We, the Generation in the Wilderness Ricardo Feierstein

We, the Generation in the Wilderness Ricardo Feierstein translated from the Spanish by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow 25th Anniversary Edition 1 We, the Generation in the Wilderness Books by Ricardo Feierstein La balada del sol (1969) • poetry Inventadiario (1972) • poetry Letras en equilibrio (1975) • poetry Sinfonía inocente (1984) • trilogy of novels La vida no es sueño (1987) • short stories Mestizo (1994; 2000 in English; 2010 in German) • novel Homicidios tímidos (1996) • short stories La logia del umbral (2001) • novel Las edades/The Ages (2005) • poetry anthology Consorcio Utopía (2007) • novel Cuaderno de un psicoanalista (2010) • novel Las novias perdidas (2011) • novel El caso del concurso literario (2013) • short stories We, the Generation in the Wilderness 25th Anniversary Edition Ricardo Feierstein translated from the Spanish by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow 2014 Originally published in 1989 by Ford-Brown & Co., Boston, Mass. This twenty- fifth anniversary edition published in 2014 by Northeastern University Libraries, with permission. Provided as an open access publication by Northeastern University. All rights remain with the author and translators. Acknowledgments: Some of the translations in this book have been previously published in Literary Olympians II (Crosscurrents), The Minnesota Review, and Third World (Pig Iron Press). The translators would like to thank the following for their support: A.M.I.A.—Communidad Judía de Buenos Aires, Asociación Argentina Por el Judaismo Laico y Humanista, and Northeastern University. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ix from LA BALADA DEL SOL / THE SONG OF THE SUN 2 VIEJOS JUDÍOS / OLD JEWS 4 DATOS / VITAL STATISTICS 10 Cédula de identidad número / Passbook Number 10 Nombre y apellido / Full Name 12 Domicilio / Place of Residence 14 Edad / Age 16 Sexo / Sex 18 Nacionalidad / Nationality 20 Estado civil / Marital Status 22 Profesión / Profession 24 Familia / Family 28 Señas particulares visibles / Distinguishing Features 30 DE LA NOSTALGIA / NOSTALGIA 32 COMO ASESINAR LA INDIFERENCIA / HOW TO KILL INDIFFERENCE 34 ARGENTINA 1983 / ARGENTINA 1983 36 NOSOTROS, LA GENERACIÓN DEL DESIERTO / WE, THE GENERATION IN THE WILDERNESS 38 INTRODUCTION In a 1985 letter, Ricardo Feierstein quotes Malraux’s remark that all literature is autobiography. It is a telling comment, for Feierstein’s own work is saturated with autobiography. His life and the people in it are his sources. It is possible to converse on a street corner with the model for Mario, a character from a novel, or dine with Dani and Lili, now adults, who are fixed as children in novelistic time. (“I knew you as kids,” I said in astonishment when I met them.) He is married to Susana of the love poems. In spite of the autobiographical emphasis, Feierstein is neither narcissistic nor self-deprecating. In his shorter poems, he does analyze the sources of his own joys and pains. Elsewhere, though, he presents the content of his experience as emblematic of his “age.” In some poems, “age” means just that: maturational stages people pass through on the way to adulthood. He examines the self as it moves through time. In works such as “Nosotros, la generacíon del desierto” (“We, the Generation in the Wilderness”) the “age” means a historical generation, of which Feierstein becomes the ambitious bard. He isolates details from his own past—games played, books read, movies seen—and uses them to illustrate moments of crucial psychological transition: almanacs replete from the start with smiling artistes whole cartons of illustrated magazines and collections of books and balls fabricated from rags and figurines inexhaustible in form and color… Sometimes with a royal “we” his voice becomes that of all those who shared the experience with him. The generation both lauded and decried is that of those born during the cataclysmic events of the 1940s who found themselves “left out” of history. He writes specifically of Jews who missed (fortunately) the Holocaust and (reluctantly) the founding of Israel. Feierstein builds “We, the Generation in the Wilderness” from a huge amount of detailed information: memories, objects evocative of ephemeral popular culture, and fashionable philosophies. Throughout, Feierstein’s use of language is ferocious and playful. He uses an extraordinary command of vocabulary as an offensive weapon against the ix reader, writing of “la boya milimetrada de la fe” (“the calibrated buoy of faith”) and “cascabeles de turquesa avinigrada” (“small bells of sour turquoise”). Elsewhere, he commands a simple, tender language: “Porque me gusta verla dormir” (“Because I like to watch her sleep”). Some poems, particularly in La balada del sol (The Song of the Sun) include techniques derived from music. “Argentina 1983” is an experiment in internal rhyme. Cadences are orchestrated around anaphora. There are pulsing rhythms and startling chaotic enumerations. The verse resonates with Biblical intonations. Born in Buenos Aires in 1942, an architect by profession and best known for his numerous collections of short stories, Ricardo Feierstein now lives with his wife in a building of his own design. For many years he was cultural director for the Asociacíon Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association. There he organized Jewish cultural events. As managing editor of its publications division, Editorial Milá, he oversaw the creation of over three hundred books on Jewish themes. He is now the editor-in-chief of Acervo Cultural Editores, a publisher of Jewish texts. Since childhood, Feierstein has been active in Argentina’s highly organized and highly factious Jewish community. He has written for a wide variety of Jewish periodicals and given innumerable lectures on Jewish themes. After being involved in HaShomer HaTzair, a left-wing Zionist movement, he and his family lived in Israel from 1972 to 1974, a period described in El caramel descompuesto, the second novel in his award- winning trilogy, Sinfonía inocente. “To explain this experience has taken me three novels—a total of 800 pages—and I’ve hardly begun to reflect on it.” Sinfonía inocente is one of the most ambitious works ever written on an Argentinean-Jewish topic. It deals with growing up Jewish in Argentina, life as an Argentinean-Jewish immigrant in Israel, and return to life in Argentina during the dictatorship. Elegantly constructed on the model of a symphony, it juxtaposes sections as if they were ascending and descending melodies. Shifting suddenly from first to third person, the trilogy includes a dazzling array of prose styles. La balada del sol (1969), Feierstein’s first book of poetry, organized musically into two symphonic movements and written soon after his marriage, is a farewell to childhood. The poems of Inventadiario (1972) are associated thematically with classifications in an old-fashioned Argentinean identity document. “Age,” “nationality,” and “marital status” prompt poems reflecting the poet’s experience of these states. From the “Exteriores” (age, address, sex) can be deduced “Interiores” (the experience of time passing, dreams, favorite authors). The book’s title is a neologism combining the x words inventario (inventory) and diario in its two senses of daily newspaper and personal diary. Letras en equilibrio (1975) was written after Israel’s Yom Kippur war and is Feierstein’s attempt to deal with the horror and loss of ideals of war. Equilibrium lost and regained, the book is an act of recovery and renewal. While Jewish themes appear throughout the collections, the 1982 poem “Viejos judíos” (“Old Jews”) is the most intensely Jewish of Feierstein’s works, a meditation on those aging immigrants to Argentina whose adaptation to their adopted land was painful and never complete. In “Nosotros, la generacíon del desierto,” his longest and most ambitious poem, Feierstein moves his focal point through time and space: The European ghetto, a kibbutz in the Galilee, and a Buenos Aires neighborhood collide. Aspects of Jewish identity and recreations of “temps perdus” are presented in a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Here Feierstein is naïve and prophetic, disillusioned and confident. Ricardo Feierstein is a vocal and identified Jew in a country where many Jews deny or play down their Judaism, an atheist and practitioner of Humanistic Judaism who numbers cabalists among his best friends, an avowed leftist working for the Jewish Establishment, a leader in the Jewish community and an aggressive critic of it. He has visited the Soviet Union and Cuba, but of the United States he has seen only Miami; College Park, Maryland; and Boston. Like Whitman, Feierstein contains multitudes. He can be simultaneously local and international, Jewish and Argentinean, at home and in exile. He can be aghast at life and life-affirming. Ricardo Feierstein seeks simplicity in the arabesque and remains optimistic in the knowledge of despair. This is the spirit of his poetry. Since the original publication of We, the Generation in the Wilderness, Ricardo Feierstein has gone on to be a prolific writer of novels and short story collections. He also continues to write poetry. His novel Mestizo (1994) that I translated into English in 2000 is a canonical work of Latin American Jewish literature. His subsequent novel, La logia del umbral, is a metaphorical interpretation of Argentinean Jewish history, and Cuaderno de un psicoanalista (2010) is a masterpiece of carnavalesque writing. —SAS, 1989, 2014 xi “Untranslatable” is the translator’s constant complaint, after which he goes

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