The Entre Ríos Trilogy: Three Novels (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Entre Ríos Trilogy: Three Novels David William Foster The Entre Ríos Trilogy: Three Novels, by Perla Suez, translated by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, introduction by Ilan Stavans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. 241 pp. $24.95. A volume in the now extensive New Mexico series, Jewish Latin America, admirably edited by Ilan Stavans, Perla Suez's trilogy joins a long line of Latin American Jewish writers translated into English. Because of the significant Jewish presence in Argentine culture, it is no surprise that many of these translations relate to experiences in that country; moreover, the particular importance of Argentine women writers means also that there is a particularly important representation of female Jewish voices: Ana María Shua, Alicia Steimberg, Nora Glickman, Alicia Kozameh, Alicia Partnoy come immediately to mind, and they are joined by translated Jewish women writers from other Latin American republics, such as Marjorie Agosín (Chile), Margo Glantz (Mexico), Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (Mexico), and Clarice Lispector (Brazil). I don't wish to generalize about any particular feminist consensus among these writers or to overgeneralize any particular array of themes. Suffice it to say that they constitute an important presence, as women and as Jews, in the extensive body of Latin American literature represented in translation, thanks to series like New Mexico's. Suez is particularly well known as a children's writer and also a teacher of creative writing in her native Córdoba, Argentina, where she was born in 1947. The three novels represented by this trilogy are Letargo (Lethargy; 2000), El arresto (The Arrest; 2001), and Complot (2004). These are all fairly short novels, characterized by a spare and micronarrative style. All three are set in the Mesopotamian area of east central Argentina known as Entre Ríos (which lies upriver and slightly to the northeast from Buenos Aires), an area where there was an organized attempt, by the Argentine government and the Jewish Refugee Committee working in Argentina, to settle Jewish immigrants as farmers and dairymen in the late nineteenth century. Although there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the towns and villages of that area for over 125 years now (an iconic settlement is known as Moisesville; also written occasionally as Moisés Ville), it was inevitable, especially given upward social and economic mobility in Argentina, that sons and some daughters and even entire families would eventually make their way to large cities, preferably, of course, Buenos Aires, to make up the dynamic, constantly changing, and vital Jewish quarters of one of the great metropolises of the continent, eventually participating, in addition to all range of commercial enterprises, in a full spectrum of Argentine cultural, intellectual, academic, and artistic life. [End Page 216] It is customary to speak almost in dithyrambic terms with regard to the successes of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, as well as to lament the exodus, primarily to Israel and the United States, that has resulted, first, from neofascist military tyranny in the periods 1966–73 and 1976–83, and, second, from the disasters of often disingenuous official economic policies. In the process, what frequently gets lost is the story of the harsh struggles of Jews to survive in what was not a hostility-free environment. Antisemitism was often a part of official policy, but it was more often an irreflexive business-as-usual conduct of people of all social classes in the fierce struggle for survival what had become, by the early twentieth century, almost universally (at least in urban and semi-urban areas) a very hard-scrabble immigrant society. Indeed, there is probably nothing very original in the details of everyday persecutions and indignities Jews suffered in Argentina: what is original is the way in which Jews were able mostly to triumph and to come to play, as in the United States, such a vital role in national life. But to this day, gross repression continues, such as in the very anti-Jewish discriminatory policies of the self-styled "Christian" military dictatorships in the two periods mentioned above and in, despite the return to constitutional democracy in 1983, the two acts of significant violence against the Jewish community: the...