The Book of Memories (review)

178 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 modem era" and "fueled European settlement and expansion in the western hemisphere" (pp. 8-9). Faber chooses to focus on the British empire rather than other European nations because Britain transported far more blacks during the height of the slave trade in the latter part of the eighteenth century than any other nation. Nevertheless, his starting point is the seventeenth century, in which he notes that Jewish merchants of the Resettlement tended not to invest in either the Company ofRoyal Adventurers Trading into Africa, or the Royal African Company, or the South Sea Company in the early eighteenth century, or the Company ofMerchants Trading to Africa in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, in the colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, and mainland America, few Jews had a stake in slavery and the factoring enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for they were not engaged in agriculture but worked as shopkeepers and merchants who supplied the planters and their slaves. Thus persons such as Alexandre Lindo in Jamaica and Jacob Rodrigues Rivera and Aaron Lopez in Rhode Island-persons who made fortunes in the business of slavery-were the exceptions and not the rule. As a whole, this book, which is loaded with quantitative data, is a taxing read. One must wonder why Faber, who states that his purpose "is not to establish degrees ofguilt or blame nor, conversely, to exonerate" (p. 8), attempts to evade the ethical dimensions of this problem, especially since inter-ethnic conflicts, such as those involving certain segments ofthe black and Jewish groups in the early 1990s, by their very nature center around ethical problems. Suffice it to say that Faber has delivered a powerful body blow to those who claim erroneously that persons ofJewish faith dominated the British slave trade. Unfortunately, the historical consciousness of persons like those among both blacks and Jews who view the other group in monolithic images (rather than in terms ofproportions as Faber suggests) and passionately embrace negative myths ofthe other, will remain oblivious to the empirical data, regardless of how graphically they are rendered. Vernon J. Williams, Jf. History and American Studies Purdue University The Book of Memories, by Ana Maria Shua, translated by Dick Gerdes. Introduction by Han Stavans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. 178 pp. $16.95. The life and times ofthe Argentine Jewish family Rimetka is told by three generations in an ongoing discussion centered around the items to be found in the family album called The Book ofMemories. Whether it was grandfather's forged exit visa, granny's bitter disappointment over the unflattering photograph her children put on her grave- Book Reviews 179 stone, Aunt Judith's marriage to a gentile, or the time Uncle Pucho disappeared, Shua's often unidentified narrators weave a dissonant but familiar-sounding story for contemporary readers. In this novel of assimilation and displacement, family ties are stretched to the limitby characters attempting to forge a new identity beyond the culture of Jewish ghettos. Their mishaps and quirks are funny to third- and fourth-generation readers, particularly their reinvention ofsoccer to fit their family's assets and liabilities. Ana Maria Shua's very name places her at the crossroads of many cultures in the Jewish Diaspora. Ana comes from the Hebrew Chane, but Maria is unmistakably Spanish Catholic. Shua is her paternal grandfather's Lebanese name simplified from Schoua. Born in Buenos Aires in 1951, Ani Shua is a versatile, prominent and hardworking writer who has won literary prizes since the publication of her poetry at age sixteen. Shua has written for the Argentine screen and has a great sense ofwhat sort ofanthologies will be successful: horror stories, sudden fiction (extremely briefstories), love stories, folk tales from Chelm, satirical essays about the average Argentine husband, El marido argentino promedio (1991). She deserves special recognition for her novels Soy paciente (1980)-the title has been rendered in English with great ingenuity as Patient (Discoveries) by the translator, David W. Foster-and Los amores de Laurita (1984), both of which were also adapted as feature films. The story of the gutsy, soccer-playing Aunt Judith, a major character in...