Inheriting Ghosts in Latin American Jewish Literature: Forging Stories and Selves Out of Deathly Pasts in Sergio Chejfec and Eduardo Halfon

Abstract

For those in Diaspora, Jewishness is a patrimony of blood and knowledge. The stories of fathers and grandfathers inscribe progeny into a lineage that links them to a family and thus, more broadly, to a people that stretch back in time. These connecting stories constitute a sense of origins, bequeathing a history and therefore a starting point from which children and grandchildren may form an organized conception of themselves. But what happens when death produces a problem in transmission, when trauma renders a story’s guardian dead in life, or when that life story becomes a narrative of death? Two Latin American autofictions, Argentine Sergio Chejfec’s Lenta biografía (1990) and Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon’s El boxeador polaco (2008), address the issue of receiving identifying legacies defined by death. The son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, Chejfec and Halfon grapple with inheriting haunting life stories by turning to writing. In the earlier work, death produces a dearth of information, and Chejfec combats the potentially damaging consequences of a biography mediated by the spectral by inventing details of a man and a history whose presence overwhelms through their absence. Halfon is told his grandfather’s story, yet, though known, it too haunts his attempts to use it to understand himself. While the former’s solution achieves some level of success in dispelling the disruptive aspects of the ghostly, the latter’s turn to writing almost twenty years later does not yield such resolution, suggesting that some shift has occurred—over time or generations—in attitudes toward resolving the persistence of death in identifying life stories.