Jewish Issues in Argentine Literature: From Gerchunoff to Szichman by Naomi Lindstrom (review)

Book Reviews115 studies on Tudor/Elizabethan iconography offers scholars the opportunity to assess the merits of different approaches to a much neglected area. EUGENE R. CUNNAR New Mexico State University NAOMI LINDSTROM. Jewish Issues in Argentine Literature: From Gerchunoffto Szichman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. 205 p. Jewish Argentine writing, in the past few years, has received increasing attention from literary critics. Naomi Lindstrom's admirable study, the first book to appear in English on the subject, makes an immediate contribution as an introduction of Jewish Argentine writing to the non-Spanish reading public. It is an excellent presentation, not only because the author meticulously translates all quotations from the original Spanish texts, but also because the book includes a general survey of Jewish involvement in Argentine literary life and investigations of major works. This is not to say that the book will disappoint specialists. On the contrary, the acuity of Lindstrom's detailed account of the interrelations of a developing Jewish Argentine literature and the events of Argentine social and literary history, as well as her textual analyses, will be extremely useful to Latin American literary scholars. As her title suggests, Lindstrom is primarily concerned with the issues, that is, with the "ways in which literature implies a commentary on aspects of society." Lindstrom's introduction affirms that "Jewish Argentine writing has potentially a great deal to reveal about history: Argentine social history, the history of attitudes toward cultural variety, the history of Jewish thought" (1). Jewish Issues traces a progressive movement in Argentina, a "gradually increasing freedom," which has allowed Jewish Argentine authors the possibility of displaying cultural "particularism" (2). The chief tendencies identified in contemporary Jewish Argentine writers are social criticism and overt allusion to distinctive traits and intellectual resources originating in Jewish tradition. This book adopts a sociological and cultural approach similar to Leonardo Senkman's in La identidadjudía en la literatura argentina (1983) and Saúl Sosnowski's in La orilla inminente (1987). Lindstrom shares with Senkman and Sosnowski the determination not to marginalize Jewish Argentine writing in a folkloristic ghetto. Jewish Issues complements the preceding studies with its foregrounding ofthe specifically Argentine cultural scene. Whereas Senkman focuses on dilemmas particular to Jewish identity, Sosnowski's perspective is the broadest in its insistence on the Latin American context and the most militant in its affirmation of the pluralistic ideological function of Jewish Argentine writing. The eight chapters of Jewish Issues that analyze one work each by Alberto Gerchunoff, César Tiempo, Bernardo Verbitsky, David Viñas, José Rabinovich, José Isaacson, Marcos Ricardo Barnatán, and Mario Szichman demonstrate the versatility of Lindstrom's critical ability. Lindstrom is as adept at unravelling Viñas' disparate narration of social and cultural contradictions in Dar la cara as in discovering the implicit cultural significance attributed to Spinoza in Isaacson's poetic Cuaderno Spinoza. Jewish Issues explicitly 116Rocky Mountain Review recuperates both Isaacson and the experimental novelist, Barnatán, from Senkman's negative judgment, on the grounds that these authors reclaim elements of the Sephardic and Kabbalistic traditions "as part of the cultural legacy of Spanish-speakers" (143). In defense of Gerchunoffs Los gauchos judíos, Lindstrom points out that its idealization ofthe immigrant experience derives not simply from conformity to the dominant Argentine ideology but also from a transposition of the discourses of Jewish transformation, such as Zionism and utopian programs, prevalent in post-1881 Russia. Although her introduction and postface seem to applaud the tendency of contemporary Jewish Argentine writers, particularly since the end of the military repression (1976-1983), "to make Jewish Argentine questions one point of entry" into the critique of social history, Lindstrom herself hesitates to criticize authors for their implicit or explicit accommodations with hegemonic ideology. In her demonstration of empathy, Lindstrom stands slightly apart from the "parricide" literary generation of the fifties, including Viñas and Gladys Onega, and the "parricidal" critics of the eighties, like Senkman and Sosnowski, who deconstruct the myth (celebrated by Gerchunoff and other writers) ofArgentina as the immigrant's Promised Land. Looking back at the history of Jewish Argentine writing, Lindstrom finds "a long-standing and understandable reluctance, especially in troubled periods, to raise, as...