Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  Also Guatemalan is Alcina Lubitch Domecq (b. 1953), who now makes her home in Jerusalem. In 1983 she wrote The Mirror’s Mirror: or, The Noble Smile of the Dog. A novel clearly influenced by Lewis Carroll and Borges, it described the adventures of an eight-year-old Jewish girl left alone on a battlefield. Her thirty or more stories, including “Bottles,” were collected in 1988 in Intoxicated and have been published in French, German, and Italian anthologies. Most of her stories—what Irving Howe has called “short shorts”—are hardly longer than a page. Yet like those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, her images are breathtaking insights into the complexities of a genealogical past or a troublesome family life. In one story she describes how a widow is surprised by the sudden appearance on her face of her late husband’s mustache. In another, a troubled housewife is trapped in a gigantic bottle, as if metamorphized into a huge Kafkaesque insect. The message is clear: as with the lucid prose of Lispector, the reader is provided with an idiosyncratic view—at times paranoid, often distorted and disturbing—of the claustrophobic reality of women’s lives in Latin America.

  THE ISSUE OF CULTURAL IDENTITY

  How can Jewish Latin American fiction be compared to the literature created by Jews in the United States or by modern Israeli writers? First and foremost, it is obvious that while writers such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick have acquired a wide international readership, most of the Jewish writers included in this anthology remain unknown, appreciated by a rather small audience, primarily Jewish. The bridge toward internationalization has been crossed by only a few, among them Moacyr Scliar, Isaac Goldemberg, and two or three others not included in this anthology, such as Jacobo Timerman (1923–1999), the Argentine newspaper editor and journalist who wrote Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, a personal account of repression by the military junta during the 1970s. But as a literary tradition, Jewish writing south of the Rio Grande still has little echo. Why? The explanation is complex.

  Until the 1960s (and perhaps much more recently) European and North American readers knew hardly anything about Latin American letters in general. It was when Borges won the Publisher’s Prize and his narratives began to be translated into many languages that others began to pay attention. A narrative boom followed: in 1967 Miguel Angel Asturias, the Guatemalan author of the acclaimed Men of Maize, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his contribution was followed by Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuentes’s A Change of Skin, and Vargas Llosa’s The Green House. What caused this literary phenomenon? As Emir Rodriguez Monegal forcefully argued, there’s little doubt that political, social, and economic factors were involved: the end of the Second World War brought with it the collapse of Western colonialism, and nations in Africa, Asia, and Oceania emerged as new politically independent realities.

  It suddenly became clear that high culture was not the property of a handful of European intellectuals but could be found as well on the periphery—in the so-called Third World. In different parts of the globe but with similar goals, V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Chinua Achebe, to name only a few, published their works, and their “marginal” voices began to be heard. The list of new literary voices included Latin Americans, yet only a few of them gained the public’s attention in Europe and the United States. The less avant-garde themes and styles were regarded as unimportant, and those writers not considered mainstream never entered the international arena. Such became the fate of Jewish writers, along with other minorities, in countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. World readership was interested in “standard,” stereotyped views of the region, not in the sum of its heterogeneous parts. The day will come when Asian, Italian, and black narrative voices emerging from Latin America will also be heard, just as today Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison are recognized as North American writers of excellence.

  Because of the tragedy that befell European Jews during the Second World War, but also as a result of the creation of the state of Israel and the dynamism of Jews in the United States, the political and cultural balance of power in world Jewry shifted its headquarters from Vienna and Berlin to New York City and Tel Aviv. Thus, after 1948, early twentieth-century writers such as Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, Daniel Fuchs, and Henry Roth in the United States, and Sh. Y. Agnon in Israel, gained recognition as important Jewish literary voices. In setting the scene for successors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua, North American fiction is particularly important. Stories and novels such as “Defender of the Faith” and “Eli the Fanatic” by Roth, Dangling Man and Herzog by Bellow, The Assistant and Idiots First by Bernard Malamud, and “Envy: or, Yiddish in America,” “The Pagan Rabbi,” and “The Shawl” by Ozick, together with works by Grace Paley, E. L. Doctorow, and Stanley Elkin, are essential in understanding world Jewish literature today.

  Their themes have transcended the particulars of Jewish identity to confront universal human concerns. In 1967 Philip Rahv argued, “The homogenization resulting from speaking of [North American Jewish writers] as if they comprised some kind of literary faction or school is bad critical practice in that it is based on simplistic assumptions concerning the literary process as a whole as well as the nature of [US] Jewry, which, all appearances to the contrary, is very far from constituting a unitary group in its cultural manifestation.”

  And today one can indeed speak of the long list of Jewish writers in the United States not as specifically Jewish but as mainstream writers who happen to be of Jewish origin. They have managed to jump the gap from the ethnic to the universal through their exploration of issues of selfhood, acculturation, memory, and history. Thus they transcend simply parochial interests, especially as these themes are universalized in an increasingly multicultural North American society. The broad success of Jewish writers from the 1950s through the 1970s (now somewhat eclipsed by the increasing interest in the cultural traditions of black, Hispanic, and Asian minorities) was possible because the North American audience could identify with Jewish artists, as with other ethnic writers, and pursue their development.

  Moreover, the translating process their works undergo, to be read in Berlin or Rome or Buenos Aires, itself further diminishes their narrowness of outlook. But they are beyond national borders. In part, their success is due to a voracious secular readership, made up of upwardly mobile, well-educated urban Jews in the United States, always eager to explore their identity as cosmopolitan citizens in a technological age. In fact, the heterogeneity that Philip Rahv talks about, together with the relatively large size and cultural comfort of North American Jewry as members of an open, democratic society, has made it possible for their artists and intellectuals to mature and overcome their parochialism. And the fact that Yiddish, both in daily life as well as in journalism and literature, was quickly replaced by English, fundamental to the absorption of any citizen into the so-called North American melting pot, was also a catalyst.

  The Jewish writers in Latin America have to be appreciated from an altogether different perspective. First, against Rahv’s argument, they indeed form a literary faction or school. Unlike other North American Jewish writers, many partially trace their aesthetic influences directly to nineteenth-century Yiddish writers such as Mendele Mokher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem. And although their idiom is everybody’s Spanish, the public at large, even after the contributions of Borges or Vargas Llosa, remains essentially uninterested in Jewish themes. Besides, there is a long tradition of anti-Semitism in Hispanic countries, largely supported by the church but also, indirectly, by various governments.

  Still, in some minds the Jew remains an atavistic witness to and victimizer of Jesus Christ and an unwelcome member of society. Contrary to their counterparts in the United States, the Latin American Jewish communities are monolithic. They refuse to assimilate, and the broader society also rejects their complete integration. Thus either the Jewish writer’s cultural manifestation is within the community, in which case there is little space for self-cr
iticism, or he or she sooner or later rejects the community, choosing to live outside the country, or at least far from its circumscribed borders. The processes of secularization and acculturation of the Jews in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and elsewhere in the hemisphere, because of the unstable nature of the region, do not result from a democratic, free-spirited dynamic. On the contrary, they have evolved dramatically and in the face of immense obstacles. Whereas Roth and Bellow have a secure if now shrinking following, the number of Latin American readers interested today in the works of Gerchunoff, or even Scliar, is too small to encourage the literary development of those who follow in their tradition.

  The case of Israeli writers, of course, is totally dissimilar. Since the founding of the state of Israel, there is a general recognition that the new cultural reality is not a form of Jewish identity but rather a modern national identity. Following the allegorical prose of Agnon, with its Talmudic, biblical, and folkloric resonance, and since independence in 1948, novelists such as A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz have taken as their duty to describe, reflect, and comprehend today’s Middle Eastern reality, and especially the Israeli one. Thus, in a moment of crisis and seemingly permanent political turmoil, their mimetic inclination has been toward psychological realism. The Israeli public, highly literate and avid to escape the daily routine through the imagination, reads these literary works with enormous interest. Yiddish, once a challenger to become the national tongue, is now the property of an old, dying generation, unknown or ignored by the young and rejected by the intellectuals. Hebrew, with its amazing rebirth, carries pride and denotes courage and renewal.

  More than anything, what really is at stake now, when it comes to linguistic battles in Israel, is the question of the Palestinian writers’ relationship to Hebrew as their own idiom.* In terms of the selection of realist topics, while some writers, among them Aharon Appelfeld and David Grossman, trace their roots to pre-Holocaust European culture, and indirectly to Yiddish, the majority has buried the names of Sholem Aleichem and his successors, considering them curiosities of the Diaspora past. Their political life, the permanent threat of Arab-Jewish conflict, and the daily contact with Palestinian aspirations draw their full attention. Being Jewish is not the issue anymore; rather the issue is the quality and future of Israeli culture. The collective identity has been reshaped on a concrete, material level. Similar to the personal and cultural transformation of Saul Bellow from Jew into North American, Oz, Yehoshua, and others are now Israeli, not Jewish, writers.

  Will the time come when Latin America will be truly democratic and pluralistic, less intolerant of the particular? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the Jews, in Octavio Paz’s view “the few” in the universe of “the many,” remain the “other voice” that refuses to be devoured by the monstrous whole. Their labyrinthine worldview has been recorded in literature, where they have successfully built, in spite of the climate of revolution and fantasy, a room of their own, a “tropical synagogue” like that of Moacyr Scliar’s The Gods of Raquel—a hybrid creation intertwining symbols from the Old World and the New.

  * See my “Cynthia Ozick and Anton Shammas: Duel Over the Hebrew Language,” Jewish Frontier 56, no. 4 (1989): 7–13. See also my introduction to The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, edited by Ilan Stavans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  ARGENTINA

  Camacho’s Wedding Feast

  ALBERTO GERCHUNOFF (1884–1950)

  Translated from the Spanish by Prudencio de Pereda

  Set at the turn of the century in Rajíl, a shtetl-like agricultural town in La Pampa, this lyrical story, first published as part of The Jewish Gauchos (1910) and among the best in the volume, evokes the often explosive relationship between gentiles and Jews in the Southern Hemisphere. It fuses the universal theme of the stolen bride with a narrative voice and incident borrowed from Don Quixote. Through the tale’s folkloristic tone, which finds pleasure in describing the details of pastoral life as well as Jewish rituals and tradition, the Russian-born author, considered the grandfather of Jewish Latin American literature, advances his ill-fated view of Argentina as the true Promised Land.

  FOR TWO WEEKS now, the people of the entire district had been expectantly waiting for Pascual Liske’s wedding day. Pascual was the rich Liske’s son. The family lived in Espindola and, naturally enough, the respectable people of the colonies were looking forward to the ceremony and feast. To judge by the early signs, the feast was to be exceptional. It was well-known in Rajíl that the groom’s family had purchased eight demijohns of wine, a barrel of beer, and numerous bottles of soft drinks. Kelner’s wife had discovered this when she happened to come on the Liskes’ cart, stopped near the breakwater. The reins had broken, and the Liskes’ hired man was working frantically to replace them.

  “The soft drinks were rose colored,” she told the neighbors. “Yes!” she said, looking directly at the doubting shochet’s wife.* “Yes, they were rose colored, and each bottle had a waxen seal on it.”

  Everyone agreed old man Liske’s fortune could stand that kind of spending.

  In addition to the original land and oxen that he’d gotten from the administration, Liske had many cows and horses. Last year’s harvest alone had brought him thousands of pesos, and he could well afford to marry off his son in style without touching his principal.

  Everyone further agreed that the bride deserved this kind of a wedding. Raquel was one of the most beautiful girls in the district, if not in the whole world. She was tall, with straw-blond hair so fine and full it suggested mist; her eyes were so blue they made one’s breath catch. She was tall and lithe, but her simple print dresses showed the full curving loveliness of a beautiful body. An air of shyness and a certain peevishness became her because they seemed to protect her loveliness.

  Many of the colonists had tried to win her—the haughty young clerk of the administration as well as all the young men in Villaguay and thereabouts, but none had achieved a sympathetic response. Pascual Liske had been the most persistent of these suitors, but certainly not the most favored, at first. In spite of his perseverance and his gifts, Raquel did not like him. She felt depressed and bored because Pascual never spoke of anything but seedlings, livestock, and harvests. The only young man she had seemed to favor was a young admirer from the San Gregorio colony, Gabriel Camacho. She had gone out dancing with him during the many times he used to come to visit.

  Her family had insisted she accept Pascual and the marriage had been arranged.

  On the day of the feast, the invited families had gathered at the breakwater before Espindola. A long line of carts, crowded with men and women, was pointed toward the colony. It was a spring afternoon, and the flowering country looked beautiful in the lowering rays of the sun. Young men rode up and down the line on their spirited ponies, calling and signaling to the girls when the mothers were looking elsewhere. In their efforts to catch a girl’s eye, they set their ponies to capering in true gaucho style. In their eagerness, some even proposed races and other contests.

  Russian and Jewish songs were being sung in all parts of the caravan, the voices fresh and happy. At other points, the songs of this, their new country, could be heard being sung in a language that few understood.

  At last, the caravan moved into the village. The long line of heavy carts, being gently pulled by the oxen, had the look of a primitive procession. The carts stopped at different houses, and the visitors went inside to finish their preparations. Then, at the appointed time, all the invited guests came out together and began to make their way to the groom’s house.

  Arriving at Liskes’, they found that rumors of the fabulous preparations had not been exaggerated. A wide pavilion stood facing the house with decorative lanterns hanging inside on high poles, masked by flowered branches. Under the canvas roof were long tables covered with white cloths and countless covered dishes and bowls that the flies buzzed about hopelessly. Old Liske wore his black velvet frock coat—a relic of his prosperous years in Bessarabia—as well as a
newly added silk scarf of yellow, streaked with blue. With hands in his pockets, he moved from group to group, being consciously pleasant to everyone and speaking quite freely of the ostentation and unusual luxury of the feast. To minimize the importance of it all, he would mention the price, in a lowered voice, and then, as if to explain his part in this madness, would shrug his shoulders, saying, “After all, he’s my only son.”

  The Hebrew words ben yachid (“only son”) express this sentiment very well, and they were heard frequently as many guests expressed their praises of the fat Pascual. Even his bumpkin qualities were cited as assets in the extraordinary rash of praise.

  His mother was dressed in a showy frock with winged sleeves and wore a green kerchief spread over her full shoulders. Moving quickly, in spite of her ample roundness, she went from place to place, talking and nodding to everyone in the growing crowd, which was soon becoming as big and fantastic as the fiesta.

  Under the side eave of the house, a huge caldron filled with chickens simmered over a fire, while at the side, in the deeper shadow, hung a row of dripping roasted geese. In front of these were trays with the traditional stuffed fish stacked for cooling. What the guests admired more than the chicken-filled caldron, the roast geese, stuffed fish, and the calf’s ribs that the cooks were preparing were the demijohns of wine, the huge cask of beer, and, above all else, the bottles of soft drinks whose roseate color the sun played on. Yes, it was so. Just as they’d heard in Rajíl, there were the bottles of rose-colored soft drinks with red seals on the bottles.