Jews in Flight: Aleppo to Montevideo

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.

Perfumes of Carthage (paired with another novella by Porzecanski called Sun Inventions) is published in English by the University of New Mexico Press as a part of its remarkable series—edited by esteemed Jewish Mexican-American essayist, critic, and translator Ilan Stavans—called Jewish Latin America.  

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 Jeremías 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

Desperate in Brooklyn, the Literary Borough

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

This wicked little novel--a mordant concoction  of "Virginia Woolf," Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, and (strangely) of William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic (those abrasive exchanges between Paul and Liz that nearly make you want to scream with irritation)--came my way quite by accident as I trolled my local bookstore.  Ms. Fox, ninety this year, is a remarkable writer who has alternated between producing award-winning children's books and well-regarded works of fiction for adults.  Desperate Characters is her masterpiece, regarded by many novelists and critics as one of the finest short novels ever written by an American.  Irving Howe compared Desperate Characters to "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day." I'm not sure about Billy Budd--Sophie Bentwood, the novel's heroine, lacks Billy's ingenuousness--but Fox deftly captures the shallow American discontentment that one finds in Fitzgerald and the mutual destructiveness that often lies at the heart of Bellow's stories of love and marriage.

Like a finely-crafted Joseph Cornell box or one of those deft fictional miniatures created by Kawabata or Soseki, Desperate Characters revolves around just a few characters--the married couple Otto and Sophie Bentwood and a handful of acquaintances--and a relatively narrow slip of 1960's Brooklyn, the untidy borough as it existed before the arrival of the pioneers, the place where people threw trash out of their windows and where you had to walk many blocks to find a cup of coffee.  In fact one of Fox's deft touches is to contrast the aspirations of the neighborhood with the rapidly diminishing dreams of the Bentwoods--as though urban decay had crept into their well-appointed living room and quietly eroded what money and propriety had so tenuously created--their sham of a middle-class life.

"What the owners of the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and indirection."

"At night, the street had a quiet, earnest look, as though it were trying to continue to improve itself in the dark."

Otto and Sophie are well-off, childless, social but not friendly, close but not intimate.  We enter their life at dinner time--chicken livers and risotto Milanese and a nice salad--in media res, a Friday night, with a party looming that neither wishes to attend.  In the midst of what we might reasonably take to be a typical  desultory conversation, the sort of comfortable exchange that defines the banality of ordinary domestic life, Otto reveals that he has broken relations with his law partner, severed, in fact, all ties with his (ostensible) best friend; a few moments later, in attempting to feed a stray cat, Sophie is badly bitten, wounded in a way that surprises her: "Sophie winced as she felt a thrust of sharp pain. [Otto] frowned at her and she saw that he thought she hadn't liked what he had said. She'd tell him now, might as well. The incident with the cat was silly. At a distance of a half an hour, she wondered at the terror she'd felt, and the shame."  Thus, in a moment, the Bentwood's lives begin to unravel--Otto's business partner isn't going away, and Sophie's wound tears at the foundations of her unexamined life.

My in-laws grew up in Brooklyn.  My father was born in Queens and used to take me to Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbet's field, including that last heartbreaking season in 1956 after which Walter O'Malley moved the team to LA.  I have a program from '56 somewhere here in my study inscribed with the magical names from that summer: Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Weese, Jim 'Junior' Gilliam, Don Newcombe.  (See The Last Good Season, by Michael Shapiro).  I don't get to Brooklyn often nowadays, but when I'm there I'm on the look-out for the writers who reside in the borough rather than for ballplayers (though a ballplayer or two lives there still).  I'm not sure I'd recognize Jonathan Lethem (his photo was in the Times today and he looked more like my daughter's third-grade teacher than the oddball writer he is), but if I were in Brooklyn I wouldn't mind catching up with Ms. Fox or with one of the Great Bald Men of American writing: Mark Doty, Daniel Mendelsohn, Chad Harbach, Ben Marcus. Or running into Nicole Krauss or the irritable James Wood, or maybe Richard Price...I'm not sure all these writers live in Brooklyn, but many do, Jennifer Egan for example, who lives right there in Fort Greene on the same block as an Irish friend of mine--so many writers, both the living and the dead.

Brooklyn, then, is the literary borough. Writers everywhere, and famous people, and rich, endless life.  The best kind of place to be desperate.


Paula Fox is a New York writer, and a lot has been made of that fact. But Desperate Characters hardly feels like a New York novel--like a Paul Auster entertainment for example--Otto and Sophie might play out their marital and existential malaise in Iowa City as well as off Henry Street in Brooklyn.  Aside from a dappling of local color in the early chapters, the Bentwoods carry out their lives in the claustrophobic binary space of an unhappy marriage--a place every bit like the hell Satan carried with him.  Otto is a bigot, given to complaints about "them" dropping their trash on the street, and to sayings like, "I watched a colored man kick over a trash basket yesterday...Americans...softly dropping their turds wherever they go."  And Sophie yearns, perhaps for something other than Otto, or perhaps for something she once had but misplaced in her nice home in Brooklyn.  Fox brilliantly captures the kind of drift that makes up most lives, desperate or not.  Rabies, which Sophie may have contracted from the cat bite, her swollen hand, her troubled dealings with exiled Charlie, her confused sense of her "place," give her desperation a focus, but hardly explain it.  What is it that makes the Bentwoods so uneasy?

"[Otto] tightened his grip on [Sophie's] hip and turned her toward him, and as she sank below him on her back he saw by a faint glimmer of street light shining through the cracks in the window shutters, the dark smudges of her closed eyes. Then, with no ceremony and perversely gratified by the discomfort he was inflicting on them both, he entered her. When he withdrew, after an orgasm of an intensity he had not expected, he had the fleeting thought that his sudden impulse had had little to do with sensuality."

Nothing at all.  Cruelty, it appears, possesses a logic, and gives pleasure, unique to itself.

Desperate Characters is published by Norton. 

George Ovitt (9/12/13)

Portugal: Don Quixote Meets Walter Mitty

The Illustrious House of Ramires by Eça de Queirós (1845-1900)

“A combination of Don Quixote and Walter Mitty,” remarks a reviewer for The London Spectator in describing the main character of the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós’ witty, ironic, often brilliantly modern novel, The Illustrious House of Ramires. Indeed our hero, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires, failed student, dilettante, idler, dreamer, coward, plagiarist, and inbred scion of the once-great House of Ramires, tilts at windmills every way he turns—and nearly always in a bumbling, affectionately human way. 

Set largely in and around The Tower of Santa Ireneia, the last remaining structure of the old Ramires estate in Portugal, Gonçalo or “‘The Nobleman of the Tower,” as he is commonly known, spends much of the story trying to write an Historical Novel called The Tower of Don Ramires, based on the heroic exploits of his Visigothic ancestors, in particular those of one Tructesindo Ramires, “standard-bearer of Sancho I.” He attempts this both as a means of ennobling himself as a man among the locals and as a way of improving his prospects as a politician—a largely egotistical dream of his that all but governs his waking hours. Also at the root of his efforts to memorialize his ancestors in prose is his reactionary desire to honor the ancient, much debased virtues of the great nation of Portugal itself with something “Portuguese alone, ours alone, blossoming from our soil and race!” As his friend and editor exclaims to him one day: “It’s a duty, a sacred duty… Portugal, my boy, is dying for lack of national sentiment! We are dying wretchedly of the evil of not being Portuguese!”

Richly tongue-in-cheek, The Illustrious House of Ramires is both a satire and a study of wit and style. It surprises one. While at first glance a fairly traditional novel, it is in fact a wryly self-conscious, decidedly experimental tale. As V.S. Pritchett puts it in his introduction: “…the book is a novel within a novel, a comedy of the relation of the unconscious with quotidian experience. One is tricked at first into thinking one is caught up in a rhetorical tale of chivalry a lá Walter Scott; then one changes one’s mind and treats its high-flown historical side as one of those Romances that addled the mind of Don Quixote…”

What I love about this novel is the way that de Queirós clearly revels in his own language, in the delight and fecundity of words. Here now, to end with, to help cast this novel’s spell, is the opening description of our hero, The Nobleman, Dom Gonçalo Ramires, at work in his study:

The library, a light and spacious room, with blue-washed walls and heavy blackwood bookshelves, where, amid the dust and grave leather bindings, lay thick volumes from convents and legal parchments, overlooked the orchard through two of its windows, one with a small balcony and stone seats with velvet-cushioned tops, the other, a broader one, with a veranda deliciously perfumed by the honeysuckle which entwined the railing.  It was in front of the brightness of this window that the table stood, an immense table with twisted legs, covered by a faded red damask cloth, and burdened this afternoon by the stiff volumes of The Genealogical History, the whole of Bluteau’s Vocabulary, and various volumes of Panorama, and in the corner a pile of Walter Scotts on which stood a glass full of yellow carnations. Form here, from his leather chair, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires, pensive before the sheets of foolscap paper and scratching his head with the duck-quill pen, could see the inspiration  his novel—the Tower. The ancient Tower, square and black against the lemon-trees of the orchard which grew around it, with a little ivy dressing the cleft corner, its deep loopholes barred with iron, its battlements and turret clearly silhouetted in the blue of the June sky…

 Jóse Maria Eça de Queirós was born in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal in 1845. Over the course of his life he wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, translated the work of fellow writers, and served as a diplomat in Havana, London, and Paris. Among his best known works are The Maias, The Crime of Father Amaro, The Yellow Sofa, and The City and the Mountains, each of which I recommend. He died in Paris in the year 1900 while serving as the Portuguese Consul-General and working as a journalist. (Thanks in part to New Directions). The Illustrious House of Ramires, published by New Directions, is translated by Anne Stevens.

Peter Adam Nash