10 - A Balancing Act: Latin American Jewish Literature in the United States (or Towards a Jewish-Latino Literature)

Summary

The study of Latin American Jewish writing as a subdivision of Latin American literature is a relatively new field, with a vast amount of scholarship dedicated to defining, cataloguing, and interpreting texts that, for the most part, have been written from the margins of national and hemispheric literatures. The debate over what precisely constitutes a Jewish literature is still very much alive, even as Jewish-American literature has passed its centennial mark and, in Latin America, it is fast approaching. Although informed by a series of ontological questionings and theoretical interpretive strategies, such a debate continues to focus on the writer's self-definition as a Jew, either ethnically or religiously, and on the persistence of certain themes, folkloric elements, and concerns that have, historically, pertained specifically to the Jewish experience.

A major difficulty arises from attempts at globalizing the ‘Jewish experience’, which negate the role of national cultures in identity-formation and the impact of assimilation on ethnic self-identification. For example, some critics contend that the question of marginality so prevalent in the golden days of Jewish-American literature has been recently replaced by a preoccupation with the demands of secularism on religious and ethnic identity, a choice that is not yet readily available to the Latin American Jewish writer. As Darrell Lockhart explains, the Jewish Latin American writer operates from a ‘double marginalization‘: geographically and socio-economically, along with the whole of Latin America, as citizens of the Third World, and within their respective societies as outsiders to the dominant Luso- or Hispanic-Catholic tradition (xi). However, having been relegated to the periphery of Latin American letters, the Jewish-Latin American writer has been able to draw from both cultural and historical traditions, broadening the scope of both established literatures, and disputing, from the perspective of marginality, the hegemony of dominant segments in society. Therefore, texts by Jewish-Latin American writers can be interpreted as a compelling counter-discourse to their respective official – and, therefore, exportable – national literatures.