Networked Jewish Memory in Tununa Mercado’s Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad (2005).

I provide below an excerpt of the talk I gave at the February 2015 “Liminal Spaces and the Jewish Imagination” conference. To hear the full presentation (as well as those of other panelists) click here: https://soundcloud.com/ucsc-ihr.

Author’s note:

The talk I gave at the “Liminal Spaces and the Jewish Imagination” conference in February, 2015 stems from a larger project that explores more broadly the ways in which places of memory, as they are portrayed in Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, can structure, maintain, revive, or preserve memories of historical trauma and complex, overlapping identities –including Jewish identity. I highlight below the work of Latin American author Tununa Mercado (Argentina) as I trace how the spaces of memory contained in her work become linked to a kind of globalized, Jewish identity -connections based upon shared experiences of historical trauma, exile, and displacement. I question: What is categorized as Jewish space? How is it mapped or made visible through fiction? What is marked as spaces of Jewish memory? Building off of the work that Murray Baumgarten has undertaken on one specific site of Jewish memory, the Venice Ghetto, I seek to untangle the complexity of the superimposed meanings that attach themselves to these Latin American spaces; each memory-place is constructed with layers or palimpsests of memories. In this way, I consider the liminality of these Latin American, Jewish spaces.

1: Comparison versus connectivity

In her 2014 MLA Presidential Address entitled “Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times,” Marianne Hirsch calls us to position our work as humanities scholars within a “multiplicity of networks”; she proposes that instead of focusing on issues of “comparison,” we should instead shift our attention to moments of “connectivity” (334). Hirsch focuses this term through the lens of trauma, memory, and most recently, postmemory, as she thinks about how multiple –and what she deems “multiplying” –moments of historical violence and structural injustice weave complex webs of interconnected stories that have come to mark our present.

“In developing the notion of postmemory to account for the aftermath of catastrophic histories, I have thought precisely about the ways in which we might make ourselves vulnerable to what Susan Sontag has called ‘the pain of others,’…Postmemory describes the relationship that later generations or distant contemporary witnesses bear to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of others –to experiences they ‘remember’ or know only by means of stories, images, and behaviors…The contact with past or distant atrocities is thus mediated by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (339);

“…what do these entangled responses do in the present? What do they demand of their viewers?” (341).

2: Applying the framework of connectivity to the works of Tununa Mercado

I consider the work of Argentine author and journalist Tununa Mercado, composed in response to her experience of exile during the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla. As I situate her writing within a broader landscape of memory, I observe that these are “entangled responses” to trauma; these are fictional spaces that embrace the connected nature of Hirsch’s “historical vulnerability.” As I move through her fictional topographies, I note that this non-Jewish writer evokes the memory of absent Jewish bodies and history –both within and outside of national borders. She links her moment of vulnerability in a Latin American context to those of Jewish experiences, citing shared struggles of expulsion, displacement, exile, and persecution –as they occur across time and space. And, she works through her own trauma at a remove; Mercado revisits these difficult histories from a perspective of temporal and spatial distance –through the lens of exile.

Between 1974 and 1986 Videla’s military dictatorship forced Mercado into exile in Mexico. Her works are often defined as fictionalized autobiographies, as she uses the space of writing to grapple with her experience of displacement, and the trauma of having witnessed radical violence within Argentina only at a remove. As I move chronologically through this author’s work, figures enter, and then reappear in later pieces, as Mercado adds layers and dimensions to their stories; as she writes, she blurs the borders between her experience and the histories of others.

I trace the figure of Pedro, who first appears in her novel, En estado de memoria (1990) translated into English as In a State of Memory. As Mercado describes, Pedro had latched himself on to a group of Argentine exiles who met regularly in the space of Mexico:

“Pedro, a Spanish refugee of rather diffuse nationality, somewhere between French and central European, ‘stuck’ to the Argentines, so to speak, though it could just as well have been to the Uruguayans or to the Chileans, and made himself one of the group. We had the impression that in this way he was carrying out a kind of emotional exercise, putting to the test the old traumas that marked his existence…” (82)…“Perhaps he joined us because re-creation of the void was the characteristic condition of living in exile…and our exile was, so to speak, fresh, recently premiered, receptive and, therefore, for the veteran Spanish experience and, at the same time, for our Spanish friend, a fertile ground for the exercise of lack. For the same reason that he was drawn to us, we were drawn to other exiles like ourselves, and beginning with those most distant from us in the chronology of exile, we banded together with the Guatemalan, and from there on down the line until we reached the Chileans and Uruguayans” (85).

Pedro connects with this other moment of historical vulnerability –and attempts to entangle his own exilic identity with those of the Argentines; however, Mercado’s fictionalized relationship to this figure evolves as I trace Pedro’s presence through her later works. Interestingly, Mercado-as-narrator begins to realize that much like Pedro depends on her, she depends upon Pedro to construct her exilic identity.

In a short story, “Historias, memorias” (Histories, Memories) included in her 2003 Narrar después (Narrating After), Mercado triangulates the figure of Pedro within a composition of three short vignettes. The first recounts her interviews with Holocaust survivor Eva Alexandra Uchmany. In the second, Mercado returns to Spain –a homecoming at a remove for Ovidio González Díaz –a Republican soldier who has lived in exile in Mexico since the Spanish Civil War; as she writes, she describes –from the position of a proxy –the memory traces of this family and oral histories that remain behind on Spanish territory. And finally, she returns to the curious figure of Pedro.

She describes for her readers, once again, how Pedro had clung to the Argentine community in exile –however, as she notes, during this time he never told her his story. When Pedro reads Mercado’s first novel, and realizes that he is depicted within the fictional space, he asks Mercado to his home and gifts to her his mother, Sonia’s, diary, written in Europe during WWII; “Tengo algo que confiarte” he says –“I have something to entrust you with” (143). Mercado becomes engrossed in this diary, and decides to trace its silences and gaps, piecing together a complex story of Jewish identity, exile, experiences of the Spanish Civil War, contemporary Israel, Argentina, and Mexico –which she then fictionalizes in the space of her most recent novel, Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad (I Never Promised You Eternity, 2005).

Using the diary as a point of departure, Mercado weaves strands of histories together –utilizing diaries, family interviews, photographs, pieces of art –in order to create a hybrid genre she calls an “album” –a composite form, one that can be added to, one that always has blank space to fill. This memory-network leads her to Berlin, to Paris, to Spain, to Jerusalem, to Mexico, to Argentina, as she works through (in many languages) the experience of exile of Pedro, his mother Sonia, a German Jew, and his father Ro, a German citizen who joined the International Brigades to fight in the Spanish Civil War; but, curiously, in the process of doing so, she interpolates herself and her own exilic experience into this web. She writes:

“When for the first time I saw Sonia’s diary (before the madness of my filling in its blanks) as I was finishing translating, to justify my work, I formulated, or thought, that this translation would have addressees. I wanted, in a way, to return to Pedro the having been almost a character in my book about my own exile. And so, I translated for his daughters, putting myself in the situation of handing down, stupidly, what was theirs. At the same time: I wanted to appropriate this text… After, there appeared in my intention that idea of giving back –not now to the grandchildren –but to Sonia herself, a loan, an advance, something that she would have given me and I would have accepted, warned by the first sign of identification that Pedro demonstrated with us, Argentine exiles in Mexico, hearing with attentive ears the history of loss. I, debtor, have continued feeding the woman’s necessities, looking for all that would compensate for her disintegration, feeding my own enormous voids, balancing with my search the absolute abandonment that brought her to decide her life and death. As if this daily nourishment could delay her extinction” (my translation, 183–4).[i]

Through understanding Sonia’s exilic experience –a displaced Jewish political who ends up an exile in the space of Mexico –Mercado comes to understand her own displacement –a displaced Argentine political who also ends up an exile in the space of Mexico. Both coincidentally, take up weaving –both literally and metaphorically; as they try to formulate a new identity within the space of exile, both become weavers of textiles and of stories.

3: Returning to connectivity

To conclude, I return to Hirsch’s presidential address; she writes,

“…each past envisioned its own future in response to its own vulnerabilities, and thus vulnerable times can encompass many distinctive historical moments and temporalities…If we think of vulnerability as a radical openness toward surprising possibilities, we might be able to engage it more creatively –as a space to work from and not only as something to overcome” (337).

I argue that the work of Tununa Mercado models for her readers exactly what this kind of focus on “vulnerability” as a form of “openness” might look like; in her working through of her own responses to their specific moments of historical violence, she entangles within the process an exploration of Jewish identity and space; she embrace what Michael Rothberg might call memory’s multidirectionality — memory that is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; …productive and not privative” (3). Or, as the fictionalized narrator in Mercado’s I Never Promised You Eternity describes the process, it teaches us to be attune to our “sensation of having touched something that until this moment I had only brushed against: a history inside of the great History of War, with episodes of short reach, but of enormous repercussions” (my translation, 39).[ii] I argue that these texts allow us, as readers, to mimic this practice; we are forced to peel back the layers of stories that are contained within each grand narrative. As Mercado reveals the traces and shadows of Jewish experiences within these Latin American spaces, as these stories interact within larger networks and webs of connectivity –they trace, as Hirsch describes –what it might mean to forge connective histories in vulnerable times.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Marianne. “Presidential Address 2014: Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times.” PMLA 129.3 (May 2014): 330–348. Print.

Mercado, Tununa. In a State of Memory (1990). Trans. Peter Kahn. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Print.

— Narrar después. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003. Print.

— Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad. Buenos Aires: Planeta. 2004. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.

[i] “Cuando por primera vez vi el diario de Sonia, antes de mi desvarío de llenar sus blancos, cuando acababa de traducirlo, para justificar mi trabajo enuncié, o pensé, que esa traducción tenía destinatarias. Quería, en cierto modo, devolver a Pedro el haber sido casi un personaje de mi libro sobre mi propio exilio. Traducía, pues, para sus hijas, poniéndome en situación de legar tontamente lo que era de ellas. Eso por un lado: quería apropiarme de ese texto, y, para disimular, hacía una donación, yo testaferro de mí misma. Después apareció en mi propósito esa idea de devolver no ya a las nietas, sino a la propia Sonia, algo, un préstamo, un adelanto, que me habría dado y yo había aceptado al advertir la identificación que demostraba Pedro con nosotros, exiliados argentinos en México, y de escuchar con oídos atentos la historia de extravío. Yo deudora he seguido alimentando las necesidades de esa mujer, buscando todo aquello que compensara su desintegración, alimentando mis propios enormes vacíos, equilibrando con mi búsqueda el desamparo absoluto que la llevó a decidir su vida y su muerte. Como si ese alimento cotidiano demorara su extinción” (183–4).

[ii] “…sensación de estar tocando algo que hasta ese momento sólo había rozado: una historia dentro de la gran Historia de Guerra, con episodios de corto alcance pero de enrome repercusión” (39).