one of the most significant early figures. Tales of the Immigrant, his collection of stories published at the age of twenty-seven, which includes “Johnny Golem” and “Kalovim,” is clearly influenced by Hermann Hesse. Rawet’s concern is the Jewish process of assimilation into Brazilian life. By adapting to their new milieu, he suggests, they lose sight of their true identity; using one of his favorite metaphors, they “evaporate.”

  The Seven Dreams, a more mature work influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Kafka, again focuses on misanthropic, obsessive characters tormented by their inner selves. Rawet’s obsession with the Jews, whom he perceived as highly intellectual and model citizens, continued in Ahasuerus’ Trip (1970). But unexpected events changed his mind, suddenly causing him to feel ashamed of his religious and ethnic background. The result was a total rejection of his past. This personal transformation is evident in I-You-He (1972), a discursive narrative dealing with larger Brazilian social issues. What is absent in this book is actually more interesting than the subject matter: Rawet wanders around metaphysical and philosophical problems but leaves out his most urgent concern: Judaism. This existential detour ended up tragically, with his suicide at the age of fifty-four. He was incapable of finding an answer to his doubts and ambivalence.