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Polish and Jewish Identities in the
Narratives of Ana María Shua
by
Silvia G. Dapía
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As a consequence of the military dictatorship of 1976, Argentina experienced an "immigration in reverse." Many of the descendants of the immigrants who arrived in Argentina during the half-century before the First World War had to leave the country for political reasons in the 1970s, and again, mainly for economic reasons, in 2001. Immigration seen from the perspective of exile acquires a totally different meaning. Mempo Giardinelli's Santo Oficio de la memoria (Memory as a Sared Officiator), a novel whose composition began in 1982 and was published in 1991, is traditionally regarded as the epitome of this genre.1 Yet Ana María Shua's El Libro de los recuerdos (The Book of Memories), which I propose to examine here, falls squarely within the new genre of Argentine exile literature. This genre, inaugurated by Giardinelli, comprises works penned beginning in the 1990s largely by authors who went into exile themselves. Unlike Kerby Miller's study of the Irish immigrant experience through literature which seeks to interpret the emigration of the Irish as an exile, or Matthew Frye Jacobson's extension of Miller's work to the Poles and Jews, in the Argentine case the authors reflect on their own exile by evoking the immigrant experiences of their ancestors.2 |
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Ana María Shua.
Courtesy of Ms. Shua.
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Ana María Shua has emerged as a leading author of contemporary Argentine fiction. In more that forty books she has exhibited her amazing literary dexterity by mastering novels, short stories, essays, poetry, theater, film scripts, children's fiction, humor and Jewish folklore. The universality of her popularity is attested to by the fact that her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Bulgarian, and Serbian. Shua's El libro de los recuerdos (1994), published in English as The Book of Memories (1998), traces three generations of the Rimetka family since its migration from Poland to Argentina by means of reflections stirred by leafing through a family album. Shua explores "the way in which narrative and the memories associated with photographic images structure how the characters see themselves and how they reconstruct their notions of self both in the past and in the present."3 As the narrator of the novel tells us, these reflections are the only legitimate sources we have, yet they are often incomplete and subject to the interpretation of the person recalling the events. |
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But Shua's El Libro de los recuerdos does not refer only to the private sphere of the members of this family. On the contrary, private and public spheres are intertwined in as much as the text makes explicit references to episodes of Argentine history that correspond to the three generations of the Rimetka family. Thus, the reader finds unmistakable references to President Juan Domingo Perón's first and second administrations (1946–55), as well as references to the military dictatorship of 1976, also known as the "Proceso de Reorganización Nacional" (National Reorganization Process). The goal I shall pursue in this article is twofold. First, I plan to discuss the influence of immigration and immigration policy on the growth of Argentina in order to contextualize the subsequent discussion of the text. Then, within this framework, I plan to discuss the work of the Polish-Jewish Argentine author Ana María Shua, particularly her El Libro de los recuerdos. |
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ARGENTINA'S HISTORY AND IMMIGRATION: "GOBERNAR ES POBLAR" (TO GOVERN IS TO POPULATE) | |
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Argentina's history has been shaped extensively by immigration. In recent decades Argentina received immigrants from Korea, Taiwan, and other Latin American countries. But between 1830 and 1950, Argentina received 8.2 million European immigrants, a figure exceeded only by the number of European immigrants to the United States.4 As was the case in the United States, Italians and Jews, the latter coming mostly from East European countries like Poland, Russia, Hungary, today's Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania, constituted the two largest groups entering Argentina. So important was the flow of Jews that Buenos Aires became the largest Jewish center in Latin America, followed by São Paulo and México City. |
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A liberal Argentine thinker from the intellectual movement known as the "Generation of 1837," Juan Bautista Alberdi, concerned over what he perceived to be the under-population of what was then regarded as a colony of marginal importance within the Spanish empire, asserted: "Gobernar es poblar" (To govern is to populate).5 Argentina's immigration policies have been closely related to this concept. The 1853 Constitution reflected a strong concern for populating the country including a clause regarding immigration:
The Federal Government shall foster European immigration; and may not restrict, limit or burden with any tax whatsoever, the entry into the Argentine territory of foreigners who arrive for the purpose of tilling the soil, improving industries, and introducing and teaching arts and sciences.6
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The 1853 Constitution reflects, among others, the liberal thinking of Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, intellectuals who advocated republicanism, favored centralized government, and pushed forward the modernization of the country.7 Alberdi created the famous phrase "to govern is to populate" to encapsulate the idea that immigration was the most important tool for the transformation of Argentina into a modern nation. In Alberdi's view, education by itself was not going to be able to change the stagnant nature of an inherited Spanish society. Even if one makes the gaucho "go through the transformation of the best education system," Alberdi thought, "not even in a hundred years will you get an English worker."8 For Alberdi, the alternative was to provide the nascent Argentine Republic with the dynamism of new blood, by bringing from developed Europe a population that had modern work habits. Anglo-Saxons, Alberdi proclaimed, "are identified with the steamship, with commerce, and with liberty, and it will be impossible to establish these things among us without the active cooperation of that progressive and cultivated race." Spaniards, Alberdi argued further, were "incapable of establishing a republic," either here in America or there in Spain.9 Sarmiento, for his part, delineated the terms of the debate in the "civilization-barbarism" dichotomy. Sarmiento agreed with Alberdi that the local population would not be able to develop and adapt to modern civilization under its current conditions. For one thing, the Spanish legacy had to be totally eradicated because it was regarded as a symbol of backwardness, and along with it there were calls for the elimination of the famous gaucho, whose image was equated politically with the idea of federalism. In Sarmiento's view, the gaucho had no means of subsistence, no education, living happily in his poverty and barbarism; for him "mental culture [was] useless or impossible."10 Therefore, there was no room for him in a modernized Argentina. Like the Indians, the gaucho had to be pushed aside. |
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The equation was clear for the liberal élites: the country needed immigrants that would work the land and transform the country as had been done in the United States. In the eyes of the liberal Argentinean élite, European immigration appeared to be the key for Argentina's modernization. The most desirable immigrants were Anglo-Saxon immigrants. They should come from Protestant Europe, for these intellectuals believed the people of these countries possessed the qualities necessary for constructing a prosperous, democratic nation guided by Enlightenment principles.11 Anxious to build a modern Argentine nation, and after waging wars of extermination against the indigenous population,12 the Argentine state actively sought to attract European agricultural workers to populate the country. The efforts to "Europeanize" Argentina were encompassed in an immigration bureau, which was established in Buenos Aires and which appointed immigration officers in Europe to recruit settlers. Upon arrival immigrants were given temporary lodging in the port of Buenos Aires and free transport from port of arrival to different zones of the country.13 With the "right" population, the liberal élites argued, Argentina would integrate successfully into the modern world as an agricultural exporter.14 Thus, Argentina became one of the world's leading countries of immigration in modern times. Between 1895 and 1914 the population more than doubled (from 3 million to 7.8 million). By 1914 more than thirty percent of the country's population and approximately fifty percent of the population of the city of Buenos Aires was foreign-born. Most of these were Italians, followed by Spaniards, Russian and Poles, French, Ottoman Turks, Lebanese, and Syrians.15 Far behind came the Anglo-Saxons, who, mainly as investors, bankers and railway engineers, helped to fund and build the infrastructure of an extraordinarily wealthy agrarian-export economy.16 |
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However, at the turn of the century, the first contradictions of the immigration-oriented model surfaced. For one, only as little as eight percent of immigrants were landowners by 1895, indicating that the colonizing of the land had not developed as expected.17 The structure of the rural property ownership was clearly favorable to Argentine élites, which still controlled cattle-raising and agriculture. But the newcomers were occupying positions of increasing status, with seventy percent of business firms belonging to foreigners. Furthermore, most inmigrants settled in the big cities, where they would represent sixty percent of the urban working class.18 Yet, much as in the United States during the same era, immigrants were not becoming Argentine citizens as expected. By 1914, only around two percent of male foreigners were naturalized.19 Liberal élites—that had previously supported immigration—came increasingly to perceive the immigrants' tendency to refuse naturalization, their inclination to educate their children in their own language and schools, as well as their proclivity to establish in their own language newspapers, aid societies, and hospitals as obstacles to assimilation. However, the greatest challenge represented by the European immigration for the liberal Argentinean ruling class was the introduction into Argentina of the new ideologies of socialism, anarchism, and trade unionism. |
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Thus, as civil unrest grew and strikes multiplied, the Argentinean ruling class blamed the faulty selection of immigrants.20 The reaction did not take long to be felt. Italians and Jews became targets for xenophobic attacks and abuse. No longer would every European settler be welcome in the Argentine community. To prevent the arrival of undesirable strikers and deport the existing ones, the Congress enacted two anti-immigrant laws, the so-called Residence Law in 1902 and the Social Defense Law of 1910. By means of these two laws, the Argentine state would turn down or allow the expulsion of those who, because of their background or leftists ideologies, were regarded as "undesirable elements" or "agitators."21 Literature reflects this negative image of the immigrant. Authors such as Carlos María Ocantos lamented the fundamental linguistic and cultural changes being wrought by immigrants in a 1911 novel entitled El peligro (The Danger), and worried about the future of the Argentine nation in view of these massive changes. In ¿Inocentes o culpables? (Innocent or Guilty?) Juan Antonio Argerich, for his part, narrates the life of an impoverished family of Italian origin, the Dagiore family, whose son does not succeed in escaping from his ancestors' "inferiority" and leads a degraded existence. In the overtly anti-semitic novel La Bolsa (The Exchange), Julián Martel makes his protagonist, Dr. Glow, lament over the babelic confusion that reigns in Argentine society: "Now we do not even know what we are—French or Spanish, Italians, or English."22 |
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To integrate Europeans into the nation, the government initiated an "Argentinization" campaign, which rested on two pillars, mandatory public education and military service. Through mandatory public education, the ruling élites attempted to impose a homogeneous framework of understanding that would allow the process of state coordinated modernization. As Ernest Gellner indicates, modernization demands a homogeneous high culture within whose framework the state can function, and a homogeneous high culture, in turn, demands a massive educational system.23 The Argentine élites felt that there was a need to create that single "idiom" or framework of understanding, what Benedict Anderson calls a new "imagined community."24 The newcomers, so the élites thought, had to learn to see themselves as "Argentine" not just as residents of the country. But what did it mean, for the liberal ruling class, to be an Argentine? |
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As Gellner would have it, the Argentine élites promoted a nationalism understood as the demand that the Argentine state contain one and only one "idiom" or framework against which the people would negotiate their differences. The nationalist movement came alive as an incipient political identity in Argentina around 1910. As a supposed antidote to a perceived weakening of Argentine nationality due to massive immigration, nationalist thinkers created a "cult of pre-liberal and pre-immigrant Argentina."25 Although there were different brands of nationalism, the main idea they all shared was a desire to "Argentinize" the immigrants through their exposure to a supposedly preexisting "authentic" Argentine culture. Some Argentine élites looked back to Spain in search of a presumed "authentic" Argentine culture that could be inculcated in the newly arrived immigrants. Thus, a brand of nationalist intellectuals and writers would exalt the Spanish language and Spanish culture as desirable values to unite the national community. Manuel Gálvez, for instance, urged his Argentine followers to return to their Spanish roots in their struggle against cosmopolitanism. In liberal Argentina, Gálvez claimed, Spain was unjustly "forgotten and ridiculed." Calling Spain the "ancestral dwelling of the race," Gálvez proclaimed it time "to feel ourselves [to be] Americans and in the ultimate term, Spaniards, given that this is the race to which we belong."26 But while Gálvez thought that the authentic Argentine "cultural matrix" was provided by Spain, Ricardo Rojas believed the emerging Argentine nation was a mixture of diverse European and native elements. In fact, he was one of the few intellectuals who had an inclusive vision, seeing continuity between the indigenous pre-Columbian cultures and modern Argentine nation-state. Rojas called for a complete reorganization of the national school curriculum. Public schools, Rojas believed, should be instrumental in the effort to "define the national conscience" and bring about a "real and fecund patriotism," focusing their curricula on Spanish language and heritage, Argentine literature, national history and geography.27 Thus, via public education, diverse brands of nationalism attempted to provide immigrants with new forms of loyalty and identification with the nation-state, delineating, in that attempt, a collective Argentine identity which could operate, for those uprooted individuals, as a homogenizing factor, integrating them to the nascent nation-state.28 |
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After the 1930s, however, European immigration to Argentina decreased. Immigration was instead dominated by countries of the Southern Cone. In 1960, people from neighboring nations represented 18 percent of the foreign population, 40 percent in 1980, and 52 percent in 1992.29 During his first and second administrations (1946–55), President Juan Domingo Perón implemented policies to attract immigrants from neighboring countries but also the last serious effort to attract European immigration.30 After the fall of Perón, short-lived military juntas alternated with weak constitutional governments during two decades. By the late 1960s the military juntas' repressive policies provoked a radicalized resistance from middle and working classes. In May 1969, a mass insurrection of workers and students took place in Córdoba, which became known as the "Cordobazo." Thereafter, popular mobilization rose into armed struggle, led by the Peronist Montoneros and other guerrilla groups. Right-wing death squads targeted students, intellectuals, workers, and dissidents—paving the ground for the "Dirty War" carried out by the military dictatorship of 1976.31 |
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The military dictatorship of 1976, also known as the "Proceso de Reorganización Nacional" (National Reorganization Process), adopted strongly liberal economic policies in combination with repressive and authoritarian political ones. It developed a lingering assault on civil society: political parties were banned, the Congress closed, civil liberties suspended, and thousands of people were killed. Immigration policies were consistent with this police state. Deportation provisions gave extensive powers to the Executive to deport those who, because of their ideologies (socialist, anarchist, Marxist), could compromise internal order and security.32 Furthermore, in consonance with the liberal élites of the 1880s, the military chose to attract European immigration over immigration from neighboring countries, which, they believed, was to be carefully "selected and controlled."33 |
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LITERATURE AND THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN ANA MARÍA SHUA'S WORK | |
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Shua's work can be placed along the Argentine-Jewish line represented by the works of authors such as Alberto Gerchunoff, César Tiempo, Gerardo Mario Goloboff, Mario Szickman, Bernardo Verbitsky, and Alicia Steimberg, to mention only some, who represent, in diverse ways, the Jewish experience. Several of Shua's writings such as El pueblo de los tontos: Humor tradicional judío (The People of Folly: Traditional Jewish Humor) and Cuentos judíos con fantasmas y demonios (Jewish Stories with Ghosts and Demons) revolve around themes that are profoundly Jewish.34 As Beth Pollack asserts, "(w)hat distinguishes Shua's writings is the broad spectrum of ways in which she represents the Argentine-Jewish experience and identity, infusing these experiences with her particular brand of humor and perspicacious social commentary. Shua belongs to a growing group of authors who depict Jewish identity without the need to legitimize inclusion of it. It is a component of her identity, and thus, naturally incorporated into her writing."35 |
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In the text of El marido argentino promedio (The Average Argentine Husband), Shua refers to both her Polish (Ashkenazic) and Lebanese (Sephardic) ancestry, thus illustrating two of the various countries of origin of Jewish immigrants.36 Likewise, in El libro de los recuerdos, which is based on her own family's history, the frequent references to Poland and being Jewish shows that both traditions, being Polish and being Jewish, are an active part of her own family identity.37 But the grandfather depicted in The Book of Memories presents one face of the Jewish immigration: the Polish aspect. In the epilogue added to the The Book of Memories, Shua tells the reader that she called her Uncle Mauricio, a nephew of her deceased Grandfather Musa, to conduct some research about her Lebanese family. She found that their reasons for immigrating were different than those of her maternal grandparents. Her Uncle Mauricio insisted that he did not arrive in Argentina as an immigrant: "He did not come over like my Polish grandparents, who came by the thousands piled up in the bilges of those ships. He traveled in second class on an English steamer that departed from Cherbourg."38 Clearly this illustrates that even within the Jewish community there was a class differentiation with a very interesting ethnic component. |
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The novel begins with the story of Grandfather Gedalia Rimetka, the Jewish-Polish patriarch of Shua's novel, who left Poland, escaping, we are told, from conscription into the army. Indeed, there are clues in Shua's novel suggesting there might be more behind Grandfather Gedalia's exit from Poland than the simple remembered consensus of "escaping conscription" might on the surface imply. First, we are told that the grandfather was from Derechin and lived in Tomachevo, both cities in the Russian-occupied section of partitioned Poland. Later, we are told that Gedalia was a "communist" and that "Uncle Sylvester" was a "Trotskyite." In another portion of the The Book of Memories we are told that in fact Gedalia was drafted into the "Polish army" and escaped first by hiding in his girlfriend's parents' house and then finally by leaving the country. Arranging these pieces of the puzzle into some picture, it is quite possible that Gedalia was a communist in an area occupied by Russia and that he decided to leave the country rather than serve in the Polish army against Bolshevik Russia during the Russo-Polish War of 1919–20. In fact, this time sequence seems to fit well with what appears to be the approximate time of Gedalia's arrival in Argentina.39 |
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Grandfather Gedalia illustrates typical experiences which many groups that migrated to Argentina experienced or, for that matter, that any group that migrates to any country may very likely experience. Thus, upon arriving in Argentina, the first experience that Gedalia went through and that many immigrants go through in their countries of immigration is the particular (re)interpretation of his family name in the new country. As Shua explains it:
El apellido Rimetka fue el producto de una combinación de la fineza auditiva y la arbitrariedad ortográfica de cierto empleado, sumadas a su particular forma de interpretar un documento escrito en una lengua desconocida, más su concepto personal sobre el apellido que debía llevar en el país un extranjero proveniente de Polonia: del empleado del registro civil que, en su momento, le tomó los datos al abuelo Gedalia para confeccionar su documento argentino.40
(The surname Rimetka was the result of a combination of auditory expertise and orthographic arbitrariness of some civil servant who attempted to decipher a document written in another language by providing his own interpretation of a surname that he thought a foreigner from Poland should have.41)
Thus, she concludes, the surname Rimetka is:
un apellido intensamente nacional, un producto aborigen, mucho más auténticamente argentino que un apellido español correctamente deletreado, un apellido, Rimetka, que jamás existió en el idioma o en el lugar de origen del abuelo, que jamás existió en otro país ni en otro tiempo.42
(an intensely national name, a truly indigenous product, much more authentically Argentine than a correctly spelled Spanish surname, because Rimetka never existed in Grandfather's homeland, or in the original language or, for that matter, in any other country or time in history.43)
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Furthermore, Gedalia, like most immigrants arriving in Argentina, stays at the "Hotel de los Immigrantes." Immigrants were drawn to Argentina in part by deliberate government programs.44 Newcomers were given several days free lodgings in the port of Buenos Aires, before they were transported, also free of cost, to the zone of destination. Grandfather Gedalia, too, stayed at this free lodging in Buenos Aires. The narrator states:
Durmió en el hotel de inmigrantes. Amigos lo esperaban. Hacía frío, no como en Polonia pero mucho más que ahora. Otro frío era el frío de los inmigrantes. Adentro de la ropa se ponían papeles de diario para calentarse. Los papeles de diario calientan bien, así, así, debajo de la camiseta papeles, diarios enteros.45
(He stayed at a hotel for immigrants. Friends were waiting for him. It was cold, not as bad as Poland, but a lot colder than it is now. The cold that the immigrants felt was another type of cold. They would stuff newspapers inside their clothes to stay warm. Newspapers kept you warm, like this, underneath your shirt, yep, whole newspapers.46)
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Like most immigrants, Gedalia experiences the feeling of alienation that results from relocation to an entirely new culture. "[T]he Rimetkas were fugitives of history, inhabitants of a time outside Time," writes Ilan Stavans. "The resulting feeling is one of dislocation."47 In Gedalia's case the estrangement was the result not only of moving from Polish- and Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe to Spanish-speaking Argentina, but from an urban environment to a rural setting in the colonies in Entre Ríos, where the Jewish communities had been established and where Grandfather Gedalia was supposed to become a farmer. But Gedalia was actually a tailor and he had no clue about farming issues. Ultimately, Gedalia moves back to the city, to Buenos Aires. |
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Concerning her grandmother, "la Babuela," she recalls the hunger she had suffered in Poland. We are even told that once, "back in Lithuania," when she was little, they were washing her up to put her into a coffin as she fainted out of hunger and everybody thought she was dead but the cold water they used to clean her before burying her, woke her up.48 However, in Argentina, "la Babuela," unlike other Eastern European immigrant women, never had to work as a prostitute: "Aquí, a las mujeres, las ponían a trabajar de putas. Pero la abuela no trabajó de puta sino de vainillera"49 (It was dangerous for women. They were put to work as whores. But granny wasn't a whore, she worked as a seamstress.50) This was an important distinction to make in the context of Argentine history where, between 1875 and World War I, women were often imported from Europe for prostitution, or trapped into it by criminal organizations.51 But Shua also has positive memories associated to her grandparents' exit from Poland and arrival in Argentina. "El abuelo no sufrió persecuciones"52 (Grandfather was never persecuted,53) she states, an interesting comment from standpoint of the often contentious Polish-Jewish relations. In addition, when Gedalia finally reached Buenos Aires he liked the city, commenting that "Comparable a Varsovia, Buenos Aires. Una ciudad.54 (It was comparable to Warsaw. A real city.55) |
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The hundreds of thousands of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe left behind shtetls and cities where they were marked by their cultural and religious heritage. Precisely because of their varied countries of origin, the Jewish newcomers maintained Yiddish as a common base or lengua franca. In Shua's case we are told that her maternal grandparents were educated in the public school system in Poland, the grandfather in Derechin and the grandmother in Warsaw, thus they spoke both Polish and Yiddish. Shua's paternal family came from Beirut and according to her Uncle Mauricio: "Arabe y francés hablaba su gente, y no idish y polaco como otros que andan por ahí."56 (His people spoke Arabic and French, not Yiddish and Polish like the others.57) One day upon returning home from school, Silvestre, Rimetka's eldest son, urges that "en esa casa no se iba a hablar nunca más el Otro Idioma, el que sus padres habían traído con ellos del otro lado del mar."58 (never again in that house was anyone going to speak the Other Language, the one his parents had brought from the Old World.59) His teacher had given the command that only castellano (Spanish) be spoken at home. As David William Foster rightly asserts, "the Yiddish-Spanish divide also marks the boundaries of assimilation, and the fact that "la Babuela" cannot envision real life taking place within the structures of Spanish also refers to the impossibility of meaningful life existing in the full domain of Spanish in which cultural and religious oblivion, the unlearning of the native tongue and the native culture, has taken place."60 However, Silvester's mother (la Babuela) decides to obey because she is intimidated by the teacher, whom she sees as:
casi un funcionario de control fronterizo, alguien destacado por las autoridades de inmigración para vigilar desde adentro a las familias inmigrantes y asegurarse de que se fundieran, se disgregaran, se derritieran correctamente hasta desaparecer en el crisol de razas.61
(more like a member of the border patrol under orders from the immigration authorities keeping an eye on immigrant families and making sure they conform, integrate, and become lost in the big melting pot.62)
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This is very similar to the Polish experience in the United States where Poles established their own parochial school system to avoid the de-nationalizing and de-Catholicizing influence of the public schools. |
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CONCLUSION | |
In the Epilogue to the English version of The Book of Memories, Shua asserts:
I suddenly realized this story has no end to it because my Zeide and my Bubbe had two children, each one of whom had two children of their own. And between 1976 and 1977 the year the military junta took over in Argentina, the four granddaughters, including myself, boarded a ship of immigrants. While my sister and two cousins, the latter of whom were in a hurry, boarded a plane, I crossed the ocean on an Italian ship called Eugenio C. The ocean was wide, the ship was Italian. And we ate a lot of pasta. There were many Jews who were children and grandchildren of Russians or Arabs or Poles, and there were many Gentile children and grandchildren of Italians, Yugoslavians, and Spaniards. And we were all undesirable South Americans, sudacas. My objective was France but most of the others got off in Spain. And, thus, Spain, thinking it had gotten rid of its Jews, began to receive this new onslaught of Argentines with strange names that ended in —berg, —vich, or —sky.63
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Furthermore, in a text originally published as a cultural note, "Los que vuelven y los que extrañan" (Those Who Return and Those Who Only Have Nostalgia)64 Shua illustrates a major distinguishing feature of the two immigrations:
Registro, entonces, algunas diferencias. La de nuestros abuelos no fue una inmigración de clase media. Aunque trajeran un nivel cultural superior a las clases bajas de la Argentina, en su mayoría venían de Europa corridos por una pobreza atroz. Venían de sufrir persecuciones. Venían de partirse el lomo sobre suelos gastados y empobrecidos. Venían del hambre (I will record, then, some of the differences. Our grandparents' immigration was not a migration of the middle class, although their cultural level was superior to the lower levels of Argentina at that time. Most of them were driven from Europe by a terrible poverty. They have suffered persecutions, they have broken their backs on exhausted and impoverished soil. They came knowing only hunger).65
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Thus, Shua compares her grandparents' immigration experience with the experience of the exile undertaken by her sister, cousins, herself, and so many Argentinians during the military dictatorship of 1976. The first comparison between the two experiences is apparent in the remark that the immigrants who arrived in Argentina at the beginning of the century were, for the most part, members of the lower classes. Much as the Polish immigrants who also came to the United States "za chlebem" (for bread), these immigrants, Shua argues, came from Europe to Argentina escaping, for the most part, from famine and disease. As opposed to them, those who left Argentina in the 1970s, Shua argues further, were mainly members of the middle class—"psychoanalysts," as she states, referring to those who emigrated to Spain.66 Although immigration and exile may overlap in many respects, Shua is certainly right in highlighting the urgency in which the country must be left in exile. Immigration is voluntary and usually undergone with the intention of establishing oneself in the new country. Additionally, as Shua suggests, the immigrant (unlike the exile) is looking for financial gain or to improve her/his material circumstances. However, for those who chose exile in the 1970s, economic reasons did not play a role. They chose exile, for the most part, for political reasons, escaping the military dictatorship that was claiming the lives of thousands. |
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So, the first conclusion to be drawn is that Shua's Book of Memories can be placed in a tradition of Argentine exile literature that begins to appear in the late 1980s and for some critics begins with Mempo Giardinelli's Santo oficio de la Memoria. In this sense the experience of the grandparents' immigration narrated in the novels that belong to this genre cannot be separated from the experience of their grandchildren's exile as a consequence of the period of the repressive dictatorship in Argentina during the 1970s. It may be argued that it is their condition of exile which to a great extent elicits the reconsideration of their grandparents' immigration experience. |
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The second conclusion that I would like to suggest involves a question that arises from Shua's work. We know that the Jewish experience in Argentina has been multi-ethnic; that is, it has included immigration from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities coming from various European and Middle Eastern nations. In Shua's case, the paternal grandparents migrated from Lebanon, while her maternal grandparents arrived from Poland. We also know that she grew up in a household that was centered on the Lebanese Jewish culture. So, the question that arises is: Why did she choose to tell the maternal Polish story rather than the paternal Lebanese story? Scholars of the immigration experience in the United States have suggested that women are, more often than men, the primary transmitters of culture and ethnicity. This might also be the case with Shua, thus influencing her to focus on her mother's side of the ancestral tree. However, my interpretation suggests that it is more likely that Shua is actually reflecting, perhaps even unconsciously, typical Argentine feelings. Throughout history, Argentines sought to create a "European" imagined community, preferring to think of themselves as European rather than Latin American. So, once again, Shua's selection of her Polish Jewish ancestry as the focal point of her narratives is in keeping with the Argentine "imagined community"; that is, emphasizing the European aspects of its population in preference to the diverse origins of its other immigrants. In this respect, Shua fits snugly within the emerging genre of Argentina exile literature, but also within the more traditional approach to defining Argentina as a European nation. Shua appears to have chosen in her work to create a past that dovetails with the "imagined community" accepted as the consensus view of Argentine history and culture. Within this context, it seems that Shua has chosen to interpret her family history by focusing on the Polish grandparents as a means of "legitimizing" the family's European origins, and thus placing them within the mainstream of the "imagined" Argentine nation. European immigrants always find a place in the Argentinian imagined community. In any case, Shua clearly demonstrates how the "Polish" and the "Jewish" permeate each other, reflecting a single identity that, in itself, is also consonant with Argentine "imagined" history. |
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The author wishes to thank the members of the Editorial Board who read her initial draft and provided valuable suggestions that strengthened the final version.
1 See Fernando Aínsa "Entre Babel y la Tierra Prometida. Narrativa e inmigración en la Argentina," Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire, Numéro 1–2000, Migrations en Argentine, 2, online since January 14, 2005, http://alhim.revues.org/document87.html. Consulted December 31, 2007.
2 Kerby P. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
3 Patrick L. O'Connell, "Historical Memory, Parody, and the Use of Photography in Ana María Shua's El libro de los recuerdos," World Literature Today, Vol. 73 (1999).
4 Julia Albarracín, "Explaining Immigration Policies in Argentina During the 1990s: European Immigration, 'a Marriage in Sickness and in Health,'" paper delivered at the 2003 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Dallas, Texas, March 27–29, 2003, 1.
5 David Rock, Argentina 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 114.
6 Albarracín, 5.
7 Rock, 114.
8 Juan Bautista Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1966), quoted in Albarracín, 5. The "gaucho" arose during the nineteenth century as a marginalized group living between the urban areas and the frontier. They are roughly equivalent to North American "cowboys."
9 Alberdi, as quoted in Jeane DeLaney, "National Identity, Nationhood, and Immigration in Argentina: 1881–1930," Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, 6, http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/delaney.html, consulted December 21, 2007.
10 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism (New York: Macmillan, n.d. (first published in 1868); trans. by Mrs. Horace Mann), 51.
11 Tulio Halperín Donghi "¿Para qué la inmigración? Ideología y política inmigratoria y aceleración del proceso modernizador: El caso Argentino (1810–1914)," Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas (Köln: Bohlau Verlag, Band 13, 1976), 443.
12 The Indians were regarded as the most challenging enemy of the Argentinean civilization until the early 1880s. In 1879, General Julio A. Roca initiated his Conquest of the Desert, a war that expanded the Argentinean frontier westward and southward by exterminating the entire indigenous population. See David Rock, Argentina 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 154.
13 Rock, Argentina, 141.
14 Albarracín, 5.
15 Rock, Argentina, 166–67.
16 David Rock, "Racking Argentina," New Left Review, Vol. 17 (2002), 5 accessed at http://www.newleftreview.org/. Consulted December 20, 2007.
17 Rock, Argentina, 140.
18 Carl E. Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism in Argentina and Chile: 1890–1914 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 44.
19 Halperín, 443.
20 Aline Helg, "Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880–1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction," in Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 45; Solberg, 80–83, 108–113.
21 Helg, 46.
22 Quotation from Julián Martel, La Bolsa (Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1956), 95. On immigration and literature see Aínsa, "Entre Babel," and Brigitte Natanson, "El discurso sobre la pobreza y la miseria en la literatura argentina sobre la migración," Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire, Numéro 12–2006, Flux migratoires du XIXe et XXe siècles en Amérique latine, http://alhim.revues.org/document1532.html. Consulted Dec. 31, 2007.
23 Gellner's thesis is that economic change requires cultural homogeneity, and that the demand for cultural homogeneity is what drives nationalism. The argument is as follows. Because the occupational structures of industrial economies change significantly from generation to generation and even within a generation, no one can expect to follow in the family profession. As opposed to agrarian societies, in industrial societies training cannot be therefore left to families or guilds. None of this will do in industrial, changing societies, in which training must be much more explicit, formulated in a far more universal idiom, and in nearly context-free symbols. High culture needs an entire university system, at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of those high cultures, of those single and homogeneous "idioms'' shared by the members of the nation. Nationalism is, in Gellner's view, the demand that each state contain one and only one idiom. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1–52.
24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6.
25 David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 37.
26 Manuel Gálvez, El solar de la raza (Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor, 1936), 37.
27 Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública, 1909), 48.
28 Leaders of the educational movement were Ricardo Rojas and José María Ramos Mejías. On the educational movement see Carlos Escudé, "Education, Political Culture and Foreign Policy: The Case of Argentina," www.argentina-rree.com/documentos/culture_escude.htm. Consulted on December 31, 2007.
29 Albarracín, 6. The term "Southern Cone" refers to a geographic region composed of the southernmost areas of South America, below the Tropic of Capricorn. The region includes all of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay and some parts of Paraguay an southern portions of Brazil.
30 In the years to come, when immigrants from neighboring nations wanted to settle permanently in the country, they had to regularize their situations by amnesties that became common during democratic periods after Perón's administration. The last four amnesties were enacted in 1974, 1984, 1987, and 1992, which regularized, respectively, 150,000, 115,200, 30,000, and 200,000 migrants from neighboring countries. See Albarracín, 6.
31 Rock, Racking, 70.
32 Albarracín, 6.
33 Albarracín 7.
34 Ana María Shua, El pueblo de los tontos: Humor tradicional judío (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1995); Ana María Shua, Cuentos judíos con fantasmas y demonios (Buenos Aires: Shalom, 1994).
35 Beth Pollack, "Scribe of Time and Memory: [Con]Textualizing the Jewish Experience in Ana María Shua," in Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, ed., El río de los sueños: aproximaciones críticas a la obra de Ana María Shua (Washington, DC: AICD, 2001), 2. In this respect, I follow Mariano Siskind. As opposed to critics like Darrell B. Lockhart, who interpret the "Jewish" element in Shua's texts as a "challenge" to "hegemonic versions of Latin American cultural identity" or as an attempt to recover her "Jewish identity by salvaging the remnants of [her] ethnoreligious heritage through literature," Siskind proposes "una actitud menos defensiva y conservadora" ("a less defensive and less conservative attitude"). He suggests that writers like Shua return to that "ethnoreligious heritage" in order to appropriate it and delineate their own identities. Mariano Siskind, "Tradición y reescritura: La construcción de una identidad judía en algunos textos de Ana María Shua," in Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, ed., El río de los sueños: aproximaciones críticas a la obra de Ana María Shua (Washington, D.C.: AICD, 2001), http://www.educoas.org/Portal/bdigital/contenido/interamer/interamer_70/ Consulted December 20, 2007.
36 Ana María Shua, El marido argentino promedio (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994).
37 Ana María Shua, El libro de los recuerdos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994), 10; Ana María Shua, The Book of Memories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998; transl. Dick Gerdes, intro. by Ilan Stavans), 3 and passim.
38 Shua, Book of Memories, 173. This is a poor translation. The original Spanish does not mean to imply that there were thousands of grandparents, but that they traveled amid thousands of people crammed into third class.
39 My hypothesis differs from Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, who asserts that "Grandfather Gedalia deserted the army during World War I" (Buchanan, 3). I believe my interpretation is correct. Gedalia is a communist living in the Russian partition of Poland, thus he might be expected to support the new Soviet government. The reference to "Polish army" is also significant since there was no "Polish army" until Poland regained its independence after World War I. The only two units that might fit that description during World War I would be Gen. Józef Haller's army in France and Gen. Józef Pi¬sudski's Legions. The former operated in France, and was thus too distant to be the "Polish army" referred to, while Pi¬sudski's Legions were under Austrian command and did not constitute a "Polish army."
40 Shua, El libro, 15.
41 Shua, Book of Memories, 7.
42 Shua, El libro, 15–16.
43 Shua, Book of Memories, 8.
44 Rock, Argentina, 141.
45 Shua, El libro, 13.
46 Shua, Book of Memories, 5.
47 Shua, Book of Memories, xiii.
48 Shua, El libro, 166; Shua, Book of Memories, 140.
49 Shua, El libro, 9.
50 Shua, Book of Memories, 1.
51 Donna G. Guy, "'White Slavery,' Citizenship and Nationality in Argentina," in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms & Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 205.
52 Shua, El libro, 9.
53 Shua, Book of Memories, 1.
54 Shua, El libro, 13.
55 Shua, Book of Memories, 5.
56 Shua, El libro, 211.
57 Shua, Book of Memories, 173.
58 Shua, El libro, 25.
59 Shua, Book of Memories, 18.
60 William David Foster, "Ana María Shua: Yiddish and Cultural Memory," in Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, ed., El río de los sueños: approximaciones críticas a la obra de Ana María Shua (Washington, DC: AICD, 2001). This essay first appeared in print as "Ana María Shua," in Marjorie Agosín, ed., Pasión, identidad y memoria (Albuquerque: Univeristy of New Mexico Press, 1999), 40–45. This scene is quite similar to the scene in The Immigrant Experience: The Long, Long Journey, a video about the Polish immigrant experience in the United States in which the teacher attempts to encourage young Janek to abandon Polish in favor of English so he can become "a real American." In Janek's case, this leads to a confrontation with his grandmother when he wants to speak English at home and his grandmother insists on retaining Polish.
61 Shua, El libro, 26.
62 Shua, Book of Memories, 19.
63 Shua, Book of Memories, 177.
64 This text has been republished in Shua's El marido argentino promedio (1991; The Average Argentine Husband), a compilation and re-edition of previously published cultural notes and commentaries.
65 Shua, El marido, 206 (my translation).
66 Shua, El marido, 206.
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