The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar (review)

Scliar is one of the most comprehensively “Jewish writers” in Latin America. Although he is well known to connoisseurs of the short story in a continental tradition that has produced figures of international stature like Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar, he is, like most Brazilian writers, not widely read either by other Latin Americans (because of the differences between the Portuguese of Brazil and the Spanish of the majority of Latin America) or even in English, a language into which there are many superb translations of Brazilian literature: Brazilian literature is extensively translated into English, but not extensively read or discussed, at least to judge by conventional literary forums. The result is that Brazilian literature, which has some truly great writers (Brazil’s nineteenth-century novelist Machado de Assis is easily of the stature of any European writer of the period) is marginalized within Latin American literature and marginalized in American literary circles in the same way that all Latin American literature is. This becomes even truer when it is a matter of a subaltern writer like Scliar, whose subalternity in this case is his commitment to Jewish culture defined in the broadest terms possible. Although Latin America has major Jewish cultural centers (Buenos Aires being the largest; São Paulo being one of the most dynamic and prosperous; Mexico City being one of the most assimilated), virtually no Latin American Jewish writer has entered the mainstream of American consciousness (or European, for that matter). Borges wrote about his probable Jewish roots and wrote many stories based on Jewish themes, particularly the Cabala, but Borges is not usually identified as a Jewish writer.

The Jewish Latin America series, directed by Ivan Stavans of Amherst College, and published by the University of New Mexico Press, is a brilliant project designed to correct the lack of access to Latin American writers of Jewish descent whose works concern themselves with Jewish themes. Stavans has made superb choices for inclusion in the series, the translations are first-rate, and his articulate and urbane (and often highly personalized) introductions establish clear reading parameters for each text.

The Scliar collection is one of the most important in the series, not only because of the comprehensiveness of the representation (five-hundred pages consisting of one hundred stories drawn from a half-dozen collections—about one third of Scliar’s total number of short story collections—spread out over three decades), but also because of the sheer scope of Scliar’s fictional enterprise.

Scliar is very much a representative of many of the most sophisticated and noteworthy Jewish writers of Latin America. He is deeply imbued with secular Jewish culture (although he laments never having learned Yiddish, which is still spoken in many Latin American communities): although he is not a religious Jew (few Latin American Jewish writers are, as Latin American Jewry tends to be divided in a pronounced way between conservative and orthodox Jews and secular Jews, with little of a reform middle-ground), Scliar is profoundly familiar with Jewish history, with the richness of Jewish heritage, custom, and ritualistic observance. Scliar is often bitingly critical of the rigidities of Jewish law and of the intransigence of the debates involving compliance, assimilation, and interfaith relations, but his writing turns on a sensitivity to the abiding meanings of Jewish lore and custom. And also like many other Latin American Jewish writers, Scliar is less concerned with the question of assimilation than he is in hanging onto a level of Jewish identity that provides the individual less with a place in the world through a defining opposition to an overwhelming majoritarian society than with some context of meaning in a society in which everything is in flux and overarching principles of nationhood, and therefore personhood, are in either short supply or, when they do exist, are a mix of jingoism and worn nationalistic clichés. One could pursue this discussion in terms...