Jewishness in the Imagination of the Latin American Boom

• In Event: Jewishness in the American Imagination

Abstract

The Latin American Boom is recognized as the editorial and cultural phenomenon which established the identity of Latin American literature on the global stage. While lauded, its canonical works are often criticized for their lack of diversity. Yet, I propose that an analysis tracing the presence of Jewish characters and themes in this canon highlights the influence that minority groups did have on these works and their writers. Consider, for instance, the character called the “Wandering Jew” in Gabriel García Márquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967), or Julio Cortázar’s conceptualization of the “kibbutz of desire” in HOPSCOTCH (1963).

In my paper, I focus on Saúl, the Jewish protagonist of Mario Vargas Llosa’s THE STORYTELLER (1987), who joins the Tasurinchi people to address his own alienation in society. The questions I address include: How and why is Jewishness represented in this novel? What drew Vargas Llosa to connect the Jewish and the Indigenous communities in Peru—is this decision related to Vargas Llosa’s perspective as an outsider of both communities? While I argue that Boom writers were attentive to the Jewish minority, their identity as non-Jews influenced their writing by emphasizing the Jewish characters’ otherness. To understand how these representations differed from living contemporary Jews, I contrast THE STORYTELLER with Peruvian-Jewish author Isaac Goldemberg’s THE FRAGMENTED LIFE OF DON JACOBO LERNER (1976), a novel based on his own life. This contrast will show that Boom writers not only drew inspiration from contemporary Jewish writers, but also from allegorical, imagined versions of Jewishness (to this end, I reference David Nirenberg’s ANTI-JUDAISM (2013) and his theory on otherness in representations of Judaism).

My overarching aims are, first, to understand why Jewish authors contemporary to the Boom, as well as the symbolic ‘Jew,’ inspired writers to other their characters through Jewishness specifically. Secondly, I will analyze how this decision instilled the Boom with a Jewish ethos which ultimately connoted more than just otherness, introducing matters regarding immigration, language, religion, and assimilation to the Latin American canon.

Author

• Orit Gugenheim Katz, Yale Univeristy