Immigration and Childhood Experience in Two Contemporary Andean Jewish Novels

In spite of the relatively low numbers of Jews living in Ecuador and Peru, Jewish experience in the Andean region of South America has found literary expression in narrative works by Diego Viga (1907-1977) and Isaac Goldemberg (1945). Through the use of the child narrator, these two novelists represent various processes of cultural adaptation and individual survival. As children of Jewish immigrants to Latin America, these characters frequently cope with the contradictory circumstances that growing up Jewish in Ecuador and Peru often presents. A comparison of Diego Viga's The Lost Year (1963) and Isaac Goldemberg's The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner (1977) reveals the kind of confusion and hostility that these children encounter and the strategies they employ for dealing with feelings of isolation, abandonment, and rejection.