THE SEVENTH HEAVEN: TRAVELS
THROUGH JEWISH LATIN AMERICA
By Ilan Stavans
University of Pittsburgh Press
To many, Latin America might not seem the first place to find Jewish residents. But as Ilan Stavans notes in his new book, “The Seventh Heaven,” Jewish communities in South and Central America, taken collectively, “represent the third-largest concentration of Jews worldwide, after the United States and Israel.”
Stavans, the longtime Amherst College professor of Latin American and Latino Culture, spent five years traveling through a dozen countries in Latin America — from Cuba to Chile and Argentina — to discover how Jewish communities are defined, while tracing the history of Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492 and the simultaneous expulsion of Jews from Spain.
During his travels, Stavans, a prolific writer and essayist who grew up Jewish in Mexico, talked to families of the desaparecidos (the disappeared, or murdered), Hassidic mystics in Argentina, “Indian Jews,” and even neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia.
Stavans also visited Spain to try and understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition on the flight of Sephardic Jews from the country, beginning in the late 15th century. Some ended up in Latin America and also what later became New Mexico, where they lived as “crypto-Jews,” practicing Judaism in secret while presenting themselves publicly as Catholics.
As well, he examines outbreaks of anti-Semitism in countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador, from politicians’ diatribes against Zionists to the vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries.
Part of this journey, Stavans notes, was prompted by his reading of “The Enemy at his Pleasure,” an early 20th-century study of Eastern European Jewish communities by a Yiddish-Jewish author and folklorist, Shloyme Zanvi Rappoport. But Stavans also wanted to have a better understanding of his own Latino-Jewish roots.
“I love the combination of Jewish and Latino,” he writes of his meetings with varied people. “There is enormous joy in that encounter…. it was in the conversations, perhaps more than the actual places, that I found meaning.”
AND THERE WILL BE SINGING: AN
ANTHOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL WRITING
Edited by Jim Hicks, Ellen Doré Watson,
and Q.M. Zhang
University of Massachusetts Press
umass.edu/umpress
The Massachusetts Review (MR), the literary quarterly publication founded by a group of Five College professors, turned 60 this year. So to celebrate that landmark, the Review has put together a collection of what the editors call “the best contemporary and emerging international writers and writers in translation, from MR’s last decade.”
“At a time when English-only readers too often know little about the rest of the world, this volume is a classroom in itself,” the editors add. “This timely and essential anthology features fiction, essays and poetry by Mia Couto, Tabish Khair, Menekse Toprak, and Kim Tae-Young, among others.”
The collection is published by the University of Massachusetts Press and edited by Jim Hicks, executive director of MR and a senior lecturer in comparative literature at UMass Amherst; poet Ellen Doré Watson, the poetry and translation editor at MR and a writer in residence at Smith College; and Q.M. Zhang, prose editor for the Review and a professor of cultural psychology at Hampshire College.
“And There Will Be Singing” includes over 50 short stories, vignettes, poems and essays from the past 10 years translated into English from a host of other languages: Bosnian, Croatian, Arabic, Japanese, Romanian, Spanish, Russian, Italian and others, representing some 40 countries. Some pieces were originally written in English, too. As well, the collection includes artwork from Review issues of the past decade.
In an introduction, Hicks notes that he and other MR editors committed in 2009 to publishing more international writing, in part as a response to America’s entanglement in wars that decade in Afghanistan and Iraq — a decade, he adds, that was marked by American “political ignorance and provincialism.” With this new collection, Hicks writes, MR “can, has, and will continue to welcome the homeless, the poor, those masses yearning to breathe free. Sixty years on, our pages remain open, and our lamp still lifted.”
IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS:
101 TALES OF HOLIDAY LOVE & WONDER
Edited and compiled by Amy Newmark
chickensoup.com
Part of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series of books, “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas” is a compilation of personal Christmas stories, as well as stories about Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and New Year’s. A persistent theme is of reaching out and caring for others, and the editors also say the stories are “Santa safe,” meaning that they keep the magic alive even for precocious readers.
One contributor to the collection is Stephanie Schamess of Florence, who previously taught child development at Hampshire College before retiring in 2000. Her story, “The Christmas Day Mitzvah,” relates an experience her late son Gil had when he was a student at Brown University. He was in his rented home by the university and planned to come home for the school’s winter holidays. But a snowstorm on December 24 forced him to cancel his travel.
Since Gil and her family were Jewish, there was no huge need to be back home by Christmas. As Gil was trying to clear snow Christmas Day from the driveway of his home, he was approached by a Hasidic Jew, Avram, who asked him if he’d be willing to be part of a minyan, a quorum of 10 Jewish men needed for religious ceremonies. Turns out a Jewish baby was to have a bris, a ritual circumcision, that day — so Gil, who was not that observant a Jew, spent time on Christmas providing a mitzvah, a good deed, for the local Hasidic community.
As he later told his parents, he’d spent Christmas “doing what people are supposed to do … celebrating the birth of a baby!”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.