Perfumes of Carthage by Teresa Porzecanski
Once, before the creation of Israel, there was a thriving
Jewish community in Syria. Indeed for more than 3,000 years Aleppo, Syria’s largest,
now bitterly war-torn city was “the crown of Jewish splendor in the Sephardic
world.” It has been said of Aleppo that,
outside of Israel itself, there is no other city in the world that can claim
such a rich and vibrant Jewish history.
Beyond the city’s location at the heart off a bustling trade
network in spices, a part of what made the once-Ottoman city of Aleppo such an
important center for Sephardic Jewish life and learning was what has come to be
known as the Aleppo Codex, the earliest known record of the entire text of the
Bible, a manuscript (consulted by none other than the great Maimonides in his
effort to codify the text’s transmission) that, after nearly a thousand years
of safekeeping in Aleppo, was finally smuggled out of Syria to Israel in the
1940’s.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the birth of
modern Israel in 1948 proved the death knell for the ancient Jewish communities
of Syria. Just a year earlier, rioters
had destroyed the Jewish quarter of Aleppo, killing 75 people and prompting
more than half of the city’s Jewish population to flee the country for good. Of
the 30, 000 Jews who remained, it was not long before they too—like so many
Palestinians in the newly created Israel—were forced to abandon their deeply rooted
lives there, emigrating to other Jewish communities throughout the world, so that
today there remains hardly a trace of the once-great Jewish presence in
Syria.
Of the many far-flung Sephardic communities, those of Latin
America proved especially appealing to Syrian Jews who readily struggled to
make their lives anew in countries and cultures as varied as Mexico, Panama,
Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. A smaller contingent,
refugees from the many anti-Jewish restrictions and pogroms in Syria during the
1910’s and ‘20’s, chose Uruguay as their home, where they settled principally—amidst
a rush of Spaniards and Italians—in the bustling port city of Montevideo where
this novella, Perfumes of Carthage is
set.
Born in Uruguay at the end of WWII, a descendant of Ashkenazic
and Sephardic Jews from the Baltics and Syria, Porzecanski grew up in
Montevideo speaking Yiddish, Arabic, and Spanish—a lush, if conflicted world of
longing and nostalgia, which she skillfully recreates in Perfumes of Carthage. Centered around a woman named Lunita Mualdeb,
the story describes the small, still exotic community of Syrian Sephardic Jews
in the River Plata region of Uruguay during the 1930’s. It was a trying period in
the nation’s short history, defined largely by the dictatorship of Gabriel
Terra during which the constitution was abolished, professors and writers
jailed, and dissent often brutally repressed. The title, Perfumes of Carthage is the name of a perfume shop owned and
operated by one of the novella’s principal characters, a man named JeremÃas
Berro whose perfumes—like so many of the novel’s details—have the power to
conjure both the distant wonders of the Orient and the Past itself, which
haunts this funny, tragic tale.
The author’s dedication of the novellas is moving: “For my
aunt, Ana Porzecanski, shot to death in Latvia, 1939.”
Teresa Porzecanski, a scholar on such wide-ranging issues as racism, labor history, and
Indian rituals, has published five
novels and seven collections of short stories in Uruguay. Perfumes
of Carthage and Sun Inventions
were translated by Johnny Payne and Phyllis Silverstein. Find them and other
great titles from the Jewish Latin America series at http://www.unmpress.com/.
Peter Adam Nash
No comments:
Post a Comment