David
William Foster, ed. Latin American Jewish Cultural
Production. Nashville:
Vanderbilt
University Press,
2009, 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8265-1624-4
With his most recent
edited book, Latin American Jewish Cultural Production,
David William Foster picks up where Marjorie Agosín left off
with her
invaluable 2005 anthology Memory,
Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America.
Foster’s anthology imperatively augments Agosín’s
work and will soon become an essential text in the growing scholarly
field of
Latin American Jewry. Foster’s book advances this scholarly field into
studies of cultural production necessary for understanding how Jewish
Latin
America has transcended persecution and dislocation by attempting to
re-establish
a communal and cohesive identity.
The volume consists of
eleven
essays divided into categories of identity, literature, plastic arts,
film and
photography. Foster’s book, like Agosín’s,
enjoys contributions from scholars with diverse academic backgrounds: a
librarian; a curator; an independent film scholar; Spanish, Portuguese,
and
comparative literature professors; and literary theorists, among
others. The
essays, Foster relays, “were recruited on the basis of cultural
production that was, in some way, Jewish marked” (xiv), leaving open to
interpretation
the degree to and manner in which the cultural production is
influenced. These
ambiguities steer Foster’s edition toward a widely applicable study of
cultural production that does not buckle – or limit itself – in its
approach and scope. That its contributors are Semitic and non-Semitic,
alike,
draws attention to how Latin American Jewry has cultural implications
beyond
concentrated localities in Brazil,
Argentina, and Mexico.
Jewish identity, the
adhesive that
adjoins the eleven essays in this volume, comes in a multiplicity of
forms. The
first part of Foster’s volume, titled “Latin American Jewish
Identity,” includes essays on cultural production of authors whose
primary motivation is a sense of identity influenced by Judaism or
Jewish heritage.
The bulk of Berta Waldman’s essay, “Notes Concerning Jewish
Identity in Brazil:
From Word to Image,” concerns Brazilian Jewish immigrant writer Clarice
Lispector. For Waldman, Lispector
represents a case study for a “privileged moment in which we can
contemplate
a degree of cultural identity to be seen as collision and the mixture
and
fusion of cultures, traditions, and diverse histories” (5). She goes on
to consider the effects Brazilian nationalism had on Lispector’s
writing and, in particular, her knowledge of Yiddish. Waldman concludes
by
exploring young Brazilian artists with Jewish origins that seem to
address
Jewish matters more explicitly than their precursors. In her essay
““Israel”:
An Abstract Concept or Concrete Reality in Recent Judeo-Argentinean
Narrative?,” Amalia
Ran studies how
biographic stories in several contemporary Argentine novels by Jewish
Argentineans elucidate identity connections to Israel. Ran delicately
probes
divisive questions of Latin American Jewish identity, especially the
importance
of Zionism that has had nearly a sixty year history in Argentina.
The
last essay in the first part of Foster’s volume is “Beyond Exotic:
Jewish Mysticism and the Supernatural in the Works of Alejandro Jodorowsky” by Ariana
Huberman. In it, she explores the
influences of Jewish
cultural motifs in the works of Chilean-Mexican writer, filmmaker, and
performance artists Alejandro Jodorowsky,
a renounced
Jew. Huberman detects Jewish influence of
mysticism,
the Kabbalah, and folk beliefs in Jodorowsky’s
work, showing that Jewish cultural production does not only come at the
hands
of those who identify as Jewish.
The second part of
Foster’s
book, “The Literary Road,” contains studies of Latin American
Jewish literature. It opens with Márcio
Seligmann-Silva’s chapter, “Writing on the Shoah in Brazil,”
on reflexive Holocaust literature by both Jewish immigrants to Brazil
and
Brazilian Jews who were compelled to write about the subject. This body
of work,
Seligmann-Silva notes, has not received
much national
or international attention despite its quality and pervasiveness among
Jewish
writing in Brazil.
Naomi Lindstrom returns the reader to the imperative works of
Jewish-Brazilian
writer Clarice Lispector. Her study,
“Judaic
Traces in the Narrative of Clarice Lispector:
Identity Politics and Evidence,” deals with Lispector
scholarship since the 1970s and how many scholars have unreasonably
extrapolated from and misinterpreted Lispector’s
identity in her writing. Lindstrom argues that Jewish elements in Lispector’s writing have broadened the group of
“literary texts and writers that come under the purview of Latin
American
Jewish cultural studies to include writers who do not thematize
Jewish topics, but whose Jewishness
may be sought in less tangible manifestations” (94). The final essay in
the collection on literature is “Argentina’s Wandering Jews:
Judaism, Loyalty, Text, and Homeland in Marcelo Birmajers’s
Tres mosqueteros”
by Sarah Giffney. Giffney
considers the Tres mosqueteros
by Marcelo Birmajer as a key in
understanding the
transitioning loyalties of Argentine Jews away from religion. The
novel’s
unremitting humor, Birmajer finds,
emphasizes Jewish
community and discusses a loyalty defined more by the cultivation of
community
than by a belief in God.
“The Plastic Arts” is
the third part in Foster’s volume on cultural representations of Latin
American Jewry. Laura Fellman Fattal’s chapter, “Spectacle and
Spirituality: The Cacophony of Objects, Nelson Leirner (b. 1932),”
examines
the ways in which Nelson Leirner’s talismans and installations, among
other projects, express the hybridity of his own Jewish identity.
Indeed, Leirner’s work, Fattal
suggests, can be seen as a synecdoche of Jewish Latin American
(plastic) artists:
the artists “eschew direct depictions of religion, the Holocaust and
Zionism, but their work is rife with allegory and conjecture” (133).
Janis Breckenridge considers the contentious public debate in Buenos
Aires,
Argentina about the Jewish community’s resolve to establish memorial
sites for the victims of dictatorial state terrorism in her chapter
“Text
and the City: Design(at)ing
Post-Dictatorship
Memorial Sites in Buenos Aires.” She considers three sites (Parque de la Memoria,
El Club Atlético, and Museo de la Memoria)
as crucial examples of the ongoing debate in
Argentina of how to grapple with the devastating memory of the last
dictatorship in concert with two testimonial texts – one from Jewish
detainee Nora Strejilevich and the other
from a
national commission – linked to El Club Atlético.
These sites and texts, Breckenridge describes, act like a collective
memory of Argentina’s
desaparecidos.
Foster’s anthology
takes a
turn toward the visual arts in its last part, “Film and
Photography.” Ilene S. Goldman opens the section with a study on the
tensions of Jewish identity in a Mexican comedy, its literary
predecessor and
successor, “Mexican Women, Jewish Women: Novia que
te
vea from Book to Screen and Back
Again.”
Though the film and novels look at their comfortable lifestyles,
Goldman highlights
the identity crises many Mexican Jews face in
their
everyday lives thematized by all three
works,
establishing a fruitful dialogue between them. Hernán
Feldman’s chapter, “Catastrophe and Periphery: July 18, 1994 and
September 11, 2001, on Film,” looks at the darker side of Jewish life,
in
particular the fatal consequences of terrorism in both Argentina and the United States, through
cinematic
responses. The Jewish response to these catastrophic events is of
particular
concern to Feldman who examines the ideological issues that stem from
these.
Foster concludes the collection, and the book, with a poignant essay on
Judeo-Brazilian photographer Madalena
Schwartz. His
chapter, “Madalena Schwartz: A Jewish
Brazilian
Photographer,” parallels Huberman’s
earlier chapter on Jodorowsky. Scwartz,
like Jodorowsky, is an artist whose
production does
not explicitly concern cultural Jewish motifs. Yet Schwartz’s work, as
Foster points out,“demonstrates
a particular Jewish commitment to the Other” (211). Perhaps the most
renowned portrait photographer in Brazil, Schwartz’s work
unconditionally captures the interface of art, politics, and identity.
Foster’s anthology
builds
upon a body of scholarship that is concerned with Latin American Jewish
identity within their cultural production. Agosín’s
2005 anthology more than merely contributed to the fields of both
Jewish and
Latin American Studies. Agosín’s
edition
broadened the applicability of Latin American Jewry to disciplines
beyond the
humanities and social sciences. Her edition is unique for its
multifarious
contributors: creative writers, historians, literature scholars,
anthropologists, social scientists, and artists. The fifteen pieces it
presented ranged from poignant anecdotes of émigré and
recollections
of Sephardic legacy to academic studies of Jewish humor and devastating
chapters on Jewish persecution. Foster’s compilation naturally
parallels Agosín’s. Indeed, Latin
American Jewish
Studies is multidisciplinary and should not restrict its ambition to an
already
blazed path. Foster, astutely, has taken the field of Latin American
Jewish
Studies yet another step with this carefully compiled book.
The force of Brazilian,
Argentinean, and Mexican localities upon academic discourse, however,
remains
one of the few shortcomings of Foster’s Latin American
Jewish Cultural Production. By his own admission,
Foster’s book draws attention to the three major Jewish loci in Latin
America: Argentina,
Brazil, and Mexico.
Ariana
Huberman’s study of Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films, performances, and writings
provides
the only exception in this volume to studies of the three major Jewish
societies. Foster’s volume, thus, runs the risk of cultural
reductivity;
that is, reducing a culture to a certain nexus or origin thereby
overlooking
peripheral cultural production. Peripheral cultural production
frequently
proves to be the most fruitful for academic study and therefore should
merit
more attention than it currently enjoys. Foster, however, acknowledges
the
volume’s limited scope and identifies it, aptly, as a point of
departure
for further academic study of Latin American Jewry in Cuba, Peru,
Colombia, Venezuela, and Uruguay.
The opened space for
further studies of cultural production in these “peripheral” Latin
American Jewish societies invites a potentially groundbreaking – and
multidisciplinary – study that could reshape conceptions of Jewish
representation around the world, forging intersections between topics
as
disparate as psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, Marxism, and postcolonialism.
Works Cited
Agosín,
Marjorie (Ed.). Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in
Latin America. Austin:
University of Texas
Press, 2005
Foster, David William (Ed.). Latin American Jewish Cultural Production.
Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2009.
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