“I’ll see who devours whom.”26
1
Fun Vonen Is a Yid?
“Clarice was called alienated, cerebral, ‘intimist’ and tedious by hard-line Communist critics. She only reacted when offended by the stupid accusation that she was a foreigner.”1 “She always got very annoyed when people suggested she wasn’t entirely Brazilian,” her closest friend wrote. “True, she was born in Russia, but she had come here when she was only two months old. She wanted to be Brazilian in every way.”2 “I am Brazilian,” she declared, “and that is that.”3
I was born in the Ukraine, my parents’ country. I was born in a village called Chechelnik, so small and insignificant that it isn’t even on the map. When my mother was pregnant with me, my parents were heading toward the United States or Brazil, they still hadn’t decided. They stopped in Chechelnik so I could be born and then continued on their journey. I arrived in Brazil when I was only two months old.4
Though she had arrived in earliest infancy, Clarice Lispector always struck many Brazilians as foreign, not because of her European birth or the many years she spent abroad, but because of the way she spoke. She lisped, and her rasping, throaty r’s gave her an odd accent. “I am not French,” she explained, which is how she sounded. “This r of mine is a speech defect: I simply have a tongue-tie. Now that my Brazilianness has been cleared up …”5
She claimed that her friend Pedro Bloch, a pioneer Brazilian speech therapist, had offered to carry out an operation that would fix the problem. But Dr. Bloch said her pronunciation was natural enough for a child who had imitated her foreign parents’ speech: the throaty r’s, if not the lisp, were, in fact, common among the children of Jewish immigrants in Brazil.6 It was through training, not surgery, that Dr. Bloch managed to correct the problem. But only temporarily.
Despite her constant disavowals, she stubbornly refused to shed this immediately noticeable sign of her foreignness. She would struggle throughout her life between a need to belong and a dogged insistence on maintaining her apartness.
A few months after his successful treatment, Dr. Bloch ran into Clarice. He noted that she had started using her old r’s again. Her explanation was simple. “She told him she didn’t like losing her characteristics.”7
There was no characteristic Clarice Lispector might have wanted to lose more than her place of birth. For this reason, despite the tongue that tied her to it, despite the sometimes horrifying honesty of her writing, she has a reputation for being something of a liar. White lies, such as the few years she was given to shaving off her age, are seen as a beautiful woman’s coquettishness. Yet almost every lie she told has to do with the circumstances of her birth.
In her published writings Clarice was more concerned about the metaphysical meaning of birth than the actual topographical circumstances of her own. Still, those circumstances haunted her. In interviews, she insisted that she knew nothing about the place she came from. In the 1960s, she gave an interview to the writer Renard Perez, the longest she ever granted; the kind and gentle Perez surely put her at ease. Before publishing the piece, he gave it to her for approval. Her single objection was to the first sentence: “When, shortly after the Revolution, the Lispectors decided to emigrate from Russia to America …” “It wasn’t shortly afterwards!” she protested. “It was many, many years afterwards!” Perez obliged, and the published piece began, “When the Lispectors decided to emigrate from Russia to America (this, many years after the Revolution) …”8
And she lied about how old she was when she came to Brazil. In the passage cited earlier, she italicizes her insistence that she was only two months old when her family disembarked. As she well knew, however, she was over a year old. It is a small difference—too young, either way, to remember any other homeland—but her insistence on shaving it down to the smallest credible integer is odd. Why bother?
Clarice Lispector wanted nothing more than to rewrite the story of her birth. In private notes composed when she was in her thirties and living abroad, she wrote, “I am going back to the place where I come from. The ideal would be to go to the little town in Russia, and to be born in other circumstances.” The thought occurred to her as she was falling asleep. She then dreamed that she had been banned from Russia in a public trial. A man says “only feminine women were allowed in Russia—and I was not feminine.” Two gestures had inadvertently betrayed her, the judge explains: “1st I had lighted my own cigarette, but a woman should wait with her cigarette in her hand until a man lights it. 2nd I had pushed my own chair to the table though I should have waited for a man to do it for me.”9
And so she was forbidden to return. In her second novel, perhaps thinking of the finality of her departure, she wrote, “The place she was born—she was vaguely surprised it still existed, as if it too were something she had lost.”10
In a novel based on her family’s emigration, Elisa Lispector, Clarice’s oldest sister, repeatedly poses a question: Fun vonen is a yid? Literally, it means “Where is a Jew from?” and is the polite way a Yiddish-speaker inquires about another’s origin. Throughout her life Clarice struggled to answer. “The question of origin,” one critic wrote, “is so obsessive that one can say that Clarice Lispector’s entire body of work is built around it.”11
In photographs, she hardly looks like she could be from anywhere but Brazil. Perfectly at home on Copacabana Beach, she wore the dramatic makeup and the loud jewelry of the grande Rio dame of her day. There was no hungry ghetto waif in the woman hitting the slopes in Switzerland or wafting down the Grand Canal in a gondola. In one photograph, she stands next to Carolina Maria de Jesus, a black woman whose harrowing memoir of Brazilian poverty, Child of the Dark, was one of the literary revelations of 1960. Beside the famously beautiful Clarice, whose tailored suit and wraparound sunglasses make her look like a movie star, Carolina looks tense and out of place, as if someone dragged Clarice’s maid into the picture. No one would guess that Clarice’s background was even more miserable than Carolina’s.
Yet in real life Clarice often gave the impression of foreignness. Memoirs frequently mention her strangeness. There was that odd voice, and that odd name, so unusual in Brazil that when her first book appeared a critic referred to “this unpleasant name, likely a pseudonym.”12 There was the strange way she dressed; after separating from her husband, she had little money to update her wardrobe, and she wore the old clothes, purchased abroad, that for years afterward made her look “foreign, out of season.”13
Her oddness disturbed people. “They accuse her of being alienated,” one critic wrote in 1969, “of dealing with motifs and themes that have nothing to do with her homeland, in a language that recalls the English writers. There are no chandeliers in Brazil, and nobody knows where that besieged city is.”14
(The Chandelier, the title of her second novel; The Besieged City, of her third.)
“I must seem stubborn, with the eye of a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language of the country,” she wrote.15 Yet her attachment to the country that had saved her family, where she spent her life, and whose language was the medium of her art, was natural and genuine.
More remarkable is how often others insist on her attachment to Brazil. One never sees writers on Machado de Assis, for example, asserting that he was truly Brazilian. In writing on Clarice Lispector, such assertions are almost inevitable. The editors of the popular paperback series “Our Classics” chose, as one of only two extracts from Clarice’s five-hundred-plus-page book of newspaper columns, a few short paragraphs she wrote in response to a question about her nationality. “I belong to Brazil,” was her answer.16
A full third of the flap copy of one biography is dedicated to insisting that she was Brazilian: “This mark of her origin [i.e., her foreign birth], however, is the contrary of what she tried to live, and what this biography asserts, based upon a vast correspondence and dozens of interviews: Brazil was more than her adoptive country, it was her true home.”17 On the popular social-networking Web si
te Orkut, the Clarice Lispector group, with more than 210,000 members, announces that it is a “community dedicated to the greatest and most intense BRAZILIAN writer ever. I said: BRAZILIAN.”
But from the very beginning readers understood that she was an outsider. “Clarice Lispector,” writes Carlos Mendes de Sousa, “is the first, most radical affirmation of a non-place in Brazilian literature.”18 She is both Brazil’s greatest modern writer and, in a profound sense, not a Brazilian writer at all. The poet Lêdo Ivo captured the paradox: “There will probably never be a tangible and acceptable explanation for the language and style of Clarice Lispector. The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and, even, of the history of our language. This borderland prose, of immigrants and emigrants, has nothing to do with any of our illustrious predecessors. … You could say that she, a naturalized Brazilian, naturalized a language.”19
“My homeland left no trace on me, except through the blood heritage. I never set foot in Russia,” Clarice Lispector said.20 In public she referred to her family’s origins no more than a handful of times. When she did, it was either vaguely—“I asked my father how long there had been Lispectors in the Ukraine, and he said: generations and generations”21—or falsely. Her published references to her ethnicity are so sparse that many imagined she was ashamed of it.22
Fun vonen is a yid? It is not surprising that she longed to rewrite the story of her origin, in the winter of 1920 in the goubernia of Podolia, which until shortly before had been part of the Russian Empire and which is today in the southwestern part of the Republic of Ukraine. “I am sure that in the cradle my first wish was to belong,” she wrote. “For reasons that do not matter here, I must have somehow felt that I didn’t belong to anything or anyone.”23
The emphasis is added: she never explained those reasons. But the least one can say about the time and place of her birth is that they were badly chosen. Even in the panoply of murder and epidemic and war that passes for Ukrainian history, from the Mongol sack of Kiev in 1240 through the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl in 1986, 1920 stands out as a particularly horrifying year.
Worse was still to come: twelve years later, Stalin began his systematic starvation of the country’s peasants, killing more people than died during the First World War on all sides put together.24 Nine years after that, Hitler’s invasion killed 5.3 million people, one inhabitant in six.25 “Ukraine is not yet dead,” the national anthem marvels.
In this bleak panorama not every catastrophe can be duly commemorated. But though mostly forgotten today, what befell the Jews of the Ukraine around the time of Clarice Lispector’s birth was a disaster on a scale never before imagined. Perhaps 250,000 were killed: excepting the Holocaust, the worst anti-Semitic episode in history.
In 1919 a writer declared that during the First World War, “what the Jews of Eastern Europe were threatened with was not the temporary suffering and decimation inevitable in war, but the total extermination by ingenious and rapid torture of a whole race.”26 When that sentence was published, the writer believed that horror to be in the past. The real drama was about to begin.
2
That Irrational Something
One little corner of the tsar’s enormous empire, Chechelnik, in the western Ukrainian province of Podolia, was typical of the grubby places where, until the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s Jews lived. Before World War I it had around eight thousand inhabitants, a third of whom were Jewish. An emigrant from Chechelnik to New York, Nathan Hofferman, emphasized that “the majority of Jews were poor. And not the standard of ‘poor’ which is accepted here in the States, but literally poor. Which meant not having a slice of bread to feed the children, that were plentiful.”
Some lived in hovels of two or three rooms with earthen floors, half naked, cold in the winter and hot in the summer. … Child mortality was high, but the birth rate was also high, since according to Jewish law birth control is taboo. There was no sanitation, all the infant and child sicknesses were of epidemic proportions, and medical help was very scarce. … When I said no sanitation, I did not exaggerate. Most homes did not even have an outhouse. People relieved themselves in the back of the house, in small ravines on the edge of the town. The only cleaners were the pigs that roamed in the streets and the rains that washed it down to the stream.
Grain was the economic mainstay. As Jews were not allowed to own land or farm, many of the smaller traders were Jews, who also bought and sold livestock. “At the top of the town was a large open plaza where the peasants and horse traders bought and sold horses,” Hofferman remembered. “At the foot of the town there was another plaza where they traded cattle. The procedure was the same as with the horses except, that here was cow shit and at the other horseshit.”1
Chechelnik today does not seem so terrible. Its ramshackle village architecture, colorfully painted in green and purple, is interrupted by a few crumbling concrete Soviet interventions. Other buildings remember vanished populations: the Catholics who worshipped in the Polish church are long gone, and the synagogue where Mania and Pinkhas Lispector would have brought their newborn daughter to be blessed is in a sad state, empty, open to the elements behind its still impressive stone façade.2
It is the kind of town where a can-do mayor owns the grocery store, the gas station, and the hotel; where poultry wanders down the main street, Lenin Boulevard; and where people fondly recall the Brazilian ambassador, wearing shorts and sandals, arriving a few years back to scout out a place for a monument to Clarice Lispector. (For its inauguration he was more formally attired.) Chechelnik does not have a lot of monuments, and it does not see a lot of ambassadors.
Atop a high ridge, the town offers commanding views over the green hills of the surrounding countryside, views not designed to delight tourists but to offer fair warning of impending invasion. The place was always endangered, a vulnerable frontier post sitting on the border of what, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were the Turkish and Polish empires.
The Lispector family would not be the town’s first refugees. Chechelnik was founded by refugees, and is even named for them. The story goes that the root of the word Chechelnik, kaçan lik, is the Turkic word for “refugee.” Its first settlers arrived under the leadership of a Tatar renegade, Chagan, who married an Orthodox girl, was baptized, and settled on the right bank of the Savranka River.3 Following Chagan’s lead, more refugees arrived at the beginning of the sixteenth century, runaway serfs whose lives under their Polish owners were bad enough to risk settling in a territory subject to the terror of unremitting Tatar invasion. An elaborate system of tunnels underneath the buildings provided shelter. There were three main interconnected passageways, some as deep as five meters under the ground and up to two meters tall. Most houses, and almost all Jewish houses, had camouflaged entrances to the catacombs in their basement. In peacetime they were used for storage; during invasions the whole town disappeared underground, the whole population, animals included. The system’s engineers had taken care to provide access to an underground river, where the animals could drink.4
By the seventeenth century, under Polish rule, Chechelnik was officially elevated from a village to a township; and around 1780 the Jews erected the handsome synagogue whose precarious ruins still stand. It was a time of religious strife, often intra-Christian. The town’s rulers, the princely Lubomirski family, tried to “Polonize” the locals, building a Catholic church and seizing the lands of Orthodox foundations.
The princes also introduced the town’s claim to its extremely modest fame, a large stud farm that produced valuable horses. For Clarice Lispector’s birthplace, this is an almost uncannily appropriate industry. “Trying to put into sentences my most hidden and subtle sensation,” she wrote, “I would say: given the choice I would have been born a horse.”5
“After entering the town, we see a Roman Catholic church with a green roof and a high bell tower,” the Polish traveler Kraszewski wrote after
a visit in 1843. “Only vases decorate the tops of the walls that surround the ruins of Prince Lubomirski’s palace. … The town and market are empty, houses are poor, low, lopsided, and made of clay. Local Jews speak more Russian than Polish and look very different from Jews in Poland.”6
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a century after Chechelnik had passed into Russian hands, there were few Russians in the area. The peasants were Orthodox and spoke Ukrainian. The gentry was Polish and Catholic; these were the people who worshipped at the impressive Catholic church Kraszewski noticed, which was much fancier than its Orthodox cousin across town. Despite the poverty the Russian government enforced, the Jews survived, often barely, in commerce, frequently as cattle traders. All the stores in Chechelnik belonged to Jews, except the drugstore, which belonged to a Pole, and the liquor store, which was part of the government vodka monopoly.
Can a place impress its traits on one who abandoned it in infancy? It would seem not. Yet the fact remains that a great mystic was born in a area famed for its great mystics. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the area Clarice Lispector came from was not its poverty or oppression but its electric relationship to the divine. Isolated and poor, the Jews of Podolia were frequently swept up by millenarian waves.
The Hasidic movement, with its emphasis on a direct, personal experience of God, made its first appearance, and burned most intensely, in benighted Podolia. The movement’s founder, the Ba’al Shem Tov, died not far from Chechelnik, in Medzhybyzh, and the tomb of the apostle of Hasidism, Nachman of Bratzlav, is even closer by, in Uman. In the eighteenth century, the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism has written, “within a geographically small area and also within a surprisingly short period, the ghetto gave birth to a whole galaxy of saint-mystics, each of them a startling individuality.”7
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