Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations

Preface

The first time I read the work of Ilan Stavans, I was perusing the pages of a favorite literary journal of mine, Transition. His witty and biting essay “Two Peruvians” played the personality of novelist Mario Vargas Llosa off against the persona of Shining Path leader Carlos Abimael Guzmán Reynoso . Like scores of other readers before and after, I was struck by Stavans’s touch with words: his prose was luminous, noncondescending, and thought provoking. Indeed, the way he dished out the “snapper” reminded me of Mark Twain. Like Twain, he cut his teeth in journalism, and, just like the author of Huckleberry Finn, he employs a sharp, argumentative style that makes the reader’s ride less bumpy when traveling to the payoff. Stavans also knows his postmodernism inside out, and his magic prose is filled with humor, trickery, and sleight of hand. He draws into a bag of tricks again and again on subjects ranging from Subcomandante Marcos to Selena to Elián Gonzáles. But for all his style and playfulness, Stavans is a man of letters and ideas with electricity at his fingertips—a man at once committed to the ancient double life represented by the pen and the sword. In an age where we have abandoned the page-turner for the channel changer, his oeuvre is a passport back into the universe of Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Wilson, and Isaiah Berlin, all of whom had a formative influence on him. Through his essays, Stavans journeys into the realm where the intellect always tests itself anew. He is a fiercely independent critic: he might throw down the gauntlet when he feels that a piece has been marked up way beyond its real value; or he will praise a manifestation of pop culture if it appears to him to be an allegory or perhaps a symptom of a larger human issue. We are invariably inspired by his courage and conviction. vii Preface Preface After reading “Two Peruvians,” I didn’t return to Stavans again until 1996 when I found his collection The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories . I later went out and bought his other books as quickly as they hit the press. I took them with me on a research trip to Brazil. On my return, I worked up the conviction to write to him—the first of many such letters. I was then on staff at Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. I was also deeply involved in a personal exploration of Jewish life in America and abroad, and in the way the memory of the Holocaust lives on. Those demands took me all over Europe and into North Africa and Israel. I examined the Jewish past in prewar Europe, and the Jewish present of survivors who had rebuilt their lives in Israel, America, Europe, Latin America, and South Africa. Those experiences inevitably informed my discussions with Stavans as our correspondence accumulated. I still vividly recall an early exchange with him: a discussion of Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, on our “fathers,” or what we consider to be the “official ” Jewish-American approach to history. His comments were unpredictable , radical, and enlightening. “We have much to learn from the period of cohabitation in medieval Spain,” he said. “Jews then understood the concept of ‘tolerance’ in less manipulative a fashion than we do today. American Jews have a monolithic, Eurocentric viewpoint. Diversity for them is comfortable when it occurs outside their realm, but not in the comfort of home.” The conversations in this book are filled with such comments, and collectively they inspired me to complete a book of my own conversations with Stavans. The dictionary defines the word “conversation” as “informal or friendly talk; exchange of ideas and opinions by talking informally.” Recorded and transcribed, conversations, might of course be far from leisurely paced, especially when they are destined for print. We want to put the best face on our words. The result is often a stiffness and dogmatism that is unappealing . This is because, after months on the lecture circuit or press junket, a writer’s responses become polished and rehearsed. But the reader of this volume is likely to be surprised. Stavans is what the French describe as a conversateur: his answers to my questions—questions that I hope are a map of and a compass to his peripatetic mind—are candid, panoramic, even artful. They defy expectations and, as such, they constantly...