Jewish Brazilian Post-Holocaust Fiction: The Body as a Source of Polymorphous Memory Discourse in Cíntia Moscovich’s Por que sou gorda, mamãe?

In this article, I propose a reading of the Brazilian novel Por que sou gorda, mamãe? (2006) through the prism of the body as an oblique signifier of polymorphous post-Holocaust memory discourse. I will be employing the idea of the “strange body” in the following, that is, an experience of estrangement that can arise from trauma-induced conflict or fracture and “is capable of testifying to complexes of social operations and realities well beyond not only a given subject, but also a given generation” (Atkinson 2017, 34). In Cíntia Mos­covich’s novel, this strange-bodiness is articulated through the uncanny presence of an obese Jewish female body; a body which bears witness to a subversive force of trauma and denounces the fascist ideology within the continuities of subtly intertwined European and Brazilian histories. European Jewish life in shtetlech, pogroms, exile, and the Holocaust merge not only with the Brazilian context of Jewish immigration, but also with the history of Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Judaism, Enlightenment, and Ideology

The co-existence of Enlightenment and ideology has long vexed Jews in modernity. They have both loved and been leary of Enlightenment reason and its attending scientific and political institutions. Jews have also held a complex relationship to ideological forms that exist alongside Enlightenment reason and which have both lured and victimized them alike. Still, what accounts for this historical proximity between Enlightenment and ideology? and how does this relationship factor into the emergence of modern anti-Semitism? Can Jewish communities participate in contemporary societies committed to scientific developments and deliberative democracies and neither be targeted by totalizing systems of thought that eliminate Judaism’s difference nor fall prey to the power and seduction of ideological forces that compete with the Jewish life-world? This article argues that Hegel’s discussion of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a social practice of critical common sensism provides an immanent critique of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s analysis of the absolutism of the Enlightenment that can bolster Jewish communal and philosophical hope in the commensurability between Judaism and the contemporary expressions of Enlightenment reason, even if it does not fully eradicate the challenges presented by ideology for Jewish communities and thinkers.

A Time to Gather

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust, when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually “own” this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: whether in Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of “birth certificate” or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews’ long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history’s traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future.

Making the Past into History

This chapter chronicles battles over the restitution of Nazi-looted archives from Worms and Hamburg, which were eventually transferred to the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, and also the contested possibility of establishing Jewish archives in 1950s Germany. It argues that restitution was really about the transfer of the German Jewish past into the realm of history. Israeli archivists and their restitution agency allies argued that Jewish life was at its end—and feared that establishing new archives in Germany would provide a kind of “birth certificate” for fledgling Jewish communities. The chapter traces this history to the 1980s and 1990s, when new Jewish archival efforts in Germany reflected the growth of Jewish communities in Germany.

Conclusion

This chapter considers the overall impact of the twentieth-century proliferation of archive activities in Jewish life and the rising paradigm of total archives in particular. By looking at the development of Jewish archiving in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine, we see the concrete manifestation of the impulses of a “time to gather” in Jewish cultures around the world. These efforts represent a kind of community-based archives, but also the internal tensions: What happens when there is a widespread understanding of the value of archives, and they represent resources of cultural capital worth fighting for? This conclusion also places the history of Jewish archives and the struggles to “own” the past in the broader context of the emerging information society. Altogether, this history indicates contentious struggles over what it means to have control over history in its most practical terms.

Ingathering the Exiles of the Past?

This chapter follows the history of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, founded in 1939 and opened in 1947, which in 1969 changed its name to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. This archive sought to bring Jewish archives from all over the world to Jerusalem under the banner of what they termed the “ingathering of the exiles of the past.” Its leaders, including Alex Bein and Daniel Cohen, who spearheaded the effort to gather materials from Europe, hoped to draw upon the legacy of European Jewry and thereby place Jews around the world within a sphere of Israeli cultural hegemony. In this archive, one finds an extension and intensification of the Gesamtarchiv’s dream of a total archive of Jewish life—and a powerful instance showing both its possibilities and the problems of fundamentally reframing the Jewish past.

Archival Totality in the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden

This chapter uncovers the history of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the central archive of the German Jews, which operated from 1903 until it was confiscated by the Nazis in 1943. It details the Gesamtarchiv’s attempt to create a singular archive of German Jewish history in Berlin, and also opposition to the project of centralization, and it situates the archive within the wider trends of archival science. It thereby explicates the Gesamtarchiv’s vision of total archives and traces its legacy across the arc of the twentieth century. This archive was intended to help produce the history of Germany’s Jews and also to help manage its communities, but it was ultimately turned into an instrument for the domination of Jewish life by the Nazi regime. Altogether, this chapter offers the Gesamtarchiv as a starting point for a global network of Jewish archives that followed the Gesamtarchiv’s vision of archival totality.

Encountering the 'ghetto'

In the history of Western perceptions of Jews and the ‘Jewish problem’, the First World War marks a period of change which was, among other things, influenced by the course of the war on the Eastern Front. The German occupation of large parts of Russian Poland in 1915 brought the difficult conditions of Eastern European Jewry closer to public attention in the West, not only in Central Europe, but also in neutral states. For the Scandinavian writers who travelled to occupied Poland in 1916 and 1917, the direct encounter with East European Jewry was a new and often disturbing experience. Their travelogues represent an illuminating and, so far, unused source for Scandinavian perceptions of Jews in Eastern Europe, focusing on the ‘ghetto’ as the physical embodiment of Eastern Jewish life. Analysing these accounts, the present article discusses the different depictions of Warsaw’s Jews thematically and identifies three interwoven perspectives of the ‘ghetto’: as a site of extreme poverty; as a foreign (‘oriental’) element in Europe; and as an archetype of Jewish life in general.