Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  ——— . Solo de clarineta: Memórias. 1973; Porto Alegre: Editora Globo, 2005.

  Vieira, Nelson. “A expressão judaica na obra de Clarice Lispector.” In Clarice Lispector: Remate de Males: Revista do Departamento de Teoria Literária. Edited by Vilma Arêas and Berta Waldman. Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1989.

  ——— . Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995.

  Vincent, Isabel. Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas. New York: William Morrow, 2005.

  Vovk, C. T., S. V. Taranets’, and V. A. Kosakivsky. Narisi z istoryi Chechel’nika: Z naidavnishikh chasiv do nashikh dniv. Vinnitsa, Ukraine: “Komp’iuterna verstka ta khudozhne oformlennia redaktsii gazeti ‘Chechel’nits’kii visnik’,” 2000.

  Wainer, Samuel. Minha razão de viver: Memórias de um repórter. Edited by Augusto Nunes. São Paulo: Planeta, 2005.

  Wainstok, David. Caminhada: Reminiscências e reflexões. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Lidador, 2000.

  Wainstok, Israel. Zichrones fun a fater. Rio de Janeiro: Impresso nos Estabelecimentos Gráficos “Monte Scopus,” 1955.

  Werneck, Humberto. O desatino da rapaziada: Jornalistas e escritores em Minas Gerais. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992.

  Williams, Claire. The Encounter between Opposites in the Works of Clarice Lispector. Bristol, England: Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Monographs, 2006.

  Zweig, Stefan. Begegnungen mit Menschen, Büchern, Städten. Vienna: H. Reichner, 1937.

  ——— . Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers. 1942; Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 2003.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Fernando Sabino and Clarice Lispector, Cartas perto do coração (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2001), 67, 59–62.

  2. Clarice Lispector, “Já andei de camelo, a esfinge, a dança do ventre (Conclusão),” in A descoberta do mundo (1984; Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Francisco Alves Editora S.A., 1994), 379.

  3. Instituto Moreira Salles, Cadernos de literatura brasileira: Clarice Lispector, vols. 17 and 18 (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2004), 53.

  4. Ibid., 92; Edilberto Coutinho, Criaturas de papel: Temas de literatura & sexo & folclore & carnaval & futebol & televisão & outros temas da vida (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1980), 168.

  5. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 2005), 70.

  6. Laura Freixas, Clarice Lispector: Vidas literarias (Barcelona: Ediciones Omega, 2001), 16.

  7. Hélène Cixous and Deborah Jenson, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  8. Nádia Battella Gotlib, Clarice: Uma vida que se conta (São Paulo: Ática, 1995), 485.

  9. Ibid., 52.

  10. “Meus livros têm ‘recadinhos’: Quais? Os críticos é que dizem …,” O Globo, May 15, 1961.

  11. “Clarice Lispector diz que Escreve sem ter Esquemas,” [Curitiba], July 25, 1970.

  12. María Esther Gilio, “Tristes trópicos: Con Clarice Lispector en Río,” Triunfo, June 5, 1976.

  13. Quoted in Federico Mengozzi, “Mistérios de Clarice,” Época. Edition no. 342, December 12, 2004, n.p.

  14. Clarice Lispector, De corpo inteiro (São Paulo: Editora Siciliano, 1992), 199.

  15. Antônio Hohlfeldt, “Uma tarde com Clarice Lispector,” Correio do povo, January 3, 1971.

  16. Isa Cambará, “Clarice Lispector: Não escrevo para agradar a ninguém,” Folha de S. Paulo, September 10, 1975.

  17. Teresa Cristina Montero Ferreira, Eu sou uma pergunta: Uma biografia de Clarice Lispector (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1999), 258.

  18. Clarice Lispector, “Amor,” in Laços de família (São Paulo: Francisco Alves, 1960).

  19. Lispector, “Perfil de um ser eleito,” in Descoberta, 416.

  20. Sérgio Fonta, “O papo: Clarice Lispector,” Jornal de Letras 259 (1972).

  21. Lispector, “Brain Storm,” in Descoberta, 262.

  22. Ibid., 75.

  23. Le Monde, September 19, 1970.

  24. Clarice Lispector, Um sopro de vida: Pulsações (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1978), 25.

  25. Clarice Lispector, Água viva (1973; Rio de Janeiro: Editora Artenova, 1993), 40.

  26. Lispector, “Minha próxima e excitante viagem pelo mundo,” April 1, 1972, in Descoberta.

  Chapter 1

  1. Amylton de Almeida, Gazeta, 1986, quoted in Nelson Vieira, Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 120.

  2. Olga Borelli, Clarice Lispector, esboço para um possível retrato (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1981), 43.

  3. Gotlib, Clarice, 66.

  4. Lispector, “Esclarecimentos—Explicação de uma vez por todas” in Descoberta, 345, italics in original.

  5. Clarice Lispector, Teresa Montero, and Lícia Manzo, Outros escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2005), 95. Tongue-tie is a relatively common birth defect, but it rarely lingers into adulthood. Dr. Pedro Bloch assured her that it was easy to fix, she wrote, but she declined the operation for fear of the pain.

  6. Alberto Dines quoted in Vieira, Jewish Voices, 120.

  7. Instituto Moreira Salles and Carlos Mendes de Sousa, “A revelação do nome,” in Cadernos de literatura brasileira: Clarice Lispector (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2004), 144.

  8. Interview, Renard Perez; Renard Perez, Escritores brasileiros contemporâneos, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1970), 69.

  9. Quoted in Claire Varin, Langues de feu: Essai sur Clarice Lispector (Laval, Québec: Trois, 1990), 54–55.

  10. Clarice Lispector, O lustre (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Agir Editora, 1946), 185.

  11. Carlos Mendes de Sousa, Clarice Lispector, figuras da escrita (Minho: Universidade de Minho Centro de Estudos Humanísticos, 2000), 164.

  12. Sérgio Milliet, quoted in ibid., 21.

  13. Lêdo Ivo, quoted in Instituto Moreira Salles, Cadernos, 50.

  14. Sousa, Figuras, 22.

  15. Lispector, “Crônica social” in Descoberta, 199, quoted in Varin, Langues, 97.

  16. Emanuel Brasil, Nossos clássicos: Clarice Lispector (No. 120) (Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1994), 138–39.

  17. Ferreira, Eu sou.

  18. Sousa, Figuras, 22.

  19. Lêdo Ivo, quoted in Instituto Moreira Salles, Cadernos, 48.

  20. “Clarice, um mistério sem muito mistério,” Correio da Manhã, November 2, 1971; Instituto Moreira Salles, Cadernos, 59.

  21. Julio Lerner, “A última entrevista de Clarice Lispector,” Shalom, June–August 1992.

  22. “She tried at all costs to hide her Jewish background,” one critic typically asserted. Edgar Cézar Nolasco, “Restos de Ficção: A criação biográfico-literária de Clarice Lispector,” Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2003, 9. For other examples of this misconception, see Sousa, Figuras, 27.

  23. Lispector, “Pertencer,” in Descoberta, 110, emphasis added.

  24. Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 132.

  25. Ibid., 147.

  26. Marcus Eli Ravage, The Jew Pays: A Narrative of the Consequences of the War to the Jews of Eastern Europe (New York: Knopf, 1919), 27.

  Chapter 2

  1. Nathan [a.k.a. Norman] Hofferman, The 20th Century and I, records of the Chechelnicker Benevolent Association of New York, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

  2. A Jewish cemetery proves that Jewish life persisted in Chechelnik long after the Holocaust, though the remaining Jews have either gone to the cities or emigrated.

  3. C. T. Vovk, S. V. Taranets’, and V. A. Kosakivsky, Narisi z istoryi Chechel’nika: Z naidavnishikh chasiv do nashikh dniv (Vinnitsa, Ukraine: “Komp’iuterna verstka ta khudozhne oformlennia re
daktsii gazeti ‘Chechel’nits’kii visnik’,” 2000), 41. Neighboring Savran, where Elisa was born, and the related Savranka also bear Turkic names.

  4. Ibid., 42.

  5. Clarice Lispector, Onde estivestes de noite (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Artenova, 1974), 45.

  6. Quoted in Vovk et al., Narisi, 62–63.

  7. Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 337–38.

  8. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 67, 59–62.

  9. Borelli, Esboço, 11.

  10. Coutinho, Criaturas, 170.

  11. Scholem, Major Trends, 349.

  12. Tania Lispector Kaufmann, Elisa and Clarice’s sister, affirmed that the book is “about eighty percent true.” Its chronology and the places it describes the family passing through are all traceable in other sources, not least in the “nonfictional” Retratos antigos, and the general outline of the story is common to many other memoirs and histories of the period. It is usually easy to see where Elisa is inserting novelistic flourishes. In any case, her main concern seems to be to provide a record of the suffering of her family.

  13. Elisa Lispector, Retratos antigos, 8. Collection of Nicole Algranti, Teresópolis, Rio de Janeiro.

  14. He may also have worked, at least for a time, as a shochet, a kosher butcher. According to In Exile, he abandoned his profession, set up a tea house for his wife to run, and dedicated himself to Talmudic studies. (These descriptions may be fictional; in Retratos Elisa says he was a shopkeeper.)

  15. E. Lispector, Retratos. Other sources mention eight children: Ferreira, Eu sou, 20; “eight children” is also the number given in Elisa Lispector, No exílio; Romance (1948; Rio de Janeiro: Editora Pongetti, 1971), 51.

  16. E. Lispector, Retratos, 9.

  17. Ferreira, Eu sou, 19; author’s visit to Jewish Cemetery of Barro, Recife.

  18. Ferreira, Eu sou, 17.

  19. E. Lispector, Retratos, 10.

  20. E. Lispector, Exílio, 21, 24.

  21. E. Lispector, Retratos, 14.

  22. E. Lispector, Exílio, 21.

  23. E. Lispector, Retratos, 16–17.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid., 20.

  26. E. Lispector, Exílio, 51, 29.

  27. E. Lispector, Retratos, 21.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Lerner, “Última entrevista.”

  30. E. Lispector, Retratos, 21.

  31. Ibid., 23.

  32. Ferreira, Eu sou, 21.

  33. Isidore Singer and Cyrus Adler, eds., “Agricultural Colonies in the Argentine Republic,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History to the Present Day, 12 vols. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906).

  34. He, too, later came to Recife.

  35. Ferreira, Eu sou, 21–22.

  36. Israel Wainstok, Zichrones fun a fater (Rio de Janeiro: Impresso nos Estabelecimentos Gráficos “Monte Scopus,” 1955).

  37. S. An-Ski, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 3–4.

  38. Ibid., 15.

  39. David Engel, “World War I,” in Gershon David Hundert, ed., The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:2034.

  40. Ibid., 2:2033.

  41. Joachim Neugroschel, introduction to An-Ski, Enemy, ix–x.

  42. From the beginning, the Ukrainian nationalist movement was unusually hospitable to Jews. There were several reasons for this. Mykhailo Hrushevski, the president of the Ukrainian revolutionary government, the Central Rada, was an outspoken advocate of the rights of national minorities. As Hrushevski realized, the Ukrainians and the Jews needed each other. The ethnic Ukrainians were principally agrarian, whereas the cities were heavily Russian, Jewish, and Polish. The Ukrainian national movement needed a bourgeoisie, and an alliance with the Jews was natural. But the very concept of “Ukrainian Jewry” did not exist. The Jews of the Russian Empire thought of themselves as Russian Jews, and they feared that if the supernational state fractured, they would be vulnerable to the new nationalisms. If the Jews were to adhere to the new government, they would have to identify with the Ukraine rather than Russia. The Rada, long before it declared independence, therefore emphasized its friendliness to minorities. The parliament set aside large blocks of seats for Russians, Poles, and Jews. In the lower house, the Jews were even disproportionately overrepresented. The government created the world’s first Ministry of Jewish Affairs. These moves were designed to establish the principle of self-determination for minorities, including the Ukrainians, within a larger Russian state. “By granting extraterritorial autonomy to their minorities,” Henry Abramson has written, “the Ukrainians took the high moral ground in their negotiations with the [All-Russian] Provisional Government over greater territorial autonomy for Ukraine as a whole.” Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies, 1999).

  43. Ibid., 61.

  44. Ibid., 80.

  45. This proposal, like so much else during this critical time, was rendered toothless by the endless infighting of the Zionists and the Socialists. The Zionists, who insisted on using Hebrew, which almost nobody spoke, faced off against the equally intransigent Socialist parties, who used Yiddish, the language of the vast majority of the Jews. The Ministry of Jewish Affairs, caught between the two extremes, dithered throughout the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918.

  46. The Jewish parties, along with the Russians, universally opposed the declaration. The Ukrainians thought that the least the Jews could do in return for the Rada’s unusual liberality was to support Ukrainian national aspirations, and were angered when they did not.

  47. Abramson, Prayer, 88.

  48. Ibid., 100–101.

  49. E. Lispector, Retratos, 17.

  50. Ferreira, Eu sou, 23–24.

  51. E. Lispector, Exílio, 59. In Retratos antigos she writes, “In one of the first pogroms that followed the Red Revolution, when the Bolsheviks were still hardly established, Grandfather died pierced by several bullets, as he ran up the stairs of what had until then been his own house, later used to quarter troops.”

  Chapter 3

  1. American Jewish Congress, Israel Goldberg, and Committee on Protest against the Massacres of Jews in Ukrainia and Other Lands, The Massacres and Other Atrocities Committed against the Jews in Southern Russia (New York, 1920), 5, 13–14.

  2. Ibid., 12.

  3. This is the town Elisa names in her book.

  4. E. Lispector, Retratos, 23.

  5. E. Lispector, Exílio, 32–33, emphasis added.

  6. E. Lispector, Retratos, 15.

  7. Interview with Claire Varin, Laval, Québec, January 7, 2006.

  8. Clarice Lispector, Objecto gritante (II), 1971, 155, Dorothea Severino Collection, Nashville, Tennessee.

  9. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Viking, 1996), 678.

  10. American Jewish Congress et al., Massacres, 15–16.

  11. For a description of this pogrom, see Bernard Lecache, Quand Israël meurt (Paris: Editions du “Progrès civique,” 1927), 181. On 182–89 there is a description of the pogrom in Pinkhas Lispector’s native Teplyk, where Tania was born four years earlier. The family may have been in Teplyk, though Elisa names Haysyn.

  12. American Jewish Congress et al., Massacres, 8–15.

  13. Lispector, Descoberta, 110–11; “Pertencer,” in Descoberta, June 15, 1968.

  14. http://www.schoolscience.co.uk/content/4/biology/abpi/diseases/disease10.html; Brown, Biography, 255, n. 61.

  15. Brown, Biography, 72–73.

  16. In Ukraine, Israel, and the United States, the author consulted several experts
on Jewish and Ukrainian folk medicine. None knew what Clarice was referring to when she mentioned “a common superstition” linking pregnancy with curing illness. When women in Chechelnik were asked about this superstition, they exclaimed in immediate recognition.

  17. Lispector, “Esclarecimentos—Explicação de uma vez por todas,” in Descoberta, 345.

  18. E. Lispector, Exílio, 37.

  19. Ibid., 40.

  20. Lispector, “As crianças chatas,” August 19, 1967, in Descoberta, 15.

  21. E. Lispector, Exílio, 53.

  22. I. Wainstok, Zichrones, 12.

  23. E. Lispector, Exílio, 63.

  24. One of Mania’s Rabin cousins, Abraham, had married a woman named Rebecca Chichilnitsky in Buenos Aires. Her name indicates an origin in the town.

  25. E. Lispector, Exílio, 70.

  26. Vovk et al., Narisi, 80.

  Chapter 4

  1. Sousa, Figuras, 177.

  2. Instituto Moreira Salles and Sousa, “A revelação do nome,” 165.

  3. Lispector, Sopro, 127. Quoted in Sousa, Figuras, 178.

  4. Clarice Lispector, Visão do esplendor: Impressões leves (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Francisco Alves Editora S.A., 1975), 21.

  5. Lispector, Sopro, 32–33.

  6. Ibid., 15.

  7. Clarice Lispector and Teresa Montero, Correspondências (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002), 291, [June] 28, [1974?].

  8. Sousa, Figuras, 181; Borelli, Esboço, 61. In a late story, “As maniganças de dona Frozina,” a character says, “Listen, Miss Fronzina, there are worse names than yours. There’s one named Fleur de Lis—and since they thought it was a bad name they gave her an even worse nickname: Minhora.” (“Minhora” sounds like minhoca, worm.) In Lispector, Onde, 88.

  9. Clarice Lispector, A paixão segundo G. H. (1964; Rio de Janeiro: Editôra do Autor, 1991), 24; Sousa, Figuras, 186.

  10. E. Lispector, Exílio, 73.

  11. David W. Tschanz, “Typhus Fever on the Eastern Front in World War I,” http://entomology.montana.edu/historybug/WWI/TEF.htm.

  12. Vidkun Quisling and Fund for the Relief of the Jewish Victims of the War in Eastern Europe, The Truth about the Ukrainian Horror: Official Report (London: Fund for the Relief of the Jewish Victims of the War in Eastern Europe, 1922), 18.