The Genealogies

THE GENEALOGIES /Margo Glantz translatedby Magdalena Garría-Pinto and Catherine Parke Margo Glantz lives in Mexico City where she writes fiction and criticism and serves as Director of the Department of Literature at the National Institute of Fine Arts. Her two forthcoming works are a collection of essays entitledLa lengua en la mano (Tongue in Hand) anda criticalfiction calledDe la erotica inclinación de enredarse los cabellos (Of the Erotic Inclination of Becoming Entangled In Hair}, The excerpts presented here are from The Genealogies (Las Genealogías, Mexico, 1981), a fictionalautobiography. ALL OF US, whether or not we· descend from noble lineages, have our genealogies. I am descended from Genesis, not out of pride, but out of necessity. My parents were born in a Jewish Ukraine, very different from the Ukraine of today, more different yet from the Mexico where I was born—this Mexico, Federal District, where I had the luck to come into the world amid the cries of the merchants at the Merced market, those merchants whom my mother, dressed in white from head to foot, used to stand watching in amazement. I can't be accused, like Isaac Babel, of flowery writing or bookishness, since unlike him (or my father) I didn't study Hebrew or the Bible or the Talmud (because I wasn't born in Russia and I'm not a male). Like Joan of Arc I hear voices, but I am not a maid and I have no desire to be burnt at the stake, although I am attracted by the gaudy and beautiful colors that Shklovski condemned Babel for when they were not yet old men, and that he remembers nostalgically now that he is one (that is to say, Shklovski remembers, because Babel died in a concentration camp in Siberia, 14 March 1941). Perhaps what attracts me most about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, of its color and grotesqueness, the same awareness that really makes Jews a small people with a big sense of humor, with their simple cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. I am attracted by old photographs of a Lithuanian peddler who smiles out of the print with a goatee beard (which invited persecution) and an outsized overcoat while he offers trinkets; beside him we see the vendor of dead man's clothes, the farmyard jackal, who can smell out the imminent death of the man whose suit he will be buying. I also feel drawn to those children at the /eider (Jewish school), walking beside a grandfather, a boy without shoes and an old man with a worn-out look' and a white beard, but J don't belong to them, except for one drowsy part of me, the part of me 156 · The Missouri Review that is closest to my father, a little peasant boy, the youngest of a family of emigrants, whose eider sister, Rojl, disappeared from the house when she was young, perhaps in Besarabia and whose brothers began to emigrate to the States after the 1905 pogroms. When I see a Warsaw shoemaker or a Wolonin tailor, or a water carrier or a Dnieper boatman, he looks to me like my father's brothers, although his brothers became prosperous merchants in Philadelphia and swapped the skull cap and beard for clothes from the big department stores, probably Macy's. When I see Lublin children who can hardly reach the table and sit astonished, wearing their caps, as always, with some old books in front of them, while the melamed (teacher) uses a pointer to teach them the Hebrew characters, I seem to be seeing, through them, my father finishing his work in the fields, with his muddy shoes, not allowed to play because he has to learn the Ten Commandments, Leviticus, the Talmud and the rites of those festivals and celebrations which are so often foreign to me. I didn't have a religious upbringing. My mother didn't separate the plates from the pans, and made no clear division between containers that were for meat and those that were for milk products. Unlike my grandmother, who wore a wig to hide her hair...