A child is born to immigrant parents in Brazil, and this child has a special problem. He is a centaur, a creature half-man, half-horse.
But that isn’t the least of it. This centaur is also Jewish in a predominantly Catholic country. And when he finally meets a female centaur, it turns out she is not Jewish.
This may sound like a story for children. In fact, it is the subject of one of the most highly regarded novels by one of Brazil’s greatest modern authors, Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011).
This 1980 novel, “The Centaur in the Garden,” was written with the “magical realist” techniques that are credited to have originated in Latin American literature. It was named one of the greatest works of modern Jewish fiction by the National Yiddish Book Center. Its author was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 2003.
And Scliar is not the only Brazilian Jewish author to have become celebrated in his native land. In a country where only about 120,000 Jews live in a total population of some 200 million, several Jews have made significant and honored contributions to the country’s literature.
Moreover, many of these writers have explored the same or similar themes, even if some haven’t necessarily done so in a directly Jewish way — themes of homeland, identity, a frustrated need to belong, self vs. other. Finally, many of these Jewish writers have pioneered the exploration of these themes for non-Jewish writers from other Brazilian immigrant groups.
Nelson H. Vieira, Ph.D., of Brown University made all these points in his discussion of “Homeland and/or Diaspora? The Cultural Politics of Being Jewish in Brazil.”
He spoke on Feb. 22 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library in one of a series of UWM Portuguese Lectures sponsored by the school’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
The event was co-sponsored by UWM’s Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies, the library, and the library’s Jewish Latin America Collection Associates.
In a summary of Jewish history in Brazil, Vieira said the earliest Jews came to the area in the 1500s. Most of them during that time were Sephardim who had been forced to become Christians; and they assimilated to the point that there is little trace of them today.
The modern Jewish community, he said, descends primarily from Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia who arrived in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. But a modern minority community of Sephardic Jews exists, comprising groups from the Middle East and Turkey; and while Vieira characterized most Brazilian Jews as having a “secular” culture, he added that “a growing number of Orthodox communities” now exist there.
Most of the Jews live in Sao Paulo (about 60,000) and Rio de Janeiro (about 40,000), Vieira said. However, some of the important Jewish writers come from other parts of the country, like Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), who grew up primarily in Recife.
Lispector in novels, stories, and journalistic columns sounded many of the themes of alienation and quest for belonging common to other Brazilian Jewish writers, Vieira said.
He quoted several of her observations: “In a land of brunettes, to have red hair was an involuntary act of rebellion.” “Life has allowed me to belong now and then… To belong is to live.”
Yet she was not overtly Jewish in her writing. In fact, Vieira said, many people didn’t realize Lispector was Jewish until she died.
Therefore, even though Lispector’s first novel came out in 1944, explicitly Jewish modern Brazilian literature, Vieira said, begins with the 1956 “Tales of an Immigrant” by Samuel Rawet (1929-1984), a native of Poland whose family moved to Rio when he was 7.
The common themes apparently are not reactions to local anti-Semitic hostility. Vieira said that while some discrimination has existed, generally “overt discrimination was less than what occurred in other Latin American countries.”
Still, the community’s experience raises many questions explored in the authors’ works, Vieira said. “Can one be Jewish and Brazilian? … Does there exist a trans-national Jewish homeland or identity that crosses borders? … Do Brazilian Jews have to live with a sense of cultural lack just because they live outside the Jewish homeland? … Does one have to accept the Zionist point of view of Diaspora as some type of ongoing exile? Or are we in a post-Zionist era?”
And this literature, he concluded, has “been prophetic in its deconstruction of the tyranny of cultural sameness that thrives at the expense of difference.”
Vieira, a native of Massachusetts, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Though he comes from Portuguese ancestry, he didn’t become interested in Brazil and its literature until he spent his college junior year in Brazil. “Brazil is a very seductive country,” he told The Chronicle.
He earned his doctorate at Harvard and is now professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literature, and Jewish studies at Brown. His publications include the book “Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature” (1995), and he is a past president (1995-2002) of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.
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