S. Freedman A Treasure Hung for Lost Memories /The New York Times
Books
A Treasure Hunt For Lost Memories
Twenty
years ago, an anthropologist named Teresa Porzecanski placed an
advertisement in a Jewish newspaper serving this distant compass point
of the Diaspora. She was looking for the residue of an unrecorded
history, the letters and snapshots of tens of thousands of immigrants
from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
Mystified
about why a scholar would care for the contents of their closets and
bottom drawers, the aging immigrants or their offspring warily came
forward, not only with mail and photographs but also with silverware,
ritual candlesticks, samovars. Ms. Porzecanski and her students then set
out, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, to interview family elders.
Those
memories and donations began an unlikely boomlet in scholarship and
literature chronicling the Jewish experience in a nation that espoused
and largely practiced an American-style commitment to the melting pot.
Uruguay's Jewish population has dwindled from 40,000 after World War II
to an unofficial estimate of 15,000 now, primarily because of economic
woes in this country of 3.4 million. But it has produced a stream of
memoirs, academic treatises, oral histories and novels. The most
commercially successful to date, Mauricio Rosencof's autobiographical
novel ''The Letters That Didn't Come'' (''Las Cartas que no Llegaron''),
will be released in English translation in the United States in 2004 by
the University of New Mexico Press.
''It
was like they discovered something that had been invisible,'' Ms.
Porzecanski said of her interviewees. ''They didn't give importance to
their own lives. There was a sense of being ashamed of their own
history, of being pursued and persecuted in their homelands. And they
didn't realize the importance of what they'd done here -- form a bank or
a charity or an organization.''
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Miguel
Feldman, a leading historian of Jewish life in Uruguay, sees the recent
outpouring as a kind of desperate act. ''The Jewish community is
becoming smaller and smaller, and the eldest people realize the
knowledge of our origins is getting lost,'' said Mr. Feldman, 74,
speaking in Spanish through an interpreter at a Montevideo hotel. ''The
first generation is already gone. I'm an immigrant's son and I'm already
old.''
The
body of Uruguayan Jewish writing points to a broader demographic truth,
the shrinking of the Diaspora itself. Today Israel and the United
States account for more than 80 percent of the world's Jewish
population, 10.3 million of 12.5 million, said Steven Bayme, the
national director of contemporary Jewish life for the American Jewish
Committee.
In
1939 fewer than one-third of Jews lived in the United States and what
was then Palestine -- 5.2 million of 17 million. Even after the
Holocaust, fewer than half the world's Jews lived in those lands.
Yet
Uruguay is also distinctive in its neighborhood. Unlike Argentina and
many other Latin American countries, Uruguay has been a liberal, secular
democracy for much of its history. It became a republic in 1830 and has
remained one, with the exception of right-wing dictatorships in the
periods of 1932-38 and 1973-85. It separated church and state in 1917.
And by 1890, it had enacted a ''policy of the open door,'' encouraging
immigration by issuing visas free of charge and even providing a hostel
for new arrivals.
Although
the earliest Jewish immigrants to Uruguay hailed primarily from Ottoman
Turkey, the majority ultimately came from Eastern Europe, Hungary and
Germany. Thousands arrived in the middle and late 1930's, when the
United States largely refused to accept Jewish refugees from Hitler's
Europe, and Latin American nations like Cuba, Mexico and Argentina set
similar barriers.
The
experiences of the first generation of Uruguayan Jews now fill such
scholarly works as Mr. Feldman's ''Difficult Times'' (''Tiempos
Dificiles'') and Ms. Porzecanski's ''History of the Lives of Jewish
Immigrants in Uruguay'' (''Historias de Vida de Imigrantes Judios al
Uruguay''). In a more personal vein, Esther Cukierman's ''Immigrant''
recounts her father's journey from Poland to Uruguay in the 1920's,
while Raul Jacob explores the belongings of one German Jewish refugee to
depict a life in ''Uncle Hugo's Suitcase'' (''La Valija del Tio
Hugo'').
By
the mid-1990's, the books had begun to attract attention among
Uruguay's other ethnic groups, which include Spaniards and Italians. The
incomparably titled ''From Matza to Mate'' (''Entra la Matza y el
Mate'') -- mate being the national drink, a kind of tea brewed from a
local tree -- was written by Jewish and gentile authors. It received a
full-page review in the Montevideo newspaper El Pais under a headline
that translated as ''Fiddler on the Roof.''
''It
is a happy sign that the multicultural mosaic is seeking to give a
space to its parts,'' said Ilan Stavans, a professor at Amherst College
who is an expert in Latin American Jewish literature. ''Jews, no longer
pariahs, are recognized as playing a crucial part in the nation's
puzzle.''
The
encounter of Jews and Uruguay has yielded both humor and poignancy. The
quintessential immigrant worked as a peddler known by the
Spanish-Yiddish term ''cuentenik.'' The ''cuente,'' meaning bill or
check, referred to the handwritten records that the peddlers used to
keep their accounts. A really successful ''cuentenik'' hired underlings
called ''klappers,'' from the Yiddish word for knocking, who went door
to door soliciting orders. A customer who failed to pay his bill was
called a ''tshvok,'' the Yiddish word for ''nail,'' alluding to a
Uruguayan idiom that an unpaid debt is as irritating as a nail.
Research
by Mr. Feldman and Ms. Porzecanski has also resurrected the heroism of
an Uruguyan diplomat named Florencio Rivas. While serving as consul
general in Germany, Rivas harbored more than 150 Jews on embassy grounds
during Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi-inspired mobs attacked
synagogues and Jews. He then issued them all passports and visas
ensuring passage to Uruguay.
So
far, however, no book has matched the phenomenon of Mr. Rosencof's
''Letters That Never Came.'' This stream-of-consciousness narrative
traverses 60 years of Uruguayan history, from the immigrant pluck of the
author's father to the deaths of the author's Polish grandparents in
the Holocaust to the author's own imprisonment for 11 years during the
1970's and 1980's because of his leadership of the revolutionary
Tupamaros group. ''Las Cartas,'' which has gone through 10 printings in
South America and two printings in Spain, is being adapted for the stage
in Uruguay and translated into English by Louise Popkin. (Mr.
Rosencof's American publisher has already released English versions of
two novellas by Ms. Porzecanski, ''Sun Inventions'' and ''Perfumes of
Carthage.'')
''It's
a work that touches on the relationship between parents and
ancestors,'' Mr. Rosencof said in a recent telephone interview. ''We all
have in our ancestry someone who came on the boats.'' His own parents
belonged to a generation of poor Jews. ''They worked all day,'' he said.
''They didn't talk much about the past. We never had the chance to ask,
how was the music in your village, what was the war like, what was life
like.''
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