Carlos M. Grünberg's Circumcision of the Tongue

Neo-Sephardim

Seeking to naturalize their place in a former dominion of the Inquisition, in the first half of the twentieth century several Argentinean Jewish writers—Ashkenazi immigrants or sons of immigrants—began unearthing the vestiges of a Jewish presence in Spanish texts dating from before the expulsion of 1492. This strategy has occasionally earned them the label "neo-Sephardim," a concept promoted within Latin American Jewish studies by one of the field's founding scholars, Judith Laikin Elkin.¹ These "neo-Sephardim" styled themselves as continuers of such Jewish or converso literary forbearers as Santob de Carrión, Fernando de Rojas, or even Miguel de Cervantes.² The writer in this category best-known to English speakers is Alberto Gerchunoff, whose 1910 novel Los gauchos judíos [The Jewish Gauchos], a paean to Jewish agricultural settlement on the pampas, has become a veritable classic of Argentinean literature. Another writer who could be called neo-Sephardic is the poet Carlos M. Grünberg.³

Biographical Overview

The son of an immigrant watchmaker from Jaffa, hailing from a Russian Jewish family long established in Palestine, Carlos M. Grünberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1903.⁴ Holding degrees in the humanities and in law, he made a living as a literature teacher and as a jurist. Though he collaborated on a treatise on estate law in 1930, Grünberg's greatest passions were poetry and Jewish rights, which he combined in a way that few writers in non-Jewish languages have managed. He began publishing works in the art pour l'art vein favored by the Buenos Aires literary group "Florida," far from the socially-committed writing employed by the contemporaneous "Boedo" circle of Argentine authors.

Grünberg's work has received little public notoriety, despite the praise given him by no less a figure than Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinean master penned an enthusiastic preface to Grünberg's 1940 poetic volume Mester de judería [Jewry's Art], the title of which plays upon the names of two medieval Spanish literary genres: the mester de clerecía [clergy's or scholar's art] and the mester de juglaría [minstrel's art.]⁵ The title suggests a desire to stake out a Jewish presence within the Spanish language and, by extension, in Argentinean society. Praise for the freedom granted Jews there abounds in the book, as do warnings of residual anti-Semitism gathering new strength from political developments in Europe at the time.

In 1946, Grünberg published Narración de la Pascua, a version of the Passover Haggadah. The title, a literal rendering of Haggadah shel Pesach, reflects the unique status of the work as a modern, nearly verbatim translation of the Seder ceremonial; the major concession to Spanish usage is the addition of the verb "to be," which is lacking in the Hebrew present tense. The reproduction of Hebrew word-order in Spanish partakes of the neo-Sephardic texture of Grünberg's work by mirroring the language of Torah study in medieval Spain.

In this same decade, Grünberg fulfilled another career wish, to become a diplomat, a wish stymied no doubt by the anti-Semitic and generally anti-progressive atmosphere reigning in the Argentinean Ministry of Foreign Relations. In 1948, the newly created State of Israel named Grünberg the liaison officer to the Argentine government, which had abstained from the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine. His efforts led to the establishment of relations between the two countries a year later.

Though Grünberg continually published poems and essays, another volume of his work did not appear until 1965. Its title, Junto a un río de Babel [By a River of Babel], ironically echoes the biblical injunction not to forget Jerusalem, for the twin Zions in the author's life—Argentina and Israel—had shown themselves to be flawed, and recent Jewish history all too catastrophic. Some poems—"Ultratumba," "Testamento," "Codicilio," "Inmortalidad" ["Beyond the Grave," "Last Will," "Codicil," "Immortality"]—prefigure all too clearly the author's death three years later, in Buenos Aires.

Onomastics

The...