Écriture et identité juive en Argentine dans la transition démocratique (review)

In his 1986 article "Sobre el inquietante y definitorio guión del escritor judío-latinoamericano" ("On the uncomfortable and defining hyphen of the Jewish-Latin American writer"), the well-known Argentine critic Saúl Sosnowski argued that the hyphenated nature of "Jewish-Latin American" identity reveals a complex double marginality. On the one hand, to be Jewish in Latin America is to be an "other", a member of a minority group excluded from the dominant national identities as constructed in the post-independence period of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. On the other hand, in a global context, to be "Latin American" is also to be marginal, excluded from the cultural and political "centers" constituted by Europe and North America. I would add that there is yet another level of marginality at work here: to be Jewish and from Latin America is to be constructed as a minority "other" in relation to mainstream scholarship on Jewish identity, which privileges cultural production in Europe, the U.S., Canada and Israel. With this in mind, Dr. Viviana Fridman's recent manuscript Écriture et identité juive en Argentine dans la transition démocratique (Writing and Jewish identity in Argentina during the democratic transition) offers a solid and highly significant contribution to the field. It reveals the need for further work on this fascinating topic and simultaneously provides a model methodology.

Dr. Fridman's manuscript is a carefully crafted analysis of seven significant works by key Jewish-Argentine authors. Her study uses as a point of departure Alberto Gerchunoff's 1910 collection of stories, Los gauchos judíos (The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas), the paradigmatic antecedent of contemporary Jewish-Argentine narrative, and demonstrates its impact on the construction and representation of Jewish-Argentine identity in more recent works. The other novels included in the study are: Mario Szichman's, A las 20:25 la señora entró en la inmortalidad (At 8:25 Evita Entered Immortality); Ricardo Feinstein's Mestizo; Cuando digo Magdalena (Call Me Magdalena) by Alicia Steimberg; Liliana Heker's El fin de la historia (The End of the story); Manuela Fingueret's Blues de la Calle Leiva (Blues from Leiva Street); and La gesta del marrano (Marrano, an Epic) by Marcos Aguinis. These novels were all written between 1981 and 1996, a period which corresponds roughly to the final days of the military dictatorship (1976-1983) and the transition to a relatively stable democracy. The time is significant, given that Argentine national identity was at that time in a state of instability in the aftermath of the horrendous violence visited upon citizens in the name of patriotism.

Fridman considers the novels comparatively from a sociological, rather than a purely literary perspective. Her stated goal is to provide a "sociocritical" analysis of the literary text or, in other words, an inquiry into the interrelation between the discursive and social configurations of literary texts and the structures of the socio-political and cultural contexts that give rise to them. She justifies this approach by reminding the reader that, "la littérature est, à la fois, productrice et produit du discours social" (literature is simultaneously producer and product of social discourse) (84). Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches, including those of Barthes, Ricoeur, Lukács and Goldmann, she establishes a solid methodological framework and applies it consistently throughout. Given her manuscript's explicit socio-critical perspective, one finds at the heart of her analysis the concept of the "sociogram," essentially a mapping of social interactions in given circumstances or contexts. She uses this methodological concept to explore and deconstruct the dynamics between fictional Jewish characters and the social and historical situations in which they find themselves and, consequently, their search for personal and community identity.

After providing a clear and concise synopsis of each work and a solid justification for their inclusion in the study, Fridman offers readers unfamiliar with the specific context a brief but essential socio...