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3 / Re-membering the Nation by Remembering the Family: Ana María Shua’s The Book of Memories Ana María Shua was born in Buenos Aires, in 1951, to a Jewish Argentine family. She published her first book, El sol y yo (1967), when she was sixteen years old and has gone on to publish prolifically in a variety of genres, including the novel, short story, poetry, and children’s literature. Shua’s interest in Jewish culture, tradition, and humor is evidenced by such books as Risas y emociones de la cocina judía (1993), Cuentos judíos con fantasmas y demonios (1994), and El pueblo de los tontos (1995). Shua has received numerous literary awards, including two for her first book of poems, and she was awarded a Guggenheim for her work on El libro de los recuerdos (1994; The Book of Memories, 1998). The Book of Memories tells the story of several generations of the Jewish Argentine Rimetka family. Like the narrators in her text, Shua is from a family of Jewish immigrants. The Book of Memories can be read as a text based on family genealogy and history that is an attempt to preserve Shua’s cultural memory and to come to terms with the history and stories of her family and her country, characteristics often cited as common to third- and fourth-generation Jewish Latin American writers (Lockhart xxii). Memory is a central theme of Shua’s narrative, as it is of many autobiographical texts. Indeed, Steven Sadow, in his introduction to King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers, points out that “in writing that is both Jewish and autobiographical, memory is oftheutmostimportance.Memoryoftheoldcountry,parentsandgrandparents , arrival and culture shock, growing up, places lived in, ‘making re-membering the nation / 73 it in America,’ artistic, business, or political achievement, anti-Semitism and the Nazis” (xvi). He goes on to note that there is “ambivalence about personal and collective memory, a constant evaluation of Jewish identity as a personal issue and in a Latin American context” (xvi)—all issues that we can trace in Shua’s text (and in the autobiographical narratives of Luisa Futoransky discussed in chapter 2). Other critics writing on Jewish Latin American literature have also underscored the issue of memory. Nora Glickman writes of the primacy of memory in the works of Latin American Jewish writers explicitly preoccupied with Jewish issues. Many of these authors have written of their own memories and of their ancestors’ memories, blending together the personal and the collective histories. Glickman writes of authors who “share a history of exile that consists of memories of uprooting, persecutions , pogroms, and irrational hatreds” (300) and who persistently incorporate their families into their fictions in ways that attest, “both positively and negatively, to their enduring attachment to the richness and pain of the Jewish experience” (321)—descriptions that fit Shua’s work here as well. Marjorie Agosín, in her introduction to Passion, Memory, and Identity, discusses how the “gestures of writing become the retrieval acts of memory” so that “all literary acts are also acts of remembering ” (xii–xiii). She traces a number of fundamental themes and concerns in the Jewish literature of Latin America, including the three that mark out the title of her collection. Agosín asserts that the unifying tradition for Jewish women writers in Latin America is the memoir, arguing that it is in memoir that “Jewish women writers assume their own identities, remember through the voice of the father or the mother, but at the same time feel the world from their position as outsiders. The act of writing memoirs that document exiles and arrivals and that incorporate , through personal experiences, what it means to be Jewish in Latin America is probably the most powerful contribution these writers can make” (xiv). Agosín argues that being Jewish means living always in two worlds, the past (which is recuperated through memories) and the present (xviii). Shua recuperates the past world through memories at the same time that she inscribes her self and her family into Argentine (and Jewish Argentine) culture. The memories of migration and multiple diasporas are crucial, but so too are the memories of family vacations and financial ventures. In The Book of Memories, Shua presents the life of the family, like the life of the South American country, full of everyday events like childhood soccer games, impetuous love affairs, successful and failed businesses, [18.221.146.223] Project MUSE (2024...

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