Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations

1. The Self and the World

The Self and the World i. s. My ancestors lived in Poland and the Ukraine for centuries. They were poor and uneducated merchants, although my mother’s ancestors maintained a prominent standing within the Jewish community . In the late nineteenth century, as pogroms erupted and anti-Semitism spread, various members of the family decided to immigrate to the New World: a few came to the United States, others traveled as far as Brazil. As a result of immigration quotas, a portion ended up in Mexico. My father’s mother, Bela Stavchansky, arrived in the early decades of the twentieth century from Nove-Brudno, a small town near Warsaw. The process of adaptation was rough, but they succeeded marvelously . Their genealogical talent to assimilate into new environments proved to be as effective as it had been many times in the past. In some cases, the accepted strategy seemed to be to altogether cut ties with Europe: not to speak a word of Polish again, not to invoke relatives’ names. . . . For a while I thought this attitude to be cruel to the degree of being inhuman. I didn’t think highly of one of my grandmothers because of it. But as I grow older, I realize that every immigrant, to survive, needs to find his own tactics. I too forced myself not to phone the Mexican family too often by long distance when I moved to New York City. I put their photos in my room, but sometimes quietly hid them under the mattress. 3 1 The Self and the World n. s. Were you afraid to cave in to nostalgia? i. s. I remember the period as one filled with moments of intense longing. n. s. Ellis Island holds a firm nostalgic grip on the American Jewish imagination both in literature and film. Is there an equivalent iconic port of entry for Jewish immigration to Mexico? i. s. Not really. . . . Veracruz was a port of entrance, but immigrants also arrived at other sites, including Central America. Keep in mind that, unlike the massive immigration through Ellis Island, the newcomers to Mexico were just a few hundred, and at times a couple of thousand a year. n. s. New York is part of your spiritual and intellectual center of gravity . For example, in your memoir On Borrowed Words [2001] you wrote: “No matter where I live, no matter where I travel, the only place I feel I truly belong is New York.” New York has been transformed by the tragic events of 9/11. i. s. The events have had a deep impact on me, as they have on most everyone I know. It is a date that will live in history as a watershed: before it we enjoyed life with a naïveté that today seems almost obscene . It was Billy Collins who said that New York in particular, and the United States in general, lost their virginity on that date. If so, it was rape that brought it along: a violent act of submission. n. s. One passage in your memoir eerily foreshadows these troubled times: “New York is a city that is omnipresent in literature, so much so that if a catastrophe ever occurred one would be able to re-create its sidewalks, dance clubs, and subway stations, its love affairs and robberies, even the shadow projected by a restless fly on a rain-soaked umbrella, through what its inhabitants write about.” Do you still feel that literature can re-create life formerly existing in Manhattan or is it part of a past we know we can’t return to? i. s. Obviously, no one ever imagined such a catastrophe. But surely literature is a way to overcome death and oblivion. Masterpieces will emerge from the ashes. n. s. Let me return to the perception of the Jewish experience in Mexico . How is it different from that in the United States? i. s. America, in the mind of Eastern European Jews, was a Promised Land. Mexico, on the other hand, wasn’t even on the map. If anything 4 The Self and the World was known about it, it was marred with distortion: primitive, barbaric , uncivilized. . . . n. s. Still, Mexico City became a small-scale center of secular Yiddish culture and learning. As a young boy you attended Mexico City’s oldest Yiddish day school, the Colegio Israelita de México. How did your education impact or...