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The Impact of the Holocaust in Latin America

Not long ago, I was sent a slim volume published recently in Buenos Aires, barely a hundred pages long, called Barbarie y memoria. It is a compilation of international authors, edited by Manuela Fingueret and meant for a general Spanish-language audience. Its subtitle indicates that it includes reflections on both the Holocaust and the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. That intrigued me.

The number of anthologies about the Nazi atrocities has multiplied in the United States in the last 25 years, after a period of silence immediately following World War II; today, the Holocaust is a permanent fixture in American-Jewish life, explored in documentaries, films, memoirs, museum exhibits, and more. Nothing like the Shoah business exists, even remotely, south of the Rio Grande.

I thus browsed Fingueret's volume with enormous excitement. At first, I was disappointed by some of the selections: poems, nonfiction, testimonials, and stories by figures like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Simon Wiesenthal, and Nelly Sachs. Those seemed predictable choices, although, I realized, probably not for the Hispanic public in the Southern Hemisphere, where the names might be recognizable, but nowhere near the heart of the region's intellectual debate. As I read on, however, what made my exposure to Barbarie y memoria far more satisfying was the way that the obvious sat side by side with the unanticipated. Among the prominent figures from the Spanish-language world (not only from Latin America, but the Iberian Peninsula as well) were Jorge Semprún, Spain's former minister of culture, whose 1964 account of an agonizing truck ride to Buchenwald after he was captured working with the French resistance (translated as The Long Voyage) is one of the few works on the Holocaust in Spanish. But there was also the poetry of León Felipe, Héctor Yánover, and Mónica Sifrim, and the prose of Simja Sneh, León Rozitchner, and Santiago Kovadloff: Some of the selections dealt directly with the effects of the Nazi genocide in Spanish-speaking countries, barely known within the writers' linguistic boundaries, almost never beyond them; others concerned the impact of the Argentine dictatorship, far more a subject that people around the globe have come to expect from Latin American authors. A few selections even related, compared, and contrasted the two events.

Ultimately, the juxtaposition of the Holocaust and Argentina's tyranny during its "Dirty War" was nothing if not provocative. It was an invitation to open up the discussion of the role of anti-Semitism in Hispanic America. Yes, I reflected, Fingueret's effort might seem minuscule to those exposed to the overwhelming amount of Holocaust literature in English, French, German, and other European languages. But "minuscule" carries the wrong connotation in reference to a book on the Holocaust published in Argentina -- a book that is limited, perhaps, by the region's circumstances, but not unimportant.

At first glance, it may seem strange that the Nazi genocide has played so little role, to date, in the Latin American imagination. According to the World Jewish Congress, about half a million Jews live in Latin America, mainly in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, but also in countries like Guatemala, Peru, Costa Rica, and Colombia. That, in fact, is the fifth-largest concentration of Jewish population on the globe, after the United States, Israel, Russia and Central and Eastern Europe together, and France. Argentina alone has 250,000 Jews -- eighth in the congress's listing of national populations.

A large percentage of the Jews in the region arrived from the 1880's to the 1960's, a substantial number of them Yiddish speakers from shtetlach and urban centers of the Old Continent, and another considerable portion from what was once the Ottoman Empire. Before that influx came the immigration of Marranos, or "crypto-Jews," who had first converted and then fled Spain, desperately trying to escape the mighty fist of the Inquisition.

There is little doubt that the Holocaust itself played a significant role in increasing Jewish immigration to Latin America -- and in the history of the Jewish communities there. Eager to flee increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, many German-speaking Jewish refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe found havens in the Southern Hemisphere in the 1930's. Numerous others -- survivors of concentration camps and displaced persons from Eastern Europe, Greece, and Turkey -- immigrated to Latin America in the aftermath of World War II.

Yet the Jewish presence has remained peripheral in Latin America. In my youth in Mexico, Jews were approached not just with curiosity, but also with suspicion. In the early 1970's, when I was an adolescent, my sixth-grade teacher took us to a school screening of Alain Resnais's Night and Fog. To better illustrate the Holocaust, an Auschwitz survivor was invited to the classroom. I vividly remember the moment he raised his sweater sleeve and showed us his tattooed number. But mine was a small, insular, Yiddish-language day school, so discussion of the Holocaust was not so surprising. Few non-Jews in Mexico at the time (or, for that matter, until recently) were introduced to the Holocaust through more than, at best, a smattering of popular culture -- television miniseries like Holocaust, with Meryl Streep, and movies like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, imported from the United States. As a result, knowledge of the Jews and their history has remained fractured, incomplete. Just how incomplete was brought home to me in 1981, when, by then a college student, I was confronted in a public bathroom by acquaintances who wanted to see what a circumcised Jew looked like.

It has long been a puzzle to me that Octavio Paz, a Renaissance man whom I admire wholeheartedly, whose work fills my library shelves, reflected on just about anything, from Buddhism and T. S. Eliot to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Surrealism. But not on the Jewish presence in his homeland. The more than a dozen hefty tomes of his Obras Completas are a veritable map that links Mexico to the rest of the globe. But absent in those reflections is any serious consideration of Jewishness. So ubiquitous in Western civilization, Jews seem to have been nonexistent in Paz's eyes.

The indifference is not always as blunt. Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller is about a Jew in Lima, Peru, who is described as "strange," and the writer's essays tackle controversial issues, including the entangled Middle East conflict. The novels of Carlos Fuentes, from A Change of Skin to Terra Nostra, analyze Jewish-Hispanic relations since the Middle Ages. But even in the oeuvres of those authors, Jews, although mentioned, are usually dealt with superficially, not as a significant part of Hispanic culture.

The opposite should be said about Jorge Luis Borges, whose reaction to Nazism was uncompromised by his environment, and whose interest in Judaism ran deep: ranging from Hebrew and Hasidism to kabbalah and the birth of the state of Israel. Borges was arguably the most important 20th-century intellectual in Latin America. But was he truly Latin American? I don't want to enter into meaningless debates about authenticity. Nevertheless, the fact is that the Argentine writer was superb precisely because he turned Argentine letters upside down, because he proved that cosmopolitanism was a legacy not only of Europe, but also of the globe. His preoccupations weren't those of his continent, by even the most generous stretch of the imagination.

It ought to be noted that Latin America is not alone among Hispanic cultures in holding an ambiguous relation to the Jews in its midst. Spain gave us Rafael Cansinos-Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, both of whom wrote sympathetically about Jews, as well as Angel Pulido, whose dream it was, at the dawn of the 20th century, to create an atmosphere that would facilitate the return of Jews to the peninsula. Federico García Lorca was inspired by a Jewish cemetery in his Poeta en Nueva York, and Miguel de Unamuno wrote an obscure poem, "Canción del sefardita," about nostalgia for Sepharad, which is the word used by Levantine Jews to refer to Spain. Iberian theater includes references to the Nazis and the Old Testament and to some claims that Christopher Columbus was Jewish. But the amount of anti-Semitic literature -- which includes works by Francisco de Quevedo, the poet, and Benito Pérez Galdós, the novelist -- is far more substantial. Significantly, debate or dismay about it is conversely small.

In Latin America, not even the topic of Marranos and Jews in colonial times -- so important a part of the history of the area's settlement -- elicits much attention. Indeed, the silence is almost palpable. Figures like Luis de Carvajal the Younger -- whose autobiography, drafted in Spanish prison in 1589, named other crypto-Jews and ignited so much fear among his compatriots that many left Spain -- remain little known. Carvajal's writings, including his letters, are long out of print and unavailable today to Latin American readers. Scholars know about him, but most other readers know at best only a problematic biography of the Carvajal family, filled with ambiguous feelings toward Jews by the author, Alfonso Toro. More than 30 years ago, Seymour B. Liebman produced a bibliography of Inquisition cases and sources about Marranos in the New World; he and Martin Cohen also studied Carvajal. At least such a resource is available in English. But only a small portion of that research has been translated into Spanish, and it is mostly unobtainable today. Anthologies about Sephardic civilization have appeared, but their circulation is limited.

Again, the question is why. Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life (1999) attempts to explain how remembering the Nazi genocide became such an industry -- even a religion -- in the United States. For years after the war, Novick argues, a combination of factors, from cold-war politics to the reluctance of American Jews to be considered victims, silenced discussion of the Holocaust; then, events like the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the Six-Day War in the Middle East opened up the topic. That hasn't happened in Latin America. For one thing, the region's Jews themselves have yet to "go public" about who they are and how they are perceived. More often than not, they still prefer silence to open debate about their status in society. Fear of anti-Semitism, fear of being stigmatized as a minority, still runs high.

Of course, Jewish immigrants to new lands have always struggled to assimilate and become full citizens. But those who fled to Hispanic America faced a particular kind of anti-Semitism. For the overall structure of Hispanic society since the Middle Ages has been colored by the concept of pureza de sangre, "purity of blood," used by Old Christians to vilify half-hearted converts -- mainly former Jews. That has made a world of difference. The anti-Semitic bias has deep roots; even in territories where Jews were not actively persecuted, the xenophobia against those who are not genealogically Roman Catholic is still ubiquitous. To complicate matters more, the concept of purity of blood also pervaded the subjugation of the New World, echoed by conquerors, explorers, and missionaries, who saw aboriginal people as impure. For the conquered, the concept carried with it the sound of doom.

It must also be remembered that many Jewish immigrants who survived the Holocaust and came to Latin America faced a sad irony: They found themselves living with often-visible Nazi fugitives who had also found their way there, aided by "rat lines" and sympathetic officials who, fascinated by the militarism of the Nazis and fed by anti-Semitism, made the region a haven for Nazis. Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, and Klaus Barbie were only the best known of the German escapees to the region.

Then too, for many people in Latin America, the Holocaust took place far away and out of sight. If, at the time, it was reported scantily in North America, south of the border it was covered nothing short of abysmally. Part of the reason is that tragedy is always local, and the history of the Hispanic Americas, especially as they were forcibly introduced to modernity, has more than its own share of genocide to occupy its people.

The arrival of the Spanish conquistadors gave rise to a devastation of human life just as unimaginable as that of the Holocaust. How many Indians in the Hispanic world died in wars or as the result of plagues and famine is up for grabs, but the numbers historians debate are in the millions. The collective memory of such devastation persists to the present day. Add to those memories the wreckage of the battles for independence, and of the chain of oppressive regimes that followed, and the effect is a chilling museum of human atrocities in which anti-Semitism, for many people, seems to play only a small, often tangential role.

Terror has played a part. No one should minimize the effect of living in fear: For a long period, neither the survivors of the Holocaust in Latin America nor anyone else living in the shadow of the dictatorial regimes there dared draw attention to themselves by speaking about their own experience with fear.

And yet, and yet ... Fingueret's anthology is the product of a slightly more open atmosphere that dates to the late 1980's and the end of the very visible dictatorship in Argentina. Jews seem more comfortable talking about themselves, and others seem a bit more willing to listen. There's a refreshing new sense of self-consciousness about the Nazi period in Latin America, and about the role of Jews in Hispanic society. The openness is more evident in some Latin American countries than in others, but it is safe to say that the pattern is beginning to span the region. The presence of sustained, if fragile, democracy is probably part of it. So, too, is a kind of envy with which some Hispanic Jews regard their seemingly more comfortable and more open coreligionists to the north. Many children and grandchildren of survivors are scattered throughout Argentina's capital, as well as in urban centers in Brazil, and want more information about the emotional troubles faced by Jewish immigrants. And perhaps third- and fourth-generation Jews in Latin America are finally beginning to feel more at ease than their forebears.

That is not to say that full acceptance of Jews is at hand. Much of the new feeling is still unspoken, unexplored. But the silence, at least in my view, is not as emphatic as it once was.

Jewish authors, for example, seem to have more presence in the Southern Hemisphere. From Argentina, there is Ricardo Feierstein, Marcos Aguinis, Jorge Goldenberg, and Fingueret herself; from Mexico, Rosa Nissán; from Uruguay, Mauricio Rosencof. Many of those authors began their careers decades ago, but now the collective impact of their work is beginning to be felt. Some are even achieving popular success. And while few take the genocide in Europe as their central focus, many do offer it as backdrop. Editorial Milá and the Acervo Cultural in Argentina publish Holocaust survivors' accounts, like that of Charles Papiernik, originally a French citizen, who endured four years in Auschwitz. And a recent fiction contest, organized by Feierstein, brought a handful of Holocaust-related narratives, including El último día, by Mina Weil, about a Jewish girl growing up in Mussolini's Italy. I've also seen some nonfiction articles, like one about relationships among Holocaust victims by Diana Wang, a psychologist in Buenos Aires, who found out she was Jewish as she was about to take first Communion.

Films, too, are part of the trend. I'm acquainted with fewer than half a dozen movies made in Latin America that address the Holocaust directly, but several others deal with the topic at least tangentially. Those include Luis Mandoki's 1987 Gaby, a true story about a handicapped Mexican woman whose parents were refugees from Nazi Europe, and a 1993 adaptation of Nissán's novel Novia que te vea (Like a Bride).

Of course, time continues to add to the emotional traumas faced by Jewish refugees. Like Simja Sneh (1914-99), a Yiddish- and Polish-speaking intellectual in Argentina, they fled fascism only to live through the Dirty War, often run by hoodlums who had been trained by Nazis or the children of Nazis. Then they witnessed the atentados -- terrorist attacks -- on the Israeli Embassy and the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina in Buenos Aires in the early 90's. Today, they still often confront the presence of the children of escaped Nazis -- a presence obvious in areas like Bariloche, Argentina, where the heirs of the Nazis are known in popular lore as "Swiss Germans," as well as in Asunción, Paraguay, where the German population divides itself into "good" and "bad" Germans.

However, the Holocaust survivors and their children are freer to discuss their mounting burden publicly. Take an example, again from Argentina: Daniel Feierstein, a son of the novelist Ricardo Feierstein, leads a group of young Holocaust scholars -- Marcela Bartoló, Guillermo Levy, Damián Montero -- at the University of Buenos Aires, where they have produced a body of essays about Nazi methods in the ghettos and camps of Europe. Recently, the university's press published Feierstein's revised Seis estudios sobre genocidio, first available in 1997. Feierstein is also one of the first to examine Argentine-government archives containing secret correspondence with the Axis powers during World War II, and he has now edited those documents and published them on a CD-ROM.

I want to reiterate a word of caution: The emerging consciousness that grapples with the Holocaust in Latin America has probably reached only a tiny fraction of the population; it may also be more evident to a viewer looking to Latin America from the United States than in Latin America itself. For most of the Hispanic Americas, the Holocaust is still little acknowledged.

Indeed, it is to the north that the real impact of new discussions about the role of the Holocaust in Latin America is being felt most strongly. A number of intellectuals and scholars of Jewish-Hispanic descent -- I include myself here -- have moved to the United States in search of a more open atmosphere to explore our Jewishness. As a group, we are forcing American Jews to see the Holocaust not only from a U.S. viewpoint, but from a more pluralist perspective. The evidence is growing: museum exhibits, films, drama, fiction, and poetry on the impact of the Holocaust in Latin America (some written or produced in English, some translated from the Spanish or Portuguese); relatively recent scholarship like Jews of the Latin American Republics, by Judith Laikin Elkin, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge From Nazism, by Leo Spitzer, and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Questions, by Jeffrey Lesser; personal essays by the Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar. Sadly, such work tends mainly to be ignored in Latin America.

So I see Barbarie y memoria as testimony to a moment of intriguing change. It is a moment when Jews in Latin America are beginning to be more open about their Jewishness, and when scholars in the United States are creating a field to study them. Nothing like the Shoah business north of the Rio Grande exists to the south. But it is a start.

Ilan Stavans is a professor of Spanish at Amherst College. His book On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (Viking) will be published in August. He is the editor of the series Jewish Latin America, published by the University of New Mexico Press.

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