Diáspora y exilio: Crónica de una familia argentina

Abstract

In this mixture of family history and autobiography, Eduardo D. Faingold describes a family’s reaction to the terror, displacement, and seeming randomness of Argentina’s Dirty War. It is a book about personal adaptation and family cohesion. Diáspora y exilio is clearly not an academic study of the Dirty War (known in Argentina as the Proceso). Rather, the author tells the story from the point of view of an average Argentine Jew in an extended family that was trying to survive the terror the best it could.When the Dirty War began in earnest in 1976, Eduardo was a college student, like a large proportion of Argentine Jews of his age. At that point, the growing terror seemed not to touch him personally. Then in 1977, his home was subject to attack, or allanamiento, a kind of breaking, entering, and destruction that was carried out by the army and later paramilitary groups. Eduardo had heard of people who had been disappeared, that is, abducted and murdered, though he didn’t feel endangered. But, after the attack on his home, Eduardo, though never a Zionist, escaped to Israel.In Israel, Eduardo tried to continue his schooling and to mind his own business. He did not want to be in Israel. Whereas most immigrants come to Israel to build the country or to practice intensely held religious beliefs, Eduardo had neither of those motivations. He just wanted to hide out from the Argentine thugs and to try to get his moorings. After three months in a Galilean kibbutz, he left Israel, eventually for Denmark and a second exile in a country very unlike Argentina. With hardly any money, he traveled around Europe, eventually returning to Israel and then to Denmark again.At a Danish border crossing in 1980, Eduardo was stopped by an Argentine consular official. The functionary told him that he had only ten hours to return to Argentina and immediately enlist in the army. Like many young Argentines, particularly those on the run, it turned out that that Eduardo could survive only if he returned and served in an army he detested. Ironically, at that point in the Dirty War, the military was one of the safest places to be.Faingold includes many other people in his story through the use of interviews, remembered conversations, and brief, episodic commentaries by many speakers, including himself. Most of these are enlightening, though a few are repetitive and unhelpful. While the variety of characters is a strength of the book, there are so many characters that it is hard to keep track of them. The story ends when Eduardo Faingold is dis charged from the military and sets off on yet one more voyage of discovery in Israel and other domains. Yet the reader needs to know more. What happened to those who stayed? Did things get even worse? How did it all end? The war on the Argentine public went on for three more years. The psychological portraits that hold this book together should have gone farther.Eduardo D. Faingold’s work is best when he is writing about himself. He is both an everyman and an idiosyncratic individual. He shows himself constantly making rash decisions and always leaving people and places behind. While the book is about family, the early chapters about his paternal and maternal European ancestors should have been shortened. There is more information than is really needed, and this skews the book.In Diáspora y exilio, Faingold has written a short book that is both highly emotional and compelling. He appears as both the teller of tales and as the main character. He is the student, the kibbutznik, the man on the road with barely enough to live on, and the exile who returns to Argentina to join the army. He watches his beloved family split up and emigrate to countries where Spanish is not spoken. Faingold himself is now a professor in Oklahoma. For most members of his family, and in spite of all they went through, the tie to Argentina remains strong.