Using a Samovar to Think about Edna

At last week’s LAJSA NYC 2018 (a bienniel regional conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association http://www.lajsa.org/fifth-regional-research-conference-2018/ ) we concluded two exciting days exploring Jews and Race in Latin America with an intimate memorial to our colleague, our friend, our teacher and mentor Edna Aizenbeg who passed away recently. Her husband and spiritual partner Yehoshua came and talked about Edna, her path towards a life of scholarship, her courage to push through intellectual boundaries and overcome obstacles. He shared great stories of a day they spent with Borges in Manhattan, taking him out to lunch and watching him gleefully eat Borscht. 

Many of her close colleagues and friends sent personal reflections and several of the participants in the conference spoke movingly of her kindness toward them, of how she would push them to write better and to think better, of her toughness and sharp eye.

I would often run into Edna and Yehoshua in New York, often I was with my kids at some cultural event. The last time was on Christmas; we met like good Jews meet on Christmass, at the the Jewish museum. She recommended the Modigliani exhibit and said she wanted to talk about an idea for a panel on Race and Colonialism for the upcoming conference. And a few months later she was no longer with us. 

We decided to read a few excerpts from Edna’s writings- we chose a short but innovative and provocative piece from 1999, “How a Samovar helped me Theorize Latin American Jewish Literature”

Prooftexts May 1999

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689545

I shared the following short reflection before reading some of the most salient parts of that very tightly conceived essay.

.  .  .

This essay is one of the first things I read by Edna, I stumbled upon it as a young grad student.  – I was studying at NYU’s dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, and although I felt welcome by my colleagues and professors, my personal religious orientation, my time spent in Israel and my lack of formal training in a classical program in Spanish lit. set me apart – at least in my own mind.

Stumbling on this essay was anchoring and energizing:

the center needs the periphery,

 the canonical can be read best, sometimes, by reading otherwise

And where is the center anyways?

These were all questions and sensibilities expressed in many of my graduate seminars, especially the most exciting ones – but Edna helped me think about these ways of reading in light of Jewish culture.

Do the jarchas belong to Spanish literature or Hebrew- are they the provenance of a Jewish studies department or a Spanish dept. – Thankfully they belong to no one; they invite multiple, polyvocal readings

Latin American Jewish Studies can speak across disciplines, it is both inside and out, and it can be a place that embraces the multi-lingual and the rich, fractured legacies that are the inheritance of a Jewish author.

Edna was a great translator of text and ideas into English. She made the particulars of a story, the nuances of a community in its historical moment come across clearly and evocatively.

I have the great honor at Yeshiva to teach a course on Jews in Latin America – almost all of my students are curious gringuitos- with nary a word of Spanish or Portuguese. I look at the syllabus and realize that I assign a lot of Edna.  I use so much of Edna’s work because it is such an eloquent interrogator of the classics—Gerchunoff and Borges- but also lesser known figures like the debauched poet of the seaside Venezuelan town of Coro- David Elias Curiel- linking (but not conflating) different eras and voices.

She also never forgot that literature is written in real time, for real people, the political and the social are never elided by literature, they pulse through the veins of even the most fantastical literary works.

“Books” AND “Bombs in Buenos Aires”! Both are real, both inform each other.