The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, and: Cláper (review)

116 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 Book Reviews The Jewish Gauchos ofthe Pampas, by Alberto Gerchunoff, translated by Prudencio de Pereda, foreword by Ilan Stavans. Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 1998. 149 pp. $18.95. Claper, by Alicia Freilich, translated by Joan E. Friedman, introduction by Ilan Stavans. Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 1998. 182 pp. $17.95. To most Americans the republics south of the Rio Grande are the stuff of benign neglect. Only the occasional sweep ofillegal aliens, the momentary drug bust, the quick vacation on some tropical beach may briefly lift our eyelids as we tsk-tsk our bemusement atthose underdeveloped folk. Generally, we don't really care. The world conducts its serious economic and cultural business in New York, or London, or Tokyo, or Singapore. ~o cares about a bunch of vilde chayes on the pampa plains? Where are the pampas, anyway? I use vilde chayes intentionally, since Jews are by and large no better informed than their fellow Americans. The Jewish world runs on a U.S.-Israel axis, with Europe included because it's where our grandparents came from and where the Holocaust occurred. But Latin America? Ah, yes, what about those Nazis in Argentina? Happily, change is in the air. Academe, at least, has discovered not only that there are Jews in Latin America, but that they are vibrant, creative, with something to say to other Jews and culture-makers. In departments of history, sociology, cultural studies, and Latin American and Brazilian literatures a new discipline is emerging: Latin American Jewish Studies. (Jewish Studies has been slow to recognize the newcomer.) A confluence of fortunate-and less fortunate---<:ircumstances has put LAJS on the map, with literature often leading the way. Why now? Writers in Latin America are today asserting their Jewishness, however problematically. This wasn't always so. Until recently, Latin American Jewish intellectuals were often immigrants outside the mainstream or native-born Jews whose concerns had little or nothing to do with Judaism. Argentina's Alberto Gerchunoffwas an early exception; that is why his book has been reprinted. Harsh dictatorships in the seventies served as a painful impetus for change. Young Latin American Jews identified with progressive and democratic forces found themselves under a double siege-as Argentines, Chileans, Brazilians, or Uruguayans, and as Jews. Repression and exile led many to reconsider their Jewishness as a paradigm of suffering and resistance and as a source of cultural memory and pride. The result was an outpouring ofLatin American Jewish creativity: organizations,journals, conferences, Book Reviews 117 publishing houses, fiction, critical works. Democracy's return intensified the awakening. The Jerusalem-based Association of Jewish Writers in Spanish and Portuguese currently serves as the intellectual address for a network of authors living in Latin America, Spain, France, Israel, and the United States. It publishes Noa), an important literary journal whose name echoes with biblical intimations of catastrophe, survival, and rebirth. The association has sponsored heady writers' symposia in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Miami, and Jerusalem, and calmer scholarly events with AMILAT, the Israeli Society for Latin American Jewish Studies. In Buenos Aires, Argentine-Jewish intellectuals are spearheading the publication of novels, story collections, and anthologies. They are reediting books by previous generations ofLatin-American Jewish authors who wrote in Yiddish, Portuguese, and Spanish, creating their ancestors even as they look to the future. Marcos Aguinis, Ricardo Feierstein, Gererdo Mario Goloboff, Alicia Steimberg, and Elihau Toker are some of those identified with the new activism, which has spilled over into Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela. A corresponding surge of interest has overtaken the North, spurred by the decadeold Latin American Jewish Studies Association. LAJSA members are teaching courses in Latin American Jewish history and literature at majorU.S. universities, correcting the prejudiced, homogenizing picture of"Latin Americanness." (Are Freilich, Gerchunoff, or Aizenberg Hispanic names?) Their work as translators and critics is gaining acceptance for Latin American Jewish Studies in an academic and cultural climate that vocally celebrates difference-as long as it's narrowly defmed. English translations ofLatin American Jewish fiction were a rarity just a few short years ago. The exception, again, was Gerchunoff. His Los gauchos )udios (1910), a pioneering story collection aboutthe turn-of-the-century Jewish agricultural settlements on the Argentine pampas, was translated by Prudencio de Pereda in 1955; the book, however, has long been out ofprint. With the new vibrancy in the field, the moment was ripe for making Gerchunoff "speak English" again, and for letting his successors be heard. The University ofNew Mexico Press's timely translation series, "Jewish Latin America," underthe editorship ofIlan Stavans, partially fills the need. Pereda's reissued rendition inaugurates the series; Ciaper, by the Venezuelan novelist Alicia Freilich, follows. But was recycling a 40-year-old translation the best way to begin? Alas, unlike fine wine, translations do not improve with age. They tend to sour, become dated, as Mark Harman points out in the preface to his hailed new translation of Katka's The Castle, based on the restored text (Schocken, 1998). Edwin and Willa Muir's familiar English version of Das Schloss, built on Max Brod's severely abridged German edition, frequently ignored the tone, tentativeness, and contentiousness ofKatka's prose in the interest ofsmooth readability. Decades ofscholarship, updated views on the nature and 118 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 purpose of translation, better understanding of the Czech master's esthetic all have helped produce a "Kafka for the twenty-fIrst century." What readers and scholars needed was a "Gerchunofffor the twenty-fIrst century": a contemporary translation thattakes into account Gerchunoffs extensive linguistic and ideological revisions-there is a 1936 edition quite different from the original-as well as the controversies swirling around a book hailed as Argentine Jewry's "naturalization papers" and reviled as an accommodationist text. Closer to the Brod-Muir generation, Pereda provides a smoothly readable Gerchunoffbut rarely captures the author's tone, a kaleidoscopic mixture of archaic and modernist Spanish, transposed Yiddish, Yiddishized Hebraisms, and gaucho turns of phrase, as Gerchunoff strove to create a Spanish literary medium commensurate with the new Judeo-Argentine experience. There are likewise errors in the translation, and there is no consideration ofthe textual changes or the critical and political arguments. To have some form of Gerchunoff back in English print is better than noneStavans 's foreword gives relevant background information-but this is only a fIrst step. When a new, updated translation of Gerchunoffs classic appears, the circle will be complete. More successful is Joan Friedman's version ofAlicia Freilich's Claper(1987), the story ofan immigrant peddler-the quintessential door-klapper-and his Venezuelanborn daughter, who becomes more like him the more she tries to break away. The novel's polyphonic structure alternates the father's and daughter's voices, the immigrant and post-immigrant narrations, and Friedman captures the oral Yiddish rhythms ofone and the intellectual Spanish ofthe other. Her rendition makes clear that Freilich is truly Gerchunoffs successor, continuing to ponder the dilemmas of belonging and the linguistic challenges he confronted. Together with other Latin American Jewish writers increasingly available in English, these authors attest to Jewish communities and cultures that can no longer be ignored by the wider Jewish world. Edna Aizenberg Marymount Manhattan College Jewish Theological Seminary ofAmerica Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, by Richard I. Cohen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp. $50.00. "Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him" (p. 6). As Richard I. Cohen stresses in the introduction to Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, the one hundred and fIfty years since Heinrich Graetz made that comment have seen not only the expansion ...