The Maps of Nostalgia: Juana Salabert's Velódromo de invierno

The Maps of Nostalgia: Juana Salabert’s Velódromo de invierno tabea alexa linhard washington university in st. louis  Árboles yoran por luvia I montanias por ayre Ansi yoran los mis ojos Por ti kerida amante Yoro i te digo ke va ser de mi En tierras ajenas yo me vo murir . . . (Kante sefardi) Lost and Found Three crucial moments in history merge in Juana Salabert’s Velódromo de invierno : the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492; 1942, the moment when all Jews in France were confined and eventually deported to concentration camps; and, finally, a symbolic reconciliation and return to the lost homeland, Sefarad, in 1992. Different temporalities intersect seamlessly in the text: the novel takes place between 1942, when Ilse, a young Jewish girl is able to escape imprisonment and certain death in a concentration camp, and 1992, when her son Herschel confronts his mother’s traumatic past. Yet a third character, Sebastia ́n Miranda, a Sephardic Jew from Thessalonica, connects the past and the present, and also serves as a link between the twentieth century diaspora and the consequences of 1492. The exchanges between Herschel and Sebastián also mark an encounter between generations, between past and present, between a pre-World War II Mediterranean childhood where everything seemed to be certain , even comforting, and a post-Holocaust Atlantic childhood profoundly marked by doubt and ambiguity. At the end of the novel Herschel recovers a lost object that at first glance might provide a sense of closure and circularity to the novel. The object, an engraving of a mermaid, reappears in a second-hand bookstore in Paris. It is an eighteenth-century German piece that once belonged to Herschel’s grandmother , but one she had to sell quickly before being deported from France to the Nazi death camps. Jokingly, Herschel asks the Jewish storeowner whether the fact that the artwork is German might allow for a discount. In lieu of a response, the storeowner inquires whether Herschel is Sephardic. Herschel replies: ‘‘Tal vez. Soy español y vengo de Puerto Rico. Pero mi abuela era alemana. Judı́a 62  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.1 (2007) alemana’’ (259). This moment represents the first hesitant answer Herschel articulates : up to this point, his process of identification has mainly consisted of question upon question about his family’s fate. It appears again that we might be witnessing a moment of closure: Herschel has just found the same engraving that Annelies Landermann, his grandmother, had to sell hurriedly in 1942 in Paris. At that time the Vichy-led government had closed the French borders and soon afterward would round up Jews, regardless of citizenship, at the ‘‘Velódromo de invierno,’’ to later deport them to concentration camps.1 Here, most of them, including Annelies, her husband, and her son, would be put to death. Only Herschel’s mother survived, as she escaped from the Velódromo, leaving the others behind. Yet more than giving a sense of closure to a novel that can only remain openended , this recovered object allows the protagonist to sketch a map of his past, present, and future: a softly-traced topography of nostalgia. In a text filled with journeys that never reach their destination, such a map is not necessarily a path to be followed, but rather a means to articulate the traumatic history of the twentieth century, in which diaspora, displacement, and the return to an idealized homeland come together. To use the terms Svetlana Boym proposes in The Future of Nostalgia, such maps come into being in a constant movement between restorative and reflective nostalgia . While the former, explains Boym, ‘‘puts emphasis on the nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps,’’ the latter ‘‘dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’’ (41). Even more crucial is that ‘‘(t)he first category of nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth’’ and that ‘‘(r)estorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history , in the dreams...