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Chapter 12 Shared Memories
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Chapter 12 Shared Memories Nedda G. de Anhalt 162 And as I speak to myself, I re¶ect and invent myself. I discover who I am. —Octavio Paz, in Vigilias II what does it mean to be a Jewish woman in Latin America? It’s not an easy question to answer since it means folding back into myself, contemplating the events of the past and resurrecting them in order to offer a partial history and geography of my origins. If they had to be lined up, I’d say that Cuban, Jewish, and Mexican factors all have their chromosomes carefully implanted in my spiritual universe. my mother, born in warsaw, and my father, born in Riga but educated in Vilna, arrived in Havana, Cuba on different dates. There they met, fell in love, married, and brought me into the world. The day and time? Five in the afternoon on the ¤fth of February, 1934. I spent my childhood, adolescence, and part of my young adulthood in Havana. At the University of Havana I began to study civil, diplomatic, and administrative law, studies I interrupted when I went You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. shared memories 163 as a transfer student to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Classi¤ed as a junior, I’d have graduated in another year, but I interrupted myeducationagain. I madeanimportant choice whichIstilldo not regret: to marry Enrique Anhalt. And since my husband was born in Mexico and lives there, this is how the second stage of my life became a Mexican one. About this topic, choice vs. destiny, I wrote a shortstoryaboutJewishlove,“ALoveStoryLike NoOther”(inCuentos inauditos [Mexico: Editorial Incaro, 1994]). What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in Latin America? The question is asked from an abstract point of view. The concept of Latin America, an apparently magni¤cent idea, is utopian. We are twentytwo very different countries, strangers to each other. No one could be more different from an Argentinian than a Bolivian, for example. And if you add to this gap their Jewishness, you have to ¤nd out whether it is Sephardi or Ashkenazi. But above all, I think that being a Jewish woman in Latin America, or in any other remote corner of the earth, means something similar: a belief in one God and an inherited burden of past injustices that impels one to try to construct a more ethical and more just human order. I don’t mean to imply that Judaism dedicates itself exclusively to the past,butthatitdoesextractinvaluablelessonsfromhistoryinordertolive in the present and see the future as a vibrant space of potential. Judaism has always been capable ofextracting a song ofhope from sufferings. Our marginalized condition engenders the need to embue our acts with moral meaning. The problem is that some Jews have forgotten this and have buried our best qualities under a frivolous or vain super¤ciality. But let’s take this step by step. my childhood in cuba was a time of all eyes and ears. I gazed constantly at the sea and at palm trees, stars, lizards popping in and out of great clumps of ¶owers. I listened to the calls of those selling fruits and other foods, pushing their merchandise on carts through the streets. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. nedda g. de anhalt 164 The Cuban language in contact with music was a great literary lesson. The tastes, aromas, and colors were the language of the pagan spirit of the island. Ididn’t withdraw from it, but rather submerged myselfin it. I lived like the vegetation or the clouds, feeling myself part of an enchanted nature. I felt Cuban but at the same time Jewish. Why? Because at an early age my ears heard about the trial of Captain Dreyfus and other terrible stories of anti-Semitism that my mother told me. I listened to how my father went to the Cuban authorities of the time to plead, to no avail, that the passengers of the ship the San Luis be allowed to disembark. I listened to my parents’ strategies for bringing to Cuba the only survivors of Nazism who remained from my...