Casa da linguagem: identidades arruinadas e a literatura judaico-brasileira no século XXI

Abstract

From two immigration movements to Brazil in the twentieth century, the pogroms in Russia and the Shoah, the Jewish-Brazilian or Brazilian-Jewish literary production was created by the second generation from these diasporas and it carries concepts such as memory, trauma, and continuity. The books written by Moacyr Scliar which contain biblical themes, A mulher que escreveu a bíblia, Os vendilhões do Templo and Manual da paixão solitária, are analysed according to Cynthia Ozick‘s definition of metaphor on its historical construction; Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger‘s point of view explains the continuity of Jewish cultures maintained by the written word at the centre of its transmission and they also may be read as Midrash Aggadah, according to Leopoldo de Oliveira, because they bring a millenarian Jewish tradition concerned with interpretation, narrative, and exegesis. From the second wave of immigration, and also in the literary production made by its second generation, there are two Auschwitz‘s survivors in common and their diaries, which were written after their release. The first was written by Lili Jaffe and it is part of O que os cegos estão sonhando? (What are the blind men dreaming?), a book by her daughter Noemi Jaffe. The second one is a fictional diary written by the narrator‘s grandfather in Diário da Queda (Diary of the Fall), by Michel Laub. They are analysed according to testimonial literature and post-memory, on Marianne Hirsch‘s definitions, which brings the discussion about trauma by opening up the possibility of its transmission to the next three or four generations of the survivors. The books have in common the fact that they were published between the end of the twentieth century and the two first decades of the twenty-first century, having contents such as transmission, in terms of cultural continuity, of written words and their interpretation, as well as trauma. The analysis is performed through ruin as latency, which guides this thesis, because their contents have the possibility of being manifested, and thus also indicate a messianic character in historical phenomena. The first to compose this structure is the meaning of ruin about the archive and its intention of probing the eventual origin by Jacques Derrida. The second one, by Giorgio Agamben, associates ruins with the rest as a synonym to the lager‟s witnesses, in which there are historical gaps to be filled, textual interpretation and also revision. The third conception of ruin was created by Walter Benjamin regarding his thesis on trauerspiel (tragic drama) as a literary genre, as he works on the term ruins which is interpreted on Baroque context, associating it with decadence, with the end, towards the allegoric concept. On his Thesis on History (1940), History is told by the defeated, against the grain. These minorities are central characters in these four novels, Lili‘s diary and Jaffe‘s story, this last one is under analysis. Therefore, when ruin and its specifications are used in the books‘ analysis, the continuity, the metaphor, the metonymy, the allegory, the written word and a non-blood lineage startle from and in between them.