At Home Abroad
The Little-known Field of Jewish Latin American
Literature.
By Stephen Sadow
A series of fortuitous accidents led me to the
little-known specialty of Jewish Latin American literature. As a graduate
student in Spanish at Harvard, I was spending the afternoon in Widener
Library dutifully researching a Chilean novelist when I chanced on books
by Carlos Grünberg, Bernardo Verbitsky, José Isaacson, and
Alberto Gerchunoff. I read those books, and to my astonishment, discovered
an entire literature. Soon after, I arrived in Buenos Aires to do research
for my doctoral thesis on Ricardo Güiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra,
a classic Argentine novel that has nothing to do with anything Jewish.
Needing a place to stay, I rented a room from a Jewish family in the Villa
Crespo section of the city, a neighborhood in which the population was,
to my amazement, more uniformly Jewish than Tel Aviv or Boro Park in Brooklyn.
I soon learned that, like most Jewish Americans,
Jewish Latin Americans had their origins in Russia, eastern Europe, and
Germany. A much smaller number were Sephardic Jews from Greece, Turkey,
and the Balkans. Some had come after 1880 to work the land on the huge
Jewish agricultural colonies of Argentina and Brazil. Many more had made
the voyage southward after the United States closed its borders in 1924.
They settled in all the Latin American republics, most often in the larger
cities like Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Montevideo, and Havana; but some
started out as pack pedlars in the mountains of Peru and Bolivia or the
streets of Porto Alegre, Brazil. For others, small family businesses gradually
gave them access to a middle-class lifestyle. Still others worked in the
needle trades or in small manufacturing concerns. In each country, the
Jews established synagogues, social welfare organizations, community centers,
newspapers, and school systems where Hebrew was taught along with Spanish.
In some places, they faced pervasive anti-Semitism; in others, they were
welcomed. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants continued to
run the family businesses or became physicians, psychologists, engineers,
marketing executives, accountants, and, of course, writers of all sorts:
poets, novelists, journalists, and playwrights. At present, there are half
a million Jews living in every Latin American country. The largest communities
are found in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, with significant populations
in Venezuela and Chile.
Soon after I joined Northeastern's faculty as
an assistant professor in 1977, a battered package with an Argentine return
address appeared at the door of my home. It contained a novel and the résumé
of a young novelist named Ricardo Feierstein. My professors had repeatedly
told me that "if you come upon a good writer whom nobody knows about,
hold on tight!" I immediately wrote this Ricardo Feierstein, telling
him how much I liked his work and asking him to send me more. He did. And
through the ensuing correspondence, a deep and lasting friendship developed.
A couple of years later, I returned to Buenos Aires to meet Feierstein.
Soon afterwards, the American poet Jim Kates and I translated and published
Feierstein's poetry in We, the Generation in the Wilderness (Ford-Brown
Press, 1989). This bilingual volume was favorably reviewed in Argentina,
Venezuela, Israel, and the United States, and my career in Jewish Latin
American studies was launched.
A subset of the field of Jewish studies, Latin
American Jewish studies investigates the history, sociology, demographics,
and cultural aspects of Jewish communities and individuals from Latin America
and the Caribbean. What do you do when you are working with a literature
that is obscure outside of its home culture? What do you do when members
of one culture know little of another culture, and vice versa? Responding
to these questions,
I decided upon an approach that would take me
far beyond traditional literary criticism. Through a series of "voyages
of discovery" to Jewish communities in Latin America, a growing number
of correspondences with writers, literary critics, psychologists, even
mystics, and an enormous amount of reading, I immersed myself in the Jewish
literature and culture of Latin America.
These writers wrote of the strains of being in
the minority, of balancing Jewish and Hispanic culture, of Jewish tradition,
of optimism for the future, of Zionism, and of the Holocaust. It became
my intention to enter this literary culture as a step towards truly understanding
its writings. I wanted to see the world as a Jewish Latin American writer
saw it. More importantly, it was my goal to become a transmitter of culture
from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish.
I began by writing a series of articles about
Jewish American life and literature for Raices: Judaismo contemporáneo
(Roots: Contemporary Judaism), a highly respected cultural journal then
published in Buenos Aires. I wrote book reviews for Mundo Israelita (Jewish
World), Buenos Aires's weekly Jewish newspaper.
In July 1994, a terrorist car bomb destroyed the
AMIA building, the center of Jewish communal life in Buenos Aires, killing
eighty-six people, many of whom were not Jewish, and injuring hundreds
more. I had been in that building many times; my last visit had been only
two weeks before the attack. Mirta Strier, an acquaintance of mine, died
that day. Back in Boston, I was deeply shaken. I felt that I had to respond
in the ways that I could as a scholar. I decided to translate Feierstein's
Mestizo, a vast and powerful novel that portrays the Jewish Latin American
experience from its European origins to its modern struggles.
At the same time, my work has continued on other
fronts. In 1997, the Acervo Cultural Editores publishing company in Buenos
Aires published my Un yanqui judío: Tradición, cultura, educación
y vida cotidiana en Estados Unidos hoy (A Jewish Yankee: Tradition, Culture,
Education, and Everyday Life in the United States Today). In this semifictionalized
work, I describe what it is like to be Jewish in a Boston suburb not unlike
Westborough, Massachusetts, where I live, in a Reform Jewish congregation
not too different from Congregation B'nai Shalom, where my family worships.
American and British literary journals published translations that I did
with Jim Kates of poetry by Feierstein, the Peruvian-American writer Isaac
Goldemberg, the Argentine-Israeli poet Teodoro Ducach, and the world-renowned
Argentine poet and playwright César Tiempo. I served as guest editor
of an issue, dedicated to Jewish Latin American literature, of Brújula/Compass,
a bilingual journal of the City University of New York.
At Northeastern, Jewish Latin American studies
extend beyond my office. In 1996, N.U.'s Jewish Studies Program put on
"A Celebration of Jewish Latin American Arts," a three-day event
that included presentations by poets, composers, and filmmakers, and a
dramatic performance.
Most recently, I published King David's Harp:
Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers (University of
New Mexico Press, 1999). In this book, Mario Szichman (Argentina/United
States), Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (Mexico), Alicia Freilich (Venezuela),
Moacyr Scliar (Brazil), and eleven others write about their lives and about
being Jewish writers. And, finally, I did complete my translation of Feierstein's
Mestizo (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press).
In conjunction with Acervo Cultural Editores,
I recently directed an international writing contest in the hope of bringing
forth a new Jewish Latin American novel. We advertised in Argentina, Uruguay,
Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, the United States, and Israel.
It worked. After heated arguments, we chose as the winner Marcela y Judith,
by the Argentine writer Enrique Amster. It is a tale of a Jewish woman
who leaves Buenos Aires in order to emigrate to Israel, only to realize
that Argentina is where she belongs.
There is a word in Yiddish, beshert, that roughly
translates as "meant to be." I often feel that my research has
taken me to where I am meant to be. Maybe the accidents that led me to
Jewish Latin American literature were not really accidents after all.
Stephen Sadow is
a professor of modern languages in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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