Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine Jewish Writing - Softcover

Aizenberg, Edna

9781584652540: Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine Jewish Writing

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584652543 ISBN 13: 9781584652540

Publisher: Brandeis University Press, 2005

On July 18, 1994, the Asociaci n Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), which housed major Argentine Jewish organizations and served as a storehouse of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Argentine Jewish documents and literature, was bombed by terrorists. Although over 80 people were killed and the bomb leveled a city block in downtown Buenos Aires, the perpetrators were never found. Taking the bombing as her starting point, Edna Aizenberg crafts an unusual and powerful study of two canonical Argentine writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto Gerchunoff. Examining in particular the literary and cultural reverberations in other authors of Gerchunoff's 1910 story collection, The Jewish Gauchos and Borges' Judaically inspired work, Aizenberg delves into the primary issues of Argentine and Latin American Jewish cultural production: Holocaust writing, resistance to dictatorship, pluralism and identity, and the position of the writer-scholar as a direct and vital participant in the transformation of culture and society. Situating Latin American Jewish literature within the multiple contexts of the Holocaust, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, Aizenberg argues that a literature celebrating pastiche, hybridity, and carnivalization is more democratic than literature that does not. She makes a brave case for the power of the pen in a contemporary world dominated by the power of the sword.

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Review:

"Aizenberg belongs to a solid core of scholars who have done much over the past twenty years to ensure what is precisely her thesis: that Argentine-Jewish writing - or Latin-American Jewish writing, for that matter - is not a marginal or minority literature. Rather, it is at the heart of what may now be called issues of diversity and hybridity in Latin American culture. And writing in the context of the AMIA bombing, Aizenberg is very eloquent in underscoring the ways in which violence against Jews in Argentina is part of the larger fabric of violence in Argentine society, whether the historically framed violence of neofascist dictatorship or the 'structural' violence that underlies the current economic - and, therefore, social and political crisis in Argentina." - World Literature Today; "This is a provocative challenge to traditional theoretical criticism [of Latin American Jewish literature] in which Aizenberg offers partisan revisionism instead of cultural monumentalism for the consideration of all interested in Argentine life and letters." - Choice"

About the Author:

Edna Aizenberg is Professor and Chair of Spanish at Marymount Manhattan College and has been Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies at Princeton University and of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her books include Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff's "Los gauchos judios" (2000); and Borges, el tejedor del Aleph: del hebraismo al poscolonialismo (1997).

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