Immigration and Childhood Experience in Two Contemporary Andean Jewish Novels
In: Shofar: a quarterly interdisciplinary journal of Jewish studies ; official journal of the Midwest and Western Jewish Studies Associations, Band 19, Heft 3, S. 56-64
ISSN: 1534-5165
In spite of the relatively low numbers of Jews living
in Ecuador and Peru, Jewish experience in the Andean region of South
America has found literary expression in narrative works by Diego Viga
(1907-1977) and Isaac Goldemberg (1945). Through the use of the
child narrator, these two novelists represent various processes of
cultural adaptation and individual survival. As children of Jewish
immigrants to Latin America, these characters frequently cope with the
contradictory circumstances that growing up Jewish in Ecuador and Peru
often presents. A comparison of Diego Viga's The Lost Year (1963)
and Isaac Goldemberg's The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner
(1977) reveals the kind of confusion and hostility that these children
encounter and the strategies they employ for dealing with feelings of
isolation, abandonment, and rejection.