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Clarice Lispector on Jewishness after the Shoah: A Reading of “Perdoando Deus”
- Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 16, Number 2, June 2018
- pp. 225-238
- 10.1353/pan.2018.0013
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This article examines the view of the Brazilian Jewish author Clarice Lispector on the triangular relation between Jewishness, the Shoah and the chosenness of the Jewish people by combining biographical evidence with a close reading of her short story “Perdoando Deus.” Through an analysis of allegorical motifs, “Perdoando Deus” emerges as a historical, philosophical, and personal (anti)theological process. As such, this short story, mostly overlooked due to its obscurity, marks a watershed in Lispector’s oeuvre in terms of the recognition of her Jewishness — which she defines not as a religion but as an ethnic category and a collectivity of survivors.