Borges e outros rabinos (review)

Lyslei Nascimento's Portuguese-language Borges and Other Rabbis opens with a striking image: an old Jorge Luis Borges touching Ha-Kotel Ha-Maaravi, Jerusalem's sacred and ancient Western or Wailing Wall, during a visit to Israel. We don't actually see the photo, we just read a description, but that excellently suits Nascimento's purpose. She wants to show us how Jewish fragments of fragments of fragments disperse and recombine in Borges's oeuvre and form an archive of tradition, identity, and memory. Borges inscribes this archive in Latin America's culture, just as more recent artists and writers have done elsewhere, updating the re-inscription process up to the present.

There are two ways of reading this book, one, as a self-standing object; the other as itself a fragment of a larger whole. As a self-standing object, the volume covers much ground familiar in Borges criticism in English and Spanish as it relates to Jewish topics. For example, the idea that Borges is a kind of jocular "rabbi" who engages in a midrashic process, wherein he comments on earlier texts to tease new meanings out of them; or the significance of the Aleph, denoting language as an alphabet of symbols, particularly in the story "El Aleph," with Beatriz Viterbo as a text-woman de-territorialized rhizome-like into multiple images (43). Also, the Golem, symbolizing the power and danger of the creative word, and the exercise of bricolage in the recycling of the homunculus through Gustav Meyrink, Borges, and even the American sci fi series, the X-Files (83).

One of the more original moments in the book comes in this golem-inspired discussion about the X-Files episode "Kaddish," where we happen to find a murdered Isaac Luria, an exhumation of a grave, and a book about Jewish mysticism that tells of a robot energized only by the Word. Nascimento then applies Umberto Eco's typology of different kinds of mirroring, to the iterations of the magic clay man, in an interesting mirroring of her own.

Also present in Borges e outros rabinos are the themes of the Shoah and Jewish memory of the catastrophe. These memories, like the Western Wall itself, are often fragmented, disseminated and buried. The story "El milagro secreto" commands the author's attention in this regard, a fiction that has received extensive important commentary that Nascimento does not mention. Borges's other audacious Holocaust story, "Deutsches Requiem," is covered too, though less fully, and again without citing the large bibliography on the text that has appeared in recent years. A chapter on the Kabbalah and Borges's crime fiction completes Nascimento's study, centering on "La muerte y la brújula" (Death and the Compass), where detective Eric Lönnrot famously "solves" the mystery of multiple deaths through the manipulation of the Tetragrammaton, God's omnipotent and unpronounceable four-letter Name.

If as a free-standing object the volume is familiar, it becomes de-familiarized within a broader context—de-familiarized understood here positively, as a good thing. Towards the beginning of the study Nascimento comments that the relation between the Jewish archive and Latin American writer/artists seems particularly compelling. In a continent marked by multiple immigrations, she says, the Jewish tradition constitutes one of the area's most important cultural heritages, since Jewish themes and images coalesce significantly with the predominantly Christian Iberian tradition inherited by or imposed on Latin Americans (25).

Her strong statement points to a wider movement that in recent decades has vehemently challenged that imposition—the work of writers, artists, musicians, film makers, and scholars like Nascimento herself who refuse the inherited blanking out or hiding of the Jewish, what Borges called lo hebreo, instead placing it up front and personal. Brazil itself exemplifies the rebellion that is taking place in the globalized Latin America that today includes Latin Americans and Latin Americanists the world over. Brazil, where scholars today unabashedly talk about the great Clarice Lispector's Jewish schooling, and Yiddish, and Kabbalah...