“I, a Jew”: Borges, Nazism, and the Shoah

Es infantil impacientarse; la misericordia de Hitler es ecuménica; en breve (si no lo estorban los vendepatrias y los judíos) gozaremos de todos los beneficios de la tortura, de la sodomía, del estupro y de las ejecuciones en masa.

It is childish to be impatient; Hitler’s mercy is ecumenical; in short (if the traitors and Jews don’t disrupt him) we will enjoy all the benefits of torture, sodomy, rape, and mass executions.

Jorge Luis Borges, “1941,” published December 1941

CREATING “BORGES”

Would Borges have been “Borges” without World War II and the Holocaust? Let me be provocative: without the confluence of Hitler, the collapse of the Western order as he knew it, the national-fascist revolution in his own Argentina, and the torture, sodomy, rape, and mass executions, the so-so poet and sharp-tongued essayist would not have become “Borges,” the maker of the ficciones that earned him international fame—and indeed, the subject of this JQR forum. In fact: I’d like to propose that without the intervention of what he would call lo hebreo, the process of creating “Borges,” the renovator of representation, might not have happened.

Some Borgistas might shake their heads in doubt, but permit me to run with the idea. I’ll follow a fourfold path: first, the personal experience of the supposedly impersonal author; second, the politics of the allegedly apolitical writer; third, the unreal fictions of the all too real fabulist; and finally, the censored reception of the hater of censorship.

THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF THE IMPERSONAL AUTHOR

“Borges” didn’t spring into being fully formed. The author is informed by a wealth of life experience. Absurdly, the notion that Borges somehow robotically shunned personal circumstance or didn’t live in reality is a long-held dogma. Jaime Alazraki, one of the writer’s most assiduous commentators (and one of the first students of the Kabbalah in Borges), stated it bluntly when he decreed: Borges has “avoided human experience.”¹

The extreme version of this notion served as narrative fodder for the German novelist Gerhard Köpf. In his novel Borges gibt es nicht (There is no Borges, 1992), it turns out that an actor has impersonated Borges all along; the man never existed, never penned a single line. Alazraki and Köpf both fell into the same artfully dug trap: they confused a fictional practice that refused to replicate personal circumstance with the actual avoidance of human experience. The confusion reveals less about Borges than about his glossators’ difficulties relating to his innovative confrontation with reality.

The making of the “Jewish” Borges began in earnest in Geneva, during and after World War I. Like other semi-moneyed Argentine families of the time, the Borges family made a trip to Europe to soak up culture, and in their case, to get an operation to help Borges’s father’s ailing eyes. In Geneva, Jorge Luis, aka Georgie, was immersed in painful and enriching otherness. The languages spoken, French, Latin, and German, were not his own; the Swiss, he later recalled, were standoffish; close friends, Maurice Abramowicz and Simon Jichlinski, were both Jews of Polish origin; and the First World War was never far away, affecting even Switzerland, so skilled at keeping the devil beyond the Alps.

“Jewishness,” as Borges perceived it, swirled around each of these realities. He enthusiastically claimed to share the heritage of his adolescent buddies; he read, mostly in German, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, author of the Kabbalah-saturated novel Der Golem, along with other works on Jewish mysticism, and was moved by the biblically imagistic German Expressionists. Borges felt a sense of being both inside and outside Western culture, a difficult but fruitful “Jewish” position he later recommended for Latin Americans. He also was moved by the Expressionist poets, who captured the mass destruction of the war and were the only ones for whom protest against the atrocities, Borges said, trumped typical Teutonic philosophical coolness or mere formal experimentation. (All the other “isms,” Borges told me in an interview, were...