Landscapes of Memory and Impunity
Edited by
Raanan Rein (Tel Aviv University)
Editorial Board
Edna Aizenberg (Marymount Manhattan College) Judah Cohen (Indiana University) Luis Roniger (Wake Forest University) David Sheinin (Trent University) Rosalie Sitman (Tel Aviv University)
volume 6
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/jlam
The Aftermath of the amia Bombing in Jewish Argentina
Edited by
Annette H. Levine Natasha Zaretsky
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Landscapes of memory and impunity : the aftermath of the AMIA bombing in Jewish Argentina / edited by Annette Levine, Natasha Zaretsky. pages cm. -- (Jewish Latin America, ISSN 2211-0968 ; volume 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29748-7 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29749-4 (e-book) 1. Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina. 2. Antisemitism--Argentina--Buenos Aires. 3. Bombing investigation-- Argentina--Buenos Aires. 4. Terrorism--Argentina--Buenos Aires. 5. Buenos Aires (Argentina)--Ethnic relations. I. Levine, Annette H., 1973- II. Zaretsky, Natasha, 1975-
DS146.A7L37 2015 363.3250982’11--dc23
2015011589
The publication of this book series was supported by Tel Aviv University’s Elias Sourasky, Chair of Iberian and Latin American Studies. issn 2211–0968 isbn 978-90-04-29748-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29749-4 (e-book)
Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Acknowledgements vii List of Figures ix List of Contributors x
Introduction 1 Annette H. Levine and Natasha Zaretsky
1 The Nation’s Bodies: Justice and Belonging in the Aftermath of the amia Bombing 8 Susana Wappenstein
2 Reading Memoria Activa’s Discourse: Demands for Justice and Identity Symbols 44 Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff
3 Remembering the amia Bombing: The Mothers of Pasteur Street and Stones of Memory 59 Edna Aizenberg
4 Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado: Monumental Photographs and Spaces of (Impossible) Return 77 Annette H. Levine
5 Blows to the Heart: Reflections on the Literature of the amia 102 Stephen A. Sadow
6 Struggles of Coherence: Listening as Political Agency in the Plazas and Streets of Memory 125 Natasha Zaretsky
7 Searching for Justice: Citizenship, Human Rights, and Anthropology 153 Karen Ann Faulk
8 So We Don’t Lose Memory: Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires after the amia Bombing 169 Lillian M. Wohl
Index 191
Acknowledgements
The publication of this volume benefited from the generous support of the Jewish Studies Program at Ithaca College and the Office of the Provost at Ithaca College. An earlier version of Edna Aizenberg’s article, “The Mothers of Pasteur Street,” was published in Spanish in the journal Revista Iberoaméricana, Vol. lxvi, Núm. 191, (abril-junio 2000), and her article, “Stones of Memory,” was published in Iberoamericana (2001-), Nueva época, Vol. 1. No. 1 (2001). We would like to thank Nicole Arocho for her translation of “Stones of Memory” and the editors of these journals for the permission to reprint those articles here. We would also like to thank Jennifer Burgess for her concept for the cover design and the photographer Marcelo Brodsky for permission to use the images taken by Annette Levine of his 2003 installation, Piedras por la Justicia, Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Stones for Justice, Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires. We are grateful as well to Christopher MacNamara for his research and edito- rial assistance, and to Mark Bast for his copyediting assistance. We would also like to thank Meghan Connolly, Katelyn Chin, and Paige Sammartino of Brill for their assistance, efficacy and dedication. Additionally, we would like to thank Raanan Rein, the series editor, for his comments and support of this volume. This volume would also not be possible without the ongoing support of our respective families (especially our partners, Robert Levine and Oliver Schietinger) for accompanying us during our many years of fieldwork and research trips to Buenos Aires. This work developed through many conversations and dialogues between the co-editors, beginning with a discussion we had during the xii Latin American Jewish Studies Association (lajsa) Conference held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, nh, June 2004, and continuing through many trips to Argentina and lajsa meetings. Most importantly, this collection also emerged through the ongoing and sustained engagement with the questions of memory and impunity that are at the heart of the bombing’s aftermath and central to the lives of our research subjects. We would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of the victims of the bombing and to the ongoing demands for justice. We would also like to dedicate this book to the brave work of Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman and her fam- ily and those who regularly attended the commemorative actos in the Plaza Lavalle, Pasteur Street, and the many other sites of memory and justice, includ- ing activists like José Blumenfeld, Isidoro Bronstein, Enrique Burbinski, Moisés Dulfano, Laura Ginsberg, Pablo Gitter, Benjamín Guz, Carlos Mañón, Rebeca
Sacolsky, Fernando Scheitman, Marcos Scherlis, Felisa Sendler, Carlos Susevich, Eugenia Szejer, Diana Wang, and the late Mina Fridman-Ruetter, Bernardo Gruman, Norma Lew, Samuel Sylberberg, and Gabriel Tallaradona. Our deep engagement with these topics is also indebted to the support of Moshé Korin, Shifra Lerer, the late Reizl Sztarker, Jack Fuchs, Ester Szwarc, Anita Weinstein, and Ricardo Feierstein, and to affiliations and research con- ducted at the amia’s Centro de Documentación e Información sobre Judaismo Argentino Marc Turkow (Marc Turkow Center for Documentation and Information about Argentine Judaism at the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association), the daia’s Centro de Estudios Sociales (Center for Social Studies at the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations), the Buenos Aires iwo (Institute for Jewish Research), the ides Nucleo de Estudios sobre Memoria (Memory Studies Group of the Institute for Social and Economic Development), and the Contested Memories and the Politics of Change research group at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. We would like to especially thank the family members of the victims and their supporters for opening their lives to us and for sharing their struggles. It is their persistent effort to seek justice and articulate their experiences that we chronicle here. May this volume further contribute to the daily struggle for justice and understanding in the aftermath of the amia bombing.
1.1 Blowing the shofar on Mondays at 9:53 am (1999) 21 1.2 Crowds gather for Memoria Activa (1998) 21 1.3 We all are Active Memory (1998) 22 1.4a,b Memoria Activa’s “National Document Against Impunity” (1999) 30 1.5a Button in support of Memoria Activa with the slogan, “Enough Impunity!” (1998) 32 1.5b Button with the slogan: “Justice, justice shalt though pursue” (1998) 33 1.6 Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo head march “For Justice, against impunity, exclusion and discrimination” at the commemoration of the military coup. Some hold pictures of assassinated photojournalist, José Luis Cabezas (1999) 35 1.7 Enough Impunity! Banner in Plaza Lavalle by the Unión de Trabajadores de Prensa de Buenos Aires (Print Media Worker’s Union of Buenos Aires, UTPBA) for a joint event with Memoria Activa (1998) 35 4.1 Andrea, a los tres meses, mirando con asombro un mundo supuestamente perfecto. (Andrea, at three months, looking in awe at a supposedly perfect world.) La gran mentira [The Great Lie] (11) 86 4.2 Andrea, a los cinco años, sonriendo a un futuro promisorio. (Andrea, at five years, smiling at a promising future.) La gran mentira (23) 87 4.3 Andrea, a los siete años, adquiriendo conocimientos para su futuro. (Andrea, at seven years, acquiring knowledge for her future.) La gran mentira (41) 88 4.4 Andrea, a los ocho años, cuando aún éramos una familia (Andrea, at eight years, when we were still a family.) La gran mentira (51) 89 4.5 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 92 4.6 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 93 4.7 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 94 4.8 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. New amia building visible in background. 96 4.9 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. Close-up. 97 6.1 Shofars at Memoria Activa (August 29, 2004) 126 6.2 Testimony at the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) (May 19, 2003) 137 6.3 Familiares Acto at Pasteur Street (December 18, 2003) 141
6.4 Monument to the Victims of the amia Bombing in the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) designed by Mirta Kupferminc (August 26, 2013) 147 6.5 Plaque at base of what is titled the Monument to the Martyrs of the amia (August 26, 2013) 148 7.1 Monument in the Plaza (2004) 154 8.1 Luis Alberto Spinetta and Fito Páez performing at the Recital por la Reconstrucción, November 30, 1994 172 8.2 Coro Ale Brider in the Café Literario 182
Edna Aizenberg is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and cultural studies, memory studies, Latin American Jewish writing, and the Holocaust in Latin America. Professor Aizenberg, one of the founders of Latin American Jewish literary studies in the u.s. and a former co-president of lajsa, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, inaugurated the first courses on Latin American Jewish literature at the New School University, Princeton University, and Marymount Manhattan College. An internationally recognized scholar of Borges, her books include The Aleph Weaver (1984), El tejedor del Aleph: biblia, kábala y judaísmo en Borges (1986, winner, Fernando Jeno Prize; 1997, second ed.; Borges, el tejedor del Aleph y otros ensayos, 1997), Borges and His Successors (1990), Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff’s Los gauchos judíos (2002), and Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires (2002; paperback ed. 2004). Among Prof. Aizenberg’s current projects is a book on culture, public memory and the Holocaust in Latin America.
Karen Ann Faulk is an anthropologist specializing in issues of human rights and justice. She cur- rently teaches for the Global Studies Program in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina, was published as part of Stanford University Press’s Series on Human Rights (edited by Mark Goodale). In addi- tion, she has authored a number of articles and book chapters, as well as a forthcoming edited volume entitled A Sense of Justice: Legal Knowledge and Lived Experience in Latin America (co-edited with Sandra Brunnegger). Her current project explores the idea of birth as a human right.
Fernando Fischman teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a researcher for conicet (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas or National Scientific and Technical Research Council). His main research inter- ests are verbal art, performance theory, Argentine Jews, interculturalism, and social memory. He edited Donos da Palavra: autoria, performance e experiência em narrativas orais na América do Sul (2007) (with Luciana Hartmann), Dime
Annette H. Levine is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Ithaca College. Her research focuses on cultural production (literature, film, art, monuments, music, and theatre) in the aftermath of dictatorships in Latin America. Dr. Levine is an active member of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association and has published several articles devoted to Latin American Jewish authors in the journal Modern Jewish Studies and in the Hostos Review. Her book, Cry for Me, Argentina (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), grapples with literary and cultural manifestations of the Argentine Dirty War’s haunting repercussions. She is an active literary translator and also produces Latin American and Latina/o Theatre in Ithaca, ny.
Javier Pelacoff is Adjunct Professor of Social Psychology at the National University of Mar del Plata; he also teaches courses in the Social Sciences Faculty at the University of Buenos Aires, where he is currently leading working groups entitled, “Trends in Contemporary Thought” and “Psychology and Communication.” He is a mem- ber of the editorial board of the journal Sudamérica, the Review of Social Sciences; he is also a former member of the editorial board for the journals Argumentos (iigg) and Sambatión. His research has focused on interdisciplin- ary projects on justice, education, civil society, and Jewish Studies.
Stephen A. Sadow is Professor of Latin American Literature and Jewish Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. He specializes in Jewish Latin American literature and art. Among his many books are King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers, winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and his translation of Mestizo, a novel by Argentine writer Ricardo Feierstein; and Unbroken: From Auschwitz to Buenos Aires, the autobiography of Holocaust survivor Charles Papiernik. Sadow has produced four online “Open Source” publications, which include his website of Jewish Latin American art; an anthology of narrative and poetry; and “Identity and Diversity,” artist’s books containing Jewish Latin American poems and art inspired by those poems, edited with Perla Bajder and Irene Jaievsky.
Lillian M. Wohl is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Jewish Musicology at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, nyc and a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Doctoral Dissertation Write-up Fellowship from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2013–2014. Her forthcoming doctoral dissertation, “Blessed Memory: Jewish Musical Performance and the Proliferation of Memory in Buenos Aires, Argentina” examines the role of memory in Jewish musical performance in Buenos Aires.
Natasha Zaretsky is an anthropologist working on political violence, memory, and citizenship in urban diaspora communities in Argentina and the United States. She has taught courses at Princeton University and Rutgers University focusing on human rights, memory, migration, and genocide. As a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Studies of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, she co-leads the Argentina Trial Monitor and chairs the Latin America Working Group. She has several publications focusing on the aftermath of political vio- lence in Buenos Aires, including security practices, Yiddish song, and Holocaust memory, most recently “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experience in the Southern Cone (Brill 2013). Her new research examines testimony and political activism among undocumented migrant youth; she is also conducting fieldwork focusing on post-Soviet Jewish memory and belong- ing in New York. In addition, she is finishing her ethnography, Disruption: Memory, Violence, and Belonging in Jewish Buenos Aires, and editing a docu- mentary film about Argentina, City of Memory.
Annette H. Levine and Natasha Zaretsky
Eighty-five people were killed when a car bomb tore into the core of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia), the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association, in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994. That event marked Argentina, with its history of military dictatorships and the still recent 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, once again as fertile ground for terrorism and injustice.1 Indeed, the 1994 amia bombing was the most destructive ter- rorist attack in the history of Argentina (and Latin America more broadly) and one of the worst attacks on a Jewish community since World War ii. The very nature of the bombing and the lack of justice in its wake have further cemented this moment as a key turning point for Jewish life in Argentina, as witnessed in its impact on the community’s political activism, literary and musical production, and the rhythms of everyday life—most notably, the new security measures seen in Argentina and throughout Latin American Jewish communities. While the epicenter of the 1994 bombing was seemingly beyond repair and the sense of citizenship and belonging for Jewish Argentines had been literally rattled, the nation witnessed an immediate response and an unprecedented level of mass repudiation. This set the stage for an even greater struggle for Jewish belonging within the Argentine national fabric. Three days after the bombing, on a rainy Thursday, July 21, 1994, Buenos Aires was inundated with approximately 150,000 concerned citizens who marched in silence to the Plaza de los dos Congresos with their umbrellas. This expression of unity and indig- nation, known as la tarde de los paraguas (the Afternoon of the Umbrellas), embodied a groundswell of solidarity where banners read “De pie frente al terror. La auténtica solidaridad es la justicia” (Stand up to terror. True solidarity is jus- tice), and “Todos somos judíos” (We are all Jews), a phrase originally penned by Mario Diament in response to the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing.2
1 This is in reference to Argentina’s history of dictatorship and specifically the period of mili- tary dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, deemed by the military regime as El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, the Process of National Reorganization, which led to approxi- mately 30,000 disappeared—those who were detained, tortured, and killed by the military dictatorship. 2 Mario Diament first published this piece in El Cronista the day after the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing. The continued use of this phrase during the Tarde de los paraguas in 1994 empha- sized a critique of the marginalization of the Jewish community in Argentina.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_002
In the two decades since the amia bombing, the social movements that took shape have become fixtures in the tapestry of human rights activism in Argentina. Since 1994, ongoing struggles over memory, belonging, and justice continue to frame the Jewish experience in Argentina in significant ways. Ethnographers and scholars have paid careful attention to the sustained move- ments devoted to memory and the pursuit of justice in the aftermath of the attack, as well as the range of cultural expressions (including literature, art, film, and music) that emerged. The first groups to form in the weeks after the amia bombing were family members of the victims and their supporters united in pursuit of information and later justice. Spearheaded by Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas (Family and Friends of the Victims), Memoria Activa (Active Memory), and later APEMIA, Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la amia (Association for the Clarification of the Unpunished amia Massacre), as well as a more recent group, 18 J, we see an emergence of new forms of political activism and engagement of the public sphere. Their activism firmly places Jewish Argentines within the public register of citizenship and the struggle against impunity in a way some would argue is integral to the contemporary Argentine national imaginary. The political dynamics of the Argentine state have transformed dramati- cally since 1994. When the amia bombing took place, Carlos Menem presided over a nation fully immersed in rising neoliberalism, while the crimes of the military dictatorship (1976–1983) remained in rampant impunity. Twenty years later, in 2014, President Cristina Kirchner prioritized human rights as part of her political agenda, supporting public memorial projects (such as the trans- formation of the torture center at the ESMA, or Escuela Mecánica de la Armada—the Navy School of Mechanics—into a Space for Memory and Human Rights) and the prosecution of the perpetrators of the crimes commit- ted during the dictatorship.3 Additionally, as a result of the activism of Memoria Activa before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in 2005, Argentina accepted its failure in providing justice for the amia case. Yet despite these significant political changes, two decades later the amia bombing remains in a state of impunity. Recent developments include the sudden January 2015 death of the lead prosecutor in the investigation, Alberto Nisman, who had made strong allegations against President Cristina Kirchner’s government (that her government denied), also putting into question
3 In 1989, President Carlos Menem granted pardons to military officials tied to abductions, disappearances, and murders during the dictatorship period, effectively putting an end to pending trials.
*
The chapters in this volume derive from firsthand engagement and field- work as “encounters” performed at distinct moments in the chronology of the bombing’s aftermath.4 Some of the key sites emerging in the landscape, though never fully bounded, include the Plaza Lavalle (where Memoria Activa staged weekly protests), Pasteur Street (the site of the bombing and where Familiares y Amigos held monthly commemorative ceremonies), and the newly rebuilt amia building, in addition to other symbolic spaces of representation, such as literature, discourse, art, and music. This volume critically examines memory in contemporary Jewish life in Argentina—a theme that also resonates with the significance of commem- oration as a political practice and idiom for Argentines more broadly, espe- cially in the human rights movements struggling against impunity. This collection thus chronicles Jewish Argentine experience as part of a broader legacy of memory as a social practice in Argentina.5 Further, it contributes to memory studies more broadly, an interdisciplinary field that has grown significantly in the last thirty years of scholarship, especially studies that focus on memorial processes responding to trauma, conflict, war, and polit- ical violence.6 Many of the chapters address the centrality of memory to understanding the aftermath of the bombing. Aizenberg’s work, “Stones of Memory” and “The Mothers of Pasteur Street,” examines the significance monuments hold in bearing witness to memory and the activism of the victims’ mothers in decry- ing the injustice perpetrated on Argentine soil. Memory can be seen as a thread in almost every chapter of this volume but one that manifests itself in distinct
4 The idea of encounters in fieldwork as being constitutive to significant critical understand- ings has been further developed in other ethnographic work, including the Berg series Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge. See, for instance, Parvis Ghassem- Fachandi, ed., Violence: Ethnographic Encounters (Berg, 2009). 5 See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997); Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013); Anreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2003). 6 See Mieke Bal et al., eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1999); Veena Das, et al., eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Natasha Zaretsky’s “Struggles of Coherence.” There, she describes how the act of listening has become a way to express political agency and citizenship; this attention to listening also highlights a more nuanced understanding of narra- tive as a response to violence. Indeed, the endurance of these practices, and understanding the legacy of these protests so many years later, raises impor- tant questions about what is at stake in contemporary citizenship in Jews in Argentina.
*
The 1994 amia bombing represents a critical juncture in Jewish Argentine his- tory. From a range of disciplinary perspectives, this volume chronicles the aftermath of this bombing, an event that continues to shape the landscape of Jewish experience in Argentina. The scholarship represented in this volume affords opportunities to witness key moments in the evolution of the after- math, positioned from different temporal and disciplinary sites. Nevertheless, we see patterns and continuities emerge, especially in the intersections of violence, belonging, and memory that have become key dynam- ics of Jewish life in Argentina. While examining one of the most significant historical moments in contemporary Jewish Argentine history, the collected work in this volume also raises important questions about memory as a social process. What are the boundaries of memory? What does this volume reveal about the possibilities and limitations of narrative and representation as a response to violence? What can we learn about trauma and resilience? In addi- tion to engaging these important questions of violence, belonging, and sur- vival, Landscapes of Memory and Impunity offers important insights into the longer durée of Jewish existence in Argentina and the persistent questions of pluralism and belonging that animate the desire for full inclusion in Jewish Argentina.
Susana Wappenstein i An Unsettling Blast
When the car bomb exploded outside the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society (amia) building on July 18, 1994, a trail of destruction and deceit was left to haunt the survivors and relatives of victims of the blast, the Argentine Jewish community, and society at large. This violent incident fit the profile of attacks on Jewish targets worldwide, though publicly no organization—local or international—claimed responsibility for it. In 2006, after years of failed inves- tigations, Argentine prosecutors formally accused the government of Iran of being the mastermind behind the explosion and members of Hezbollah as the material executioners. Two years before the amia event, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires suffered a similar fate when a bomb exploded outside its build- ing, killing twenty-two people. Failure on the part of Argentine authorities to seriously investigate the blast at the embassy fueled anxiety among members of the Jewish community. The reluctance to scrutinize the bombing of the embassy and to offer some logical explanation or guarantee of security was coupled with the extended and complicated history of anti-Semitism in Argentina, which also cast a suspicious shadow on the amia tragedy. Initial reactions of broad-based social consternation, solidarity, and support were tarnished within days of the blast. While recovery operations were still underway, some media reports differentiated between the “innocent” victims of the bombing (i.e., pedestrians, neighbors, or other non-amia–related, presumably non-Jewish public) and the “guilty” by default, assumed Jewish, intended targets.1 President Menem’s first condolences after the amia bomb- ing were inexplicably directed to the Israeli government—though clearly the amia is an Argentine civilian institution, none of the victims were Israeli, and the blast occurred in the heart of Buenos Aires on Argentine soil.2 The inter- pretation of the incident within the parameters of global geopolitics, rather
1 Testimonios de una Semana de Horror (Buenos Aires: Ediciones JAI, 1995). 2 Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (cels), Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: cels, 1998), 47.
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3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 3. 4 Ana María Alonso, “The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 33–57; Ana María Alonso, “The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity,” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 379–405; Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico” in Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of the Rule in Modern Mexico, eds. Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, 3–23 (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1994); Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America (London: Routledge, 1996); Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997).
The process of imagining and building the nation involves the constitution of identities that imply a sense of belonging to a broader community, both mate- rial and symbolic. A common theme among scholars of nationalism is how national identities often get created in relationship to ethnic and racialized “Others.” Scholars examine how these distinctions get incorporated into state institutions and official practices and, more importantly, how they are intro- duced and made second nature in the everyday practices of most of the popu- lation. The demarcation between an “us” and a “them” is a crucial aspect of nation building that gets reproduced throughout a nation’s existence and uses many mechanisms to determine, according to time and space, how the pro- cesses of incorporation and exclusion take place. The concept of “the people,” that is, a collective identity of belonging and sameness, is not a predetermined category but a historically constituted and always shifting categorization imbued by particular relations of power. In Argentina during the 1970s, nationhood was constituted through politico- ideological categories dominated by the perspective of military leaders who unequivocally established ideological, internal Others identified as threats to the nation. As Diana Taylor suggests, “The population, confined to spectator- ship, was either seduced or coerced into identifying with the military project.”5 By invoking bodily tropes of health and illness, along with traditional military speech and allusions to biblical similes, the military regime established clearly demarcated categories of inclusion and exclusion. It enforced these boundar- ies through a brutal and well-coordinated plan that acted on individual bodies as well as the social body and, ultimately, through fear and terror, produced a self-censoring and self-policing public congruent with the nation imagined by the military.6
5 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 60. 6 Ibid., 92. Diana Taylor offers a meticulous analysis of the intricate processes by which the military in Argentina used a double mechanism to imagine and to impose a national identity. Her argument, based on performance theory, interconnects gender and nation, which act to produce oppositional and exclusionary identities: “Just as one is male as opposed to female, one is Argentinean as opposed to something else…. Doing one’s nation-ness/gender ‘correctly’ promises privilege and a sense of belonging, yet involves coercive mechanisms of
Military leaders justified the use of repression against Argentine citizens by defining them as “internal enemies,” consequently placing them, symbolically and materially, outside the realm of the nation and, thus, taking away their rights. General Jorge Rafael Videla, leader of the first military junta, declared in 1977: “The repression is directed against a minority we do not consider Argentine…it is a great offense to want to change our Western and Christian way of life for another one that is foreign to us. And in this type of struggle, a terrorist is not only someone who attacks with a bomb, by shooting or kidnap- ping, but also a person whose ideas want to change our way of life, ideas that are subversive, that is, they subvert our values.”7 According to the military, thus, this was a necessary and extraordinary struggle to “save” the nation, which required the use of extraordinary, radical measures, what the military itself labeled a “dirty war.”8 The nation was re-created by literally removing from it large sectors of the population and figuratively deterritorializing them. Symbolically, through the so-called “flights of death,”9 the military banned thousands of these bodies from the spaces of the nation by dumping the usually alive and semiconscious prisoners into the estuary of the Río de la Plata—the physical and emblematic boundary and birthplace of the contemporary city of Buenos Aires and the nation itself.10 The authoritarian plan was intended to permeate all aspects and spaces of everyday life. With a tight control over the landscape and its inhabitants, the spaces of the nation were transformed according to the military vision. The colorful, loud, massive populist rallies that had once overflowed Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo and spread out into factories, city streets, and university class- rooms were emptied and replaced with an atomized, silenced, and disciplined environment. The disappearances targeted individuals but were clearly
identification. National/gender identity is not so much a question of being as of doing, of being seen doing, of identifying with the appropriate performative model.” 7 La Nación, December 12, 1977. Cited in Isidoro Cheresky, “Régimen Estatalde Desapariciones” (paper presented at the Segundas Jornadas de Sociología–uba, 1976– 1996: Veinte Años Después, Buenos Aires, November 11–13, 1996). 8 Martin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1993); Daniel Frontalini and Maria Cristina Caiati, El mito de la guerra sucia (Buenos Aires: cels, 1984). 9 Horacio Verbitsky, El vuelo (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995). 10 David William Foster, Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
11 Nunca Más. Informe final de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1985); Juan Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Pilar Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición. Los Campos de Concentración en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 1998). 12 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 99. 13 Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 78–79. 14 On human rights organizations in Argentina, see Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Marguerite Bouvard Guzman, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994); Alison Brysk, The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1994); Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Elizabeth Jelin, “La política de la memoria: El movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,” in Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina, eds. Carlos Acuña et al., 101–145 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995); Héctor Ricardo Leis, El movimiento por los derechos humanos y la política argentina/1 + 2 (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1989); Emilio F. Mignone, Derechos humanos y sociedad: el caso argentino (Buenos Aires: cels, 1991); Marysa Navarro, “The Personal Is Political: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo,” in Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, ed. Susan Eckstein, 241–258 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Raul Veiga, Las organizaciones de derechos humanos (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1985).
15 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1998). 16 On struggles around human rights, justice, memory and democracy, see Carlos Acuña et al., Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995); Adriana Bergero and Fernando Reati, eds., Memoria colectiva y políticas de olvido: Argentina y Uruguay, 1970–1990 (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997); Manuel Antonio Garretón, “Human Rights in Processes of Democratization,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994): 221–234; Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg, eds., Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship and Society in Latin America (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1996); Luis Roniger and Mario Sznajder, The Legacy of Human-Rights Violations in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Hugo Vezzetti, Pasado y Presente. Guerra, dictadura y socie- dad en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 2002).
Carlos Saúl Menem, the charismatic governor of the province of La Rioja, was elected president of Argentina in 1989 on a platform that skillfully combined references to a nationalist-populist Peronist past with a global modernizing future. Menem presented himself as a pragmatist and not an ideologue; he represented the antithesis of economic stagnation, social dismemberment, and national decomposition. A central element of the Menemista platform was implied in seeking the recognition, internally and internationally, of Argentina as a powerful nation. The myth of the Argentina potencia was recast as dependent on a notion of national unity and collective sacrifice for a com- mon goal. In his inaugural speech in 1989, President Menem announced that he was “arriving to unite the two Argentinas,” which he identified with differ- ent pairs of historical antagonisms of the nation: “Rosas and Sarmiento, Mitre and Facundo, Peñaloza and Alberdi, Pellegrini and Irigoyen, Perón and Balbín.”17 In the same tone of great conciliation, Menem sought to provide clo- sure to the issue of human rights and military opposition. He did this through two interconnected strategies. First, he disqualified the importance of human rights under the premises of economic urgency and the “real” threat of hyper- inflation simultaneously as he displaced the domain of the human rights movement with a neoliberal discourse about economic (market) freedom. Second, he alleviated the tensions with the military and reestablished the chain of command, which had been continuously challenged during the Alfonsín administration, by granting a general amnesty through two presiden- tial pardons that set all convicted members of the military free in exchange for their constitutional loyalty. Within this context, all political, economic, cul- tural, and social conflicts were presented by the Menem administration as antithetical to the premise and promise of the globalized and modern Argentina. The main element of this national project was clearly focused on the economy and the comprehensive adoption of neoliberal policies with an emphasis on state divestment, economic liberalization, and private sector pre- eminence dominant worldwide.18
17 Vicente Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Política y poder en el gobierno de Menem (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996), 377. 18 On economic reforms in the 1990s, see Naúm Minsburg and Hector Valle, eds., Argentina hoy: crisis del modelo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Letra Buena, 1995); Vicente Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Políta y poder en el gobierno de Menem (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996); Hugo Nochteff, ed., La economía argentina a fin de siglo: fragmentación pre- sente y desarrollo ausente (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA-FLACSO, 1998); Ana Margheritis, Ajuste
In the Menemista 1990s, the political Others of the military period were largely replaced by the economically anachronistic, nonmodern Others, which were cast as holding on to the bygone era of inefficient state-led development, unproductive welfare benefits, and ideologically driven debates. Though evi- dently not based on a practice of brutal political repression as experienced during the military government, the Menem era imposed a narrow version of national identity based on a reconstituted myth of the Argentina potencia and a constrained role for civil society basically reduced to the participation of consumer citizens in the market. This process was not as much the product of the direct elimination and physical exclusion of certain groups, behaviors, and ideas as the effect of a general emptying of the public sphere, an erosion of acquired collective rights, the devaluation of the state as an instance to redress inequality and injustice, and the delegitimization of alternative representa- tions of daily life.19 The totalizing narrative of neoliberalism, in this case, was also built on an idea of “national emergency” due to economic chaos and lack of political leadership, and the solution was presented as inexorable and tech- nical, not political, and thus not subject to critical review. The justification for limiting discussion around restructuring and the parallel dismissing of cri- tiques relied on the appeal to an idea of national unity, through “national paci- fication” and “reconciliation” devoid of any political or social conflict. As in previous time periods, those relegated to the margins of the master narrative searched for alternative means of participation and representation by taking advantage of the openings and cracks that became available within the apparently monolithic and univocal dominant neoliberal logic. From 1993 on, through unconnected events in various areas (the northern provinces of Salta, Jujuy, and Santiago del Estero; the southern province of Neuquén; the northeastern province of Corrientes; and in the city of Buenos Aires and the Greater Buenos Aires area), unemployed workers, teachers, state employees, lawyers, retirees, disenfranchised youth, and the new poor staged considerable protests focused on: the negative effects of privatizations; labor reforms; state divestment from health, education, and pension plans; and the adoption of austerity measures. A range of collective actions were used, from burning down public buildings and private residences of local politicians in Santiago del Estero to picketing and weeklong road blockades (piquetes y cortes de ruta) in the declining oil towns of Cutral-có and Plaza Huincul in Neuquén to an
y reforma en Argentina (1989–1995). La economía política de las privatizaciones (Buenos Aires: Nuevohacer, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1999). 19 Danilo Martuccelli and Maristella Svampa, La plaza vacía. Las transformaciones del per- onismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1997).
20 Some of these protests and their effects are analyzed in Javier Auyero, La protesta. Retratos de la beligerancia popular en la Argentina democrática (Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, uba, 2002); Javier Auyero, Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003); Emilio Cafassi, Olla a presión. Cacerolazos, piquetes y asambleas, sobre fuego argentino (Buenos Ares: Libros del Rojas, uba, 2002); Gabriela Delamata, Los barrios desbordados. Las organizaciones de desocupados del Gran Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, uba, 2004); Maristella Svampa, ed., Desde abajo. La transformación de las identidades sociales (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos–Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2000). 21 Since the return to democracy in 1983, cases of police brutality proliferated all over Argentina. The victims were disproportionately young and poor, and the number of viola- tions committed by police officers out of uniform was also significant (see cels annual Informe anualsobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos). Additionally, throughout the 1990s, there were a few highly publicized cases of murders committed or ordered by well- connected businessmen or local politicians who remained largely uninvestigated during this time period. Among the best known cases are the deaths of three young people in the suburban neighborhood of Ingeniero Budge; the death and disappearance of Miguel Angel Bru; the death of Cristian Cicovicci after he refused to participate in an extortion scheme run by members of the police force; the arbitrary arrest, torture, and death of
The focus on economic recovery and its promises not only did not material- ize evenly but in fact shifted the target of exclusion to new subjects. The tactics of exclusion operated socially through the marginalization of the poor but also institutionally through the same past practices of repression that had not been purged from the dominant establishment, including the control apparatuses of the sate and sectors within the judiciary. These demarcated patterns, like those dominant during the military regime, were progressively unmasked by the very excluded. Emerging from seemingly weak, isolated, and even unex- pected counterpublics, alternative narratives about the nation entered the public sphere of the 1990s, similar to the development of an activist human rights public produced from within the all-encompassing and brutal repres- sion of the military period. iv The Disruptive Explosion
The bombing of the amia building on July 18, 1994, challenged the strategies put forth by the government through the politics of “national reconciliation.” The failure to respond convincingly to this event encapsulated the state of affairs under what became popularly baptized as Menem’s “regime of impu- nity.” Considered the worst single incident of terrorism on Argentine soil, and the most significant attack on a Jewish institution worldwide since the Second World War, this explosion cast serious doubt on Menem’s constructed narra- tive of the Argentina potencia. President Menem engaged with this event in the same manner that he dealt with the disruptive questions of past and pres- ent human rights issues: by isolating and excluding it from the national narra- tive. The most important element that facilitated this strategy in the case of the amia explosion was that the target had clearly been chosen because it was
Walter Bulacio after a rock concert; the disappearance and death of eighteen-year-old Sebastián Bordón; the assassination of photojournalist José Luis Cabezas; the death of school teacher Teresa Rodríguez after police opened fire at a protest of unemployed work- ers in the province of Neuquén; and the well-publicized case of the death of María Soledad Morales, which involved members of powerful political families in the province of Catamarca. Several of these cases sparked massive mobilizations and, at the time, served as a basis for the creation of organizations such as cofavi (Comisión de Familiares de Víctimas de la Violencia Institucional/Commission of Relatives of Victims of Institutional Violence or sometimes Comisión de Familiares de Víctimas Indefensas de la Violencia Social e Institucional/Commission of Relatives of Defenseless Victims of Institutional and Social Violence) and correpi (Coordinadora contra la Represión Policial e Insitucional/Coordinator Against Police and Institutional Repression).
22 Testimonios, 34.
For over ten years, each Monday morning as Buenos Aires rose to the work- week and subway loads of well-dressed passengers carrying briefcases and folders walked up the stairs to the street level joining others hurriedly entering the imposing building of the Judicial Palace or Tribunales, which occupies one entire city block in front of Plazas Libertad and Lavalle, the howling sound of the shofar—the ram’s horn used in Jewish holidays—broke the routine of this space. Since the mid-1994 event and for the greater part of the remainder of that decade, a mixed group of 150 to 200 people exercised their own routine in front of the Judicial Palace, the main structure representing the nation’s Judiciary. It started at 9:53 a.m. with the blowing sound of the shofar, a sound that acted as a marker of the (Jewish) specificity of the crowd that assembled there, as well as a general reminder of the unresolved nature of the event evoked (the Monday, 9:53 a.m., July 18, 1994, bombing of the amia building; see Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3). After years of botched investigations, no one was charged with the bombing of the Jewish community center, and only a general connection to the Islamist group Hezbollah indicated that someone organized, planned, and carried out this event. This is precisely why the crowd gathered in the “Plaza of Memory” across from the “Palace of Injustice”—as the protestors rebaptized these oppos- ing spaces—every Monday morning beginning two weeks after the bombing. After the blowing of the shofar, done in lieu of a “minute of silence,” three or four guest speakers, usually artists, actors, intellectuals, community leaders, jour- nalists, human rights activists, or high school and university students, addressed
Figure 1.1 Blowing the shofar on Mondays at 9:53 am (1999) Photo by Author
Figure 1.2 Crowds gather for Memoria Activa (1998) Photo by Author the crowd with words of solidarity and often critical outrage. Then, a representa- tive of the relatives of the victims and member of Memoria Activa, the organiza- tion that carried out these protests, gave a speech recounting and condemning the supposed advances in the official investigation. These poignant speeches did
Figure 1.3 We all are Active Memory (1998) Photo by Author more than express sadness at the loss of their loved ones or anger and frustration at the lack of progress in the case; they carefully dissected and disproved key aspects of the official investigation, often disclosing alternative explanations that paralleled the official versions, and updated the listeners on the develop- ment of the legal cases in which Memoria Activa was involved. References to individual victims were seldom made in these speeches; instead, the focus of these communications collectively edited by members of Memoria Activa was on a demand for justice in resolving the case. The charge was made without ask- ing for special treatment or preference but in accordance to the existing laws and procedures of an established democratic state to which all citizens have a right. In contrast to President Menem’s attempts to situate the bombing of the amia outside the realm of the nation, Memoria Activa’s weekly gatherings in Plaza Lavalle insisted on placing the event in a physical and symbolic center. The gatherings on Monday mornings were held in a space chosen for its pub- licness, openness, and “Argentineanness.” With three vigorous shouts of “Justice!”—one for the victims of the equally unresolved 1992 bombing at the Israeli Embassy, one for the victims of the amia bombing, and one for the vic- tims of impunity in Argentina—and a commitment to “meet next Monday,” the crowd broke off and Memoria Activa’s members and their supporters returned to their daily activities.
Officially registered as a not-for-profit civilian organization in 1997, Memoria Activa’s main purpose was to keep the cases of the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the amia building open within the Argentine judicial system and alive in the public consciousness. The group developed into an independent association that borrowed and resembled many of the characteristics of previ- ous human rights struggles. For example, the organization used certain sym- bols (the blowing of the shofar in an open plaza, outside the traditional space of the synagogue, was a particularly dramatic illustration) and particular lan- guage (the slogan “Basta de Impunidad” or “Enough of Impunity!” created an immediate identification with other concurrent, national issues) to disrupt and resignify the dominant narratives. At the same time, they intervened directly in the political and legal spheres to support their claims. The most vis- ible and highly symbolic activity carried out by the group, whose core constitu- ents included some family members of the victims of the bombings, as well as other Jewish and non-Jewish supporters, was the Monday morning weekly gatherings in Plaza Lavalle in front of the Judicial Palace. Memoria Activa was a vocal critic of the actions (or inactions) of both the government and the hier- archy of the amia and the daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations).23 It broke ranks with official practices when its members hired their own lawyer to carry their case through national and international court systems.24 The discourses and practices of Memoria Activa from the very moment of the bombing targeted tactics sanctioned by the Menem government that underpinned the labeling of the attack on the amia as an isolated, disconnected, and largely foreign matter. Practices by the government aimed at re-creating the bombing of the build- ing of the amia as a story that occupied a place outside the national narrative.
23 The president of the daia at the time, Ruben Beraja, had a close relationship with President Menem and his government. This connection developed in part because of Beraja’s management as head of Banco Mayo, a private financial institution with close ties in the business-industrial sector. The bank collapsed in October 1998, in some respects anticipating the broader breakdown of the financial system in late 2001. Many believed that Beraja’s close association with Menem impeded Jewish authorities from taking an independent and forceful position regarding the amia investigation. Similarly, this rela- tion allowed the Menem administration to sever the Jewish community into factions and to choose which ones it would discuss the case with. For some of the political intricacies within the Jewish community at the time, see Silvia Chab, Entre la crisis y la esperanza. La comunidad judeoargentina tras el atentado a la amia (Buenos Aires: Catalagos, 2001). 24 Dr. Alberto Zuppi, a respected lawyer best known for his successful participation in the extradition from Argentina to Italy of former Nazi ss captain Erich Priebke.
By using the Jewish specificity, the demands made on the state for the resolu- tion of this case were marginalized and “privatized.” The state apparatuses’ actions and inactions sought to relegate this issue to the memories of the vic- tims and their families similarly to how past human rights violations were for- mally consigned to a discrete place in the nation’s history. President Menem never visited the site of the bombing nor did he ever meet with survivors or relatives of the victims. While he and other members of his administration condemned the attack, there never was a forceful commitment to uncover the circumstances of the blast.25 In fact, Menem’s administration systematically stalled the investigation and gradually displaced its significance in the collec- tive history of the nation. Several measures reinforced the deterritorializing strategy crafted through official practices. For example, upon demands of more security around Jewish institutions and buildings, the government dedicated recruits from its border police force (the Gendarmería) to guard these sites. Thus, the conspicuous presence of these uniformed personnel seemed to indi- cate that Jewish buildings and institutions indeed had a distinct state line that placed them outside the realm of the nation. This impression was further rein- forced when authorities from the Jewish community made the decision to place cement barriers in front of Jewish organizations and institutions, includ- ing schools and synagogues, and enforced strict access procedures at their entrances. These combinations of outside and self-imposed measures served to symbolically and materially mark Argentine Jews as separate from the rest of society. For the activists of Memoria Activa, the cement barriers that still dot the city landscape represent precisely the lack of security and safety as they are artificial safeguards that cannot replace the true protection that would come only from the clarification of the case, the assignment of responsibility, and
25 Initial investigations suggested that a gang of corrupt policemen might have been involved in the bombing, though from the onset it was clear that, if they were involved, they acted under the orders of others. Suspicions of foreign participation were always present and eventually were traced to Iranian and Syrian support of the group Hezbollah. Ten years after the bombing, and after three years of investigation into an examination of the evidence and legal proceedings, a special investigative commission concluded that serious violations had been committed around the amia case, including a systematic obstruction of justice through deliberate distortion and destruction of evidence, bribery by the principal justice in charge of the case, Judge Juan José Galeano, and a planned cover-up operation that reached the highest levels of the Menem administration, casting direct doubts on the president himself. The commission also concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to link the policemen to the event and set free those who had been held in custody. For a journalistic account of the case, see Roberto Caballero, amia: La verdad imposible (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2005).
26 Gerardo Mazur, interview, March 23, 1999. 27 Laura Ginsberg, interview, April 26, 1999. 28 The Nunca Más report produced by the conadep includes a short section on anti-Semi- tism (pp. 69–75). There are numerous accounts about the military’s affinity for Nazism, torturers’ references to Hitler and the ss, and the particularly brutal and sadistic tortures to which Jewish prisoners were subjected. One of the testimonies by a survivor encapsu- lates this anti-Semitism in what was often repeated to her by her captors: “The only good Jew is a dead Jew.” See Nunca Más. Informe final de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1985), 74. See also the testimony by newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1981) about his ordeal as a prisoner of the military. Also see Leonard Senkman and Mario Sznajder, El legado del autoritarismo: Derechos humanos y
antisemitismo en la Argentina contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Instituto Harry Truman– Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1995); and Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, especially Chapter 3, “Life Here Is Normal.” 29 Elizabeth Jelin, personal communication, February 28, 2000. 30 It is interesting that this general pattern was reproduced within the amia tragedy itself. The second largest category of victims (approximately 20 percent), following staff and other employees of the amia, were those seeking support at the amia’s employment service or bolsa de trabajo. In her discussion of some of the internal dynamics within the Jewish community, Silvia Chab also indicates in Entre la crisis y la esperanza that beginning in the late 1980s and
Neoliberal reforms largely dismantled previous public safety nets. In essence, public policies were no longer “public” since services (including gas, electricity, water, communications, social security, and health) got transferred to private interests and the Menem government did not see the state as responsible for providing such services as a public right. This drop in the “publicness” of social policies was accompanied by an increase in discourses and initiatives focused on issues of “public security,” which criminalized the poor, the increasing num- ber of legal and illegal immigrants from neighboring countries, and other social “undesirables” such as street children, sexual workers, the unemployed, petty drug dealers, and nonconformist youth.31 “Why do rates of violence and insecurity rise?” asked a participant in one of Memoria Activa’s Monday morn- ing events. “Because the number one promoter of insecurity has been the Argentine government, but no one wants to talk about that.” “Security” was clearly not guaranteed by the state as the amia case exemplified; rather, it too was resolved through the privatizing frenzy. Those sectors of the population that could purchase security did so by hiring private guards or living in closed, gated communities.32 The strategy of exclusion that hierarchically situated citizens also permeated the application of “justice,” which appeared to be directed toward members of vulnerable groups but was of little consequence to powerful, elite groups or to state institutions. President Menem’s own immoderate lifestyle, whereby he flaunted his meetings with international rock stars, supermodels, and sports celebrities, emphasized the picture of a government more concerned with a trendy global image than with its citizenry, growing sectors of which did not benefit from the neoliberal program. The space of Memoria Activa in Plaza Lavalle, thus, became an important symbol for many aggrieved by Menem’s “regime of impunity” reflected in situations involving past and present human rights vio- lations. Gerardo Mazur, a member of Memoria Activa, interpreted it this way:
Well, there is a peaceful occupation of the Plaza on Mondays to demand our rights. We occupy the Plaza in the sense of being, we are in the Plaza
through the 1990s, the number of Jewish families seeking support from the social services of the amia grew dramatically as the traditional Jewish middle class shrunk. 31 Horacio Verbitsky, “Estado Penitencia,” Página/12, April 16, 2000; Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (cels), Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: cels, 1995–2000). 32 This process of urban spatial segregation was not unique to Buenos Aires. For a thorough study of this pattern with reference to the case of Sao Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
exercising our inherent rights as citizens and demanding justice by inviting various people representing different sectors of society. This is how we came to organize acts together with the Association of Graphic Journalists over the Cabezas case [the execution of photojournalist Jose Luis Cabezas], or the striking teachers’ union, on Monday we did something with the Mothers [of Plaza de Mayo]. There is a common structure, which is the structure of impu- nity in Argentina. There is specificity within each human rights organization, the Mothers search for their children, the Grandmothers their grandchildren, all of them searching for justice of course, and we are looking for justice in the attack on the amia and the Israeli Embassy. All within the common space of horror that is impunity.33
Members of Memoria Activa, too, became more politicized through the years as they recognized the same patterns of government inertia present in their case connected to broader human rights struggles. A significant turning point for the organization came after the commemoration of the third anniversary of the bombing. On July 18, 1997, 20,000 people gathered at the site of the blast on Pasteur Street, where Laura Ginsberg, the representative from the victims’ fami- lies and at the time a member of Memoria Activa, gave an impassioned, powerful speech in which she directly accused Menem’s government of indolence, cover- up, and lack of justice. Representatives from the government, including Minister of the Interior Carlos Corach and Chief of Staff Jorge Rodríguez, along with the president of the daia, Ruben Beraja, who were all present at the act, were pub- licly jeered and whistled at.34 Memoria Activa’s uncompromising stance and the connections it made between the lack of justice in this case and that of other historical events helped frame the demands of the organization as those of other sectors of the population also wronged by the structure of impunity. The expansion of Memoria Activa’s agenda to address issues of impunity outside of the amia case was constantly delegitimized by Menem, who dis- missed Memoria Activa as “a minority group with political interests.” This rein- forced the antipolitical official discourse through which the public sphere was redesigned and essentially emptied of nonmarket-driven content during these years. The hierarchy of Jewish organizations grouped under the daia, as well as the other group of bombing victims’ family members, also critiqued Memoria Activa.35 Yet the strength of Memoria Activa developed because it
33 Gerardo Mazur, interview, March 23, 1999. 34 See the ample media coverage of this date. 35 The other group of family members gathered in the Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas del Atentado de la amia held a monthly public event every 18th at the site of the bombing
We have always been questioned in Memoria Activa for extending our soli- darity to other, non-Jewish, victims or victims of non-Jewish acts of terror but who are victims of police violence, or have been victims of the repression during the dictatorship, or are victims of the economic plan. We all are vic- tims of this impunity that the Menem democratic government itself has imposed, at least it self-describes as “democratic.” But this is not gratuitous, that is, it’s not like one says, “I get together because it is convenient for me” or “I get together so that I don’t have to stand alone.” At the root of all our prob- lems there is a common denominator, which is that in all of them state secu- rity forces are involved. There is where one can create networks of support, of solidarity, of dialogue. We know a lot of mothers who have lost their children due to police violence or the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo or the striking teachers. We all suffer from the same ill, and the connections are, unfortunately, very close.36
on Pasteur Street. At these events, a strong speech demanding justice was usually deliv- ered after the names of the victims were read and a candle lit for each victim along with a red rose placed on a simple wooden altar inscribed with the words “Justicia y Memoria” (Justice and Memory) in white letters. After the ceremony, gatherers were invited to pray in silence in accordance to individual religious belief. This group was more reluctant to criticize the direction of the official investigation fearing that excessive criticism would create more antagonism and less desire on the part of judges to work on the case. The group continued to carry its legal case under the auspices of the amia/daia. Some mem- bers used to participate in Memoria Activa, but many found Memoria Activa’s expansion of its agenda to encompass other cases of impunity questionable and too politicized. In 2002, apemia (Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la amia, or Group for the Clarification of the Unpunished Massacre of the amia), a more radical group also constituted of family members and led by former Memoria Activa activist and bombing victim widow Laura Ginsberg, was formed. This organization has held the strongest critique against all Argentine governments since the bombing as well as other organizations, including Memoria Activa, perceived as complacent with the gov- ernments’ concealment and deceit and the lack of pursuit of local responsibilities. 36 Laura Ginsberg, interview, April 26, 1999.
Figure 1.4a Memoria Activa’s “National Document Against Impunity” (1999) Photo by Author
As the name of the Memoria Activa organization itself sought to imply, it is important to highlight these connections without abandoning a referent to a specific Jewish identity. This was appealingly interpreted in one of the Monday morning protests when the speaker representing Memoria Activa explained to the gathered crowd that in the Jewish tradition the act of wasting time is an offense and so should the lack of justice and, thus, the “waste of time” in resolv- ing cases in a democratic tradition, be interpreted as a serious political and ethical transgression. For Memoria Activa the issue of justice in the amia case was closely connected to the history of impunity in the country, and the best hope to keep memory alive or active was to have its claim become that of soci- ety as a whole, keeping the specificity of its Jewish markers—as the attack was clearly anti-Semitic—but insisting on the “Argentineanness” of the demand. Emblematically, in 1999, approaching the fifth anniversary of the bombing, Memoria Activa issued its own version of an Argentine “national id” that granted its holders with a general “national document against impunity,” all of them bearing the same number: 18071994 (18-July-1994; see Figures 1.4 and 1.5).
Figure 1.4b (Continued) Photo by Author
Concurrently with these symbolic practices that sought to reterritorialize the event and its victims, the core of Memoria Activa’s legal case centered on what was labeled “the local connection.” The reason behind this claim was that regardless of who masterminded the bombing nationally or internationally, it could not have been executed without a national base of support that likely entailed a network of local connections. At the event commemorating the fifth anniversary of the explosion, Diana Malamud, speaking for Memoria Activa, emphasized: “There are no doubts: The local connection of the amia attack is the Argentine state, which has managed to cover up and protect those responsible so that the truth will never be reached.”37 In April 2000, Dr. Alberto Zuppi, Memoria Activa’s lawyer, indicated—after showing me rooms full of boxes, binders, and piles of papers all related to the legal action—that the only certainty in the case up to that moment was that a Ford Traffic was the vehicle used in the attack. Everything else, even the most basic information, including
37 Página/12, July 19, 1999.
Figure 1.5a
Figure 1.5b
Even if some cases [of impunity] would be resolved this would not mean that a structure of impunity would cease to exist. It is an extension of the structure that existed during the dictatorship and continues under this democracy which, although more educated and couched under different words, continues to be just at an initial stage. It continues to be a democ- racy with unchanged diapers and thus it has a strong smell of shit.38
Popular discontent was summed up in the slogan of the “fight against impu- nity,” which originated among human rights activists to condemn the lack of punishment for violations of rights but became the general symbolic catch- phrase of this era (see Figures 1.6 and 1.7). The word impunity was before reserved for the more specialized parlance of judges and lawyers but was pop- ularized and made familiar by human rights activists. As Martín Abregú, at the time at cels, suggested, “It is one of the most frequently used words in the Argentine vocabulary.”39 “Fight against impunity,” thus, became the most com- mon manner to express the general frustration with the lack of punishment and accountability for past violations, as in the gross violations perpetrated during the military period, and for the injustices of the neoliberal era, as in the cases of massive layoffs, white-collar and government corruption, police
38 Gerardo Mazur, interview, March 23, 1999. 39 Martín Abregú, interview, May 14, 1998.
Figure 1.6 Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo head march “For Justice, against impunity, exclusion and discrimination” at the commemoration of the military coup. Some hold pictures of assassinated photojournalist, José Luis Cabezas (1999) Photo by Author
Figure 1.7 “Enough Impunity!” Banner in Plaza Lavalle by the Unión de Trabajadores de Prensa de Buenos Aires (Print Media Worker’s Union of Buenos Aires, UTPBA) for a joint event with Memoria Activa (1998) Photo by Author
40 S., interview, April 13, 1998.
I discussed key formations around categories of belonging as they pertain to the creation of the Argentine nation from the 1970s onset of the military gov- ernment through the neoliberal democratic 1990s with specific references to public debates regarding human rights struggles and demands. I argued that, through specific discursive and material practices, groups of people were pre- sented as Others to the dominant projects of nation building and were system- atically excluded from the spaces of the nation. But since hegemonic meanings require constant rearticulation and are always projects in construction, nei- ther the military nor the neoliberal narratives were able to completely control or expel subordinate accounts of the Argentine nation. During the military regime, the dominant narrative was based on political exclusion and was executed through a concerted, violently repressive plan that literally saw people considered threats to the nation disappear. This story was confronted by human rights organizations precisely by rematerializing the lives of those erased by the military and by demanding truth and justice. In the 1990s, a different narrative occupied the Argentine imagination. President Menem’s version of the nation involved a predominance of an economic logic based on the celebration of individualism and the private sphere at the exclu- sion of the public and collective spheres, including a role for the state. The contestations to neoliberalism emerged from sectors that did not benefit from its promises but also from groups that demanded attention and responses from the state and its institutions in their public responsibility, for example, in the demand for accountability. Nation building is based on notions of territory and space that entail a sense of belonging, ownership, and sameness. I have argued here that in contempo- rary Argentina the nation was built on the enforcement of these spatial bound- aries and social categorizations through explicit processes that deterritorialized bodies, political ideas, and cultural practices. This was obvious during the mili- tary government when people disappeared, their bodies sometimes thrown out and expelled outside the national territory. In the democratic neoliberal project this was not explicit, yet the emptying of and the degradation of a political public sphere also served to exclude voices, lives, and experiences not congruent with the dominant project. Contestations outside of what was demarcated as appropriate to a narrowly defined and depoliticized public sphere were seen as threatening and the presence of alternative explanations as disruptive. The bombing of the amia and the activism of Memoria Activa serve to explore the connections between the practices of nation building and
oppositional struggles in the 1990s. The bombing itself was a disruption that threatened Menem’s narrative, in part because it required a presence of the state that the neoliberal project was intent on weakening. Furthermore, by dis- cursively classifying the bombing as a “foreign matter” or labeling it a “Jewish concern,” the government sought to reestablish the boundaries of nationhood by excluding the event and its victims and by rebuffing demands for state accountability. The biggest disruption, however, emerged from the activism and presence of Memoria Activa. This group challenged official narratives about the bombing of the amia in particular, and the neoliberal experience in general, by occupying public spaces of the nation, formulating alternative explanations, and articulating a collective demand for justice. In the formula- tion of this counterpublic, Memoria Activa used previous human rights strug- gles to construct other meanings that challenged the parameters of the neoliberal project. For Memoria Activa and other human rights activists in the 1990s, the demands against impunity were conceptualized within the frame- work of what participation in a democratic nation involves, which included the right of citizens to place demands on the state. At the center of the demands by Memoria Activa was a claim to the “Argentineanness” of the event, including replacing within the boundaries of the nation the institution that was blown up, the bodies that were in the build- ing, the history that allowed it to occur, and the reactions and policies that were taken in its aftermath. All of it belonged to and in Argentina.
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Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff
Starting in the 1990s, the Jewish community reached a level of visibility unpre cedented in its long history in Argentina.1 After two tragic events, the attack on the Israeli Embassy in March 1992 and the amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina or Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society) bombing in July 1994, the display of elements characterized as “Jewish” received a level of attention unknown until then.2 Such visibility took different forms. One such form marked the urban fabric—in the name of safety standards aimed at reducing the impact of another possible attack of the same kind—to signal the location of Jewish community institutions. Formerly indistinguishable congregations and schools began to stand out in the city landscape because of yellow cement blocks, pilotes, raised as barriers to car bombs. On another level, increased Jewish visibility took place via the staging of numerous public acts of remembrance devoted to the attacks. Oftentimes those acts were accompanied by the explicit support of non-Jewish public figures. Prominent personalities in the fields of popular music, politics, the
1 This chapter comprises a paper given at the Eleventh International Research Conference of lajsa (Latin American Jewish Studies Association) that took place at Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2002; an addendum written two days before the conference; and an addendum written in late May 2014. The latter addendum contextualizes the first two parts and provides a key for readers who will find a work that, in its original version, dealt with a recent past—1999, the date of the editorial analyzed in the paper—and a later moment, when the piece was written. We have chosen this format in response to the editors’ wish to reflect on the specific period of the twenty years since the amia bombing. While the chapter is listed as coauthored by Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff, due to the editorial obligation to respect the coauthorship of the original version presented in 2002, the process required to revise, translate, update, and further develop some of the original concepts was completed entirely by Fernando Fischman. 2 On March 17, 1992, a bomb destroyed the Israeli Embassy located in downtown Buenos Aires, leaving twenty-nine people dead and over two hundred injured, and on July 18, 1994, the headquarters of amia was attacked and eighty-five people were killed.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_004
3 Richard Bauman, “Performance,” in Bauman, Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, 41–49 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).We understand them to be performances in that they are “an aesthetically marked and heightened mode of communi cation, framed in a special way and put on display for an audience” (41). 4 Memoria Activa is a civil association formed by relatives of victims of the attack and other actors of the Jewish community that early on took a discordant position toward the way Jewish leadership—and other relatives—headed the demand for a full investigation. 5 We refer to the commemorative ceremonies that amia carries out every month on the 18th, in the street at the entrance of the building. 6 At the time of the lajsa conference in June 2002 when the original version of this paper was presented, both authors were undertaking individual research projects on Jewish commem orative practices that used a corpus of written media sources in their empirical materials.
“An Expression of Life”: The Shaping of a Unique Voice
We base our analysis on the premise that discourses are “the precipitates of continuous cultural processes.”7 That is, discourses are the result of social pro cesses that leave their mark in the form of utterances.8 In this case, as will be apparent, we deal with a complex array of expressions from varied sources. The following excerpts, noted i–iv, appeared in the second issue of the pub lication Memoria Activa, a free newsletter distributed in Plaza Lavalle, five
7 Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, “The Natural History of Discourse,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, eds. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 1–17 (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1. 8 Mijail Bajtin, Estética de la Creación Verbal (México City: Siglo XXI, 1982).
i
It is neither a demonstration, nor another institution, it is an expression of life of all men and women of good will, Argentine Jews and non-Jews alike, all those who want to join in this demand for Justice.11
The use of “neither…nor” emphatically states Memoria Activa’s unique iden tity. On the one hand, it marks the ephemeral nature of protests that take place in public locations, and, on the other hand, it marks the immutability of estab lished institutions. This assertion implies both an affirmation of the enduring nature of the group and a distancing from a number of static organizations.12 In this sense, it is not only about not being an institution but about not being “another institution,” thus rejecting any ascription to the network of estab lished institutions that comprise Jewish Argentine organizations. In contrast to the preceding negative definition, the statement “expression of life” as the first positive definition would seem to designate with the highest degree of abstraction an attribute that binds the members of the group with potential supporters (“all those who want to join”). Various adjectives define the degree of inclusiveness to which the call appeals. The first expression, “all men and women of good will,” contains, in regard to this universality, an implicit reference to the Preamble of the Argentine Constitution. However, a specification follows this definition of an extended collective—“Jews and non-Jews”—that introduces the singularity of the collective affected directly by the attack (those who would be moved to
9 The dissemination of written materials has been a steady practice of this organization. The newsletter was one among other means, like the compilation of transcripts of speeches delivered in the public performances that Memoria Activa published in con junction with the Página/12 newspaper. 10 We selected these excerpts for this paper because they eloquently illustrate the interdis cursive articulation that shapes Memoria Activa’s singular voice. 11 “No es una marcha, no es una institución más, es una expresión de vida de todos los hom bres y mujeres de buena voluntad, argentinos judíos y no judíos, de todos aquellos que quieran acompañarnos en este reclamo de Justicia.” 12 This remark should be understood in the context of a debate with other Jewish organiza tions about their relationship to the national government, of which this editorial is an expression.
13 Raúl Alfonsín was the first democratically elected president after the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. In his electoral campaign he recited the Preamble of the Argentine Con stitution as a means of assuring the reestablishment of legal order. 14 In 1976 a military coup overthrew President María Estela Martínez de Perón, initiating a period of state terrorism that carried out a systematic abduction of citizens, for the most part young activists, workers, students, union leaders, and intellectuals. 15 We retain the use of the present tense used in our first version as a conference paper in 2002, when Memoria Activa still met every week. In December 2004 the termination of these public demonstrations was announced.
ii
Memoria Activa was and is one of the most important popular move ments that emerged in the years after that stunning example of Mothers and Grandmothers as expressions that became social agents able to sub limate violence.16
Memoria Activa’s self-categorization as a “popular movement” shows an inflec tion with respect to its definition as a “social movement” in the title of the editorial, to the extent that each refers to a different discursive matrix. The term social movement has some continuity within the discourse that, given the implication of the term Justice, accentuates the demand for (individual) civil rights. Further, the shaping of political discourse using the term popular movement has a semantic load that can be broken down. First, it refers to the social base of the movement’s participants. Thus, popular movement applied to Memoria Activa combines a Jewish affiliation with political participation typi cal of the Latin American “popular sectors,” a group not usually associated with the social background of an Argentine Jewish population that generally belongs to the middle and upper classes. Also, unlike the focus on individual rights and its legal framework, popular movement refers to the progressive inclusion of diverse groups in the political arena, in the form of successive mass movements and the consequent extension of social rights. Another relevant issue is expressed with the explicit recognition of a conti nuity with human rights movements that emerged as a consequence of state terrorism starting in the mid-1970s. The centrality of Memoria Activa’s protests on the public stage is relativized by the use of the phrase “one of the most important” (our emphasis). Nonetheless, the link with human rights organiza tions is enhanced by the presupposition of intelligibility that implies the use of the shorter form “Mothers and Grandmothers” to refer to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.17 The definition of these
16 “Memoria Activa fue y es uno de los más importantes movimientos populares que sur gieron en los últimos años después de ese maravilloso ejemplo de Madres y Abuelas, como expresiones que lograron convertirse en agentes sociales para sublimar la violencia.” 17 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Madres de Plaza de Mayo) and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) are two human rights organizations founded in 1977 during the dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The former centered its demands on the search for their children who had been abducted—and disappeared— by the military. The latter, aware that there were young women who were pregnant at the time of their abduction, initiated a search for the babies born in captivity. One of the
iii
Although certain themes do not make it to the headlines, certain social segments, starting from these movements, demonstrated their effective ness in transforming their issues into even more heartwarming news. These new social movements, including Memoria Activa, for their tenacity, perseverance and persistence, play a privileged role in promoting new
main forms of protest of both organizations was the weekly rallying in Plaza de Mayo, across from the Casa de Gobierno, the seat of the Executive Power, a form of demonstra tion that gave them international prominence and that continues to this day, although their discourse went through successive changes in response to governmental policy shifts. 18 The demand for “juicio y castigo” (trial and punishment) was, throughout the early years after the return to democracy and in the 1990s after the laws of amnesty, one of the mottos of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. 19 Perla Aronson, “La ciudadanía en entredicho. El caso de Memoria Activa,” Producciones en estudios sociales de la Universidad Nacional de Villa María 1 (2000): 73–92.
fields of awareness and tend to create solidarity, a subject little discussed in an Argentina of indifference.20
The transformation of “certain themes,” these organizations’ agendas, into “news,” that is, public events on the media’s agenda, is, according to Memoria Activa, the result of these movements making those themes noticeable. “Tenacity, perseverance and persistence” make for a “privileged role” of Memoria Activa among these movements that promotes both a renewed social aware ness and a sense of “solidarity” within the current national setting (“an Argentina of indifference”). Again, this remark interpellates the dominant neoliberal ide ology of the 1990s that by that time—the end of the decade—was already being put into question. The “Argentina of indifference” is the nation turned into an individualistic body where nobody—neither the government nor other social actors—seemed to care for the already apparent consequences of an erosion of rights brought about by the policies applied in those years. One aspect of such efficacy is due to the familiarity with some central fea tures of media products, particularly with their heightened level of emotional impact. In this sense, any visibility gained by these movements was related to their ability to exploit the sympathy aroused by their presentation in the media. The next paragraph of the editorial specifically addresses the issue of justice:
iv
The absence of justice, or mismanaged or corrupt justice, leaves people with a sense of profound helplessness. That is why the demand for justice became a new national articulator that encompasses different social sectors. It’s like a waterfall, upon successive cascade-like unpunished crimes, trust in justice broken, every crime can spark a popular move ment because people assume that once more, institutions are either powerless or accomplices and therefore unable to find answers.21
20 “Aunque en la información no aparezcan determinados temas, ciertos segmentos socia les, a partir de estos movimientos, evidenciaron su eficacia para transformar estos temas en noticias más conmovedoras aún, que la misma información. Estos nuevos movimien tos sociales, entre los que Memoria Activa ocupa un lugar de privilegio, por su tenacidad, su constancia y su persistencia, promovieron nuevos campos de conciencia y tienden a la creación de la solidaridad, un tema muy poco tratado en la Argentina de la indiferencia.” 21 “La ausencia de justicia, o la justicia mal administrada o corrupta, deja a la gente con un sentimiento de desamparo muy profundo. Por eso el reclamo de justicia se constituyó en un nuevo articulador nacional que abarca los distintos sectores sociales. Es como una
In addition to the explanation that the group itself searches for the relevance it has acquired, this paragraph also adds the revelation of a reflexive mecha nism whereby the consequences of collective public actions themselves—by definition not fully controllable and predictable—are incorporated into the set of situations in which the protesting collective is involved. In this sense, Memoria Activa’s interventions typify a number of “demand[s] for justice.” These articulate “different social sectors” given that instances of injustice affect citizen rights, social belonging notwithstanding. This points to the justice sys tem’s neglect for the violation of rights systematically bringing together diverse social actors who find in their demands for justice a unifying thread that would be unlikely otherwise. In addition, the demand for justice builds relationships initiated with the acknowledgment of the aforementioned human rights organizations as exem plary ancestors, upon establishing the affinity between the various protests that recognize among themselves a common appeal to justice. The metaphor of the waterfall indicates that such recognition arises from the construction of a common antagonism (the “cascade-like unpunished crimes”). The construction of antagonism on the semantic axis of justice and impunity leads to a questioning of the institutional power dynamic, whereby judicial “institutions” are identified, by act or omission, as “powerless or accomplices,” as agents of such impunity. Thus, the radical demand of justice resides in the fact that its achievement is beyond the realm of possibility for the accused gov ernmental institutions. The development of the waterfall metaphor allows for the reintroduction of the appeal to the “popular,” as a potential for mobiliza tion contained in a protest now characterized as a “new national articulator.”
Conclusions
Following the analysis made here, it is possible to appreciate Memoria Activa’s attempt at creating a distinctive discourse. The basis of their demand for jus tice differs from those of the main Jewish Argentine organizations—amia and daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations)—and, at the same time, establishes a complex balance of affinities, distances, continuities, and specificities with respect to those of other groups of collective protest.22
catarata, al sucederse en cascada los delitos impunes, quebrada la confianza en la justicia, todo crimen puede desatar una movilización popular porque la gente presupone que una vez mas, las instituciones serán impotentes o cómplices para encontrar respuestas.” 22 daia is the political representation of the Jewish Argentine community.
The basis of Memoria Activa’s appeals acquires a para-institutional nature with respect to the Jewish community (regardless of the specific links and the network of relationships of some members of the group).23 As a condition for the possibility of gaining distance from the institutional framework of the Jewish community, and simultaneously as a way to position itself in relation to “Jewishness,” a discursive link with a Jewish cultural tradition is set. It is precisely this call to a relatively diffuse cultural continuity that allows an opening of the parameters of belonging that spill over into the institutional frameworks of the community. This possibility—the extent to which Memoria Activa can emerge as a constitutive reference of Argentine Jewish identity—remains to be seen.24 Two main discursive matrices of Argentine political history have been noted. This hybridization is the result of an alternative and almost equivalent use of two appeals: one that emphasizes the demand in terms of rights and individual guarantees and another that does so from a place of kinship with “popular” manifestations and their potential for mobilization. One can then hypothesize that the politicization of Memoria Activa’s performances, its political impact, lies in connecting with the most entrenched features of Argentina’s political culture, that is, in the group’s capacity to reference the discursive matrix associ ated with the term movement and the national—popular—interpellation. In short, this discursive configuration provides Memoria Activa with a dis tinct vantage point. By universalizing the demand in terms of human rights violations—that is, placing it as one of many in which government institu tions are involved—it avoids being characterized as a body of “Jewish” protest (though it claims the Jewish specificity of the target of the attack). In this way, it contrasts with other entities of varying degrees of institutionalization (e.g., daia and mjdh—Movimiento Judío por Derechos Humanos, or Jewish Movement for Human Rights) that historically have led protests in the name of the Jewish community.25 Articulating elements of the Judaic cultural tradition in the context of a discourse that both uses and arrogates the idea of universal rights increases the visibility of its “Jewishness.” This peculiarity is typical of the Jewish community in its relationship with the larger society and allows
23 This para-institutional nature does not preclude some members of Memoria Activa from being active members of Jewish community organizations. 24 The question of Memoria Activa’s ultimate impact arose during our initial research over a decade ago. As this chapter goes on to explore, political and social changes in the ensuing years also shifted the parameters of these research questions (see Addendums i and ii). 25 The mjdh was founded during the 1976–1983 dictatorship by Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer and Herman Schiller. It was critical to the way Jewish leadership in general and daia in particular handled the protest of state terrorism, specifically the abduction and “disap pearance” of Jews.
Addendum i: June 20, 2002
The events of the last few years in Argentina—the years that follow the 1999 editorial we analyze—have been overwhelming. In order to explain a work that may appear outdated given the enormous political changes that have taken place recently, we should mention the political stances or statements that have attempted to respond to the demands of justice mentioned. For a while, the “waterfall” metaphor quoted earlier characterized effective social protest, demanding justice and revealing a broader picture of human rights violations (including the murder of news photographer José Luis Cabezas and the assas sination of the soldier Carrasco).26 As protests for justice that demand account ability from the state, these demands have brought strong challenges to security forces. In addition, given the characteristics of the damage that gave rise to the denunciations, the possibility of redress, compensation, or satisfaction of the demands arises, at best, as problematic. In this sense, our first hypothesis, worthy of further research, is that in a context of growing social unrest, voicing a series of claims in demanding jus tice enabled the development of new protests and the emergence of new pro test groups. Many of these new demands could be expressed in the same terms as those already extant in the public arena. In other words, these demands for justice involve overcoming the mere aggregation of denunciations to enable other emerging protests to become demands for justice as well. In this sense, perhaps the most persistent denunciations of the period, and those endowed with higher political impact, have been the periodic marches by retirees in
26 José Luis Cabezas was a news photographer murdered in the summer of 1997. His murder, in which members of security forces were implicated, stirred a wave of protests led by his fellow workers that involved street demonstrations and caravans that protested the lack of clarification of the case. Soldier Carrasco was a conscript serving the mandatory mili tary service in 1994. Shortly after he began serving he disappeared and was formally declared a defector. A few weeks later he was found dead in his military base, and it was proven that he had died due to physical abuses common in the military. The case mobi lized public opinion, and mandatory military service was abolished soon after.
27 The marchas de los jubilados (marches of the retirees) were protests started in the early 1990s when retirees began to demonstrate across the street from Congress against the government’s privatization of the pension system and in order to ask for an increase in their stipend. 28 The Carpa Blanca was one of the lengthiest and most visible protests of the 1990s. An enormous white tent was erected across from Congress in 1997 in demand of higher sala ries for teachers and a higher education budget. The tent was populated by teachers from all over the country and was regularly visited by passersby, artists, and political and human rights leaders. It steadily evolved to encompass larger socioeconomic and politi cal issues and an outstanding protest against neoliberal rule. 29 FREPASO was a political organization that gathered opponents to the government of Carlos Menem, led by Carlos “Chacho” Álvarez.
Finally, in October 2000, just a year after the inauguration of the new gov ernment, the political differences within the governing coalition led to the resignation of the vice president, Carlos “Chacho” Álvarez. Later, when Domingo Cavallo, the finance minister of the previous government responsible for the neoliberal policies that disrupted the social fabric, returned to his posi tion, it put an end to this joint political discourse. The “ethical vote” proved to be just as frustrating as the realistic feeling that “being honest is not enough” to redress the consequences of the economic policies of the 1990s. Similarly, the amia’s demands for justice, far from their initial articulatory ability, found themselves decentered among the rise of social conflict. Consequently, the public scene, now dominated by issues of unemployment and poverty rather than by demands for justice, positioned Memoria Activa as merely part of the response to the amia bombing, and in that role, it per formed its function of monitoring the evolution of the court case. Eventually, the intimidating assault on the house of the judge hearing the case returned Memoria Activa to a semblance of its past prominence. Nevertheless, with regard to political impact, today Memoria Activa has had residual efficacy. The issues of poverty, unemployment, insecurity, and social exclusion have not been alien to the Jewish community. In fact, they have trended in the oppo site direction from the one we proposed previously. If the interventions of Memoria Activa could shape an extracommunal Jewish identity appealing to many, the “new Jewish poverty” placed the community institutions back on center stage.30 Beyond its earlier established functions, it now faces the chal lenge of meeting the needs of a sustained and increasingly strong demand for social assistance. These community dynamics represent a rupture in the iden tification of Argentine Jews with middle-class sectors. However, this same break reveals a structural continuity between the Jewish population and the general population. This is due to the fact that, subject to the same processes, many Jewish Argentine distinguishing features—identification with certain social strata, an alleged protection from exposure to some risks and social pathologies based on a tight-knit net of mutual aid—became “diluted.” These new conditions are the same for everyone and make everyone the same. These final considerations suggest directions for other aspects of this research. First, we see a need to present a comparative study analyzing the intertextual
30 The “new Jewish poverty” refers to one of the most striking consequences of the eco nomic policies of the 1990s and of the ensuing crisis of 2001 for the Jewish community: a significant number of the Jewish population who used to belong to the middle and low- middle classes lost their jobs or their small businesses and by all economic indicators fell to poorer strata.
Addendum ii: May 29, 2014
Twelve years have passed since we presented our original paper in Brazil. Twelve years such as those traversed by Argentine society are indeed many. The paper was written in the context of a massive economic and political cri sis. Read in retrospect, it appears that, in addition to an analysis focused on a 1999 editorial published in the institutional publication Memoria Activa, it is a commentary on the events happening in Argentina. At the time, it sought to identify the historical and political factors that converged in this discursive editorial and the effects it intended to achieve. It focused on the work of Memoria Activa, the association that arose in response to the amia bombing, but also dealt with issues concerning the constitution of Jewish Argentine citi zenship. Additionally, it referenced wider social processes in which the mem bers of the Argentine Jewish community were immersed, as well as fellow Argentines, at a time of profound sociopolitical reconfigurations. For these reasons, we could not help writing an addendum right before fly ing to Rio de Janeiro to present the paper on June 24, 2002. We had to speak about the situation our country was going through at that very moment and reframe Memoria Activa both as part of the public demands of the Argentine Jewish community in 1999 and within the social and political movements that emerged from the 2001 crisis. As if our work was aligning with historical events or, more likely, because at that time decisive events took place regularly, when we returned to Buenos Aires on June 26, 2002, we learned that that very day Dario Santillan and Maximiliano Kosteki—members of the Coordinadora de Trabajadores Deso cupados Anibal Verón (Union of Unemployed Workers Anibal Verón)—had been murdered during a protest, marking another episode of bloodshed
Bibliography
Aronson, Perla. “La ciudadanía en entredicho. El caso de Memoria Activa.” Producciones en estudios sociales de la Universidad Nacional de Villa María 1 (2000): 73–92. Bajtín, Mijail. Estética de la Creación Verbal. México City: Siglo XXI, 1982. Bauman, Richard. “Performance.” In Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, 41–49. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Memoria Activa, “Memoria Activa: Movimiento Social,” July 13, 1999. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban. “The Natural History of Discourse.” In Natural Histories of Discourse. Edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 1–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Edna Aizenberg
Remembering the amia
“On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 a.m., a powerful bomb blew up a square block in down- town Buenos Aires. The immediate objective of the explosion was the destruc- tion of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, known as the amia, the building housing most of Argentina’s major Jewish organizations. I say the ‘immediate objective’ because, despite its primary intention to murder Jews and burn Jewish property, the bomb did not discriminate. Jews and non- Jews—some eighty of them—were killed that day, and apartment houses, schools, and stores in the area were destroyed. Images of the block on Pasteur Street where the amia stood resembled cities like Sarajevo or Beirut or Kosovo, their guts ripped out by ethnic violence.” I wrote these words some twenty years ago, shortly after the horrible event that changed the face of Argentine Jewry, of Argentina, and of Latin America’s Jewish and pluralistic life. But more than an objective, reasoned analysis of the tragedy (a prelude to 9/11), what I expressed was a cry of hurt at the death of my friend Susy Kreiman, buried under the rubble and the symbol of the unending pain of so many other friends and families of the victims. What I expressed was also a cry of outrage at the destroyed Jewish Argentine heritage—Spanish, Hebrew, and Yiddish books and countless documents and folios—the archival and intellectual legacy of the community. How to replace the mutilated trea- sures? How to rebuild? The challenge was overwhelming. The essays that follow, “The Mothers of Pasteur Street” and “Stones of Memory,” represent my continuing effort over two decades to assuage the pain and to understand the catastrophe. The first is a tribute to the women who refused to give up and who demanded justice—bringing accountability to those responsible for the bombing. The second is an attempt to rethink Latin America’s memory map and to construct a new map that revises our defini- tions of memory by including Jewish sites of remembrance. Like my book Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires, both essays combine a depth of emotion with academic study. Feelings cannot be left behind; neither can
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_005
The Mothers of Pasteur Street: The Struggle for Pluralism in Argentina
Argentina takes pride in being the most “European” country in South America.1 According to the official rhetoric, Argentina is a homogeneous country populated by inhabitants of European heritage with hardly any “drops” of indigenous, African, or Jewish blood. The armed forces, major players in Argentine politics, have rarely looked kindly on those they perceive as outside Western, Christian civilization. Custodians of the fatherland’s “fundamental values,” they have defended—by “dis- appearance” and torture, if necessary—a cluster of Hispano-Catholic ideals ulti- mately derived from medieval Iberia. Those who are not born with these essential qualities cannot be “true” Argentines, Santiago Kovadloff explains in his powerful essay “Un lugar en el tiempo: Argentina como vivencia de los judios” (A Place in Time: Argentina as a Jewish Experience).2 They remain inevitably condemned to marginalization, to being outsiders to the Argentine experience. The bomb that exploded at the amia seven unresolved years ago is painful testimony to the fact that Argentina, like many other Latin American coun- tries, has yet to cohere into a pluralistic national polity.3 Despite its manias de superioridad, its superior European airs—with Buenos Aires styled the Paris of the South—Argentina is painfully Latin American, still struggling with issues of human rights, diversity, and equality for peoples of varying social, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, of different genders and sexual orientations. The mask of Europeanness Argentina wears not only erases the existence of indig- enous and mestizo peoples, sometimes contemptuously called cabecitas negras, little blackheads, but also the presence of such non-European immi- grants as Afro Asian Sephardic Jews, and Arabs. For instance, the immediate
1 This article previously appeared in Spanish in Revista Iberoamericana and in English as part of the Introduction to Aizenberg’s Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires. It is reprinted here with permission from the author and from Revista Iberoamericana. For the Spanish, see “Las madres de la calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina,” Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 191 (April–June 2000): 339–345. 2 Santiago Kovadloff, “Un lugar en el tiempo: La Argentina como vivencia de los judíos,” Hispamérica 14, no. 42 (December 1985): 79–89. 3 This essay was written in 2001.
Remember how Borges used to say that he would speak to one grand- mother in one way and to another grandmother in another way, and that those two ways of speaking were called Spanish and English? [Borges had an English grandmother.] Well, something similar happened to me, except that in my case one way of speaking was Spanish and the other Yiddish. But since Yiddish sounded harsh and unpleasant to me, I refused to speak it. It was a mysterious language that could reveal to me who I really was. From childhood I was expected to hide, to cover up, who I “really” was and to pretend that I was someone else, who, strangely, I also was.4
Her Magdalena is a marginal being, with a Jewish and womanly identity so questioned that even her name is unstable: “When I say Magdalena,” it is just a provisional name. Feierstein presents his attack in “Aventuras de un apellido.” The protagonist, David Schneiderman, converses with a public employee:
“Last name?” “Schneiderman.” “What?” The eternal story (experienced since elementary school). “Schneiderman,” you repeat…. “Don’t get nervous. I will spell it for you.” “It would be better…if you write it yourself. I find it difficult to copy foreign names…” “What is your name, sir?” “Héctor García. Why?” “And your name isn’t ‘foreign’, but ‘Argentine’?”
4 Alicia Steimberg, Cuando digo Magdalena (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992), 60–61.
“Yes…yes, sir.” “You mean to say, then, that you descend from a tribe of Mataco Indians. Or Tobas. Or of the Quarandí Garcías. Perhaps Calfucurá García, an Araucano chief?…” “No sir, I meant to say that I am ‘Argentine’ because I was born here. In this country.” “I too was born here.”5
That is the way it continues, until the employee barks for the next person in line, and David Schneiderman mutters: “To tell the truth, beyond the verbal pyrotechnics…you are the Jew, the minority, for many, marginal.”6 For one hundred years, since the time Argentina pursued a pro-European immigration policy aimed at populating and modernizing the land, there has been an ongoing battle between those forces who wish to retain the discourse of exclusion and those who wish to embrace a discourse of inclusion that mir- rors what the nation really is.7 The events surrounding the amia bombing, especially the subsequent investigation, give a good picture of the struggle. First, who planted the bomb? Apparently, it was international terrorists, under the direction of Iran, with the indispensable local support. But nothing is cer- tain. More than seven years after the explosion, there is “still no justice,” to cite the painful title of a report issued by the American Jewish Committee. Those who destroyed Argentina’s main center of Jewish life have not been found; nor, for that matter, have those who perpetrated the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier. Why? Because, most observers believe, powerful Argentine interests are implicated, police groups with ties to the military, to neo-Nazis, to right-wing activists—in short, to those elements in Argentine society who have always viewed Jews as an alien, diabolical body and who have attacked Jewish institu- tions and denounced “Jewish” professions such as psychoanalysis. The depth of the animosity flowing from this philosophy was driven home to me personally in a chilling letter I received shortly after my op-ed article on the bombing appeared in the New York Times. It read in part: “Listen to me Jewess: It is an affront to all Spanish peoples, especially to us Argentines, to even remotely imply that there is such a thing as Argentine…Jews…. As a former Argentine army officer I am insulted by your inferences that these creatures
5 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizo: A Novel, trans. Stephen A. Sadow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 121. 6 Ibid., 125. 7 See Santiago Kovadloff, “Un lugar en el tiempo.”
How do we move on now from our long history of impunities? We hid the impunities of the past without talking too much about them, as was done with the idiots in the attics, but now all of the ghosts are out, harassing us…. If we had not consented yesterday to impunity, it would perhaps be easier to find the guilty today. One looks for a way out even though he
8 “Los clubes judíos, víctimas del temor desatado por terrorismo,” Página/12, August 16, 1994. 9 Jean Franco, “Defrocking the Vatican: Feminism’s Secular Project,” in Cultures of Politics, Politics of Culture, eds. Sonia E. Álvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, 281 (Boulder, co: Westview, 1998).
cannot see them. The only thing that remains for us is to not forget, but terribly, the forgetting has begun.10
Abelardo Castillo expresses similar sentiments in his article, “La muerte a la vuelta de la esquina”:
Perhaps the reader has noted that I have not said amia nor have I said Jews. Very well, it is deliberate. Because to make this into a new killing of the Jews…is to distance ourselves from the problem and to continue think- ing that death, criminal violence, and hate have nothing to do with us. What happened yesterday is an Argentine problem…. I know that its name is genocide and that it happened in our country because it was possible.11
His call was echoed by one of Argentina’s great men of letters, Ernesto Sabato, former president of the National Commission to Investigate the Disappeared, whose final report carried the title “Nunca más” (“Never Again”): “We cannot remain silent in light of what we have heard, read, and registered.”12 Many Argentines have said “never again.” “Today,” writes journalist Sergio Kiernan, “a great number of citizens believe that the attack on the amia is not an exclusively Jewish matter. Its resolution is a priority for the Argentine society in general, a symbol of what besets that country.”13 The most vocal group in the fight to remember and to bring those responsible to justice is Memoria Activa (Active Memory), the significantly named grassroots organization of private citizens, most but not all Jewish, most but not all relatives of the explosion’s victims. Memoria Activa accuses the government of allowing those who know some- thing to be indifferent and remain quiet, of concealing the local connection, and of obstructing the investigation supposedly being carried out. Women are the motor behind Memoria Activa, so much so that they have been called las madres de la calle Pasteur, the mothers of Pasteur Street, in analogy with the legendary Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the disappeared who during the seventies dictatorship weekly circled Buenos Aires’ main square clamoring for information about their children, clamoring for justice.14 Every
10 Tomás Eloy Martínez, “El miedo a las víctimas,” Página/12, August 21, 1994. 11 Abelardo Castillo, “La muerte a la vuelta de la esquina,” Clarín, July 20, 1994. 12 Ibid. 13 Sergio Kiernan, Still No Justice: Four Years After the amia Bombing (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1998). 14 Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994).
Monday since the bombing, Memoria Activa members and sympathizers gather at Plaza Lavalle, across from the Supreme Court, under a banner of the command from Deuteronomy: “tzedek, tzedek tirdof” (justice, justice you shall pursue). Memoria Activa has garnered considerable media attention and significant moral weight. The list of those who have stood with Memoria Activa on so many Mondays, and who have spoken at the vigils, reads like a who’s who of democratic Argentina. Here is what Laura Bonaparte of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo said on Monday, October 20, 1997:
Yesterday was Mother’s Day. And this society is trying to put together the broken body of its mother institution. And we have to do this together. Because what happened, happened in each and every one of our homes. All of us found out that state terrorism is alive and well…the terrorism of the state whose silence makes it an accomplice. The amia didn’t abandon us; it was assassinated. Those responsible for the act and for the silence are right here. The legacy of the crime will be perpetuated until such time as the testimony of truth becomes part of the search for justice.15
The conflict between Memoria Activa, the Jewish establishment, and the Menem government became public at the 1997 ceremony marking the third anniversary of the bombing, when the crowd of thirty thousand gave a rousing ovation to the tough speech delivered by Memoria Activa’s Laura Ginsberg and, in the presence of several government ministers, repeatedly interrupted Ruben Beraja, then president of the daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas), Argentine Jewry’s representative body, before the regime and the press. The daia, which groups most of Argentina’s Jewish organiza- tions, was perceived as too conciliatory toward the official investigation. Ginsberg declared:
I accuse the government…of consenting to the impunity, to the indiffer- ence of those who know but keep silent, to the insecurity, the impotence, the ineptitude…. I accuse the government…of covering up the local con- nections that helped kill our relatives. I close my eyes and imagine that it’s twelve midnight on that July 18th. We’re all sleeping and dreaming, our families are intact, and we’re all looking forward to living the next day fully, with the wild madness of being alive, with the daring expectation of being alive, with the tantalizing illusion of being alive. But when I open
15 Memoria Activa, Cuatro años de impunidad (Buenos Aires: La Página, 1998), 58.
my eyes it’s three years later, and I find myself burning with the wild mad- ness of wanting justice, with the daring expectation of finding justice, with the tantalizing illusion of “never again.”16
The power of the speech was such that it has become a foundational text of post-amia testimonial writing.17 Significantly, it appears as the final selection in an anthology of Jewish Argentinian writers published in 1999 in a collection managed by David Viñas and Gisela Heffes. The first selections, of now-classic names like Alberto Gerchunoff, Enrique Dickman, Samuel Eichelbaum, and Carlos Grünberg are not exempt from the disillusionment and the vicissitudes that the immigrants suffered in the Promised Land, Argentina. However, they still project the optimism of the beginning of the twentieth century, of the possibility of a utopian future. The words of Ginsberg, on the other hand, come from a time when the world sank beneath the rubble. They alternate between two developments: the before and after of an unforgettable day and hour, and they invert “the order of things: the open, sleepless eyes look back and trans- form yesterday into a distant dream, that of closed eyes, that which was con- sumed by an irreparable present.”18 In May 1999, barely two months away from the fifth anniversary of the unre- solved bombing, a new amia building was inaugurated and built, in the words of many, like a bunker meant to resist any future assaults. The dedication of the gray hulk, made of double-reinforced concrete brimming with the latest high- tech security equipment, was hardly a healing occasion. Memoria Activa and other groups of relatives boycotted the event. The explosion at the amia raises serious questions about pluralism in Argentina as it attempts to enter the twenty-first century by overcoming out- moded legacies. Argentine cultural critic Beatríz Sarlo puts it bluntly: “Can we find an idea of nation that doesn’t derive from fundamentalism or dictatorship?”19 Will Argentina be a space of oneness—one religion, one language, one color? Or will it be a kaleidoscopic space of multiplicity, where women no lon- ger need to grieve over their shattered dead?
16 Ibid., 16. 17 Gisela Heffes and David Viñas, eds., Judíos/argentinos/escritores (Buenos Aires: Atril, 1999), 307–318. 18 Ibid., 35. 19 Beatríz Sarlo, “La nación en el fin de siglo”: Instantáneas: medios, ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1996), 109.
Bibliography
Aizenberg, Edna. “Alongside the Dead in Argentina.” New York Times, August 2, 1994. Castillo, Abelardo. “La muerte a la vuelta de la esquina.” Clarín, July 20, 1994. Documento nacional contra la impunidad: Memoria Activa-Testimonios. Buenos Aires: Página/12, 1999. Feierstein, Ricardo. “Aventuras de un apellido.” Noaj 2, no. 2 (1988): 4–6. ———. Mestizo: A Novel. Translated by Stephen A. Sadow. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Franco, Jean. “Defrocking the Vatican: Feminism’s Secular Project.” In Cultures of Politics, Politics of Culture, edited by Sonia E. Álvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, 278–89. Boulder, co: Westview, 1998. Guzmán Bouvard, Marguerite. Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994. Heffes, Gisela, and David Viñas, eds. Judíos/argentinos/escritores. Buenos Aires: Atril, 1999. Kiernan, Sergio. Still No Justice: Four Years After the amia Bombing. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1998. Kovadloff, Santiago. “Un lugar en el tiempo: La Argentina como vivencia de los judíos.” Hispamérica 14, no. 42 (1985): 79–89. ———. Por un futuro imperfecto. Buenos Aires: Botella al Mar, 1987. Martínez, Tomás Eloy. “El miedo a las víctimas.” Página/12, August 21, 1994. Memoria Activa. Cuatro años de impunidad. Buenos Aires: La Página, 1998. Nunca más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1986. Sarlo, Beatríz. “La nación en el fin de siglo”: Instantáneas: medios, ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1996. Steimberg, Alicia. Cuando digo Magdalena. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992. Young, Gerardo. “La amia, 1,772 días después.” Clarín, May 27, 1999.
Stones of Memory: Buenos Aires and the Monuments to the Victims of the amia
1 From the Heights of Macchu Picchu to the Buenos Aires “Lowlands of Fear” When we think about Latin America’s great stones, in its places of remem- brance, what emerge are the telluric constructions of the pre-Columbian America: Peru’s Machu Picchu and Mexico’s Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá.20 “High citadel of terraced stones,” wrote Neruda, “mother of stone, sea spray of the condors…. This was the dwelling, this is the site”: this is the place, a lieu de mémoire of American greatness and misery.21 Thus, the poet interro- gates in his verse with barely contained rage: “Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?”22 Latin America’s memory map had shifted very little by the end of the twen- tieth century. Unlike the memorializing landscapes of Europe, profoundly affected by events so close to us that we have lived them, what is distinctive of Latin America—save the triumphant monuments dedicated to discoverers or eminent figures in important plazas, cathedrals, or churches—is still the pre- Columbian. In Germany, the Berlin Wall possibly was the greatest, although not intended, monument to World War ii; in Latin America, “the wall” is that of Machu Picchu to which Neruda sings (“The wall, the wall! If upon his sleep / each layer of stone weighed down”)23 or the Teotihuacán pyramid evoked by Octavio Paz (“living ruins in a world of living dead”).24 Pilgrimages to these places of memory, be they merely tourist or more sociocultural or political, reiterate this time-honored itinerary. Who travels to Latin America to look for the man or the woman amid the “stone upon stone” of our days? How does the stone upon stone of our days remember the threadbare at its core, the mur- dered, the disappeared, those blown to pieces by a bomb? With these reflections, I aspire to make room for a wider map of Latin American memory, a contemporary map. My journey takes me not to the heights but to the bottoms; it takes me to Buenos Aires, whose unostentatious
20 This article is translated by Nicole Arocho. It was originally published in Spanish and is reprinted here with the permission of Iberoamericana Editorial Verveurt. The original publication features photos of the various monuments outlined in the article. See “Las piedras de la memoria: Buenos Aires y los monumentos a las víctimas,” Nueva época 1, no. 1 (2001): 121–132. 21 Pablo Neruda, Obras completas, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967), 339. 22 Ibid., 345. 23 Ibid., 346. 24 Octavio Paz, Libertad bajo la palabra. Obra poética (Mexico City: fce, 1968), 211.
“river of drowsiness and mud,”25 as Borges called it, a river with dangerous “Low Lands of Fear,”26 is possibly the appropriate stage to start drafting this alternative map. What brought me to Buenos Aires is its recent history with its load of broken pieces, the history of the last two or three decades, no more than that, even though its roots stretch out to colonial times, or the pre- Columbian past. I walk through contemporary Buenos Aires, and its memory landscape reminds me with increasing persistence of the great modern capitals (post- modern? postcolonial?), disfigured by the horrors of the twentieth century and, beyond the horrors, marked by the controversial work of architectural remembrance—commemorative murals, monuments, gardens, and public spaces of reflection. Buenos Aires has always bragged of being the most “European” (nowadays it would be the most “globalized”) of the Latin American metropolises, the “Paris of the South.” In a perverse way, it is: walking amid certain streets of Buenos Aires and its surroundings I think of the streets of Berlin with their multiple commemorative plaques, like the one in the Wittenbergplatz metro station with its simple inscription: “Orte des Schreckens, die wir niemals vergessen dürfen” (places of terror that we shall never forget). I think of the head count at concentration camps or the cemeteries at the beaches of Normandy, which I visited in a day of rain and wind, with their rows and rows of crosses and chilling silence. I think of the Yad Vashem grounds in Jerusalem, with its overwhelming body of avenues lined with trees, commem- orative sculptures, plazas, halls, and museums that implacably bear witness to the Holocaust through the multifaceted, continuous, and changing work of architectural memory. Maybe these analogies are surprising, so un-“Latin American.” But in the environment of Argentinian dictatorships of the seventies (the euphemisti- cally named Proceso de Reorganización Nacional or National Reorganization Process); of the disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; of the disastrous Falkland Islands War at the beginning of the eighties; of the destruc- tion of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, followed by the analogous destruc- tion of the headquarters of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina; amia), the most important Jewish community center in Latin America, in the nineties; these analogies do not strike me as unreasonable. The ruins we see today, the walls, the inscriptions, the memorials that remind us of so much terror, are infinitely more directly related to that plaque in Berlin—“places of terror that we shall never forget”—
25 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 81. 26 Vlady Kociancich, Los bajos del temor (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992).
2 Places of Absence and Presence I want to start my tour through that physical space we talk so little about. This will just be the beginning, the first step toward a more complete study and a map that includes the not-yet-inaugurated Memory Park, along the riverfront of Ciudad Universitaria, which will be a place of remembrance for those who disappeared in the “Proceso,” so that no one forgets that “the tawny river was tinted with the blood of the corpses thrown there from naval airplanes.”30 Likewise the map will include a monument in homage to the fallen in the Falkland Islands, a task that fell upon military hands and is thus made in that style: red granite plaques with names of the deceased forming a semicircle
27 Eliahu Toker, Sus nombres y sus rostros: álbum recordatorio de las víctimas del atentado del 18 de julio de 1994 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá/amia, 1995), vii. 28 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1993), 7. 29 Beatriz Sarlo, Escenas de la vida posmoderna: intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994). 30 Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado, “Documento leído en el acto de la colocación de la piedra fundamental del monumento a las víctimas del ter- rorismo del estado, 24 de marzo de 1999” (1999), 2.
3 Our House is a Mass Grave On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 in the morning, a powerful car bomb destroyed an entire block in the center of Buenos Aires. The immediate target of the explo- sive was the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association’s headquarters, but the bomb did not discriminate: eighty-five individuals of all creeds and ethnici- ties died that day, hundreds were wounded, and little was left of the surround- ing apartment buildings, schools, and businesses. The images emanating from Pasteur Street looked like something from Sarajevo, Beirut, or Kosovo, from some city disemboweled by sectarian violence. Six years have passed since that heinous day, but the crime has not yet been solved. Political and ideological interests and a tradition of injustice and impunity have come together to prevent exposing and condemning the national and international culprits.31
31 Edna Aizenberg, “Las madres de la Calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina,” Revista Iberoamericana, 191 (2000): 339–345.
This lack of resolution feeds a powerful need for remembrance. The mur- dered of the amia, like those of the Proceso and the Falklands, are never for- gotten by their relatives, and thanks to their indefatigable insistence, perhaps neither by a nation not always willing to remember. Yet the fact that, save for some minor actors, the assassins are still unknown and walk among us has motivated a memorial work even more intense, more urgent, more obstinate, more combative. The weight of Argentinian history in the last lustrums, the strong memorial component of Hebraic legacy, and the unresolved pain have converged to produce, what in Argentinian history is a short period of time, a combination of monuments and spaces that try to affix the memory and the wound but also serve as an unequivocal call to action.
4 633 Pasteur The site of tragedy is the first lieu de mémoire, the most complex and contro- versial. Inaugurated in 1945, amia’s building had been constructed as an affir- mation of survival in the new world after the catastrophe in the old. The building itself was a kind of monument, for it contained the institutions and libraries that had once existed in Europe and no longer did. The destruction of this living memorial and symbol of resurrection a year before its fiftieth anni- versary, in an era that seemed to finally leave behind the terrible legacy of half a century, was symbolic and largely determined the way in which the memory of this place was configured.32 Shortly after the bombing, the building’s ruins were surrounded by a wooden retaining wall, the sort used on construction—or demolition—sites to protect pedestrians. But this commonplace, banal fence, which barely hid the rubble hanging precariously behind it, turned very quickly into a place I would call sacred. Painted black, with victims’ names and the words “justice and memory” emblazoned across it in white aerosol paint, the humble wall was transformed into the Wall: “Please respect this site,” declared the posters affixed to the upper part, and also “Remember the pain that never ceases.” This wall reminds us of the power that can emanate from the spontaneous monument (a “found” monument), as with the Berlin Wall, which has practi- cally disappeared.33 The physical fragility of the wall, its scarce, if not null, aes- thetic value, does not diminish its symbolic, almost religious power. On the 18th of every month a ceremony takes place in front of the wall. There, each holding a sign with the face, name, and age of a loved one, the relatives read a
32 Toker, Sus nombres y sus rostros, viii. 33 Young, The Texture of Memory, vii; Burt Herman, “Berlin Wall Goes Back to the Future,” usa Today, August 14, 2000.
34 amia: July 18 and After, 1999–2000. 35 Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, de: sr Books, 1994). 36 amia: July 18 and After, 1999–2000.
5 How Can We Give Them the Place They Deserve? The conflicts concerning this crucial enigma emerged not only with the Argentinian state, evasive to mark its own crimes just like other states, but also among those closest to the victims. In May 1999, barely two months before the fifth anniversary of the attack, a new amia building was inaugurated, erected on top of the ashes of the other. Now, there are no wounds, no ruins behind the wall; instead, a gigantic mass of grey concrete, an antiterrorist bunker designed with the most sophisticated security system to prevent another bombing catastrophe. And in the open plaza, between the building and the wall, now stands a monument to the amia bombing victims designed by a colleague and kinetic contemporary of Kosice, French Israeli artist Yaacov Agam. At 9 de Julio Avenue and Marcelo T. de Alvear, a changing and mobile ensemble of concrete, mirror, and water to celebrate democracy; at 633 Pasteur Street a changing and mobile ensemble of columns, colors, and shapes to pay homage and remember those whom democracy could not protect. With the splendid building and brand-new memorial, the mnemonic equilib- rium of the street has been profoundly altered, in ways that trouble the relatives. “They are building over the blood of our loved ones,” protested one relative. “There was no need to touch the debris, the new headquarters do not represent a triumph of life,” as government authorities argue.37 For these political forces, the wall, the sacred place, has become a visual hindrance; it must be demol- ished. But if it is knocked down, it seems unlikely that the Agam monument will be able to carry the commemorative density of 633 Pasteur. Consisting of nine multicultural columns erected over a base, the monument invites the observer to walk between the columns, advancing inside a labyrinth of changing images that progress from the destruction (Column i) to the reconstruction (Column ix). “Many people like it because in this space colors attract and hook you through- out the tour,” Anita Weinstein, a survivor of the bombing attack, told me. “But we feel that this is not what is meant to be there, there’s a lack of emotivity; it doesn’t speak to the heart, it doesn’t include a tribute to the victims.” Agam had suggested a more personalized tribute: besides the columns, eighty-five colorful steps along the building would symbolize each of the dead. That staircase (celestial? biblical?) was eliminated from the plan, due to bud- getary constraints, it was said, and a modest glass plaque with engraved names replaced it, a kind of rearranging to the background of what was supposed to belong in the forefront. The monument’s lack of “Argentineness” and “represen- tativeness” was also criticized. “It would’ve been more appropriate to appeal to Argentinian artists with a nationwide call for proposals, in this way affirming
37 Gerardo Young, “La amia, 1772 días después,” Clarín 1, no. 19 (May 1999): 18.
6 Neruda over the Fence Recently installed, hardly telluric, pluricultural, painful, and controversial, these new memory stones, nevertheless, insist on their Latin Americanness, on their links with the great sculptors of the continent’s conscience and memory. Thus, Neruda is present on the other side of the wall. The following slightly altered version of his poem “Forever,” from Canto General, appeared, handwrit- ten, affixed beside the victims’ names:
Forever
Though feet may walk on this site for a thousand years they’ll never expunge the blood of those who fell here.
And the hour on which you fell will not expire though thousands of voices may cross this silence.
A thousand dark-winged nights will fall without destroying the final days of suffering.
A just day conquered in struggle, and you, fallen brothers, in silence, will be with us on that vast day, the final day of our struggle.38
Neruda is present beyond the wall but not with his Heights, because what over- whelms here is not the monumental weight of a past culture but the memorial weight of a recent barbarity. The new memory stones painstakingly place us in the here and now, daring us to reconfigure the mnemonic map of Latin America.
38 Neruda, Obras completas, vol. 1, 505.
Bibliography
Aizenberg, Edna. “Las madres de la Calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina.” Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 191 (April–June 2000): 339–45. amia: 18 de julio y después. cd-rom. Buenos Aires: KehilaNet, 1999–2000. Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado. “Documento leído en el acto de la colocación de la piedra fundamental del monumento a las víctimas del terrorismo del estado, 24 de marzo de 1999.” Giardinelli, Mempo. Santo oficio de la memoria. Buenos Aires: Norma, 1991. Guzmán Bouvard, Marguerite. Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, de: sr Books, 1994. Herman, Burt. “Berlin Wall Goes Back to the Future.” usa Today, August 14, 2000. Kociancich, Vlady. Los bajos del temor. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992. Neruda, Pablo. Obras completas. 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967. Nora, Pierre. Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Paz, Octavio. Libertad bajo la palabra. Obra poética. México City: fce, 1968. Sarlo, Beatriz. Escenas de la vida posmoderna: intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994. Toker, Eliahu. Sus nombres y sus rostros: álbum recordatorio de las víctimas del atentado del 18 de julio de 1994. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá/amia, 1995. Young, Gerardo. “La amia, 1772 días después.” Clarín 1, no. 19 (1999): 18. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1993.
Annette H. Levine
Unlike private mourning for a loved one or a public ceremony held for victims of a fatal accident, a calculated and premeditated act of terror such as the bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia), forever changes the landscape and the memo- ryscape of the public sphere.1 The ongoing impunity pertaining to the terrorism unleashed at 633 Pasteur Street in 1994 is akin to a bodiless grave and prevents any closure for those intimately tied to and affected by the tragedy. As Jennifer Schirmer has stated in her work about speech acts and spaces of resistance per- taining to the disappearance of individuals due to authoritarian regimes, “While cemeteries are bounded, ‘timed spaces of grief’, the absence of a body creates painful contradictions: a loss with no end, a bodiless grave, an enclosed space waiting to be filled with a grief that has no closure.”2 The persistence of impu- nity, as in the case of the amia, results in a manifestation of what I call a bound- less space of grief, which is exhibited by the proliferation of protest groups, commemoration ceremonies, the ongoing production of cultural and artistic expressions, the dedication of monuments devoted to memory and justice, and parks allocated throughout Argentina in memory of the victims. While conducting fieldwork in 1998 on the topic of memory and justice in the wake of the 1994 atentado, the car bomb that targeted Argentina’s Jewish community by destroying the amia building, and the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing, I was struck by the assertion of memory and its representation.3
1 This chapter, which represents seventeen years of study and reflection on the amia bombing, would not be possible without the encouragement and support of Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, Dr. Patrick O’Connor, and my esteemed coeditor, Dr. Natasha Zaretsky. I would like to acknowl- edge my gratitude to Natasha Zaretsky, Dr. Paul Wilson, Dr. Sue-Je Gage, Sarah Rubenstein- Gillis, LCSW, Robert M. Levine, LCSW and Christopher MacNamara for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this work. 2 Jennifer Schirmer, “The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic within National Security States,” in Remapping Memory, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 198 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 3 Fieldwork conducted from 1997 to 1998 was supported by the Tinker Foundation in pursuit of a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Chicago. The 1999 thesis was titled “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.”
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_006
My search for articulations of the aftermath of the atentado in Buenos Aires brought me to the Macabi and Hebraica Jewish centers; to the La Tablada cem- etery; to Ciudad Universitaria, where rubble from the building was dumped; to various Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogues; to the vacant lot where the Israeli Embassy once stood; to the interim home for the Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (yivo), on Ayacucho Street, where books recovered from the bombing were being cleaned and restored; to rehearsals with the Coro Guebirtig; and regularly to Pasteur Street and Plaza Lavalle, which ulti- mately became spaces of return.4 I became attuned to what Elizabeth Jelin describes as “vehicles of memory,” as I have been particularly interested in the “dynamic link between individual subjectivities, societal or collective belonging, and the embodiment of the past and its meanings in a variety of cultural products.”5 Jelin addresses the struggle to make historical meaning and to voice one’s truth when multiple actors are involved in asserting memory and defining the past. Of the many vehicles of memory I encountered during my fieldwork, I have paid specific attention to what I deem the “spaces of return” that are Plaza Lavalle and Pasteur Street and the active movement devoted to sustaining memory and pursuing justice in the aftermath of the amia bombing spearheaded by Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas (Family and Friends of the Victims) and Memoria Activa (Active Memory). In this chapter I address the tensions surrounding representation, depart- ing from the spaces of return. The claiming of space and voice regarding how to advocate and how to remember is a seemingly complex universal problem in the face of injustice. I trace the bifurcation of protest groups in pursuit of justice post-atentado. And, at twenty years since the atrocity, when the ter- rain of justice is riddled with impunity, I analyze the use of particular vehi- cles of memory—photographs of the rubble; of the original amia building; and of Andrea Guterman, who was killed in the bombing—and determine that such remains, which I essentially deem “vestiges of memory,” carry a monumental load when framed within certain artistic and commemora- tive practices.
4 See Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–265 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). 5 Elizabeth Jelin, “Public Memorialization in Perspective: Truth, Justice and Memory of Past Repression in the Southern Cone of South America,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1, no. 1(2007): 141.
Spaces of Return
At the time of my fieldwork there were two ongoing public commemoration acts taking place: the weekly gatherings of Memoria Activa every Monday in Plaza Lavalle and the monthly gatherings of Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas every 18th on Pasteur Street at the location of the bombing. Both gatherings, or actos, stated as their primary slogan the importance of mem- ory and justice. Over a period of six to eight months I attended the actos regularly and began interviewing select participants. In the years that fol- lowed, I was able to return for periods of several months at a time to attend the annual commemorative events on subsequent July 18ths and would make the effort to also attend the monthly and weekly actos whenever possible. These were spaces of return, each distinct from the other yet essential to the task of seeking justice and practicing public memory work. The physical loca- tions in which both of these actos took place are significant to the character of their rituals. Those who actively participated had developed a binding rela- tionship akin to “place attachment” with the physical location of protest and commemoration.6 The appeal to justice that took place in Plaza Lavalle, facing the Supreme Court House of Argentina, was partially shaped by its physical location. The positioning of Memoria Activa’s gatherings in front of the national symbol of justice obligated the group, devoted to a public articulation of memory, to acknowledge the structure of power and justice while denounc- ing the presence of injustice. The unrequited search for answers evolved into a persistent living monument that kept the terror in the public eye.7 Over time, as many other scholars also document, Memoria Activa extended its cause to broader issues of injustice prevalent in Argentina. Many relatives of the vic- tims, familiares, however, developed greater attachment to articulating mem- ory at the physical location of the atentado and eventually returned only to Pasteur Street to conduct commemorative actos on the 18th of every month. These actos preserved a testimonial space that focused solely on the victims of the amia bombing.
6 Setha M. Low, “Symbolic Ties that Bind,” in Place Attachment, eds. Setha M. Low and Irwin Altman, 165–185 (New York: Plenum Press, 1992). Low describes this relationship as “place attachment”: “The symbolic relationship formed by people giving culturally shared emotions/affective meaning to a particular space or piece of land that provides the basis for the individual’s and group’s understanding of and relation to the environment.” 7 See Andreas Huyssen, “Resistance to Memory,” in Globalizing Critical Theory, ed. Max Pensky, 165–184 (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
In an earlier paper, I captured the distinct characteristics of these spaces of return and their divergence while pursuing the same ultimate goal of justice.8 I shared my perspective as witness of an act of quiet resistance by Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas that emphatically marked a rift that had been develop- ing over time. It was as if the slogan “Justicia y Memoria,” which had been prominent at both locations, had become divided. Although both memory and justice are copartners in the appeal for truth, it was as if the perceived lack of deliberate memory-work in Plaza Lavalle had created a fissure that ultimately severed a prior allegiance among Familiares y Amigos and Memoria Activa. In a subtle yet powerful act of resistance, Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas stated their claim to “Memory” and did so in a way that excluded members of Memoria Activa.9 Thus, Familiares y Amigos emphatically articulated that their commit- ment to a ritual of honoring the individual dead, of appealing to justice specifi- cally in relation to the amia bombing, must take precedence over the more encompassing actos advocating for memory and justice in Plaza Lavalle.
The Visibility of the Dead
Now, at twenty years since the atentado, when formal actos are no longer tak- ing place on a weekly or monthly basis, and when the divisions in pursuit of justice are so great that Memoria Activa does not participate in the central act of commemoration at Pasteur Street on July 18 but has initiated its own at Plaza Lavalle at the same exact time, I look to trace the temporal arc of two decades and find that the spaces of return are rarely visited as in the first decade.10 But when they are, the discourse and the architecture of memory is an insistence on the culture of impunity and the lack of justice pertaining to the amia bombing. The unrequited search for answers has fed the persistence of activism beyond the physical spaces of Plaza Lavalle and Pasteur Street and also the further bifurcation of groups in pursuit of justice.11
8 See Annette Prekker, “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Spaces for Separate Spaces,” Modernity (2000), http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. 9 On Monday, January 18, 1999, when both actos were due to coincide, Familiares y Amigos chose not to wait for members of Memoria Activa to arrive, as they usually would, before conducting the monthly acto. 10 See Natasha Zaretsky’s “Struggles of Coherence” in this volume. 11 “Con cuatro actos, conmemorarán el 20 aniversario del atentado a la amia,” Argentina en noti- cias, October 7, 2014, http://www.argentina.ar/temas/derechos-humanos/30034-con-cuatro- actos-conmemoraran-el-20-aniversario-del-atentado-a-la-amia; “Preparan diversos actos
Twenty years of activism in the face of ongoing impunity have led to the formation of four primary groups of advocates for justice: Memoria Activa has endured but concluded the weekly rituals after ten consecutive years; Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas has virtually dissolved as one family mem- ber, Sergio Burstein, developed political allegiances that other family members did not condone—he is now the head spokesperson for a group referred to as 18 J; an independent group of Familiares, excluding Burstein, continues to actively collaborate; and a group called Agrupación Por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la amia (apemia), Group for the Clarification of the Unpunished Massacre at amia, led by Laura Ginsberg, has conducted inde- pendent actos since 2002.12 Political differences between the four groups revealed themselves pub- licly on the nineteenth anniversary of the amia bombing, when the topic of the accord with Iran was ever present. On July 18, 2013, Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, whose daughter Andrea was killed in the atentado, spoke at the central commemoration ceremony on Pasteur Street on behalf of the inde- pendent group of Familiares de las Víctimas. Guterman repudiated the pact with Iran that Chancellor Héctor Timerman and President Cristina Kirchner had supported. The accord effectively gave Iran the responsibility of hosting a truth commission regarding the amia. The speech, written by Guterman and Luis Czyzewski and approved by other family members, emphasized the continued impunity and lack of justice pertaining to the bombing. Guterman made it clear that she and the family members for whom she spoke did not agree with Memoria Activa’s and Burstein’s (18 J) support for the accord with Iran:
También recordamos que muchos familiares que en ese momento sos- tenían que con los asesinos no se negocia y hasta pedían que Argentina rompiera relaciones diplomáticas y comerciales con Irán, porque “LA SANGRE DE NUESTROS MUERTOS NO SE VENDE,” hoy aplauden el Memorándum firmado entre los dos países.13
para el vigésimo aniversario de la amia,” Los Andes, July 13, 2014, http://losandes.com.ar/ article/preparan-diversos-actos-para-el-vigesimo-aniversario-de-la-amia. 12 “Memoria Activa deja la plaza Lavalle,” La Nación, December 28, 2004, http://www.lanacion .com.ar/666682-memoria-activa-deja-la-plaza-lavalle. 13 “amia/Aniversario. Discurso de Sofía Guterman en nombre de los familiares de las vícti- mas,” Iton Gadol, July 18, 2013, http://www.itongadol.com.ar/noticias/val/72360/amia -aniversario-discurso-de-sofia-guterman-en-nombre-de-los-familiares-de-las-victimas .html.
Let’s also remember that many family members who then alleged that one shouldn’t negotiate with assassins and even asked Argentina to sever diplomatic and commercial ties with Iran, because “THE BLOOD OF OUR DEAD IS NOT FOR SALE,” today applaud the Memorandum signed by both countries.
Meanwhile, Memoria Activa and 18 J postulated that all possible steps toward jus- tice and truth are worthwhile and echoed the words of President Cristina Kirchner that portrayed the memorandum as the only way to break the deadlock:
Creo que hemos dado un paso muy importante en destrabar una causa que estaba absolutamente inmovilizada, sin posibilidad alguna de poder interrogar a quienes la Justicia argentina ha inculpado, ha incriminado como presuntos participantes del atentado contra la amia.14
I believe we have taken a very important step in unlocking a case that was completely frozen, without any possibility of interrogating those who the Argentine Justice system has accused and incriminated as suspects in the amia bombing.
Familiares and apemia have insisted that such an accord permits Iran to fur- ther protect the guilty and permits Argentina to wash its hands of the case:
Lo único que el Gobierno quiere es sancionar lo antes posible esta ley, que significa un punto final para el tema de la amia. Esto significa que el Gobierno termina definitivamente con un tema que no sabe cómo sacárselo de encima.15
All the Government wants is to authorize this law as soon as possible, which means a full stop for the amia issue. This means the Government is absolutely finished with an issue that it doesn’t know how to get rid of.
Guterman’s speech was deemed highly political. However, Guterman was sure to remind the public of the individual victims, and she personalized them for the audience by sharing their names and some of their hopes and dreams never to be realized:
14 “Mensaje de Cristina Fernández sobre el memorandum entre Argentina y Iran,” Red Voltaire, February 8, 2013, http://www.voltairenet.org/article179605.html. 15 “Las grietas entre los familiares quedaron al descubierto,” La Nación, July, 19, 2013, http:// www.lanacion.com.ar.
Hoy vuelven a aparecer en nuestra memoria los sueños de Paola, de ser abogada y de tener dos hijos a los que ya les había dado nombre. Los de Yanina, de ser mejor abogada que su papá, los de Andrea, de educar a sus alumnos en los valores éticos y humanos que transmiten los maestros, los de Naum, de ser cada día mejor padre y esposo y todos los demás sueños que no pudieron concretarse.16
Today our memory is revisited by Paola’s dream to be a lawyer and to have two children whose names she had already chosen; by Yanina’s dreams to be a better lawyer than her father; by Andrea’s dreams to educate her stu- dents with the ethical and human values that teachers instill; by Naum’s dream to be an ever better father and husband; and by all the other dreams that couldn’t come to fruition.
After emphasizing that the nineteen years of impunity marked the loss of two basic human rights for all Argentines, the right to truth and the right to justice, she then distinguished the experience for those most intimately impacted by the amia bombing: “Diecinueve años que nos valemos de la Memoria como una forma de Justicia. Pero la Memoria es como el vidrio. Los muertos siguen siendo visibles, cercanos, pero ya no hay posibilidad de contacto.” (Nineteen years that we uphold Memory as a form of Justice. But Memory is like glass. The dead are still visible, nearby, yet there is no longer possibility of contact.) The visibility of the dead is unique for those most personally engaged with loss tied to the amia bombing. Guterman reminded the audience that justice has not been served, even at nineteen years since the bombing, and that the injustice is most felt by those who experienced the tragic loss of loved ones: “INJUSTICIA es una falta de acción y es una palabra. Ochenta y cinco muertos están más allá del poder de las palabras. La injusticia nos cachetea directa- mente a los vivos.” (Injustice is a lack of action and it’s a word. Eighty-five dead are beyond the power of words. The injustice deals direct blows to the living.) Closing her speech with an emphasis on the word injustice and emphatically stating that it is a word, “es una palabra,” was a significant act of enunciation recalling the years of insistence on the word justice (justicia). Years of struggle and hope that justice be served have been trumped by the ongoing impunity. Injusticia is the only word in response to the act of the nation, Argentina, pur- suing a formal pact with Iran.
16 “amia/Aniversario. Discurso de Sofía Guterman en nombre de los familiares de las vícti- mas,” Iton Gadol, July 18, 2013, http://www.itongadol.com.ar/noticias/val/72360/amia -aniversario-discurso-de-sofia-guterman-en-nombre-de-los-familiares-de-las-victimas .html.
The speech by Familiares, delivered by Guterman, was political and per- sonal. The act of recalling the individual identities of the dead was a reminder of the lives that were lost, the families forever mutilated by the amia bombing, the unique experience of loss for those continually haunted by the absence of loved ones, for whom the dead are still visible. Honoring individual memory illuminates the importance and weight of continuing to give testimony, con- tinuing to speak of the individual lives truncated, and continuing to archive the vestiges of memory so that the human cost of the atrocity not be forgotten. There lies a certain power, a certain monumental power, in the vestiges of memory, in that which remains, that which by its mere existence affirms an otherwise unpleasant truth barely able to resist the weight of oblivion. In his essay dealing with the complex issues of the art and architecture of traumatic memory, Julian Bonder describes monumentality as “the quality that some places or objects have to make us recall, evoke, think, and perceive something beyond themselves.”17 But the essence of their monumentality does not reside solely in the material existence of these places or objects and the archiving of these remains. Rather, the means by which they are rendered visible, by which they are exposed, by which they are experienced, is a complex matter that can both elevate or depreciate their monumental quality. Bonder states:
Our work often lies in unveiling—uncovering as well as anchoring— histories and memories. It is in the face of catastrophes, historic traumas, and human injustices that the architect’s and the artist’s roles become increasingly complex, problematic, and necessary…. Neither art nor architecture can compensate for public trauma or mass murder. What artistic and architectural practices can do is establish a dialogical relation with those events and help frame the process toward understanding.18
The complex task of unveiling and anchoring photographs in the aftermath of the amia bombing is exhibited by images of the victims, those who were killed and the building that was destroyed.
Vestiges of Memory: The Monumentality of Photographs
Photographs: of a baby, a child, a daughter, a family. Photographs purposefully mutilated to reflect a mutilated family. In La gran mentira (The Great Lie, 1999),
17 Julian Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21, no. 1 (2009): 64. 18 Ibid., 65.
It is precisely the indexical nature of the photo, its status as relic, or trace, or fetish—its “direct” connection with the material presence of the pho- tographed person—that at once intensifies its status as harbinger of death and, at the same time and concomitantly, its capacity to signify life.19
Now these photos of Andrea are markers of her absence and a harbinger of death and catastrophe. The act of marring them denies their capacity to signify life. Perhaps Guterman cannot establish a dialogue with Andrea’s photos, as she had done with Andrea’s drawings in En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir (The Joy of Living Is Reborn Every Spring, 1998) because of the direct connection between the photo and the material presence of the photographed person, of Andrea. These photos in La gran mentira have a more “direct” connection with Andrea’s current material presence, her now permanent absence, than do her drawings.
19 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20.
Figure 4.1 Andrea, a los tres meses, mirando con asombro un mundo supuestamente perfecto. (Andrea, at three months, looking in awe at a supposedly perfect world.) (11)
Figure 4.2 Andrea, a los cinco años, sonriendo a un futuro promisorio. (Andrea, at five years, smiling at a promising future.) (23)
Figure 4.3 Andrea, a los siete años, adquiriendo conocimientos para su futuro. (Andrea, at seven years, acquiring knowledge for her future.) (41)
Figure 4.4 Andrea, a los ocho años, cuando aún éramos una familia (Andrea, at eight years, when we were still a family.) (51)
This connection with the photographed person is now the direct connection with the dead person. Therefore, placing the photos as whole, unified portraits would only be the fabrication of yet another lie. Having deliberately desecrated the image of her daughter, Guterman transmits her unbounded grief in such a way that the visual impact unsettles the reader/spectator who becomes a witness of Guterman’s loss and a witness of the amia tragedy.
Stones of Justice
Guterman’s use of family photos predating Andrea’s death recalls the photog- raphy of Gustavo Germano20 and Marcelo Brodsky.21 Both photographers,
20 See http://www.gustavogermano.com/gallery/ausencias. 21 Marcelo Brodsky, Buena memoria: Un ensayo fotográfico (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 1997).
It is a kind of mnemonic public art that is not centered on spatial con- figuration alone, but that powerfully inscribes a dimension of localizable, even corporeal memory into the work. It is an artistic practice that crosses the boundaries between installation, photography, monument and memo- rial. Its place can be both in the museum or the gallery and in public space. Its addressee is the individual beholder, but he or she is addressed both as individual and as a member of the nation or the community fac- ing the task of commemoration.22
Brodsky articulates his desired objectives and the intentionality of his photo- graphic interventions. He seeks to make a connection with the onlooker, one that may have a profound impact beyond the transmission of information. In an interview for Fórum Latino-Americano de Fotografía de Sao Paulo (The Latin American Forum of Sao Paulo), Brodsky speaks about the narrative work he achieves through his photographic essays:
El trabajo narrativo, la transmisión de la experiencia vivida a las nuevas generaciones, la comunicación de una vivencia marcada por la violencia del estado, que es colectiva, de una generación, no individual, es una tarea que requiere de muchos elementos distintos para poder transmitir emo- cionalmente la esencia de lo vivido. No basta con contar lo que pasó. Es necesario conectar emocionalmente con el que mira, para que su comp- rensión sea profunda, no superficial, para que se produzca un apren- dizaje, no un mero pase de información. Esa experiencia es la que procuro producir con mi obra fotográfica.23
The narrative work, the transmission of the lived experience to new gen- erations, the communication of a life marked by state violence, that is collective, of a generation, not individual, is a task that requires many distinct elements in order to emotionally transmit the essence of the
22 Andreas Huyssen, “The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky,” in Brodsky, Nexo: Un Ensayo Fotográfico, 9 (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2001). 23 Manu Melo Franco, “Marcelo Brodsky,” Fórum Latino-Americano de Fotografía de Sao Paulo, August 30, 2010, http://www.forumfoto.org.br/marcelo-brodsky-2.
experience. Telling what happened is not enough. It’s necessary to emo- tionally connect with the viewer, so that their understanding is pro- found, not superficial, so that learning takes place, not merely passing on information. That experience is what I aspire to produce with my photo- graphic work.
When it was determined that an official site would be designated as a parque de la memoria (memory park) in Buenos Aires, Brodsky’s work situated him as an integral member of the Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas de Terrorismo de Estado (The Commission for Monuments to the Victims of State Terrorism). While canvassing the location in Ciudad Universitaria, Brodsky dis- covered the rubble from the amia bombing, which he decided to photograph:
Desde hacía meses, yo había estado fotografiando los escombros que había en ese terreno, donde habían sido arrojados los restos de la amia, porque sabía que esos restos desaparecerían con las obras del Parque de la Memoria y me interesaba preservarlos del olvido.24
For months I had been photographing the rubble found on that land, where the remains of the amia were dumped, because I knew that those remains would disappear with the construction of the Memory Park and I wanted to preserve them from oblivion.
He came upon the remains of the marble façade of the amia building while surveying the land with artist William Tucker, whose work had been commis- sioned for the park. This finding inspired a photo essay that has found its way to various public installations and has been published as “Restos/Remains” in his collection Nexo. In 2003, while in Buenos Aires for the ninth anniversary of the amia bomb- ing, I came upon Brodsky’s installation, “Piedras por la justicia” (Stones for Justice), in Plaza Bernardo Houssay, outside of Hospital de Clínicas, just blocks away from Pasteur Street. The installation, which includes photos that are a part of his photographic essay “Restos/Remains,” displays the recovered pieces of the amia façade and photos of other findings among the rubble, notably the fragment that Brodsky initially believed to be part of a Star of David but was actually a fragment of the letter A in amia (see Figure 4.5).25
24 Huyssen, “The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky,” 88. 25 Photos of the installation taken by the author in 2003 are included here with permission from Marcelo Brodsky.
Figure 4.5 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 PHOTO BY AUTHOR
Brodsky displays the remains he collected in a way that portrays the trau- matic event within a framework of understanding. He includes a photo of the original amia façade, intact, and circles the piece of the original façade that was found abandoned among the rubble at Parque de la Memoria (see Figure 4.6). In a manner reminiscent of his work with the class photo in Buena memoria, Brodsky writes directly on the photo, in red lettering, “Este trozo de la fachada de la amia lo encontré tirado junto al Río de la Plata en el lugar en el que fueron arrojados los restos de la explosión, el mismo en el que se está construyendo el Parque de la Memoria.” (“I found this piece of the amia façade thrown away along the Río de la Plata in the place where the rubble from the explosion was dumped, the same place where the Memory Park is being built.”) Thus, when one looks at the photo of the amia façade in Brodsky’s installation, accompanied by the actual remains of the façade, the onlooker is informed, upon first glance at the photo, that the façade is no longer. Brodsky’s intervention with an authentic photo of the amia pre-atentado is a form he used in Buena memoria, where he renders an old class photo as a historical artifact forever marked by the Argentine dictatorship. His interventions instill these archival photographs, the class photo and the photo of the original amia building, with the quality of monumentality described by Bonder. Bonder’s claim resonates as we consider Brodsky’s aforementioned interview: he purposefully aims to
Figure 4.6 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003
Figure 4.7 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 PHOTO BY AUTHOR engender understanding and a process of learning that goes beyond the mere transmission of information. The installation was intentionally placed in Plaza Houssay, in the heart of the university district of Buenos Aires, because the bodies of the injured and the victims of the atentado passed through it on their way to the university hospital.26 Brodsky sought to recognize the important role played by Hospital de Clínicas by connecting the remains of the destroyed amia façade to the upper façade of the hospital building with a red nautical line, effectively mooring the installation, the remains, to the hospital (see Figure 4.7). The remains and the cord were illuminated by night. Through his numerous interventions and intentionality, Brodsky’s installation bore testimony to the
26 In the catalog for the installation “Piedras por la justicia,” July 15–28, 2003, Brodsky writes, “Instalamos las piedras en Plaza Houssay, en el corazón de la zona universitaria porteña, por donde transitaron los heridos y víctimas del atentado para ser atendidos en el Hospital universitario, que ofreció solidariamente su equipo y sus recursos para socorrer a los afectados.” (We exhibited the rocks in Plaza Houssay, in the heart of the Buenos Aires university district, which had been traversed by the wounded and the victims of the bombing on their way to the university hospital that offered its team and its resources in solidarity to rescue those affected.).
Impossible Return
“Stones for Justice” took on renewed significance for me the following year, when I attended the events in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the amia bombing. I made sure to arrive at Pasteur Street early on the morning of the 18th so that I could collect my thoughts and reflect before the acto began. When I arrived, I was caught off-guard. The visual landscape of Pasteur was significantly altered. The façade of the old amia building, intact, stood over me. It was not my imagination. A life-size rendition of the old building was mounted at the entrance to the new amia building (see Figures 4.8 and 4.9).27 The physical simulacrum of the building was harrowing, beckoning the onlooker, beckoning me, to a space of impossible entry, or of impossible return. Alongside the re-creation of the old building façade, accompanying the list of names of all who were killed, was printed “Vivirán mientras los recordamos.” (They will live on as long as we remember them.) The bottom read, “Los edificios se pueden destruir. La dignidad y la memoria de las 85 victimas NO. Seguimos reclamando justicia con el dolor del primer día.” (Buildings may be destroyed, but dignity and the memory of the 85 victims may NOT. We continue to seek justice with the pain of the first day.) However, when I stood there on the tenth anniver- sary in 2004, this statement did not reassure me. I felt an unsettling sense of betrayal. They will live on? Is memory enough? I could not maintain my gaze on the façade—the stark contrast of the old building façade with the new construc- tion looming behind it, the list of names with no descendants to stand behind them—finding myself repelled by it. Though I wanted to photograph it, I could not capture the entire banner if I faced it head-on. And capturing solely the build- ing’s face would be simply too phantasmagoric. I wondered what the response was from those who were intimately tied to the tragedy of the bombing. In an interview with Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman in response to the façade, she stated:
Los familiares que fuimos al acto y lo vimos sentimos una opresión en el pecho. Parecía que habíamos retrocedido diez años. Fue un golpe ver esta escena y estar durante todo el acto ante algo que parecía hablarnos. Imaginé dónde hubiera estado Andrea y cómo eran cada uno de los pisos. A veces, provocar a la Memoria resulta más negativo que positivo.
27 Photos taken by the author on July 18, 2004.
Figure 4.8 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. New AMIA building visible in background. PHOTO BY AUTHOR
Figure 4.9 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. Close-up. PHOTO BY AUTHOR
The family members who were at the event and saw it felt a tightness in our chests. It was as if we had gone back in time. That scene and standing before something that seemed to be speaking to us throughout the whole ceremony was a shock. I envisioned where Andrea had been and what every floor was like. Sometimes, provoking Memory can be more negative than positive.
I contemplate her reaction. What is it about this photographic intervention that places it in stark contrast with that of Brodsky’s? Why is it more negative than positive? Why does it lack monumentality? Why does it resist Huyssen’s definition of memory art? Does it not cross the boundary between photograph and memorial? Does it not address the viewer as individual and also as mem- ber of a larger body, nation, or community, facing the task of commemoration? I find myself pondering the text on the banner: “Buildings may be destroyed.” Was this somehow an institutional justification for the reconstruction of the amia building in the very same location?28 If buildings are disposable and replaceable, why bring back the physical presence of the original building for this event? Can the dead of the amia bombing indeed live on as long as we remember them? How is this accomplished? Why is this photographic inter- vention repellant while Brodsky’s is not? The unsettling effect of the banner with the original amia façade at the tenth anniversary event and its didactic message shed light on the complexi- ties of figural and abstract representation and the importance of the paratex- tual elements associated with the banner. I am left troubled by the projection of wholeness over fractured bodies and remains. Whereas Brodsky’s “Stones for Justice” and Guterman’s The Great Lie display an interstice, an authentic representation of visual rupture, the torn photos and the broken façade, and invite the viewer and reader to a dialogical space of contemplation and under- standing, the banner, due to its image, size, timing, and placement, thrust itself on the public in a way that re-created the traumatic event for mourners and ultimately had a silencing effect. In Colson’s “Photography as Extension of the Ego,” he explains: “Photography bears a close relation to the process of change and mourning. It allows a partial identification with the lost person through a reinvestment of the fantasies and affects associated with the visual image.”29
28 This was very controversial. Whereas the space once occupied by the Israeli Embassy has been preserved as a memorial space, it was determined that the amia would be rebuilt in the exact same location of the bombing. For critique on the monuments to the victims at Pasteur Street, see Aizenberg, “Stones of Memory,” in this volume. 29 Donald B. Colson, “Photography as Extension of the Ego,” The International Review of Psycho-analysis 6 (1979): 281.
This idea of allowing for a “reinvestment of the fantasies” is precisely what makes so unsettling the casting of a “whole” amia, what makes Brodsky’s and Germano’s photographic interventions so effective, and what makes admissi- ble a mother’s deliberate act of dismembering and cutting her daughter from her photos. Those intimately tied to the trauma may no longer reinvest fanta- sies—there is no closure as their grief is boundless. I venture to argue that the exemplification of vulnerability and destruction, evident in Guterman’s and Brodsky’s work, is symbolic of the fault line posited by Homi Bhabha, where “identities are performed and contested,” where a “terrain for elaborating strat- egies of self-hood” is cultivated and the addressee/viewer/spectator/reader/ witness may engage intimately with the material in developing his or her own understanding.30 The life-size tenth-anniversary rendering of the former struc- ture, erected at the very epicenter of the bombing, however, does not benefit from such effective interventions. The amia building’s simulacrum lacks a point of entry and an appropriate anchor to establish a dialogical relationship. The creation of a monument out of the photograph ultimately stripped it of its monumentality only to recall an impossible return.
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30 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
——. Nexo: Un ensayo fotográfico. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2001. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ——. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Colson, Donald B. “Photography as Extension of the Ego.” The International Review of Psycho-analysis 6 (1979): 273–82. Franco, Jean. Cruel Modernity. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013. Franco, Manu Melo. “Marcelo Brodsky.” Fórum Latino-Americano de Fotografía de Sao Paulo, August 30, 2010, http://www.forumfoto.org.br/marcelo-brodsky-2. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky. Del corazón al cielo. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1997. ——. En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1998. ——. La gran mentira. Buenos Aires: La luz, 1999. ——. Más allá de la bomba. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1996. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997. ——. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photography and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37. Huyssen, Andreas. “El arte mnemónico de Marcelo Brodsky/The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky.” In Brodsky, Nexo, 7–11. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2001. ——. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Resistance to Memory. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2003. ——. “Resistance to Memory: The Uses and Abuses of Public Forgetting.” In Globalizing Critical Theory, edited by Max Pensky, 165–86. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Jelin, Elizabeth. “Public Memorialization in Perspective: Truth, Justice and Memory of Past Repression in the Southern Cone of South America.” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1 (2007): 138–56. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1998. ——. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–73. New York: Routledge, 1992. Nación, La. “Las grietas entre los familiares quedaron al descubierto,” July 19, 2013, http://www.lanacion.com.ar.
——. “Memoria Activa deja la plaza Lavalle,” December 28, 2004, http://www.lanacion .com.ar/666682-memoria-activa-deja-la-plaza-lavalle. Andes, Los. “Preparan diversos actos para el vigésimo aniversario de la amia,” July 13, 2014, http://losandes.com.ar/article/preparan-diversos-actos-para-el-vigesimo- aniversario-de-la-amia. Low, Setha M. “Symbolic Ties that Bind.” In Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, 165–85. New York: Plenum Press, 1992. Prekker, Annette. See Levine, Annette. “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.” Modernity (2000). http://www.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. Red Voltaire, “Mensaje de Cristina Fernández sobre el memorandum entre Argentina y Iran,” February 8, 2013, http://www.voltairenet.org/article179605.html. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schirmer, Jennifer. “The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic within National Security States: The Plaza de Mayo Madres and the Greenham Common Women.” In Remapping Memory: The Politics of Time Space, edited by Jonathan Boyarin, 185– 220. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Holtzbrinck, 1977. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in Buenos Aires.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–65. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Stephen A. Sadow
The deadly bombing of the amia on July 18, 1994, provoked a swell of protest literature from Jewish writers all over Argentina that lasted for many years. These writings go far beyond “art for art’s sake” and entail a sense of moral outrage and political intent. I focus on three aspects of the force of literature as it relates to the amia. I explore the amia as a place where literature was highly valued, the swift and fierce reply of Argentina’s Jewish poets and novelists to the destruction of the amia building, and my own testimony about how the bombing affected me both personally and as a student of literature.
The amia as a Literary Place
For me, the original amia building and its replacement were and are primarily a literary place.1 It stood on the site of the Ombú Yiddish Theater where King Lear had been a favorite and to which New York megastars Maurice and Stella Adler came to act in Yiddish theater classics, with an Argentine cast. The Marc Turkow library held books in Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, and English. In 1987, Ricardo Feierstein became the founder and director of Editorial Milá, the amia’s publishing arm. Editorial Milá produced hundreds of titles for the com- munity: Holocaust memoirs, short-story collections, novels, community docu- ments, the works of great Jewish literature translated into Spanish, and huge anthologies of Argentine Jewish writings. For many years, Editorial Milá domi- nated Jewish publishing in Latin America; its books were purchased in many
1 For Argentine Jews, since the arrival of the first immigrants in 1888, literature has served a crucial role in helping them understand the complex realities of life in the countries in which they live, helping them forge a new identity, and warning them of real or potential danger. In Yiddish and Ladino and then in Spanish, narrators and poets have, sometimes bitingly, some- times humorously, explored Jewish life in Argentina. Among the most influential writers are Mordejai Alperson, Alberto Gerchunoff, César Tiempo, Ricardo Feierstein, Silvia Plager, Ana María Shua, Alicia Steimberg, David Viñas, and Marcelo Birmajer. Most Argentine Jewish households have a collection of books written by Jewish authors.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_007
Latin American countries and can be found in libraries in the United States and Israel. The amia building was familiar to most Argentine Jews. Beyond its social service functions, it was a center of Jewish culture, housing an active theater, which played host to musical and artistic events, and also held the archives of the community.2 The amia’s Department of Culture became my center of operations. I remember clearly the black marble façade. I would go into the building that was open to everyone, without as much as a security guard. I noted that people regularly entered the amia to seek assistance from the job placement and pension offices and to use the library. From then to the present, I have made yearly visits to the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. I became an observer and participant in the cultural life of that community. For years, every time I entered Ricardo’s office, he was busy editing that year’s list of publications.3 Moshé Korin, the director of the Department of Culture and an expert on Yiddish literature, and I often dis- cussed the latest in Argentine Jewish poetry and prose. Over time, I came to know dozens of Jewish writers and artists. To a large extent, Jewish cultural production up until the bombing of the amia building, subsequently known as the atentado, was characterized by guarded optimism. In Ricardo Feierstein’s complex novel Mestizo, published in 1994 by the prestigious Editorial Planeta, the protagonist David Schneiderman is finally able to identify himself simultaneously as a Jew and an Argentine.4 The same year witnessed the publication of Ana María Shua’s short novel El libro de los recuerdos (The Book of Memories), which tenderly presents the tra- vails and foibles of the Remitka family made up of Jewish immigrants and first- generation Argentines. Under the editorship of Feierstein and Perla Sneh, the amia itself was about to publish El libro del centenario (The Centennial Book), a celebratory history of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. This mood changed abruptly on July 18, 1994. Edna Aizenberg observes:
The terrorist attack left a gaping hole in the Argentine imagination. Alongside the dead and broken bodies buried in the rubble were
2 This essay deals with the literary response to the amia bombing. For an excellent discussion of the politics of the attack, see Beatriz Gurevich, “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin American and the Caribbean, ed. Kristen Ruggiero, 86–114 (Boston: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). 3 Ricardo Feierstein retired from the amia in 2007. He now edits for Acervo Cultural. 4 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizo (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1994).
thousands of Spanish, Hebrew and Yiddish books and countless docu- ments and folios—the archival and intellectual legacy of a community…5
The bombing itself, which profoundly maimed the library, exposed the impor- tance of the amia building as a literary place. The writing of Jewish literature and the creation of Jewish art regained its momentum in the years after the atentado. At first headquartered at a tempo- rary location until the replacement building was ready, Editorial Milá contin- ued publishing books of Jewish interests, though for a time it kept a low profile, avoiding material that might offend its right-wing members and sticking to sycophantic biographies of “Jewish leaders” such as Vladomir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. Other publishing companies such as Acervo Cultural, Norma, and Dunken picked up the slack with a steady flow of fiction, Holocaust testimonies, and seri- ous studies, such as Diana Wang’s El silencio de los aparecidos (The Silence of the Reappeared), a discussion of the problems faced by children of Holocaust survi- vors.6 Acervo Cultural sponsored a novel-writing contest that brought in fourteen manuscripts from all over Argentina and from Israel. The contest winner, Marcela y Judith by Enrique Amster, is the story of a woman torn between allegiances to Argentina and Israel. Milá and other publishers later brought out other novels from the competition, such as Elías Sherbacovsky’s La Monalisa de Jerusalén (The Mona Lisa of Jerusalem) and Mina Weil’s El ultimo día (The Last Day). In 2002, the amia held a competition for young Jewish writers and pre- sented Clara Klicksberg awards for the best writing by Jewish youth. The amia also sponsored the sculpture project Reconstruimos la amia (We Rebuild the amia), in which artists had to create works of art from bits of the rubble left by the explosion. Important sculptors such as Claudia Aranovich, Danilo Danziger, and Mariana Schapiro took part. Israeli artist Yaacov Agam constructed a highly controversial, multicolored monument to the victims of the atentado for the courtyard of the new building. From August 11 to 14, 2001, the Cultural Department of the amia held an Encuentro, or get-together, to “stimulate Jewish cultural production and to move on from paralyzing complaining to inspiring debate—to invoke hope.”7 The cultural festival was open to all and lasted from morning until late at night.
5 Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002), 1. 6 Diana Wang, El silencio de los aparecidos (Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural, 1998). 7 Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001), 9.
During these three and a half days, approximately one hundred people partici- pated, some of them from the United States and Israel. It was estimated that more than thirteen hundred attended. The event focused on the meaning of Jewish identity in Argentina in 2001, and the presentations ranged from the history of Argentine Jewish cinema to the origins of the ancient Jewish com- munities of Sepharad, what is now Spain. Theater and music alternated with lectures. Three new plays were per- formed: Hombre de dos amores (Man with Two Loves) by Sol Leviton, a short piece about Jewish identity written especially for the Encuentro; scenes from Liturgias (Liturgies) by Nora Glickman; and a farce by Ana María Shua. Musical performances included the jazz-influenced klezmer music of Marcelo Moguilevsky and César Lerner, the Mordje Guebirtig Yiddish choir, and Paloma Sneh, a young saxophonist who interpreted Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Outside the auditorium was an exhibition featuring the work of leading Jewish artists such as Basia Kuperman, Delia Banchik, and Victor Chab. The majority of the scholarly papers dealt with the lingering questions of ethnic and national identity or with the nature of Argentine Jewish literature.8 During the Encuentro, explicit mention of the atentado was remarkably rare but instructive when it did occur. In one presentation, internationally known novelist Silvia Plager declared that the many claims of solidarity with the victims had not alleviated the horrible scars left by the experience. As Natasha Zaretsky recounts, psychologist Diana Wang told of how her mother, a Holocaust survivor, called her to beg forgiveness for having brought her to Argentina. For Wang, the amia bombing was a defining moment. She stated dramatically that she had been born as a Jew on July 18, 1994. Before that time, her Judaism had meant little to her; thereafter, it became central to her life. She helped found and continues to lead a community group that began with a focus on child survivors and later went on to focus on intergenerational dynamics (Generations of the Shoah), including the experience of children of survivors.9 In 1998 she wrote El silencio de los aparecidos (The Silence of Those
8 Daniel Silber’s talk was titled “Judios en la Argentina? Judios de la Argentina” (“Jews in Argentina? Jews of Argentina?”). Laura Kitzis and Enrique Herszcovits speculated on the identity of Argentina’s Jews in the second millennium. Guido Setton pondered whether Jewish Argentine literature really exists. Other topics were more specific: the Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires, the works of individual writers from the early twentieth century playwright Samuel Eichelbaum to the contemporary novelist Marcelo Birmajer. 9 See Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–232 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).
Who Did Appear). Wang became active in Memoria Activa’s protest against the government’s failure to convict those implicated in the atentado, joined a Yiddish choir, and studied Yiddish.10 This stream of artistic activity since the atentado is especially impressive given that, since 1999, Argentina’s economy has been in freefall. The govern- ment defaulted on its international debt, froze personal savings in banks, and unpegged the peso from the dollar. The middle class, which encompassed most Jewish families, was particularly hard hit. Jewish poverty, almost unknown until then, became widespread.11 At the same time, Jewish cultural production continued to flourish. In 2002, Editorial Milá published the proceedings of the Encuentro, complete with a recording of all the music.12 Another Encuentro was held at the rebuilt amia in 2003, and, in 2005, a third was held in the city of Rosario.13 After each event, book-length proceedings were compiled and published by Ricardo Feierstein and me. All three volumes are cited regularly in academic studies of the Argentine Jewish experience.
* * * * *
Literary Shouts and Echoes
Some of the earliest literary responses to the atentado include poems written by survivors and those who had lost loved ones. The remarkable book Testimonios de una semana de horror (Testimonies of a Week of Horror), edited by Miguel Steuerman, the director of Radio Jai, soon after the attack, includes poems written by survivors who had lost loved ones in the explosion. Most of the book is made up of clips from interviews done by the station during the day
10 See Natasha Zaretsky, “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires,” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experience in the Southern Cone, eds. Raanan Rein and Adriana Brodsky, 315–339 (Boston: Brill, 2013). 11 Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America (Boulder, co: Lynne Reiner, 2013), 146. 12 Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001). 13 See volumes by Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeo- latinoamericano 2: Literatura y artes plásticas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004) and Crecer en el gueto, crecer en el mundo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005). The latter con- tains many papers on Jewish Argentine identity by scholars such as Daniel Feierstein, Liliana Feierstein, Marcos Aguinis, Diana Sperling, Mario Goloboff, Lydia Gil, and Roberto Halac.
Cinco meses. El tiempo transcurre implacable. Por momentos, cuando aún sentimos el calor de la útima mirada, del último beso, de la última sonrisa, nos parece que fue hace sólo un instante.14
Five months, time moves on implacable. For moments, when we still feel the warmth of the final glance, of the last kiss, of the final smile, it seems to us that it was only a minute ago.
Following the atentado, many professional Jewish writers and artists, in shock, found it difficult to engage in creative work. Aída Bortnik, the Academy Award– winning screenwriter, argued that speaking out and action were needed more urgently than literature.15 Feierstein, who had lost many colleagues, wrote of the difficulty of thinking and feeling at the same time, of finding words to por- tray the intensity of emotions provoked by the crime, but he did believe that words were the only way to confront terrorism.16 Over time, poetry and fiction began to appear in response to the communal as well as personal trauma. Daniel Chirom, Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, Ricardo Feierstein, Susana Grimberg, Marcos Aguinis, and many others have created a body of work that grieves, protests, and attempts to explain the disaster. Directly
14 Diana Malamud, “Cinco meses,” in Testimonios de una semana de horror, ed. Miguel Steuerman, and trans. Stephen A. Sadow, 31 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Jai, 1994). All other translations of poetry are by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow. 15 Aída Bortnik, “Argentinos aquí y ahora,” Raíces 3, no. 9 (Summer 1994–1995): 50. 16 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizaje y contraexilio (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1996), 17.
18 DE JULIO*
¿Qué sucede esta noche entre todas las noches? Todas las noches comemos en forma abundante y cantamos y reímos con el vino pero esta noche sólo hay pan ázimo y vinagre pues estamos tristes pensando en el destierro. ¿Qué sucede esta noche que no entonamos cánticos? Todas las noches alabamos a Dios con nuestros mejores acentos pero esta noche el silencio reina porque nuestra hambre es débil y extenso el desierto. ¿Qué sucede esta noche que las sombras ganan nuestras casas? Todas las noches las luces brillan para iluminar la mesa pero esta noche sólo hay un candelabro para que recordemos la oscuridad. ¿Qué sucede esta noche que nuestras manos y lenguas tiemblan? Todas las noches rezamos por el día que vendrá y bailamos al pie de nuestros lechos porque la sangre inocente no deja huellas pero esta noche permanecemos quietos mientras las aguas se desbocan
y las oraciones son para los muertos que aún nos acompañan.
* En esta fecha se produjo el brutal atentado a la amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) que segó la vida de 8617 personas.18
18 DE JULIO*
Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights we eat in abundance and we sing and laugh over the wine but tonight we have only unleavened bread and vinegar because we are sad, thinking about exile. Why on this night do we not intone canticles? Every night we praise God as beautifully as we can, but this night silence reigns and the desert is vast. Why on this night do shadows take possession of our houses? On all other nights, lights illuminate the table but tonight there is only one candelabra so that we remember darkness. Why on this night do our hands and tongues tremble? On all other nights we pray for the day to come and we dance at the foot of our bed because innocent blood does not leave footprints. But tonight we stay quiet while the waters flow down and our prayers are for the dead who still accompany us.
* On this day, the brutal attack on the amia (Argentine Jewish Mutual Association) that cut short the lives of 8619 people occurred.
17 Originally, it was believed that 86 people were killed in the attack, a figure later revised to 85 victims. 18 Daniel Chirom, Candelabros (Buenos Aires: Editorial Agora 1996), 24–26. 19 See note above about the revised number of victims, which was changed from 86 to 85.
Throughout his long dirge, Daniel Chirom inverts the themes of Passover. Among the contrasts in the poem are abundant food/loss of appetite; home and family/the vastness of the desert; bright light/darkness; prayer/quiet or prayers only for the dead; singing/mouths closed; celebration/grief. Chirom does not try to replicate the four questions in the order and form known to anyone who has attended a Seder. Rather, he asks his own questions. And he offers no answers. At the same time, the rhythm and tempo of the Hebrew original is present in every line of the poem. Chirom’s is a powerful statement, filled with anguish and despair.20 A Haggadah was composed in response to the atentado. A survivor of four years in Auschwitz, Charles Papiernik told me how the explosion brought back terrible memories of those years. In his Holocaust memoir, Una vida (A Life), Papiernik recalls that when he first heard of the bombing, his mind was immediately filled with scenes from Auschwitz: “Me encontré otra vez en el Holocausto” (I found myself in the Holocaust once again).21 He had been driving toward the amia on July 18, but a traffic jam caused him to arrive near the scene after 9:53 a.m. He later collaborated with friends to compose their own Shoah Haggadah.22 Unlike Daniel Chirom, Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman is not a famous poet. In fact, when I met Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman in 1998, she insisted that she was not a poet but a mother who uses poetry to stir others to action. Annette Levine, who knows Kaplinsky Guterman well and has served as her translator,
20 In 2010, artist Perla Bajder, noted for her artwork that deals with children during the Holocaust; Irene Jaievsky, curator of the International Museum of Women; and I collabo- rated on the creation of fourteen handcrafted artists’ books for a collection entitled “Identity and Diversity: Artist’s Book.” Each book contains a poem on a Jewish theme by a Latin American Jewish poet; a translation of that poem into English, done by American poet J. Kates and me; and an original work of art by a Latin America Jewish artist. In one outstanding artist’s book, Chirom’s “18 de Julio” is featured. This poem inspired Brazilian artist Michal Kirshbaum to create, with a variety of photographic techniques, a picture that seems to be a new redbrick wall—with holes in it. Kirschbaum, a young woman, is familiar with only the replacement amia building. The poem and photo were first exhib- ited in the Museo Judío (Jewish Museum) in Buenos Aires and then at American universi- ties and Jewish community centers around the United States, the Argentine Consulate in New York, and in a bookstore in a predominately Jewish section of Mexico City. 21 Charles Papiernik, Una vida (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997), 235. Many Holocaust testimonies have been published in Argentina since the amia bombing. It is often diffi- cult to discern whether these books were written as a response to the attack, but it seems likely. 22 Communication with Papiernik. Natasha Zaretsky remembers using this Haggadah while participating in a Passover Seder sponsored by Generaciones de la Shoá. Charles Papiernik was in attendance.
No hay paz para los restos de la irracional masacre; no se escuchan sus voces perdidas en el viento.
23 Annette (Prekker) Levine, “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces,” http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. 24 Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, Del corazón al cielo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997). Sofía gave me a copy of this book. 25 Ibid., 24. 26 Ibid., 84.
Vehemente y ronco clamor se suma a la marea de la inocente sangre; así reclaman y esperan.27
There is no peace for the remains of those killed by the irrational massacre; their voices are not heard lost in the wind.
Vehement and hoarse clamor joining the tide of innocent blood; and so they make their demands and wait.
Five years after it occurred, the crime had remained unsolved, and Gover de Nasatsky’s poem highlights the lack of closure for the community. During a recorded interview I conducted with her in 2012, I asked her about her frustra- tion over the slow pace of the investigation of the atentado. Gover de Nasatsky remarked, “For example, a poem I wrote four years after the attack on the amia, another at five years after the attack on the amia, and we’ll soon be at the 18th, and they haven’t investigated, nobody knows anything.”28 Her second book of poetry, Resonancias de Auschwitz (Resonances of Auschwitz; 1999), was inspired by a visit she and her husband made to Auschwitz in Poland. In sparse yet jolt- ing poems, she imagines the inmates of the death camp, especially the children. Gover de Nasatsky wrote two fictionalized biographies, La pasión de un vision- ario: Theodor Herzl (The Passion of a Visionary: Theodor Herzl; 2004) and Desde la cima: Reminiscencias de David Ben-Gurión (From the Peak: Reminiscences of David Ben-Gurion; 2008). In these novels, Gover de Nasatsky treats two of Judaism’s most revered champions of the creation of a Jewish state. In her writ- ing, Jewish disaster is counterweighted by Jewish success and pride. In contrast to Gover de Nasatsky’s work, psychoanalyst Susana Grimberg’s novel El espejo de las palabras (The Mirror of Words; 1998) is the first published about the atentado and has no Jews among its central characters.29 A social critic, Grimberg presents the atentado as an issue that is not only Jewish but
27 Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, Persistentes vibraciones (Buenos Aires: Editorial Puma, 1999), 87. 28 Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, interview, August 13, 2012. 29 Susana Grimberg, El espejo de las palabras (Buenos Aires: Editorial Vinciguerra, 1998).
Argentine. Protagonist Laura Liberti, a non-Jewish Buenos Aires schoolteacher, hears of the bombing while on vacation and urgently returns to the capital. Adding to her shock, she learns that her close friends make anti-Semitic remarks, stating that the attack has nothing to do with them and that Jews always cause trouble. Laura shouts back, “Cualquier atentado es un crimen contra TODA la humanidad pero el hecho es que encima pusieron la bomba en una mutual judía, ¡en una Mutual!” (Any attack is a crime against ALL human- ity but the issue is that on top of that they put the bomb in a Jewish mutual association. A mutual association!)30 Back home, Laura Liberti senses that everything in the country has changed forever. She strongly believes that the nation was attacked, not solely the Jews, yet she finds few who share her opinion. Her estranged husband Julio is non- chalant about the amia; it’s not his business. Only old college friend Fernando Hartman, a former political activist and now an attorney, shares her anger and frustration. The novel’s plot mirrors the instability of the times. Laura is in the process of separating from Julio. He is infatuated with Ingrid, who in turn had been Fernando’s lover. Laura’s teenage son Damián is studying Italian and eventually leaves home for Italy. At the novel’s end Laura Liberti emigrates with Fernando Hartman to Spain; for them Argentina is an unfit place to live. Susana Grimberg’s ability to create strong characters is evident. Grimberg is a psychoanalyst, and she brings her insights to her fiction. Laura’s every thought and feeling, choice of clothing, and reasons for her sense of ease or discomfort are described in minute detail. Most pointedly, Laura’s thoughts about justice and equality are emphasized. In a filmed interview I conducted with Grimberg in 2012, she explained, “I always, always try, not only in this novel, to universalize the issue, to try to get away from all that has to do with the idea of the Jews being marginalized, and how to include, let’s say, how it concerns everyone. Despite the attack on the [Israeli] embassy, nobody anticipated a massacre. I call it a massacre, that of the amia.”31 Carlos Levy, a poet and folklorist from Mendoza, near the Andes, goes even further by universalizing the event on Pasteur Street. By the fourth anniversary of the atentado, the bombing had become part of world history. One extraordi- nary poem, “18 de Julio de 1998” (“July 18, 1998”; 2001), describes the invasion of hatred on an ordinary street, one in which children play and where rabbis, nuns, and vendors might walk: “Sobre esta calle Antonio, desparramó esta
30 Susana Grimberg. El espejo, 37. 31 Ibid.
32 Marcos Silber and Carlos Levy, Las doloratas (Buenos Aires: Editorial El Canto Rodado, 2001), 89. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 Carlos Levy, El gaucho Martín Fierro: Tresladado al djudeo espanyol (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005). 35 Ricardo Feierstein, La logia del umbral (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2001).
It is a historical novel, a family saga, but not quite a realistic one. The author of Historia del los judios argentinos (History of the Argentine Jews; 1993), Feierstein uses his vast knowledge of Argentine Jewish history as weaponry in what is here a polemic. As in Woody Allen’s film Zelig, the characters just hap- pen to turn up at moments that have Jewish historical significance.36 They believe that a family or a people should transmit its history to the generations that follow. When they try to celebrate their history in Argentina, they find themselves once again to be taking part in the history of the nation. The novel’s protagonist is the Schvel family (schvel means “threshold” in Yiddish). Through four generations, they are at the edge of Argentine society, never quite inside. The Schvels are an extended Jewish mishpocha (family or clan) who trace their Argentine heritage to the arrival in 1889 of Moises Schvel and his wife, Juana, on the steamship Wasser, the first commercial vessel to bring Jews to the Rio de la Plata. The members of the Schvel family are prime movers in the founding and development of Moises Ville, the most important of the Jewish agricultural colonies, an enterprise funded by the philanthropist Baron Maurice Hirsh. In a scene reconstructed from a historical event, the pro- genitor, Moishe Schvel, an immigrant from Russia, becomes the first Jew mur- dered in Moises Ville. Because of a misunderstanding, he is killed by a gaucho who, in turn, is torn to pieces by enraged Jewish settlers. Moishe’s son, optimis- tically named Mauricio Argentino Schvel, born soon after Moishe’s death, is the first child born in the colonies. After early travails and some pleasures of rural life, Mauricio Argentino grows up to be the paterfamilias of an enormous clan. Later on, following the historical pattern, most of the family members leave the colonies and move on to Buenos Aires, where they enter business and the professions and become active in political movements. These cousins come in all shapes and sizes. They are physically strong or sickly; devoted to their spouses or womanizers; believers in the occult or realists. More impor- tantly, the characters are emblematic, finding themselves in professions and social situations typical to Argentine Jews. Bernardo Schvel runs a small busi- ness. Miryam is a psychologist. Manuel is the most religiously observant. During the Argentine military dictatorship and its “El Proceso,” Solomon Schvel’s life is threatened by anti-Semitic thugs.37 Fearing for his life, he is secreted out of the country and flown to Tel Aviv. These characters in the novel have profound, intense feelings about Argentina. Some remember the satisfaction of rural life; others remember the
36 Ricardo Feierstein, Historia de los judíos argentinos (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1993). 37 For a discussion of the treatment of Jews during the dictatorship of 1976–1983, see Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America (Boulder, co: Lynne Ryner, 2013), 233–238.
Así crecimos con mate y varenikes, asado y guefilte fish, locro y latkes espolvoreados con azucar, medialunas de grasa y strudel, cafe con leche y te en vaso con terron de azúcar en la boca hasta arribar a la comun y economica polena/momeligue. Una mezcla sabrosa, nutritiva, Ilena de vida y esperanzas.38
And so we grew up with mate and verenikes, asado and gefilte fish, beef stew and latkes sprinkled with sugar, greasy croissants and strudel, coffee with milk and tea in a glass with a sugar cube in your mouth until arriving at the everyday and economical polenta/mameliga. A tasty mix, nutri- tious, full of life and hopes.
After a family reunion held in Moises Ville during its hundredth anniversary celebration in 1989, the Schvel family decides to create a society to promote Jewish status and history in Argentina. Gradually, they build the membership of the lodge, first with family members, then with Jews, and finally with any- one—particularly anyone who considers himself an outsider—who wants to join. The name of the lodge, La Logia del Umbral, also the title of the novel, describes the situation of the Jewish community in Argentina. Jews, as cousin Marcelo says, are both here and not here; they are on the margin. Argentine Jews are an extended family at the edge of full equality as Argentine citizens. The first joint task of the lodge members is to bring a time capsule from Moises Ville to Buenos Aires and bury it in the Plaza de Mayo, the most hallowed of Argentine places and the site where Juan Domingo Perón himself buried a capsule in 1950, to be opened in the magical-sounding year 2000. Among the documents and farming implements, the capsule contains the actual soil tilled by the Jewish immigrants. The voyage they undertake between Moises Ville and Buenos Aires (a distance of 620 kilometers; a map is included in the text) illus- trates the spatial dimension of the Argentine Jewish experience, demonstrating its presence in the Pampas, the suburbs, and the capital. As the old men are no longer strong enough to ride horses, the first leg of the trip is done in an old- fashioned sulky; from there, they travel sixty kilometers a day on horseback. Overall, the story moves forward in time, but there is a jerkiness to it, as side themes are introduced and then abandoned; sections that stop the
38 Feierstein, La logia del umbral, 128.
The Threshold Lodge was motivated—let’s say the desire to write it—by the bombing that destroyed the amia headquarters in 1994, because the main characters of the novel—it is always a novel, it is not only testi- mony—ask themselves if being Jewish in Argentina is the same after that bombing, with the destruction of the community. On one hand, and on
the other, the reaction of the Argentines, which was diverse, it was gener- ally supportive but there was a diverse reaction.39
In contrast, in Marcos Aguinis’s novel Asalto al paraiso (Assault on Paradise; 2002), none of the major characters are Jewish. Jews are present only in the short scene describing the amia bombing itself or as they appear in the minds of others. Instead, the novel is an exploration of why and how the bombing was carried out. Aguinis is a master of the historical novel and, in particular, a specialist in the workings of the Spanish Inquisition. Here he writes what could be called a journalistic novel in that the events described happened recently. Moreover, the protagonist is a journalist, the non-Jewish Cristina Tibori. In a manner reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow, Aguinis builds fiction from well-known events. Aguinis both invents material and adds information that heretofore had been suppressed. In this “amia novel” are four main characters: one Catholic and three Muslim. These characters—Cristina Tibori, the journalist; Dawud Habbif, the suicide bomber, who believes self-destruction and murder are the methods to recompense the humiliations he suffered in his native Lebanon; Imam Zacarias Najaf, a resident of Argentina who was a founder of Hezbollah but now preaches peaceful tolerance instead of fundamentalism; and Hassem Tabbani, an Iranian diplomat—are “grown” by Aguinis from bits and pieces of the historical record. Of the four, Tabbani is the only one closely modeled after a real individual. Asalto al paraiso is an intricately structured suspense novel, created with extraordinary attention to detail. Scenes shift swiftly from the bombed Israeli Embassy to refugee camps in southern Lebanon; then from a television-recording studio to terrorist training sessions; and from Buenos Aires’ red-light district and the offices of Argentina’s secret service. The plot begins on March 17, 1992, with the destruction of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, by a car bomb. Television reporter Cristina Tibori is sent by her editor to cover the story. At the scene she meets the imam Zacarias Najaf. The cleric understands the logic of terrorism and tries to explain to Cristina that if perpetrators of the first attack are not punished, a second attack will follow. Cristina does not feel a personal connection to the story until, to her horror, she learns that her sister has died in the attack. Cristina then decides that she must find those who are responsible and prevent the probable second attack. Finding the truth about the embassy’s destruction becomes Cristina’s obses- sion, but she makes little headway. (In reality, the perpetrators of the Israeli Embassy bombing have never been identified.) Two years later, unbeknownst
39 Ricardo Feierstein, interview, August 12, 2012.
Asalto al paraiso explicitly describes the ideological and methodological ties between the Inquisition in colonial Latin America, the Holocaust of
the mid-twentieth century and Islamic terrorism…. Aguinis has unequiv- ocally painted an interconnected picture throughout his novelistic career, whereby Jews serve to represent global issues of democracy, diversity, and modernity.40
For Aguinis, the atentado takes on a universal significance going well beyond the fact that it took place in Argentina. It was an anti-Semitic act against Jews, an assault on a nation state, and an act of international terrorism.
My Testimony
For more than twenty years, I have been haunted by the attack on the amia. I am not an Argentine but rather an American professor who specializes in Latin American Jewish literature. In 1982, I received El caramelo descompuesto (The Melted Caramel), Ricardo Feierstein’s first published novel. I was puzzled by the work. It was the second part of a trilogy, and the action took place in an Israeli kibbutz and not in Argentina. I wrote Feierstein, telling him how much I enjoyed the novel and asking about its content. He replied that this work passed the scrutiny of the censors of the military dictatorship because it took place in Israel and therefore was not considered dangerous. The first and third volumes of the trilogy were published in 1984, the year after the military gov- ernment was overthrown and Argentina returned to democracy. On July 3, 1994, I was chatting with Ana Weinstein, the director of the amia’s Marc Turkow library. I gave Ana some of my books and articles for the library. Her office was on the second floor of the building and faced Pasteur Street. I met Mirta Strier, a member of the office staff. Approximately two weeks later, the car bomb demolished the amia building and many shops that could be seen from Ana’s office. I was back home in Boston when the news came that the amia had been destroyed and many lives had been lost. At first the reporting was garbled. The announcer spoke of the Argentine Israelite center. A bit later, I figured out what had happened and entered a state that can only be called shock. I was terrified that Ricardo, Ana, Moshé, and Mirta had been killed by the blast. In fact, Mirta Strier was.
***
40 Dalia Wassner, Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina (Boston: Brill, 2014), 111.
I was left with a symbolic yet permanent connection to the tragedy. Though trivial compared to the tragedy that transpired on Pasteur Street, my own papers were buried in the rubble. It was on that day that I resolved to dedicate myself to the study and promo- tion of the literature and cultural production of the Jews of Latin America. Perhaps naively, I believed I could bring awareness of these Jewish writers and artists, and those of other Latin American countries, to the world. Since then, most of my scholarship, literary translation, and website development have been an effort to reach that goal. My work is, to an extent, affected by the fact that I know or knew almost all the writers whose work I analyze, include in anthologies, and translate. I have coauthored books with Ricardo Feierstein and consulted with poets about puzzling words and lines. In 1995, I saw the rubble where the amia had stood. Thereafter, I repeatedly visited what has now become “Fortress amia.” Then, I saw the yellow concrete barriers in front of the replacement building.41 I went through strict security to enter the “bomb-proof” building. However, I sensed resilience too. In the foyer, there was a sculpture exhibition entitled “Escombros” (“Rubble”) in which both Jewish and non-Jewish sculptors had created artworks from the concrete rubble of the original building. In the following years, I made many treks to the Department of Culture in the rebuilt amia. My personal library contains doz- ens of books bearing the Milá imprint.
Reflections
With its libraries, its publishing arm Editorial Milá, and the fact that it afforded a space for writers to converse and present their new books to the public, the amia, both before and for many years after the atentado, was a place where literature was highly valued. The terrorist attack led directly to the swift and fierce response by Argentina’s Jewish poets. In what was a “literature of pro- test,” each responded uniquely, reflecting personal outrage. The effect of the amia bombing had a profound life- and career-changing effect. Diana Wang returned to Judaism, and Edna Aizenberg went on to write her seminal Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing.42
41 These stanchions were meant to protect the amia, Jewish community centers, and schools from car bombs. Instead they have had the effect of drawing public attention to those same buildings and potentially making targeted attacks more likely. 42 Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine- Jewish Writing (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002).
And I, within days of the attack, invested in my career a private testimony. Since then, I continue to document, write about, lecture on, promote, and make avail- able to the world via the Internet the literature and art created by Jews in Latin America.
Bibliography
Aguinis, Marcos. Asalto al paraiso. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2002. Aizenberg, Edna. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine- Jewish Writing. Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002. Bortnik, Aída. “Argentinos aquí y ahora.” Raices 3, no. 9 (Summer 1994–1995): 50. Bublick, Armando. Poncho y Talmud. Buenos Aries: Atlántida, 1997. Chirom, Daniel. Candelabros. Buenos Aires: Editorial Agora, 1996. Dolinsky, Dina. Las doce casas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2000. Elkin, Judith Laikin. The Jews of Latin America. Boulder, co: Lynne Reiner, 2013. Feierstein, Ricardo. Alberto Gerchunoff, judío y argentino: Viaje temático desde Los gau- chos judíos (1910) hasta sus últimos textos (1950) y visión crítica. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2000a. ———. Consorcio Utopia. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2007. ———. Contraexilio y mestisaje. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1996a. ———. Cuaderno de un psicoanalista. Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2010. ———. Historia de los judíos argentinos. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1993. ———. La logia del umbral. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2001. ———. “Las palabras y las cosas.” Raices 3, no. 9 (Summer 1994–1995): 10. Reprinted in Ricardo Feierstein, Contraexilio y mestizaje: Ser judio en la Argentina, 15–17. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1996b. ———. ed. Los mejores cuentos con gauchos judios. Buenos Aires: Ameghino, 2000b. Feierstein, Ricardo, and Stephen A. Sadow, eds. Crecer en el gueto, crecer en el mundo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005. ———. Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001. ———. Recreando la cultura judeolatinoamericano 2: Literatura y artes plásticas. 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004. Feierstein, Ricardo, and Perla Sneh, eds. El libro del centenario: Comunidad judia de Buenos Aires 1894–1994. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1994. Gover de Nasatsky, Miryam. Desde la cima: Reminiscencias de David Ben-Gurión. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2008. ———. La pasión de un visionario: Theodor Herzl. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004. ———. Persistentes vibraciones. Buenos Aires: Editorial Puma, 1999.
———. Resonancias de Auschwitz. Buenos Aires: Geminis, 2011. Grimberg, Susana. El espejo de las palabras. Buenos Aires: Editorial Vinciguerra, 1998. Gurevich, Beatriz. “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses.” In The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Kristen Ruggiero, 86–114. Boston: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Kaplinsky Guterman, Sofía. Del corazón al cielo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997. Levine, Annette (Prekker). “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.” http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. Levy, Carlos. trans. El gaucho Martín Fierro: Tresladado al djudeo espanyol. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005. Melamed, Diego. Los judios y el menemismo: Un reflejo de la sociedad argentina. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000. Papiernik, Charles. La Hagadá de la Shoá. Unpublished. ———. Una vida. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997. Sadow, Stephen. “Judíos y gauchos: The Search for Identity in Argentine-Jewish Literature.” American Jewish Archives 34 (1982): 2,164–77. ———. “La colonia judía a través de la ficción argentina actual.” In Recreando la cul- tura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo, edited by Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, 27–39. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001. ———. “Lamentations for the amia: Literary Responses to Communal Trauma.” In Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agosín, 149–62. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. ———. ed. El tiempo y las palabras: Literatura y cultura latinoamericana. New York: Revista Hostosiana/Hostos Review, 2007. A revised version of the anthology can be found at http://iris.neu.lib.edu/books/4/. Sadow, Stephen A., Perla Bajder, and Irene Jaievsky, eds. The Catalogue of Identidad y Diversidad/Identity: The Artist’s Books. http://iris.lib.neu.edu/books/2/. Senkman, Leonardo. “Jewish Latin American Writers and Collective Memory.” In Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writing, edited by Robert DiAntonio and Nora Glickman, 33–44. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Shua, Ana Maria. El libro de los recuerdos. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994. Silber, Marcos, and Carlos Levy. Las doloratas. Buenos Aires: Editorial El Canto Rodado, 2001. Steuerman, Miguel, ed. Testimonios de una semana de horror. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Jai, 1994. Tavonaska, Gregoria. Ydel, el judío pampa. Buenos Aires: Corrigedor, 1998. Wang, Diana. “Lo judio en mi obra.” In Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo, edited by Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, 311–13. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001.
———. El silencio de los aparecidos. Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural, 1998. Wassner, Dalia. Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina. Boston: Brill, 2014. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires.” In The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experience in the Southern Cone, edited by Raanan Rein and Adriana Brodsky, 315–39. Amsterdam: Brill, 2013. ———. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–64. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Natasha Zaretsky
Introduction: The Plaza of Memory
On Monday, July 16, 2001, I arrived at the Plaza of Memory in Buenos Aires to find hundreds of people joined to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the bombing of the amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina)—the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society.1 This plaza cannot be found on any map—its official name is the Plaza Lavalle, a space chosen for its location in front of Argentina’s Palace of Justice. Monday after Monday, the group, Memoria Activa (Active Memory), confronted the high courts and transformed this space into what they called the Plaza of Memory to fight for memory and seek justice for the victims of the 1994 bombing of the amia building. And on this Monday, as on every Monday since 1994, this plaza filled with speakers and listeners, in response to the seventh anniversary of the attack. The speaker began the acto (the protest commemorating the attack) by marking off the days—more than 3,000—since the bombing of the Israeli Embassy; then the days—more than 2,000—since the bombing of the amia building; continuing with the number of those killed—eighty-five; and the number of those wounded—hundreds.2 He then prepared us for a moment of silence by voicing the name and age of each person killed. To each rendering,
1 This chapter benefited from comments and suggestions from several readers, including Annette Levine, and, in earlier versions, Leo Coleman and Noelle Molé Liston. I would also like to thank and acknowledge the participants in the memorial movements whom I inter- viewed as part of this project, whose names have been changed for this publication. An earlier version of this essay was presented as a paper at the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in December 2005. Most of the material in this chapter is based on preliminary fieldwork conducted in 2001 and 2002, as part of longer- term ethnographic research conducted in 2001, 2002, 2003–2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2014, partially funded by a Fulbright iie award and additional awards from Princeton University. 2 Acto can be defined as act or action. I leave it untranslated here to connote the performative and the agentive nature of these practices.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_008
Figure 6.1 Shofars at Memoria Activa (August 29, 2004) PHOTO BY OLIVER W. SCHIETINGER the crowd responded with a simple word—“Presente” (here)—invoking the presence of the memory of each victim.3 He then continued with the introduction of the shofar—a ram’s horn tradi- tionally used in Jewish religious ceremonies—which rings out every Monday morning in the Plaza of Memory (see Figure 6.1). He used the following words to provide some context for the public gathered—some of whom were not Jewish:
The shofar . . . brings together the people to listen, to know the truth . . . . The shofar of the people . . . one minute of silence, one minute of remem- brance . . . one minute of demanding justice.4
The shofar was blown—the piercing sound momentarily drowning everything out in the urban soundscape as we all stood and remembered. And then he continued:
3 During regular Monday morning actos in the Plaza Lavalle, names were usually not called out. The naming of each victim was something that took place because of the special yearly anni- versary. In contrast, at the actos organized at Pasteur Street, the names of the victims were usually enumerated every month and year that an acto took place. 4 Enrique Burbinski, Memoria Activa, July 16, 2001. Translation mine.
And so the shofar of the people is blown. Just like this, week after week, we listen to its sound, [and] we reiterate our hope that it will break down the walls of impunity in our country. In the Plaza of Memory, [here are] the testimonies.5
*
Beginning in 1994, Memoria Activa convened public actos in the Plaza Lavalle, creating a space for citizens to offer their testimonies about the impact of the bombing and impunity more broadly on their lives. Over the years, these testi- monies included the words of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, veterans of the Falkland Islands War, artists, activists, Holocaust survivors, and family mem- bers of the victims of the amia bombing, among others. The testimonies gath- ered in this plaza served as a collective response to violence, impunity, and the noted lack of justice emanating from the high courts of Argentina. Although Memoria Activa held their last official Monday acto in 2004, a group of regular attendees, who came to call themselves simply Citizens of the Plaza, contin- ued to gather in this plaza every Monday morning, to blow the shofar and share their narratives. It is this shofar—this piercing sound as a call to gather and to listen—that has marked the beginning of the actos in this plaza every Monday morning since these commemorations began in 1994. Indeed, these actos not only required but demanded listeners, who made these protests both possible and necessary. Those gathered on the outer edges, on the boundaries—the listeners— became the critical interlocutors for those offering their testimonies and for the very development of this space of witnessing. In this essay, I consider the significance of listening as a social practice in these commemorative actos and as a form of agency exercised in the aftermath of destruction—critical to understanding post–amia Buenos Aires.6 Further, listening has become integral not only to the creation of testimonies and the formations of witnesses themselves, but also to the redefinition of the public sphere and the reconstruction of civil society after the bombing. As such, I argue that listening itself needs to be considered as an instance of agency and a force for social change, necessary for formulating narratives in the aftermath of violence and destruction and critical to rebuilding communities and selves.
5 Ibid. 6 I pursue the significance of listening as a social practice in the context of Holocaust testimo- nies in Natasha Zaretsky, “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires,” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone, eds. Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein, 315–339 (Boston: Brill, 2013).
1994: Memory and Justice
On Monday morning, July 18, 1994, a car bomb exploded in front of the amia building. This attack killed eighty-five people, wounded hundreds, and destroyed a principal center for Jewish life in Argentina—one that also housed other com- munity organizations and an archive of Jewish history in Argentina. This bomb- ing had profound repercussions for Jewish life in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Only two years earlier, a similar bombing took place at the Israeli Embassy, and for many Jewish Argentines, the 1994 attack resounded with a lon- ger history of violence and anti-Semitism. This included past events in Europe, such as the Holocaust, and experiences in their new nation, such as the urban riots during the Semana Trágica in the early twentieth century and the political repression experienced during Argentina’s state terrorism (1976–1983).7 Fundamentally, this attack also prompted a crisis of belonging—challenging the place of Jews in Argentina. Many Argentines came to question what being Jewish meant and whether it was still safe to participate in Jewish activities. Fears for safety led to the implementation of new security measures at Jewish institu- tions, incuding schools, social clubs, and temples. Every Jewish building became lined with cement barricades (to prevent future car bombs), and security guards stationed at the doors monitored every person entering. These security measures significantly changed daily life in the city and the landscape of Buenos Aires. Though designed to make people feel safe, the measures also reinforced an atmo- sphere of exclusion and separation, creating Jewish space as separate in the city. The second significant change in Jewish life consisted of the rise of memory and justice movements dedicated to the victims of the bombing, which com- bine Jewish practices (such as the shofar) with Argentine modalities of social protests, including the appropriation of central symbolic public spaces as part of their advocacy work. Several social movements formed to advocate for jus- tice after the bombing: Memoria Activa (formed 1994), Familiares y Amigos de
7 Although some question whether Jews were specifically targeted as such by the military dic- tatorship, they represented a high number of the disappeared and, according to many sources, once captured, were treated differently for being Jewish. See Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York: Vintage Books, 1981); conadep, Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2003), 69–75; Marisa Braylan, Daniel Feierstein, Miguel Galante, and Adrian Jmelnitzky, Report on the Situation of the Jewish Detainees-Disappeared during the Genocide Perpetrated in Argentina (Buenos Aires: Social Research Center of daia, Argentine Jewish Community Centers Association, 2000). See also Emmanuel N. Kahan, Recuerdos que mienten un poco: vida y memoria de la experiencia judía durante la última dicta- dura militar (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014).
8 apemia has taken the most critical stance in relation to the 2013 Memorandum of Understand ing with Iran. 9 In addition to the monthly actos, Familiares were also present during the yearly commemo- rations on July 18 at Pasteur Street, where a family member would often give a speech.
Sergio Burstein, formed a separate group, 18 J, which convened an acto in the Plaza de Mayo for the first time on July 18, 2014, facing the Casa Rosada (the Presidential Palace). apemia formed in 2002, under the direction of Laura Ginsberg, a family member who had previously been a part of Memoria Activa. apemia does not hold regular weekly or monthly actos but does convene protests on the yearly anniversaries, often choosing public spaces in Argentina with a broader politi- cal resonance, such as the Plaza de Mayo and most recently, the National Congress. Despite the political and commemorative differences among these groups, their public actos have created an evolving, heterogeneous narrative in response to the violence of the 1994 bombing. These groups represent new movements within the Jewish community, marking a place for Jews as members of Argentina’s civil society, although some maintain their links to existing Jewish institutions.10 They also represent an emerging Jewish memorial practice—part of a landscape of Jewish memory in Argentina that includes the revival of Yiddish study at the iwo (Institute for Jewish Research), the creation of the Coro Guebirtig (Mordechai Gebirtig Yiddish Chorus), and the resurgence of Holocaust memory.11 Fundamentally, what I have termed memory movements have also become critical sites for negotiating and rebuilding the public sphere and the very boundaries of the “we”—as Argentines and Jews.12 They thereby respond to the personal and collective struggles for meaning and coherence that emerged after the attack—trying to make sense of the violence and simultaneously rebuild their society and nation. By employing Argentine forms of protest, spe- cifically the strategy of appropriating public spaces, they demanded to be included in the Argentine “we” as Jews. Significantly, unlike other Jewish sites, these public spaces are not bounded by barricades but accessible to everyone, enabling the formation of a community of listeners or the special witnesses they seek for their cause.
10 Some of the movements have greater links to Jewish institutions, such as Memoria Activa whose offices are in the Jewish social and sports club Hebraica. Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas also has greater links to amia as an institution. apemia, on the other hand, does not identify with the Jewish community and is very critical of the formal leadership. 11 See Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–265 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008); also more recently, Lillian Wohl’s chapter in this volume. 12 See Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years after in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, eds. T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, 89–110 (New York: Routledge, 2000).
One can further compare these movements to other commemorative prac- tices, but I argue that what makes them distinct from memorials, as well as from other social movements in Argentina, hinges on the importance of listen- ing. In this essay, I focus specifically on the actos that depend on such listening. While their practices resonate with the political traditions of groups like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who march in the the symbolically central plaza of Buenos Aires and Argentina, bearing their childrens’ faces on posters and pins, they were also distinct: at the actos of the social movements formed after the amia bombing, in the plazas and streets of memory, citizens came to tes- tify and to listen.
Toward a Theory of Listening and Trauma
In many ways, violence and terror are experiences that fundamentally chal- lenge the fabric of order and meaning that organizes human life. Anthropologists studying violence have described it as diffuse and evanescent, either exceeding the limits of representation or significantly challenging the possibility of artic- ulation.13 The central concern lies in how to narrate an event that resists and often evades the act of witnessing, especially when narration is necessary for personal and collective survival.14 In anthropology, the challenge, shared with the subjects we engage in our ethnographies, is how to represent or narrate that which evades meaning.15 Indeed, many anthropologists of violence are concerned with the consequences of transforming the nature of violence as lived experience (intangible, chaotic,
13 E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1996); Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction,” in Violence and Subjectivity, eds. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 1–18 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 14 This question has also been pursued at length about the Holocaust, including the appro- priateness of representation and the impossibility of witnessing. See Ernst Van Alphen, Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1997); Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Repre sentation: Nazism and the Final Solution. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992); Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92 (New York: Routledge, 1992). 15 Das and Kleinman, “Introduction,” 12–13.
16 Nordstrom and Martin, The Paths to Domination, 3–8; E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies. 17 Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memory.” 18 Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996); Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–74 (New York: Routledge, 1992). 19 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Interantional, 1988), 12. 20 Of course, the understanding of survivor is complex and under constant negotiation. Indeed, in terms of Holocaust survivors in Argentina, there has been debate about whether those who were not in the concentration camps but survived the Holocaust in hiding may be considered survivors. For more about the history of Holocaust survivors in Argentina, as well as an exploration of trauma and listening, see Natasha Zaretsky, “Child Survivors of the Shoah”; also Diana Wang, Hijos de la guerra: la segunda generación de sobrevivientes de la Shoá (Buenos Aires: Marea Editorial, 2007). 21 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Balitmore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
22 Mieke Bal, “Introduction,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, vii–xvii (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1999). See p. x. 23 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. 24 See also T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (New York: Routledge, 2000); Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Sigmund Freud, “Eighteenth Lecture: Fixation Upon Traumas: The Unconscious,” in General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Rivere, 284–296 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1960). 25 For more about the social dynamics of rebuilding, see Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction,” in Remaking a World; Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years after in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemration, 89–110. On the question of the need for an interlocutor after trauma, see Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness”; Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness”; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. 26 Additional practices of listening in Argentina include strikes and escraches connected to the impunity following state terrorism, as staged by the children of the disappeared (hijos). See also Diana Taylor, “dna of Performance,” in Cultural Agency in the Americas, ed. Doris Sommer, 52–81 (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2006). 27 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See pp. 10–11.
28 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 57. 29 Ibid., 63. 30 See Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness.” 31 Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Fiona Ross, “Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, eds. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 250–279 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); also John Borneman, “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, Affiliation,” in Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 281–304. 32 John Borneman, “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing.” 33 Ruth Leys, “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 103– 145 (New York: Routledge, 1996); Laurence Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 173–198 (New York: Routledge, 1996); Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Listening Toward Social Change: The Plaza of Memory
From 1994 to 2004, every Monday morning, Memoria Activa invited speakers to the Plaza of Memory to bear witness and offer their testimonies to what they experienced as a result of the bombing and to demand justice. When the group first formed, they met in silence; later, rabbis, community members, and others began to speak. They returned, Monday after Monday, to confront the high courts of Argentina. The people who came, the listeners with whom they con- structed their narratives, included family members of the victims, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Holocaust survivors, and concerned citizens. Though not with as many numbers as when the group started, every Monday, from 1994 to 2004, Memoria Activa convened actos on Monday mornings in the Plaza Lavalle (a practice to be later continued by the group Citizens of the Plaza). The presence of tv cameras and the media, and the publication of the testimo- nies on their website, also turned the nation and beyond into potential listen- ers of these actos. This attempt to create a broader, pluralistic space of witnessing made Memoria Activa’s actos distinct from those of other groups. People come to the plaza on Mondays to bear witness to what they experienced as a result of the bombing—how this attack impacted their lives. In the process, Memoria Activa created an alternative tribunal—open to Jews, non-Jews, survivors and family members, and others. By allowing others to testify, they opened what may have been a personal or communal tragedy to other narratives, including the history of impunity in Argentina. This then enabled individuals to map their own sto- ries within the contours of the 1994 bombing and its aftermath.34 Therein lies the strength and also the greatest challenge for the group—to engage the many other narratives and histories of impunity, while keeping the actos focused on their ultimate goal: justice in the amia bombing. These practices of testifying and listening—for Memoria Activa and the other memory movements—developed to create a community, with a sense of shared obligation for the cause of justice. When people gave testimonies, or came to the plaza to listen, they offered themselves like a Maussian gift, in
34 For an analysis of Memoria Activa’s relationship to other human rights struggles and issues of impunity, see also Susana Wappenstein’s chapter, “The Nation’s Bodies,” in this volume.
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When I first came to the plaza to begin my fieldwork in 2001, I tried to stand on the edges, to observe what was happening and not disturb the events—know- ing, of course, as every ethnographer does, that I inevitably would. I arrived in Buenos Aires as winter began in June, and I spent every Monday morning in the Plaza Lavalle, watching it transform into the Plaza of Memory. Speakers and listeners gathered—as they did from 1994 to 2004—to count the number of Mondays they had been standing there, to listen to the shofar and the testi- monies, and to join in the calls for justice that concluded every acto (see Figure 6.2). It took me several weeks to figure out the dynamics of the different groups gathered, who would join together for the acto and then disperse to various nearby cafés. The leadership of Memoria Activa went to one, whereas the retired schoolteachers from the Jewish school system went to another, and yet another group would go to the Banchero—a coffee shop one short block away, crossing the enormous Corrientes Avenue with a view toward the famous Obelisk. In later interviews, I was told the Banchero used to be famous as the destination many chose for their post-acto coffees, especially in the early days of Memoria Activa, where many attendees joined together the small tables to make one long stretch of activists. By 2001, the group who went to Banchero was smaller—composed of mostly men whom I had noticed stood at the plaza every Monday with the sign “Todos Somos Memoria Activa” (We Are All Memoria Activa). I went to the Banchero by chance one morning after the acto, to have a coffee and warm myself up. One of the men I recognized from the plaza approached me. He was dressed in a sharp wool coat and cap, and he walked straight up to my table and introduced himself to me, asking if I had been at the acto and commending me for being a young person from abroad there to observe the actos. He gladly gave me his phone number when I asked if I could call to follow up with an interview. Fernando [all names have been changed] lived with his wife in the neighbor- hood of Villa Crespo. Originally from Warsaw, Poland, he worked his entire life
35 Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 1990), 46.
Figure 6.2 Testimony at the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) (May 19, 2003) Photo by author in Buenos Aires. When I arrived, he sat me down in his tidy apartment, at a large dining room table, and took out a folder of writings and clippings. He surprised me with his poetry—he had written poems to many of the people he had met during the actos of Memoria Activa. He typed up these poems and then photo- copied them. Fernando helped introduce me to the world of those I will call the listeners who regularly went to the Plaza and then to the Banchero café—those who after 2004 would come to be known as Citizens of the Plaza—holding on to the space of the plaza, the Plaza of Memory, for twenty years after the attack.36 It was also through Fernando that I first met Luis. A slight man, perhaps seventy years of age, he would make his way to this plaza every Monday morn- ing by colectivo (bus) with his friend Alberto. They both lived on the outskirts of the city in a working-class barrio that used to be one of the homes to the textile industry in the city. Luis and Alberto invited me to visit them one day, and I went, taking the colectivo from Barrio Norte, a more affluent area close to the city center where upper-middle-class Argentines lived, along with ex-pats
36 See also Karen Ann Faulk’s chapter, “Searching for Justice,” in this volume, for more about the group that became Citizens of the Plaza, as well as her ethnography, Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina. (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013).
North American minds, and imagined what that fear must have been like after two terrorist attacks. After the bombing, in addition to protecting the Jewish spaces in his neigh- borhood, Alberto, like many others, also chose to go to the heart of the city—to the Plaza Lavalle—facing the high courts of his nation to demand justice. Every Monday morning—at the time and day the bombing took place—they gathered together in front of the Palace of Justice, the Tribunales, the high courts of the land, to hold actos—acts that were partly political action and partly performance, interlinked, together with other listeners. Like many others gathered there, they had not lost anyone directly in the bombing but felt personally implicated in the crisis of belonging that followed the attack and sought to participate in some way in the rebuilding and reimag- ining of “argentinidad” to include the Jewish. Graciela—another listener in the plaza—would usually arrive early, often walking slowly, perfectly coiffed and dressed neatly, with her leather purse strapped pragmatically across her chest, speaking to as many people as she could and not missing a thing with her sharp blue eyes. During my time in the plaza, she always stood on the same side of the microphone and did not feel shy about voicing her comments and critiques, loudly, about whatever was being said or whoever was speaking, even in the middle of a speech. I observed her from another corner of the plaza for several weeks before someone introduced us. After that, she took me under her wing figuratively and literally, as she took my arm under hers and insisted I stand right next to her during the protests. After the last call for justice in the plaza, she invited me for coffee to one of the nearby cafés. While the protest itself was a moment when everyone came together, afterward, each group dispersed. The organizers of Memoria Activa went to one café, the male retirees who liked to argue with raised voices and hands went to another (the Banchero), and Graciela, with her friends, went to yet another. It was at her café where she told me about her history and how she experienced the bombing. Graciela was born in Poland in the 1930s and arrived to Argentina with her family as a young girl. As she put it, Argentina gave her a place to live and raise a family, but it didn’t “regalar” anything—it didn’t make anything easy or give anything away. On the day of the bombing, she told me that she almost col- lapsed when she found out what happened. Her niece, who she described as like a daughter to her, worked in the amia building, and only upon learning that she had taken the day off and thus was not harmed did she feel relief. But it didn’t end there for her. She identified with a family history of activism and standing up against discrimination and oppression, and she could not stand idly by after the injustice of the bombing and the subsequent failures of
Listeners at the Wall of Memory (Pasteur Street)
The presence of Graciela, Luis, Alberto, and the many other listeners, was clearly quite important to the Plaza of Memory and the testimonies there. However, testimony as a practice also informed the actos organized in other commemorative spaces, such as the reconstructed amia building. Located in the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Once (pronounced ohn-say), the amia building is on Pasteur Street, itself ordinary and unre- markable—lined with cafés, grocery stores, medical supply stores for the nearby medical school and hospital, and other neighborhood stores. But it is here that the bombing was carried out, and on the 600 block one begins to notice the changes that developed in response to the attack. Eighty-five memo- rial trees appear on this street, each with a simple plaque that bears a victim’s name. Six thirty-three Pasteur is the paved-over site of the attack, where the amia building has been reconstructed and stands recessed from the sidewalk. A thick brick wall protects it, which also bears the first names of each victim. The protection continues at the door, with security guards, and at the edge of the sidewalk in front of the building, which has been studded with pilotes– cement barricades meant to prevent future car bombs. This street, this build- ing, these trees, the memorial wall—all of these have come to serve as daily reminders of what happened here in 1994. It is also on this street, in front of this building, that the group Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas held their actos every 18th of the month. On those days, the police blocked off each side of the street, not allowing any traffic to enter. Family members of the victims made large posters with the photographs, full names, and ages of some of the victims, which they attached to this wall— photos from other, happier times, with faces that stared out at us as we stood gathered for the acto. They also prepared eighty-five red roses and eighty-five candles. During the acto, a member of the Familiares group read the name of each victim, for whom a candle was lit and a rose placed in a memorial case inscribed with the words “Justice and Memory” (see Figure 6.3).
Figure 6.3 Familiares Acto at Pasteur Street (December 18, 2003) Photo by author
It was here, at one of these actos, that I met Roberto, one of the listeners. It was raining on that Sunday morning in Buenos Aires, August 18, 2002, as we gathered on Pasteur Street, facing the new amia building and waiting for the commemoration of the bombing to begin. As we stood in a light drizzle, one of the family members of the victims introduced me to Roberto, a good friend of hers who had accompanied them since the beginning. Although he had not lost anyone in the bombing, he participated in the actos and was one of the few regular attendees who was not Jewish. When I asked him, in a later interview, what motivated him, he responded: “I do it because I feel it, and I do it so that the familiares will see, so that the directly affected will see that there will always be someone who will remember. Because a person really dies when no one remembers them.” Roberto did not lose anybody in the attack. But he could have, he told me—anyone could have. As he put it in our interview, he wasn’t “directly affected.” He could not feel the pain of people who have lost their daughter, their son, their husband, their wife, their grandchild. But though he could not cross over that threshold, he also felt an obligation to the family members of the victims and recognized the significance of his own role—as one who stands, listening to their testimonies, remembering with
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Memoria Activa expanded the space of the witness—making it more accessi- ble to others who can offer their testimonies and include their own stories within the devastation of the 1994 bombing, often linking it to other instances of impunity in Argentina or personal stories of their loss. Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas needed listeners to hear their narratives and to stand with them and remember the victims. Both groups confronted the challenge of making a cause personal for them relevant to others, especially to society at large, who needed to share in their commitment to memory and justice for their work to be successful.
37 By focusing on the role these listeners play for the familiares, I do not want to suggest that they do not have their own experiences to which they bear witness. 38 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” 10.
The call to listening occasioned by the shofar in the plaza on Monday morn- ings and the monthly commemorations at the site of the bombing marked points of entry into the space of witnessing. Further, the listeners who gath- ered at every acto became critical interlocutors for those bearing witness. The memorial trees, monuments, and other commemorative sites in Buenos Aires did not demand listeners like the actos on Pasteur Street and in the Plaza of Memory. In both, listeners became necessary to hear the testimonies given, to respond “Presente” and stand with the family members as they entered—and departed from—the space of witnessing their loss.39
Concluding Reflections on Listening
The speaker who convened the crowd every Monday in the Plaza Lavalle named this space “The Plaza of Memory” and referred to the courts behind them as the “Palace of Injustice.” With their bodies, the listeners gathered dis- rupted the space of the city and the ordinary rhythms of Monday mornings. Similarly, on Pasteur Street, every 18th of the month, the family members and listeners gathered also disrupting time and space as they sought to challenge the impunity and oblivion that threatened the memory of the victims. Over the years, the Plaza of Memory in particular became a complex social and political field where other claims for addressing human rights and impunity emerged through the testimonies offered at the microphone. These testimonies established this space on the outer edge of the high courts as an alternative tribu- nal, a space for the truth of people’s experience that seemed to be excluded from the courts within. If justice could not be provided by the state, if society ques- tioned their place as Jews to belong, Memoria Activa and the listeners gathered began to build their answer from that Plaza of Memory—demanding a space as Jews and Argentines and performing a different model of society, a different ver- sion of justice, memory, and accountability than that provided by their state. In this essay, I have emphasized listening as a critical practice in the after- math of the violence of the 1994 amia bombing, necessary for the witnessing and narration of the memory movements and their attempts at finding mean- ing and coherence. With their presence, these listeners intervened in the dis- cursive spaces of the everyday life of the city and assumed the words of those in power to reshape the vision of the nation.
39 Listeners are critical to the actos that take place in the Plaza of Memory and on Pasteur Street. But it is important to note that people also remember their losses in other, more private moments.
Such political practices of narration and representation, such struggles for coherence, are critical both to finding meaning and to rebuilding the self and society. However, limits do exist—moments when the boundaries between witness and listener contract, or close, when experience cannot be shared, or the listener may not want to enter that space of the witness or perhaps shouldn’t. There are also moments when listening fails. Over the years, the number of Memoria Activa’s listeners has diminished, and despite many years of struggling against impunity, many doubt the possibility of justice or encoun- tering the true perpetrators. It is also important to remember that neither narrative nor the practices of listening that are critical for generating narrative can fully resolve traumatic experiences. Indeed, certain narrative genres or contexts of witnessing exclude aspects of experience. Fiona Ross’s work on South Africa suggests the need for understanding how narratives are constructed in a different context, such as daily life, and the different forms of telling employed, in her case, by women. She also suggests considering silences and gaps as powerful testimonies to their experiences.40 Anthropologists have further remarked on how the usual interlocutors for those who are survivors and victims of violence, such as the media and international human rights organizations, also condition a particu- lar telling and do not allow a space of expression for the nuances of everyday life, not to mention what happens after testimony.41 Furthermore, these narratives and practices may not necessarily entail an undifferentiated or contiguous coherence. For instance, the memory movements formed after the 1994 bombing have four divisions as of this writing—not unlike other human rights movements in Argentina. Although these divisions have not necessarily worked against their causes, an emphasis on coherence runs the risk of obscuring the way division itself and struggles over memory are in themselves critical to rebuilding civil society following a period of violence.42
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Yet the significance of listeners in the struggle for coherence—both personal and national—remains. Listeners were central to creating a shared fabric of belonging and mutually accountable citizenship in the actos of the family members convened on Pasteur Street and in the Plaza of Memory. In that
40 Ross, “Speech and Silence,” 272. 41 Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction.” 42 See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
43 For additional analysis of the differences between these two spaces, see also Annette Prekker (Levine), “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces,” Modernity 2 (2000), http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. See also Annette Levine’s chapter in this volume, “Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado.” 44 For more on the idea of implication in trauma, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24. For the question of spectacle in relation to political violence, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997). The personal involvement of the researcher in the study of situations of violence or trauma can be seen in many works, including Susan G. Brison, Aftermath; Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History; Julie M. Taylor, Paper Tangos (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1998). In this essay, I have not developed my own role as a listener in this ethnographic context; more broadly, the role of the anthropologist as a listener in these contexts merits further exploration.
Postscript: 2006 and 2014
Memoria Activa officially left the Plaza Lavalle in December 2004, no longer holding weekly actos. Since that time, despite several attempts at judiciary clo- sure and clarification, the amia case remains in impunity, nowhere closer to knowing or understanding the truth of what took place. In 2006, I returned to Buenos Aires for the first time after Memoria Activa had officially left the plaza (in 2004). I was curious to see how the space had changed and what had happened to the listeners. Though I had expected some changes, the emptiness surprised me. Unlike other Monday mornings, with the plaza buzzing with the activity of media gathered to chronicle the acto, it was relatively empty. I stood at the edge of the plaza, quietly observing the Monument to the Victims of the amia bombing that stood almost at the center of the plaza, seem- ing to anchor the space (see Figure 6.4). The monument itself, shaped almost like a sundial, was designed by the artist Mirta Kupferminc to be durable to the ele- ments, to withstand and survive in a public, outdoor space. Yet, signs of abandon abounded. For a while, the only other person in the area was a homeless man who had been sleeping on a patch of grass. I stood near the monument as he noisily arose from his slumber and began to stretch himself awake. Other pass- ersby were just walking their dogs. Yet others were office workers, their arms stacked with papers and files, walking briskly across the plaza. The first person to arrive that morning was Sara, wearing a bright wool coat to withstand the cold winter day that greeted us. Although she had a cold and was bundled up, she told me that she felt she needed to be there. Only about fifteen to twenty people continued to go to the plaza on Mondays, so she explained that each one who wasn’t there made a difference. Another listener in the Plaza had told me that Sara had survived persecution during Argentina’s state terrorism, though she rarely spoke about it to me directly. Instead, we talked at length about the state of affairs in Argentina, and she continually looked at her watch as the minutes stretched past 9:53 a.m., wondering aloud where everyone was. Since those who regularly attended these actos were pri- marily elderly, there could have been any number of health reasons why they weren’t there. Finally, they started arriving. When Luis saw me from a distance, he was amazed, and after asking about my own life and family, he started telling me
Figure 6.4 Monument to the Victims of the amia Bombing in the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) designed by Mirta Kupferminc (August 26, 2013) Photo by Juan Pablo Chillón
Figure 6.5 Plaque at base of what is titled the Monument to the Martyrs of the amia (August 26, 2013) Photo by Juan Pablo Chillón
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I have returned to the plazas and streets of memory many times since my very first trip in 2001. Over those years, I, too joined in listening (indeed, many would describe anthropologists as professional listeners) and thus became a part of the social practices in the Plaza of Memory and on Pasteur Street and the other memorial spaces that emerged in the wake of the 1994 amia bomb- ing. Even as the political and economic landscape shifted quite dramatically from 2001 to my most recent fieldwork in 2014, the ongoing presence of the listeners who continued to gather in the plazas and streets underline the sig- nificance of listening as a form of political agency after the bombing. Such listening became critical to the struggle for personal coherence expe- rienced by those who lost their family members in the bombing, who needed empathetic listeners to form their own narratives after trauma. Furthermore, listeners also helped rebuild the collective coherence of a community and nation fractured by the bombing—establishing a sense of mutual belonging and accountability from the ground. During those Monday mornings and those 18ths when everyone stood lis- tening, remembering, and fighting for justice, despite their differences, per- haps for a moment, the boundary between self and other, between Jew and Argentine, might collapse or shift. Perhaps, for a moment, that aperture might permit a moment of mutual identification, a moment of a common “we” criti- cal to the struggle against impunity in this case and many others in Argentina.45 Such a common “we” has become integral to the desire for memory and justice that organizes these groups and to those who join them, week after week, month after month, year after year, to remember and to listen, as they struggle to rebuild a sense of personal and collective coherence deeply fractured by the bombing and the ongoing impunity that followed.
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45 I borrow the term aperture as an analytical frame from conversations with Carol Greenhouse.
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Kirmayer, Laurence. “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation.” In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 173–98. New York: Routledge, 1996. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–74. New York: Routledge, 1992. ——. “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York: Routledge, 1992. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage Interantional, 1988. Leys, Ruth. “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory.” In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 103–45. New York: Routledge, 1996. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. London: Routledge, 1990/1950. Minow, Martha. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and JoAnn Martin. The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Prekker (Levine), Annette. “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.” Modernity 2 (2000). Ross, Fiona. “Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 250–79. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Spitzer, Leo. Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997. ——. “dna of Performance.” In Cultural Agency in the Americas, edited by Doris Sommer, 52–81. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2006. Taylor, Julie M. Paper Tangos. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1998. Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Translated by Toby Talbot. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wang, Diana. Hijos de la guerra: la segunda generación de sobrevivientes de la Shoá Buenos Aires: Marea Editorial, 2007.
Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan, eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires.” In The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone, edited by Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein, 315–39. Boston: Brill, 2013. ——. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–65. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Karen Ann Faulk
Ethnographic Mo(ve)ment
It’s a dull gray morning in the city. I arrive at Tribunales a few minutes early and climb out of the subway tunnel, walking down the subterranean hall past the young guy busking with his bandoneón, past the women selling the brightly striped socks so popular this season, past the stream of billboards publicizing English institutes, theater productions, or the city government’s new campaign to improve waste collection (remember, only put out your garbage between the hours of 8 and 9 p.m.!).1 I get to the steps to the street, nodding my head to the guy selling tissues and mints and to the ancient shoeless woman’s outstretched hand, all of them daily fixtures at this stop on the D Line. The only thing that changes regularly are the advertisements on the walls. Climbing the final set of stairs, I emerge directly in front of the imposing faÇade of the Palace of Justice (Palacio de Justicia), though my companions in the plaza prefer to call it the Palace of Injustice. I walk carefully, avoiding the ubiquitous dog excrement on the side- walks. I have heard many residents of Buenos Aires report their surprise upon traveling abroad and noting the lack of this permanent porteño fixture. Nonetheless, attempts by the city government and some neighbors to curb this freedom of canine expression are largely ignored. Crossing Talcahuano Street to enter the plaza, I notice how much more crowded it is than usual. I’m reminded of the murga practices that happen here in the summer months, as the neighbor- hood group refines its rhythms and energetic kicks in the days leading up to Carnival. But it’s fall now, and the pounding drums sound more methodical than the playfully expressive music of the murgueros. A street protest, clearly, another near constant fixture in the city, though this plaza sees fewer than the nearby Plaza de Mayo or the Plaza del Congreso. This concentration is directed at the entrance to Tribunales. Reading the signs the protesters hold, I realize that they are some of the family members and allies of the young people killed in the December 30, 2004, fire in the discotheque Cromañón, mobilized today while the
1 My thanks go to the editors of this volume for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_009
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Figure 7.1 Monument in the plaza Photo by the author, 2004.
My face-to-face engagement with family members of amia victims and the broader community concerned with remembering and securing justice for the attack took place over several sessions, during the (southern) winters of 2000 and 2001, from October 2004 to March 2006, and during brief return visits in September 2009 and December 2012. Between visits, I maintained contact electronically with key members and continued to read and review media releases and press coverage of events. While there, I was able to observe and participate in weekly memorials/protests (actos) held by the group Memoria Activa (Active Memory), including the final weeks of Memoria Activa’s official organization of these actos, the monthly memorial events held in front of the amia, yearly events by these and other groups, and the creation of the group Citizens of the Plaza. In addition to formal interviews and informal conversa- tions with participants, I also attended other relevant events during these time periods, including the trial that led to the eventual disrobing of prosecuting judge Juan José Galeano. One of the things that struck me throughout my time participating in these moments was the intermixing of the languages both of citizenship and human rights. In this chapter, I provide an overview of this mix- ing and explore some of the broader theoretical implications that this “rights talk” has, both in contemporary Argentina and beyond. I show what the linkage of these languages of rights looks like and the importance it holds, both in terms of philosophical premises and actual lived expression.2 I also reflect on the eth- nographic moment, my engagement with the events described, and the way the production of anthropological knowledge is often, and perhaps inevitably, anachronistic, displacing time as well as space through the creation of (de)con- textualized description.
Justice and Human Rights
The struggle for justice in the amia case is, in many ways, a struggle for rights. What these ideas of rights are, and what matters to those most deeply affected, cannot be taken for granted but must be explored through detailed discussion
2 Portions of this chapter also appear, in a different form, in Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013); Karen Ann Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights.” In Human Rights: Critical Dialogues, ed. Mark Goodale, 98–110 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and, Karen Ann Faulk, The Walls of the Labyrinth: Impunity, Corruption, and the Limits of Politics in Contemporary Argentina (PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 2008).
3 Kathryn Sikkink, “From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights,” Latin American Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2008): 1–29. 4 Ley 26.743 from May 2012 establishes the right to gender identity. In the words of Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (cha) secretary Pedro Paradiso Sottile, “With the passage of this law, Argentina acts in accordance with its national and international obligations and responsi- bilities and we find ourselves once again in the global vanguard on the road to full citizen- ship, in which the rights of all are respected and guaranteed, without any discrimination whatsoever” (emphasis added, my translation). See http://www.cha.org.ar/ley-de-identidad -de-genero-ley-no-26-743-promulgada-y-publicada-en-el-boletin-oficial-el-24-de-mayo -de-2012.
For the 30,000 disappeared, victims of state terrorism in our country, we demand JUSTICE! For the children, stolen from their homes during the last military dic- tatorship, who are still today searching for their real identity, we demand JUSTICE! For those killed in the Israeli Embassy bombing, we demand JUSTICE! For our friends and relatives, victims of the brutal attack on the amia building, we demand JUSTICE! tze · dek tze · dek, tir · dof—justice, justice, you will seek [Deuteronomy 16:20]. Until next Monday…
This constant feature of the weekly actos also demonstrates how Memoria Activa locates its search for justice within the broader context of Argentine identity. The move to define the bombings and the struggle for justice as prob- lems for all society is not a denial or an effacement on the part of Memoria Activa that the movement arose from the Jewish community, as seen by the use of the biblical phrase as the close of this important invocation. Indeed, the movement also publicly valorizes its identity and location as based within a Jewish tradition, however diverse and multivocal the definitions of and identi- fications with this community may have been, in ways that simultaneously work to creatively reinterpret or reactivate that tradition.5 The passage from Deuteronomy is also inscribed on the monument erected to the dead in the Plaza Lavalle and frequently appears in Memoria Activa’s documents. In using this biblical passage, Memoria Activa is affirming that the struggle for justice is
5 Beatriz Gurevich, “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, ed. Kristin Ruggiero, 86–111 (Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); Ibid., Passion, Politics, and Identity: Jewish Women in the Wake of the amia Bombing in Argentina (Buenos Aires: Universidad del cema, 2005).
Rethinking Citizenship
In this way, the attack on the amia has contributed to the expansion within Argentine society of the idea of justice as a human right, to be asserted and protected for all. The attack has also led to an increased articulation of rethink- ing the meaning of citizenship. Memoria Activa, for example, combines ele- ments of Jewish ritual with an insistence on the attacks as not being a “Jewish” issue. Rather than seeing the attacks as perpetrated against Jews, with Argentine soil being a displaced battleground for a foreign conflict, through its actions Memoria Activa locates the Jewish community as an integral part of the nation, while simultaneously asserting the right to Jewish specificity and difference. In calling for recognition of Argentine Jews as full and integral members of the Argentine nation, the movement is proposing a redefinition of the national imaginary as essentially plural, multiethnic, and multicultural. In aligning with this focus on the role of Argentine Jews within the Argentine nation, the family members of the victims of the amia bombing also use the language of citizenship in articulating their demands. As one member said during one of Memoria Activa’s weekly actos:
We wanted to remember; we wanted to practice memory, but we wanted to do it in an active way, exercising our rights as citizens, as members of a community, as free men [sic] that seek to live in freedom, and we could only achieve that through justice. For that reason [we have] our name, to practice our memory actively, for that reason [we come] to this place, in front of the Palace of Justice that does not honor its name.6
This highlighting of the victims, their families, and the broader community as citizens is also taken up by another group that has organized and engaged in public action after the amia bombing. A new group formed when Memoria Activa, after more than ten years of continuous weekly protests, made the deci- sion to end this form of action and, as it argued, focus more on the legal sphere and the cases, petitions, and briefs it was intricately involved in pushing forward.
6 Recorded by the author, March 8, 2004.
For many of the longtime participants, however, the idea of “abandoning the plaza” was too difficult to accept. Thus, a small number of these participants continued meeting in the Plaza Lavalle every Monday morning and communally decided to take on the name Citizens of the Plaza (Ciudadanos de la Plaza).7 An essential feature of this new group’s exercise of citizenship was their physical presence in the public space of the plaza. Writing on the practices of citizenship in urban, highland Bolivia, Sian Lazar has argued that citizenship is not just “an abstract status or category of belonging, but concrete, physical, and embodied, involving a sense of collectivity which includes a common rela- tionship to place.”8 In this way, citizenship is expressed and enacted through the collective, physical occupation of space and realized through the public display of ritual action. While in the case Lazar describes the ritual action involves a neighborhood fiesta, I argue that Citizens of the Plaza are likewise performing and forging their citizenship through the collective practice of continuing the weekly actos in the Plaza Lavalle. I was in Buenos Aires for the end of Memoria Activa’s weekly actos and the formation of Citizens of the Plaza, and I accompanied them for the first fifteen months. What follows is a series of brief portraits of the participants in Citizens of the Plaza. These are designed to illustrate the meaning they attribute to their practice and to provide a temporally located ethnographic chronicle of the moment. Names have been changed, and in some cases individuals sharing similar characteristics have been combined into composites. However, the descriptions retain enough of the original to endow an accurate sense of who chooses to keep going to the plaza and why. All of the participants (except this anthropologist and the occasional university student or journalist) are ages fifty to ninety-five. Most are middle class, though some count on more resources than others. There is a nearly even gender ratio, with women represented only minimally more than men among regular participants. The group as a whole would generally split into two or three smaller groups who would gather in separate nearby coffeehouses after events. These were usually segregated by gender (excepting the anthropologist, who accompanied each group on a rotating basis), though on several special occasions (e.g., birthdays, my farewell party) the participants met as a whole.
7 See also Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–265 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). 8 Sian Lazar, El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 208), 143.
Edith. “I’ve been coming since the very first moment. Not since the first week [of Memoria Activa’s actos] but from the very first moment. I was walking close to the amia when the attack happened. I immediately began to walk in that direction, to see what help I could be. When I got to Tucumán [Street], the sidewalk was covered in glass. All of the windows had been blown out. You couldn’t even walk there.” Born in Poland, Edith speaks Yiddish, German, and Spanish and came to Argentina as a child escaping Nazi persecution. One of her four sons was killed by the dictatorship while he was as a student at a pro- vincial university. She lost her life savings with the economic collapse of 2001. A voracious reader, she is capable of providing thoughtful commentary on a wide variety of themes related to contemporary politics. Nonetheless, she is soft-spoken and rarely speaks in a group, maintaining a low profile. She is also one of the few participants who does not join any of the others for coffee after the weekly actos. For Edith, her presence in the plaza is an act of resistance, solidarity, and (in my eyes) profound courage. Las maestras (the teachers). A significant number of the regular participants in Citizens of the Plaza are retired schoolteachers, from both public and reli- gious institutions. They tend to move together as a group, with one woman holding a minor leadership role among them and often speaking for the whole. Los del Banchero (the Banchero group). Most of the male participants meet afterward in a nearby restaurant known as El Banchero (one in a chain of res- taurants with that name). In the early days of Memoria Activa, many of the attendees would gather here after the actos. Thus, some of those who still did during my fieldwork had been doing so for many years and recalled wistfully the days when they occupied the entire back portion of seating. They viewed the reduction in numbers as a lack of commitment to and engagement in the fundamental duties of public citizenship. Now numbering from six to ten, this group discusses politics, Argentine history (two of their number being histori- ans and all having lived there throughout most of the twentieth century), and local and international events. They differ strongly in their political convic- tions and personalities, but all value the opportunity to share the time and space for what are often heated conversations on these Monday mornings. Sara. Through her activism as a former detainee she has accepted a degree of public visibility that furthers her cause by providing a human face to the hor- rors suffered by those in her position. She was a held prisoner (detenida) by the most recent military dictatorship when she was already in her fifties. Her advanced years, like those of a number of others, made her continued weekly presence in the plaza, regardless of rain or winter cold, a true effort she none- theless tirelessly undertook. Forceful but not aggressive, she is one of the stron- gest defenders of the importance of memory in the group. She also, like many of
9 For an analysis of these organizations, see Lindsay Dubois, “Activist Pensioners, a Contradiction in Terms? Argentina’s Jubilados,” in Anthropology & Aging Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2013): 170–183.
Emanuel. Emanuel was not quite as old as some of the others (another faith- ful participant turned ninety-four during my fieldwork; in fact, his birthday was July 18, the same day as the amia attack). However, he always seemed to have felt the effects of his years more than the others in many ways, and in part because of this, I know little of his personal history or circumstances. He was generally accompanied to the plaza by one of the Banchero group who attended his same synagogue, and this man would help him when he became overex- cited or disoriented. Emanuel would often break into heated diatribes, most often against things not clearly connected to the present situation in ways the rest of us could readily perceive. However, once in a while his injunctions did seem relevant to the moment and in a few key instances were especially perti- nent for me. On several occasions, he vocally questioned my presence and motives. He accused me of coming to Argentina and being with them in order to take away their stories and histories, to take them abroad (llevarlas al extran- jero) and use them for my own benefit. A charge, put that way, that I could not deny but would try to cast in a different light or at least relativize with appeals to my desire to contribute to the group. However, ours was not a dialogue but a one-sided screaming match, intensified by his invectives on my not being Jewish. Those around would try to silence him or smooth over the things he said. Nonetheless, I appreciated his openness, and I suspect he articulated feel- ings that others held as well, even though by the end I know many of them had come to also value my presence and care for me as I did for them. I was moved one day long into my fieldwork when Emanuel, who often refused to join the other men at the café, blaming his financial troubles and decrying the high prices of modern times, insisted in spite of all my refusals to pay for my coffee. The anthropologist (me). One of the few and meager ways in which I was able to make an immediate and direct contribution back to those who so generously shared their time and feelings with me came when the Citizens of the Plaza decided to pool their resources and replace the bronze plaque that had accom- panied the monument to the victims that formed the nodal point for their gath- ering. They very much wanted to repeat the same inscription on the plaque as it had had previously, but the long span of time since its theft meant that no one in this group remembered the exact words. Having both copied and photographed the inscription in an earlier trip to Buenos Aires, in diligent anthropological obsession with detail, I was able to provide them with a copy of the original. This gesture was appreciated, though I felt that it also fed their confusion over my purposes. My interests, as in what I found interesting or important, differed so incomprehensibly from theirs that I received constant questions, at first, and later only a quiet acceptance filled with occasional sideways glances, wondering why I would be interested in what I was asking. Who was I that I could combine
Citizenship and Human Rights
Each of the participants in Citizens of the Plaza had his or her own reasons and personal trajectories that led to continued participation in the group, often at a high personal cost—physical, emotional, or otherwise. Yet running throughout their stories is a commitment to an active and engaged practice of citizenship, a dedication to poner el cuerpo in ways deeply meaningful for them.10 As dem- onstrated by their stories and the earlier portion of this chapter, the activism provoked by the amia bombing has been noteworthy in its multiple engage- ments with ideas of citizenship and human rights. Another way in which the languages of citizenship and human rights are intertwined in the amia bomb- ing comes with the case Memoria Activa brought against the state of Argentina in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (iachr). In July 1999, five years after the amia attack, Memoria Activa filed suit with the iachr against the state of Argentina.11 The iachr and the Inter-American
10 Barbara Sutton, “Poner el cuerpo: Women’s Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina,” Latin American Politics & Society 49, no. 3 (2007):129–162. Sutton highlights how the term poner el cuerpo is used to describe the embodied nature of collective protest and activist struggle, the importance placed on the physicality of acts of struggle and resistance, and as a way of referencing dedication to a cause and the coherence between words and actions. 11 Coverage of this case (12.204) and documents relating to it can be found on the website of the iachr, http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/default.asp.
Court of Human Rights are the organs within the Organization of American States (oas) for the promotion and protection of human rights. Functioning since 1979, they operate according to legal instruments, principally pacts or conventions, as well as a small but significant set of established precedents. By this time, the iachr had a strong reputation among Argentine human rights groups for its rulings against the so-called impunity/immunity laws that halted prosecution for dictatorship-era human rights violators, which it deemed incompatible with the 1978 Convention on Human Rights.12 Memoria Activa brought two major counts against the state of Argentina, each for violating the state’s obligations as a signatory of the American Convention on Human Rights, or the Pact of San José, which Argentina ratified in September 1984 upon the official return to democracy. The first accusation concerned the right to life and physical integrity of the victims of the amia, as guaranteed under Articles 4 and 5 of this convention. Memoria Activa argued that, following the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, the Argentine state had the obligation to foresee the possibility of another attack and respond appropriately in order to prevent such an occurrence. It contended that the Argentine state “failed to adopt the necessary measures to prevent the attack,” charging that the police protection of local Jewish institutions was inadequate and noting the intelligence services’ lack of attention to indications and warn- ings of a second attack. The second count concerned the violation of the rights of the victims and their families to obtain justice through local tribunals, as guaranteed by Articles 8 and 25. It denounced numerous irregularities in the investigation carried out by Judge Galeano and his office (juzgado), claiming that the Argentine state had “violated to the detriment of the relatives of the victims the right to the judicial guarantees that assure that the causes of the events that produced the damage be effectively investigated, the right that a regular process be followed against those responsible for having produced the dam- age, and that as part of this process the guilty be sanctioned and the victims compensated.”13 In taking its case to the oas, Memoria Activa effectively removed the ques- tion of citizenship rights from a closed state-citizen relationship and drew on
12 Tom Farer, “The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime: No Longer a Unicorn, Not yet an Ox,” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1997): 510–546; Robert Goldman, “History and Action: The Inter-American Human Rights System and the Role of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2009): 856–887. 13 From the presentation by Memoria Activa in front of the iachr, case 12.204, amia-Argentina.
the paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in
14 Mark Goodale, “Introduction: Locating Rights, Envisioning Law between the Global and the Local,” in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, eds. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 1–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 15 I extend this argument in Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism.
general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself— and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within an action upon a common world, loses all significance.16
Human rights, for Arendt, must be based in rights to be a citizen. Partha Chatterjee made a similar point by identifying the nation-state as the specific form created to realize the universal ideals of modern citizenship, based on free- dom (sovereignty) and equality.17 I have argued that a recognition of the con- tinuing entwinement of citizenship and human rights is not only a pragmatic reality of the contemporary world but also contains the potential to transcend the limitations that each contains due to the lingering influence of their histori- cally particular, Enlightenment-era liberalist foundations. By focusing on citi- zenship, conceived of as a dual relationship of responsibility and accountability between citizens and the state, as the primary conduit for the promotion and protection of human rights, we are able to firmly locate the collective obligations of all members of society in the mutual construction of social well-being.18
Ethnography as Anachronism
In this chapter, I have attempted, as anthropologists often do, to convey the meaning and broader implications of the actions of those I met and worked with, in this case the family members and allies of the victims of the amia bombing. I have sought to analyze and interpret their words and actions in terms of their conceptual force and their potential for rethinking or revitalizing the way we approach fundamental notions and ways of being self-in-society and enacting social change, here as relates to citizenship and human rights. In addi- tion, I have sought to do so by conveying the texture and feel of the place, time, and space that provided the context for their actions and activism. But the act of writing ethnography often (though not always) requires displacement in space.
16 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 297–298. Emphasis in original. 17 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University, 2004), 29–30. 18 Karen Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights,” in Human Rights: Critical Dialogues, ed. Mark Goodale, 98–110 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
In order to approach the emic perspective of those whose thoughts, actions, and contexts we hope to understand, we frequently inhabit their spaces, placing our bodies in the work much as protest movements themselves rely on poner el cuerpo to achieve cohesion and strength in their demands. But it also, perhaps inevitably, entails a layering of time. I was in Buenos Aires during a number of specific moments, though my engagement didn’t end when I was away. Indeed, my thoughts and attention were often there even when my body could not be, and I maintained contact by phone, Skype, and e-mail with certain people and by reading and watching local media sources. This would on happy occasion be accompanied by the arrival into my hands of select material objects, generously brought by others whose paths had led them through Buenos Aires. Even so, physical distance both limited my sense of connection and enabled me to write. Separated by distance, writing is frequently separated by time as well. Even when doing fieldwork “at home,” at some point anthropologists often need to close off a period of research in order to write about it effectively. As such, my own writings cover certain moments and not others. Added to this layering of time comes the long process of revision and publication, followed of course by the temporal distance separating publication from the moment the reader reads what is contained therein. The events themselves occur at specific moments, in physical and temporal contexts. I sit here in 2014, rethinking arguments articu- lated mostly from 2007 to 2011, on data collected from 2000 to 2009, though later revisited, corroborated, and discussed with participants and colleagues. Building a chronicle, then, is an inherently anachronistic practice. Ethnog raphy captures better than many other forms of writing the embedded tempo- rality of events but in writing removes them from their temporal location and places them in another. My reflections here on the use of the languages of citi- zenship and human rights in the search for justice after the amia bombing show how this usage has both broadly relevant, decontextualized theoretical implications for considering the evolving nature of the state-citizen relation- ship and is deeply embedded in the particular (ethnographic) moment. The long aftermath of the amia bombing provides a chance to see both the chro- nicity of the lack of justice and the layers of time and space that the illness of impunity has traversed and pervaded.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Dubois, Lindsay. “Activist Pensioners, a Contradiction in Terms? Argentina’s Jubilados.” Anthropology & Aging Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2013): 170–83. Farer, Tom. “The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime: No Longer a Unicorn, Not Yet an Ox.” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1997): 510–46. Faulk, Karen Ann. In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013. ———. “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights.” In Human Rights: Critical Dialogues, edited by Mark Goodale, 98–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ———. “The Walls of the Labyrinth: Impunity, Corruption, and the Limits of Politics in Contemporary Argentina.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008. Goldman, Robert. “History and Action: The Inter-American Human Rights System and the Role of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2009): 856–87. Goodale, Mark. “Introduction: Locating Rights, Envisioning Law between the Global and the Local.” In The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 1–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gurevich, Beatriz. “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses.” In The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, edited by Kristin Ruggiero, 86–111. Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005a. ———. Passion, Politics, and Identity: Jewish Women in the Wake of the amia Bombing in Argentina. Buenos Aires: Universidad del cema, 2005b. Lazar, Sian. El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2008. Sikkink, Kathryn. “From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights.” Latin American Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2008): 1–29. Sutton, Barbara. “Poner el Cuerpo: Women’s Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina.” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 3 (2007): 129–62. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish chorus.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–65. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Lillian M. Wohl
Introduction: Hearing the amia, Experiencing Music
The day after the amia Recital por la Reconstrucción (Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia) held on November 30, 1994, in the Estadio Obras Sanitarias—the “templo del rock porteño” (temple of Buenos Aires rock)— Argentine newspaper coverage widely applauded this benefit concert as a spectacle of solidarity in response to the attack on the Jewish community cen- ter and mutual aid organization, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia).1 With a musical lineup consisting of Fito Páez, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Ignacio Copani, Patricia Sosa, Sandra Mihanovich, Fabiana Cantilo, and Andrés Calamaro, the amia event hoped to raise money and awareness for the recon- struction of the amia building, which was destroyed in the shocking terrorist attack that took place just four and a half months earlier on July 18, 1994 (see Figure 8.1).2 The participation of these popular musicians—who repre- sented a mix of iconic legends of Argentine rock nacional (national rock) and
1 I owe a very special thanks to Sarah Green for reviewing the translations in this essay and giving me much appreciated feedback and editorial advice. I would also like to thank Sabrina Charaf at the Centro de Documentación e Información sobre Judaísmo Argentino and Marc Turkow for directing me to the archive of photos and press clippings from the Recital por la Reconstrucción. In it, articles about the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia appear in newspapers such as Clarín, La Nación, Crónica, and Página/12, among others, including Luís Bruschtein, “Rock ‘para no olvidar’ en obras en solidaridad con la amia,” Página/12, December 1, 1994; “Emotivo festival para reconstruir la amia,” Clarín, December 1, 1994; “Los sonidos del silencio,” Clarín, November 27, 1994; “Un antídoto contra el olvido,” Página/12, November 30, 1994; “Por la amia, un recital bárbaro,” Crónica, December 1, 1994; Daniel Amiano, “Otra apuesta musical por la vida,” La Nación, December 2, 1994. See also “Estadio Obras,” http://www.estadioobras.com. 2 The amia building was reinaugurated on Wednesday, May 26, 1999. See Fernando Rodríguez, “Hoy será inaugurada la nueva sede de la amia,” La Nación, May 26, 1999, http://www .lanacion.com.ar/139796-hoy-sera-inaugurada-la-nueva-sede-de-la-amia.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_010
3 See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and Labors of Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 5. Jelin distinguishes between memory as a passive practice or unconscious intrusion and memory as a “labor” required to transform social worlds through intentional, active, and productive efforts “involved in the processes of symbolic transformation and elaboration of the meanings of the past.” 4 Pablo Vila and Paul Cammack, “Rock Nacional and Dictatorship in Argentina,” Popular Music 6, no.2 (1987): 129–148. 5 Kip Pegley and Susan Fast, “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” in Music, Politics, and Violence, eds. Kip Pegley and Susan Fast, 41 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).
6 “Un antídoto contra el olvido,” Página/12, November 30, 1994. Kapszuk states: “Yo sé que hay factores artísticos que necesariamente están implicados en el show, que Spinetta hace mucho que no toca, que Páez convoca a su público…pero te aseguro que de venta, la gente pedía sus entradas para ‘lo de la amia’, nada más.” 7 Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff, “Demandas de justicia y marcas de identitdad: mani- festaciones públicas de los judíos de Buenos Aires después del atentado a amia,” presented at the Eleventh International Research Conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, June 23–26, 2002. 8 Beatriz Gurevich, “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, ed. Kristin Ruggiero, 99 (Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). 9 Fernando Rodríguez, “Hoy será inaugurada la nueva sede de la amia,” La Nación, May 26, 1999, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/139796-hoy-sera-inaugurada-la-nueva-sede-de-la-amia. As Rabbi Ben Hamu, then chief rabbi of the Comunidad Israelita Argentina, stated at the rein- auguration ceremony, “Volver a casa simboliza el espíritu de nuestro pueblo. Es nuestro rec- lamo por la vida y significa que, aún cuando las 86 víctimas dejaron en nuestros corazones un vacío que jamás podremos llenar, ninguna bomba podrá destruir nuestro espíritu.” (Returning home symbolizes the spirit of our community. It is our demand for life, and it means that even though the 86 victims left our hearts with a void that can never be filled, no bomb will ever destroy our spirit.). Originally, it was believed that there were 86 victims; that figure was later revised to be 85.
Figure 8.1 Luis Alberto Spinetta and Fito Páez performing at the Recital por la Reconstrucción, November 30, 1994 Photo courtesy of the Centro Marc Turkow.
Jewish participation in amia events as a process of transforming ethnic heri- tage into a culturally “expedient” tool in the aftermath of ethnic violence. “The role of culture,” argues George Yúdice, “has expanded in an unprecedented way into the political and economic at the same time that conventional notions of culture have been emptied out,”10 and it “underpins performativity as the fun- damental logic of social life today,” showcasing how “culture-as-resource” is mobilized to address matters of political, economic, and social importance.11 As ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier notes, “the relation between expediency, performativity, and care of the self is seldom smooth or success- ful.” She argues, “While the paradigm of expediency might be useful for inter- preting how this music enters into circulation through live performances and recordings, it does not help us to understand why and how some musi- cians themselves experience this music.”12 By focusing on the role of music at
10 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. 11 Ibid., 28. 12 Ana María Ochoa Gautier, “Disencounters Between Music’s Allure and the Expediency of Culture in Colombia,” special issue, Latin American Research Review 48 (2013): 14.
13 A series of conferences entitled Recreando la cultura judeoargentina were organized by historian and novelist Ricardo Feierstein and literature professor Stephen Sadow in the late 1990s and early 2000s, attracting international attention and fostering greater local interest in projects addressing Jewish Argentine cultural expression, from art to literature, music, theater, and film. See Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeoargentina, 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2002) and Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 2: Literature y artes plásticas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004). In 2004, a conference was held to focus on Jewish musical engagements in Argentina and beyond, organized by Mario Benzecry. See Mario Benzecry, Aporte del pueblo judío a la música: Encuentro Internacional Recreando la Cultura Judía: dedicado a la música, diciembre de 2004, auditorio amia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2009). See also Stephen Sadow, “Lamentations for the amia: Literary Responses to Communal Trauma,” in Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosín (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 149–162. 14 Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Diaspora (Boston: Brill, 2010), 4. 15 See Agosín 2005; Aizenberg 2002; Jelin 2003; Meter and Huberman 2006; Roniger and Sznajder 1998; Sarlo 2006; Spitzer 1998; Taylor 1997, 2003; Yerushalmi 1982; and Zaretsky 2008a in this chapter’s bibliography. This list is by no means exhaustive of the many excel- lent articles, essays, and full-length volumes now dedicated to the subject of art, culture, memory, and politics in Latin America.
Constructing Jewish Musical Performance through Commemoration: “El Arte Junto a Memoria Activa”
In spite of being largely forgotten today, the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia marks a point of origin in the trajectory of “public spectacle” charac- terizing Jewish Argentine musical performance since 1994 and its use as a cata- lyst for musical-political action.16 Following its example, additional benefit concerts have been held for the amia cause, organized by groups such as Memoria Activa (Active Memory)—an independent grassroots advocacy group of friends and family members of the victims of the amia attack—to demand a clarification of the facts and to seek justice for the attack. Memoria Activa has often held critical positions in opposition to the leadership of the amia and the daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations), asserting its independence as a hallmark of its political aims. In 1999, one of these concerts was held in the Teatro Gran Rex, a historic theater in downtown Buenos Aires.17 The show drew an impressive lineup of musicians such as León Gieco, the klezmer duo César Lerner and Marcelo Moguilevsky, Ignacio Copani, Victor Heredia, Los Destakados del Pelle, Gabriela Torres and Lucho Gonzalez, Alejandro Lerner, violinist Damián Bolotin, Julia Zenko, the Coro Kennedy, and Opus Cuatro. Unlike the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia, the Memoria Activa event, called El Arte Junto a Memoria Activa (Art and Memoria Activa), relied more heavily on the presentation and performance of Jewish Argentine cul- tural and religious expressions to engage participants in keeping with their ,English: justice ;צדק צדק תרדף :motto “justicia, justicia, perseguirás” (Hebrew justice, you shall pursue), the biblical command from Deuteronomy 16:20. As anthropologist Karen Ann Faulk argues,
16 See Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997), iv. As Taylor argues, “Public specta- cle is a locus and mechanism of communal identity through collective imaginings that constitute ‘nation’ as ‘an imagined political community’” (iv). While exploring the issue of gender and its relationship to the violence of the military dictatorship government during the “dirty war,” she believes that “understanding spectacle, then, is dependent on a complex scene of interface: understanding both the local cultural specifics of national dramas and the way that national and international spectacles interface and produce each other” (xi). 17 José Blumenfeld, interview, December 2011. I would like to thank Memoria Activa mem- ber José Blumenfeld for sharing with me information about the concerts and providing me with a compact disc recording of the show. Blumenfeld remembered that the first show was held in 1997 when Mercedes Sosa, the beloved Argentine folklore singer and member of the Nueva Canción (New Song) movement, was the headliner of the event.
In using this biblical passage, Memoria Activa is affirming that the strug- gle for justice is a moral injunction as well as a social responsibility. This appeal to the theological justification allows Memoria Activa to assert a religious identity, even while discursively inserting itself and its struggle within a broader national context of counterimpunity movements.18
Although León Gieco sang nationally recognized protest anthems like “Solo le pido a Dios,” this commemorative event held almost five years after the attack featured musical performances intentionally selected to highlight Jewish sound and musical traditions. For example, the first performance by Damián Bolotin was a virtuosic violin arrangement of the Yiddish folksong “Oif’n Pripetchick Brennt a Feier,” written by Mark Warshawsky, followed up by a communal sounding of the shofarot—ritual horns named in the Bible as one of the earliest musical instruments used by the Jews.19 The shofar is an iconic symbol of Jewish sound and of the Memoria Activa organization, who met each Monday morning in the Plaza Lavalle in front of the Supreme Court Building to blow the shofar at 9:53 a.m., the time of the amia attack, and to give speeches and testi- mony in protest of the lack of justice for the bombing (until their ritual meet- ings ended in 2004).20 During the show, the duo of César Lerner and Marcelo Moguilevsky performed two klezmer freilachs (an Eastern European Ashkenazic Jewish dance form) as jugglers and street performers wandered through the crowd, transforming the arena into a “carnivalesque” atmosphere.21 As the liner notes to the Libro cd Testimonio (cd Booklet of Testimony) describe, the event was intended to be a full spectacle, performing memory “not as a rally” but as
18 Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013), 96. 19 Bathja Bayer, “Music—Biblical Period,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 14, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 641–643 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007). “Oif’n Pripetchick Brennt a Feier” is perhaps one of the most well-circulated of all Yiddish folk- songs after being featured in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and this song even appears as a unifying musical theme in the 2009 Argentine film Anita, a fictional account of a young girl’s journey through Buenos Aires in the immediate aftermath of the amia attack, directed by Marcos Carnevale and starring Norma Aleandro and Alejandra Manzo. 20 José Blumenfeld, interview, December 2011. Furthermore, after 2004, the shofar remained an important symbol of protest, blown by those who still gathered in the plaza and called themselves the Citizens of the Plaza. See Natasha Zaretsky, “Citizens of the Plaza: Memory, Violence, and Belonging in Jewish Buenos Aires” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008a) and Natasha Zaretsky’s chapter “Struggles of Coherence” in this volume. 21 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941).
“an expression of life of all men and women of goodwill, Argentine Jewish and non-Jewish, of all who want to join us in this claim for justice.”22
It was an evening when things were to happen and happened. Living stat- ues, people on stilts, mimes and jugglers, true representatives of street art, were waiting at the theater hall to deliver the National Document against Impunity No. 18071994 (the date of the bombing), a small object, a symbol that synthesizes the search for justice that cannot be given up.23
Drawing on a variety of aesthetic forms, Memoria Activa organized this benefit concert as an interactive, performative musical and theatrical experience—a show designed to engender participation and to foment Jewish attention and action not only toward the amia cause but also back toward Jewish Argentine cultural expression.
Songs of Memory for the amia
Beyond the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia, the Art and Memoria Activa concert, a handful of song and dance performances addressing the amia and the Israeli Embassy bombings detail the different ways in which a particular song or an individual musician has accrued meaning for the amia cause through the active and discursive labors of musical memory. For example, León Gieco’s song “La Memoria” from the 2001 album Bandidos Rurales is sustained as an anthem to Argentina and Latin America’s victims of domestic terror during military dictatorship governments (and other human rights atrocities throughout the continent) during the twentieth century. In it, Gieco names the amia bombing alongside these tragedies as a poetic argument contending that memory accrues value and potency as the “weapon of life and history,” subsequently writing Jewish history into the greater narrative of Latin American history of the twentieth century. Similarly, Ignacio Copani’s song “Memoria Activa” has become an anthem appropriated for the amia cause; it was recently used by the dance troupe Grupo Agshamá under the direction of choreographers Ariadna Faerstein and Leandro Díaz for the show amia Sombras—a shadow ballet danced behind a white sheet as a screen to narrate a series of tableaus portraying key symbols of
22 Memoria Activa, El Arte Junto a Memoria Activa, Buenos Aires: Latín Gráfica, 1999, com- pact disc. 23 Ibid.
24 I attended this event with the Guebirtig Choir on Monday, April 15, 2012, at Club casa. 25 This recording is available in the archive at the Centro Marc Turkow. 26 One of three candómbe drums of medium size, larger and flatter sounding than the chico (small) and smaller and sharper sounding than the piano. Candómbe is especially impor- tant to Uruguayan musical and national identity. 27 This video is available on many websites. I consulted the official amia video posted to msn Video by msn Música, July 16, 2010.
“Candombito del Recuerdo” “Little Candómbe of Memory” Kevin Johansen Kevin Johansen
Te fuiste como despidiendo You left as though you were saying La otra vuelta que te vi goodbye Ahora debés estar sonriendo The last time that I saw you Parece que seguís aquí Now, you’re surely smiling It seems like you’re still here
La sombra de tu despedida The shadow of your departure Como un tambor a resonar Like a drum resounding Para las vueltas de tu vida For everything you lived in life Y volverá a su lugar And it will return to its place
Volverá It will return A su lugar To its place Na na na na na Na na na na na Que volverá a resonar It will resound again
Y ese repique de tambores That repique of drums Por el camino que andarás On the path that you will walk Ese latir de tus amores That beating of your love Que volverá a resonar It will resound again
Volverá a sonar It will resound again Volverá a su lugar It will return to its place
Na na na na na Na na na na na
(Source: Transcription from the (Translation by author with official amia video posted to msn Sarah Green.) Video by msn Música, July 16, 2010.) Transcription of lyrics by author.
As acts of “musical reclamación”—that is, musical protests, demands, com- memorations, homages, and tributes to make reparations or to address matters of distress in reference to an act of violence or response to conflict—these songs, dance performances, and concerts associated with the amia attack both commemorate and mourn the victims in different ways. For example, public performances of “amia Sombras” by Grupo Agshamá and the video of
Johansen’s “Candombito del Recuerdo” exemplify a style of representation found in artistic commemoration, in which expressive practices directly engage with symbols of the attack. These types of songs and performances are representative of what musicologist Amy Wlodarski calls a “testimonial aes- thetic,” wherein secondary witnesses later give voice to a “postmemorial” phase of remembrance representationally distinct from primary accounts.28 Other musical examples such as the benefit concert format leverage the individual personalities and profiles of key musicians to realize what ethnomusicologist Jonathan Ritter observes as a “self-referentiality within the testimonial song tradition today, allowing meanings to stack upon meanings, remembrances upon remembrances, to accrue and sediment to particular texts and songs.”29 Moreover, all of these expressive forms deal with the question of the politiciza- tion of memory as an act of public commemoration and the ways in which musical performance opens up a space for public debate.30 However, not all musical practices referencing the amia tragedy or occurring in its memorial auditorium directly address the attack or locate the importance of the role of musical forms in the frameworks of primary or secondary witness. In fact, one critical outcome of the varied uses of musical performance after the amia attack—focused on understanding the experience of the uses of music—is that everyday musical performances and regular musical programming events at and coordinated by the amia emerge as a critical site of memory after this collective trauma. As ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman insists, “The identity of Jewishness depends on where Jewish music takes place”—a key point that lays a critical foundation for understanding how musical performance is expe- rienced at the amia.31 While musical labors of commemoration establish the amia as a site of memory, the everyday programs taking place within its
28 Amy Wlodarski, “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 109; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Hirsch addresses the role of the visual medium of the photograph to mediate what she calls “postmemory”—the means of remembrance through second- hand means of the transference of memories, which she locates in the transmission of information and affect taking place through, especially, familial relationships. 29 Jonathan Ritter, “Complementary Discourses of Truth and Memory: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Canción Social Ayacuchana,” in Music, Politics, and Violence, eds. Kip Pegley and Susan Fast, 214 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012). 30 Ritter, “Complementary Discourses”; Pablo Vila, “Argentina’s ‘Rock Nacional’: The Struggle for Meaning,” Latin American Music Review 10, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1989): 1–28; Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 31 Philip Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxxii.
Addressing the Ethnographic Present: Jews, Music, and Collective Memory in the Café Literario and the Auditorio amia
Over multiple trips to Buenos Aires to conduct ethnographic and archival research on Jewish Argentine musical practices from 2010 to 2014, I have observed how different processes of musical remembrance overlap to define the amia as a key location in the network of Jewish performance spaces in Buenos Aires. Given the amia’s symbolic and real importance as a central Jewish organization in Argentina, the amia also plays a critical role in central- izing a musical repertory of songs, instrumental works, themes, artists, and creative practices, thus demonstrating the dynamic and elastic ways in which contemporary Jewish Argentine identity is negotiated through the labors of musical memory. My research is deeply tied to my personal experiences as a foreign researcher visiting the amia to attend performances in the Café Literario salon on the second floor and in the subterranean performance space
32 See Breckenridge 2009; Huyssen 2003; and Winter 1998 in this chapter’s bibliography. 33 Paja Faudree, Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013), 8.
34 Natasha Zaretsky, “Arriving in Buenos Aires,” in Violence: Ethnographic Encounters, ed. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, 107–118 (New York: Berg, 2009). 35 Yiddish spellings of these particular songs reflect the titles of the songs as they appear in the Coro Ale Brider repertory that I collected during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires in 2011–2012. 36 Francisco José García Gallardo, “El ‘popurrí’ en las murgas o chirigotas del carnival de Huelva,” Trans Iberia/Revista Transcultural de Música 1 (1997), http://www.sibetrans.com/ trans/articulo/316/el-popurri-en-las-murgas-o-chirigotas-del-carnaval-de-huelva. 37 Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 76.
Figure 8.2 Coro Ale Brider in the Café Literario Photos by author. to the musical “remix” as an intertextual form; however, rather than expressly focusing on creating new musical meanings, the popurrí is a series of samples of easily recognized musical motifs directing audience responses back toward the past and to the original version of the song. For a popurrí to successfully engage an audience, it must include tunes and lyrics familiar to the intended audience as a technology of memory drawing on the soundscapes of shared history communicated by collective engagement. The Coro Ale Brider’s first song set this tone of participatory engagement with the invocation of this popurrí, “Idish 1,” establishing the centrality of a transnational canon of popu- lar Yiddish folksongs in Argentina. With their feathered endings and unequal balance of male and female voices, the audible, aesthetic qualities highlighted the emphasis on unison singing for social pleasure.38 Following up the popurrí “Idish 1,” the choir then moved on to sing a version of “Basavilbaso” by Jevl Katz, a Lithuanian immigrant and Jewish folk musician
38 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
39 In the past five years, excellent new research on Jevl Katz has been published by Zachary Baker, “Gvald, Yidn, Buena Gente Ievel Katz, Yiddish Bard of the Río de la Plata,” in Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage, eds. Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 202–222. See also Ariel Svarch, “Mucho lujo: Jevl Katz y las complejidades del espectáculo étnico-popular en Buenos Aires, 1930–1940,” Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional 53 (Summer 2013) and Mollie Lewis Nouwen, Oy, My Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). 40 Eugene Sofer, From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982). 41 Victor A. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1930: In Search of an Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). 42 Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6.
It is much more difficult to curate a choral repertory in Yiddish because you have to realize that, unfortunately, there are few people who speak Yiddish. The majority of our listeners have heard some traditional songs in Yiddish, and when they are sung, what you do is to take them to some moment of their life that was, almost always, happy. And so, the person enjoys listening to something that he or she likes and hasn’t heard in a while. It’s like smelling a perfume that evokes a pleasant memory of a moment in your life. And so, that is our role—finding those songs.43
By incorporating extramusical gestures and forgoing the use of repertory fold- ers—instead insisting that choir members memorize all song lyrics—the choir is able to relate to audiences in ways that reach beyond the sonic material to create an inclusive atmosphere not solely dependent on linguistic acuity but driven more by the symbolic currency of the postvernacular musical reso- nances of Yiddish.44 Throughout Buenos Aires, Yiddish choirs have played a special role in sus- taining Jewish Argentine cultural expression, and as anthropologist Natasha Zaretsky argues, some have also participated as key actors in the “social move- ment” of protesting the amia and Israeli Embassy attacks, as her study of the
43 Horacio Liberman, interview, February 2012. Liberman states, “Es mucho mas difícil hacer un repertorio para un coro en idish porque tenés que saber que es poca la gente que conoce el idish lamentabemente…. La mayoría de nuestros oyentes han escuchado can- ciones en idish, bien tradicionales y cuando se las cantan, lo que hacés es llevarlo a algún momento de su vida, que casi siempre fue feliz. Entonces disfruta de escuchar algo que le gusta y que hacía mucho no escuchaba…. Es como oler un perfume que te lleva al recu- erdo de algún momento agradable de tu vida. Entonces, esa es nuestra function—encon- trar esas canciones.” 44 For more on Yiddish literature and expression in Argentina, see the writings of Eliahu Toker. See also, Silvia Hansman, Susana Skura, and Gabriela Kogan, Oysfarkoyft: Localidades agotadas (Buenos Aires: Del Nuevo Extremo, 2006); Perla Sneh, “Ídish al sur, una rama en sombras,” in Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios, eds. Haim Avni, Judit Bokser Liweant, Sergio DellaPergola, Margalit Bejarano, and Leonardo Senkman, 657–676 (Orlando: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011); and Fernando Fischman, “En la conversación fluía. Arte verbal, consideraciones emic y procesos conmemorativos judíos argentinos,” Runa 29 (2008): 123–138; “Using Yiddish: Language Ideologies, Verbal Art and Identity among Argentine Jews,” Journal of Folklore Research 48, no. 1 (2011): 37–61; “‘Religiosos, no; tradicionalistas, sí’: Un acercamiento a la noción de tradición en judíos argentinos,” Revista Sambatión 1 (2006): 43–58.
Guebirtig Choir demonstrates.45 The social justice mission of the Guebirtig Choir was a central impetus for its formation under the leadership of music teacher Reizl Sztarker, who initially brought together a group of friends to sit together and sing songs in Yiddish while processing the aftermath of the attack.46 This group would go on to include hundreds of members at the height of its popularity in the late 1990s, participating in choral functions, actos,47 and concerts throughout Buenos Aires and the interior provinces.48 In contrast to the Guebirtig Choir, the Coro Ale Brider was founded without such explicit political aims. Instead, it originally grew out of the regular meet- ings of friends gathering together after Kabalat Shabat (Friday evening) ser- vices to discuss the impact of the Argentine economic crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which left many people without work in the city. Horacio and Mirtha led and participated in these gatherings every Friday night to share a pizza and to play games, eventually incorporating group singing into their regular routine and featuring folksongs in Yiddish and Spanish. By the mid- 2000s, the Coro Volver a Empezar, and later the Coro Ale Brider, were founded and began performing regularly in the amia and other Jewish institutions throughout Buenos Aires. Since the early 2000s, the Dúo Guefiltefish have performed all over Latin America and in Israel, becoming the official representatives of the amia on a fund-raising trip to Miami in 2006 during the fallout of the Argentine economic crisis. At the Dúo Guefiltefish’s tenth anniversary concert held in the Auditorio amia in December 2012, former director of the Departamento de Cultura
45 Natasha Zaretsky, “Citizens of the Plaza: Memory, Violence, and Belonging in Jewish Buenos Aires” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008a). 46 Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–255 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008b). 47 Karen Ann Faulk translates the Spanish word/concept “acto” as “protest-memorials.” See Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013). 48 As a part of my dissertation research, I worked extensively with the Guebirtig Choir, observing and participating in weekly rehearsals and attending various concerts. Their work should be considered a key example of a group using musical performance to pro- cess, mourn, and recontextualize the amia bombing. Yiddish spellings of these particular songs reflect the titles of the songs as they appear in the Guebirtig Choir repertoire I col- lected during my fieldwork from 2011 to 2013. See also ethnomusicologist Abagail Wood’s 2013 book, And We’re All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2013).
(Department of Culture) Moshé Korin spoke fondly of the group to open the show. “You should know,” he stated, “that Liberman, Zucker—Mirtha and Horacio—are not only singers, great singers from the Coro Kennedy, but they have a spectacular stage presence, giving audiences what they want, and for me, providing great joy and happiness.”49
A Mode of Conclusion: The amia and Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires
As the current director of Cultural Programming for amia Cultura, Gabriela Wilensky, informed me, the current purpose of cultural programming at the amia is manifold:
amia’s Department of Cultura’s mission is twofold. On the one hand, it sets out to spread Jewish culture within the Jewish community and soci- ety as a whole and on the other hand, to bring general cultural activities to the Jewish community. And to develop this double mission, it orga- nizes shows, concerts, activities, courses, and a number of other events, just as frequently at the amia as in other institutions, public spaces, or in public life. Since our dual mission is to be able to bring culture to the community and to society in general, our purpose is also to develop all of this and to guarantee the diffusion and continuity of the Jewish Argentine community.50
Since the retirement of former director Moshé Korin at the end of 2012, Wilensky and her team have rebranded the Departamento de Cultura as “amia Cultura,” and she has worked to reorient the mission of the cultural program- ming unit to direct a “puesta en valor” (program of restoration of cultural patri- mony) aimed at attracting more youth and young families to amia
49 Moshé Korin in the Auditorio amia, December 2012. My emphasis. 50 Gabriela Wilensky, interview, March 2014. Wilensky states: “El Departamento de Cultura de amia tiene una doble misión. Por un lado, se propone difundir la cultura judía en la comunidad judía y en la sociedad en su conjunto y por otro lado acercar la cultura general a la comunidad judía y para desarrollar está doble misión, organiza espectáculos, conci- ertos, actividades, cursos y una cantidad de eventos tanto dentro de amia que en otras instituciones y en la vida pública o en espacios públicos. Porque la doble misión es poder acercar la cultura a la comunidad, a la sociedad y la cultura general y para desarrollar todo esto y guarantizar la difusión y la, digamos, continuidad de la comunidad judía argentina.”
Cultura–sponsored activities. The amia bombing played a major role in the transformation of the form, content, and direction of cultural programming at the amia. As Wilensky told me, “After the attack—this year marks the twenti- eth anniversary of the bombing—there was an opening of the amia’s doors to all of society, which also opened up the cultural events it could offer…giving the institution increasingly greater visibility and participation.”51 Although seniors still remain the most steady and stable audience consuming cultural programs at the amia, Wilensky is committed to lowering the average age of participants to sustain future amia events (while continuing to serve exist- ing audiences). She named musicians such as the klezmer duo Lerner y Moguilevsky, the Orquesta Kef, and dj and musician Simja Dujov (Gabriel Dujovne) as critical to the achievement of these aims. Hearing the legacy of trauma and violence in reference to the amia requires a consideration of practices of musical commemoration and testimony as well as the practices of musical memory that shape experience on a quotidian basis. These musical performance repertories outline more general connec- tions between the Jewish Argentine community and the greater Jewish Diaspora while designating the amia as a site of hybridization through mem- ory, exemplifying how, as historian Katharina Schramm argues, “the process of the identification of memory with place is not at all self-evident, as it implies the complex entanglement of procedures of remembering, forgetting and the production of counter-memories.”52 Through the legacies of trauma, the physi- cal space of the amia itself—including the Café Literario and the Auditorio amia—are imbued with the capacity to inflect musical performance with memorial meaning that, in turn, is reflected back on the amia to reinforce and resacralize this space through narratives and gestures of ethnic heritage, high- lighting different facets and key symbols of Jewish Argentine identity. Ethno musicologist Judah Cohen argues that, as a Jewish musical process, sacralization is “the act of creating musical material objects specifically to enhance Jewish religious rituals.”53 Yet songs commemorating the amia attack and musical programming functioning within the amia building itself operate outside of
51 Ibid. Wilensky states: “Después del atentado…que este año es el 20th aniversario del aten- tado, a medio de alguna manera abre las puertas, hacia toda la sociedad. Abriendo la oferta cultural también. Abriendo todo—abriendo también la oferta de los servicios del empleo, una cantidad de cosas, pero abriendo también la cultura también se abrió a la sociedad y empieza cada vez mayor visibilidad y participación.” 52 Katharina Schramm, “Introduction: Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space,” History and Memory 23, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 5. 53 Judah Cohen, “The Jewish Sound of Things,” Material Religion 3 (2007): 337.
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18 J 2, 81–82, 129–130 American Convention on Human Rights (See 85 puntos de color (85 points of color) Pact of San José) 164 (Liniers, Ricardo) 177 American Jewish Committee (ajc) 62, 67 Abregú, Martín 34 amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (see Grandmothers Argentina) (also see Jewish community of the Plaza de Mayo) ix, 13, 26, 28–29, organizations) viii–x, 1–9, 18–20, 22–31, 35, 39, 49–50, 85 37–40, 44–45, 47, 52, 56–85, 89, 91–92, Accountability 19–20, 34, 37–38, 43, 54, 59, 94–99, 101–106, 109–114, 117–121, 123, 125, 133–134, 143, 149, 155, 166, 168 127–131, 134–135, 138–141, 143, 146–149, Active Memory (see Memoria Activa) ix, 154–158, 160–181, 184–189 2, 4–6, 9, 19–32, 34–38, 44–53, 56–58, amia bombing (also amia attack; bomb; 64–67, 73, 78–82, 101, 106, 111, 125–130, disaster; explosion; tragedy; also see 135–137, 139–140, 142–146, 148, 155–161, atentado) vii–xi, 1–9, 12–13, 18–20, 22–26, 163–165, 174–176 28–31, 37–38, 41, 44–48, 53, 56–68, 71–75, Activist; activism vii, xii, 1–2, 4, 9–10, 13, 18, 20, 77–85, 89, 91–92, 94–100, 102–107, 109–114, 24, 29, 34, 36–38, 48, 62, 80–81, 113, 127, 117–123, 125, 127–131, 134–149, 155–158, 136, 139–140, 156, 160–161, 163, 166, 168, 174 160–171, 173–179, 181, 184–185, 187–189 Acto de Iom Haatzmauut (2013) (Celebration amia building (see façade) ix, 4, 8, 18, of Israeli Independence Day) (also see 20, 23–24, 34, 36, 38, 45, 59, 66, 72–74, Israel) 177 77–78, 84, 91–92, 94–96, 98–99, 102–104, Actos (also see Marches; Monday morning 106, 110, 117, 119–121, 125, 127–129, gatherings; Protests; Rallies) vii, ix, 1, 139–141, 155, 157, 160, 169, 171, 177, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 12–13, 16–18, 20–23, 26–28, 30, 180–181, 187 35–36, 39, 42–43, 45–50, 52–55, 57, 63, 65, amia case; amia investigation; amia 74, 76–81, 95, 99, 101–102, 106–107, 111, 121, cause 2–3, 6, 8–9, 18–31, 34, 45–46, 125–131, 135–137, 139–146, 148–149, 153, 54, 56, 58, 62, 64–65, 77, 82, 112, 119, 129, 155–161, 163, 167, 175, 177–178, 184–185 146, 149, 155–156, 158, 163–165, 170–171, Adler, Maurice and Stella 102 174, 176–177 Advocate; advocacy 3, 14, 29, 78, 80–81, amia Cultural Activities, amia 128–129, 174 Departamento de Cultura (amia Aftermath vii–viii, xii–xiii, 2–8, 19, 38, 78, Department of Culture) 103–104, 121, 84, 99, 127, 132, 134–135, 143, 145, 150, 180, 185–186, 188 165, 167, 170, 172, 175, 185, 188 amia Memorial (in La Tablada Cemetery) Agam, Yaacov (see Monument to the Memory (see Marian Shapiro) 75 of the Victims of the Terrorist Attack on amia Recital por la Reconstrucción amia) 74–75, 104, 177 (Concert for the Reconstruction of the Agamben, Giorgio 14, 38 amia) x, 169–171, 174, 176 Agency 5, 7, 125, 127, 133, 149, 151, 183 amia Victims (also see Martyrs) vii–viii, Aguinis, Marcos (see Asalto al paraíso) x, 2, 4, 8–9, 13–14, 17–26, 28–29, 31, 34, 106–107, 118–120, 122, 124 38, 45, 50, 59, 63–64, 68, 70, 72–75, Aizenberg, Edna (see Books and Bombs in 77–79, 82, 84, 91, 94–95, 98, 104–105, Buenos Aires) 103, 121–122, 173, 188 109, 111, 125–129, 135, 140–147, Alfonsín, Raúl 14–15, 42, 48 154, 158, 161–162, 164, 166, 170–171, Allen, Woody: Zelig 115 174, 176–178 Alperson, Mordejai 102 Auditorio amia (amia Auditorium) 105, Álvarez, Carlos “Chacho” 55–56 173, 179–181, 185–187
“amia Sombras” 176, 178 Barrio Norte (Neighborhood in Buenos Amster, Enrique 104 Aires) 137 Anderson, Benedict (see “Imagined “Basavilbaso” (Katz, Jevl) 182–183 communities”) 10 “Basta de Impunidad” (“Enough Impunity”) Anti-Semitism; anti-Semitic 8, 25–26, 30, (also see Impunity) ix, 23, 32, 35 113, 115, 120, 128, 171 Begin, Menachem 104 APEMIA (Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento Belonging (national belonging; social del Masacre Impune de la amia) 29, belonging; also see Identity) xii, 1–3, 81–82, 99, 129–130, 161 5–11, 37, 45–46, 52–53, 78, 101, 105, 124, 128, Aranovich, Claudia 104 130, 133, 139, 144, 149, 152, 159, 168, 171, 175, Architecture 3, 80, 84, 138 185, 190 Arendt, Hannah 107, 165–166 Beraja, Ruben 23, 28, 65 Argentina vii, xi–xiii, 1–19, 22–23, 25–28, Berlin Wall 68, 72, 76 36–44, 46, 49, 51, 53–55, 57–67, Bhabha, Homi 99 69–71, 75–77, 79–83, 85, 99, 101–102, Birmajer, Marcelo 61, 102, 105 104–106, 108–110, 113–125, 127–135, 137, Blumenfeld, José vii, 174–175 139–140, 142, 144–146, 149–152, 155–157, Body; bodies; embodiment; embodied; 160–164, 168–171, 173–176, 179–186, reembody v, 1, 3, 6, 8, 10–13, 17, 26, 37–38, 188–190 51, 53, 62, 65, 69–70, 77–78, 85, 94, 98, 101, Consulate of 110 103, 107, 135, 143, 148, 159, 163, 165, 167–168, “Argentina potencia” 15–16, 18 177, 183, 188 Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut “poner el cuerpo” 163, 167–168 (yivo; also iwo) viii, 78, 130 Bohlman, Philip 179, 188 “Argentineanness;” Argentineness; Bolotin, Damián 174–175 argentinidad (also see Identity— Bonaparte, Laura 65 Argentine identity; see also Identity— Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires (Aizenberg, national identity) 22, 30, 38, 74, 139, 171 Edna) xi, 59–60, 99, 104, 121, 188 Art; artist; artistic x–xii, 2, 4–5, 20, 55, 70, 74, Borges, Jorge Luis xi, 61, 69, 71, 76, 99, 104, 76–78, 84, 90–91, 98, 100, 102–107, 110, 121–122, 188 121–123, 127, 131, 146, 151, 170–171, 173–174, Borneman, John 134, 150 176–177, 179–181, 184, 188 Bortnik, Aída 107, 122 “Arte Junto a Memoria Activa, el” (Art and Bosnia 114 Memoria Activa) 174, 176 Brodsky, Marcelo (see Buena memoria; Nexo; Asalto al paraíso (Aguinis, Marcos) 118–119, Piedras por la justicia) iv, vii, ix, 5, 89–94, 122 98–100 Ashkenazi; Ashkenazic 78, 175 Buena memoria (Brodsky, Marcelo) 89, 92, 99 Atentado (see amia—amia Buenos Aires vii, ix, xi–xiii, 1, 6, 8–9, 12, 16–17, bombing) 5, 19, 23, 28, 40, 70, 76–82, 92, 20, 35, 40, 42, 44, 57, 59–60, 62–64, 68–71, 94–95, 99, 103–107, 109–110, 112–113, 119–121, 77–78, 91–94, 99, 101, 103–106, 110, 113, 145, 171, 187, 189 115–119, 121–122, 124–125, 127–128, 130–131, Auschwitz xii, 100, 110, 112, 114, 123 134, 136, 138, 141, 143, 146, 152–153, 159, 162, Ayacucho Street 78 167–171, 173–175, 180–181, 183–186, 188–190 “Az der Rebbe Zingt” 181 Burstein, Sergio 81, 130
“Bai Mir Vistu Shein” 181 Cabezas, José Luis (see Photojournalist) ix, Bajder, Perla xii, 110, 123 18, 28, 35, 54 Bal, Mieke 4, 132–133, 150 “Cada 18” (Rago, Juan Martín) 177 Banchero, El 136–137, 139, 160–162 “Cada Día 18” (Guterman, Sofía Bandidos Rurales (Gieco, Léon) 176 Kaplinsky) 177
Café Literario salon x, 180–182, 187 Colson, Donald B. 98, 100 Calamaro, Andrés 169 Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas de Cammack, Paul 170, 190 Terrorismo de Estado (The Commission “Candombito del recuerdo” (Johansen, Kevin for Monuments to the Victims of State and Ricardo Liniers) 177–179 Terrorism) 70, 76, 91 Cantilo, Fabiana 169 Communist 161 Caramelo descompuesto, el (Feierstein, Comunidad Homosexual Argentina Ricardo) 120 (cha) 156 Cartoneros 138 conadep (Comisión Nacional sobre la Caruth, Cathy 100, 132–133, 142, 145, 150 Desaparición de Personas or National Casa Rosada (Presidential Palace) 130 Commission of Disappeared) (see Nunca Castillo, Abelardo 64, 67 Más Report) 13, 25, 40, 128, 150 Cavallo, Domingo 56 Convention on Human Rights (1978) 164 cels (Centro de Estudios Legales y Cooperativa San Telmo (Ex-Padela) 154 Sociales) 8, 12–13, 17, 26–27, 34, 39–40, 42 Coordinadora de Trabajadores Desocupados Cement barriers; cement barricades (see Anibal Verón (Union of Unemployed insecurity; pilotes; security) 24, 36, 44, Workers Anibal Verón) 57 128, 130, 140 Copani, Ignacio (see “Memoria Activa”) 169, Centro de Documentación e Información 174, 176 sobre Judaismo Argentino Marc Turkow Corach, Carlos 28 (Marc Turkow Center for Documentation Coro Ale Brider (All Brothers Choir) x, 181–182, and Information about Argentine Judaism 184–185 at the AMIA) (see Centro Mark Coro Judío Popular Mordje Guebirtig Turkow) viii, 102, 120, 169, 172, 177 (or Coro Guebirtig; Gebirtig Choir) 78, Centro Marc Turkow (see Centro de 105, 130, 177, 185 Documentación e Información sobre Coro Kennedy 174, 186 Judaismo Argentino Marc Turkow; Marc Coro Volver a Empezar 185 Turkow Library) viii, 102, 120, 169, 172, 177 correpi (Coordinadora contra la Represión Chab, Victor 105 Policial e Institucional) 18 Chatterjee, Partha 166–167 Corrientes (Province in Argentina) 16 Chirom, Daniel 107–110, 122 Corrientes Avenue 136 Citizen; citizenry; citizenship xi, xiii, 1–3, Cortes de ruta 16 6–7, 12, 14, 16, 19, 22, 25, 27–29, 36, 38–39, Crisis 15, 23, 26, 40–42, 56–57, 128, 41, 43, 48, 52, 57, 64, 106–107, 116, 124, 127, 139, 171, 185 129, 131, 135, 137, 140, 144–146, 150, Cromañón 153 152–156, 158–168, 175, 185, 189–190 Crónica 169 Citizens of the Plaza (see Ciudadanos de la Crónista, El 1 Plaza) 6, 127, 129, 135, 137, 154–155, Cuando digo Magdalena (Steimberg, 159–163, 175, 185, 190 Alicia) 61, 67 Ciudad Universitaria 70, 78, 91 Cutral-có 16 Ciudadanos de la Plaza (see Citizens of the Czyzewski, Luis 81 Plaza) 6, 127, 129, 135, 137, 154–155, 159–163, 175, 185, 190 daia (Delegación de Asociaciones lsraelitas Civil society xi, 9, 13, 16, 36, 43, 127, 130, 132, Argentinas) (see Jewish community 144–145 organizations) viii, 23, 26, 28–29, 52–53, Clarín 64, 67, 74, 76, 169 65, 128, 150, 174 cofavi (Comisión de Familiares de Víctimas Dance 109, 175–178, 181 de la Violencia Institucional) 18 Danziger, Danilo 104 Cohen, Judah 187–188 Death flights (see “Flights of death”) 12
Del corazón al cielo (Guterman, Sofía espejo de las palabras, El (Grimberg, Kaplinsky) 100, 111, 123 Susana) 112, 123 Democracy; democratic; Estadio Obras Sanitarias 169 democratization 9, 13–14, 17, 20, 22, Ethnicity; ethnic; ethnicized 10–11, 38, 54, 29–30, 34, 36–43, 48, 50, 65, 71, 74–75, 120, 59–60, 71, 105, 134, 150, 158, 171–173, 183, 124, 164–165, 189–190 187–189 Desde la cima (Nasatsky, Miryam Gover Ethnography; ethnographic xiii, 2–6, 125, de) 112, 122 131, 136–137, 145, 153, 155, 159, 166–167, Destakados del Pelle 174 180–181, 190 Detenido/detenida (detained) 1, 160 Ethnomusicologist; ethnmusicology xiii, 3, Deterritorialize; deterritorialization 172, 179, 183, 185, 187 (see Reterritorialization; Europe; Europeanness; Eastern Territory) 12, 24–25, 37 European 60–62, 68–69, 72, 128, 138, 175, Di Tella, Guido 19 183, 190 Diaspora xiii, 103, 123, 157, 168, 171, 173, 187, 189 Exclusion; exclude (see “Others”) ix, 10–11, Díaz, Leandro 176 13–14, 16, 18, 26–27, 34–38, 56, 62, 64, Dickman, Enrique 66 80–81, 128, 143–144 “Dirty War” (see Military Dictatorship; Expediency of culture (see George Proceso de Reorganización Nacional) xii, Yúdice) 172, 189–190 4, 10, 12, 39, 43, 145, 151, 157, 174, 190 Disappeared; disappear; disappearance 1–2, Façade (see amia—amia 4, 10–14, 17–18, 25, 34, 37, 39–40, 43, 49, building) 91–92, 94–95, 98, 103, 153 53–54, 60, 63–64, 68–70, 72, 77, 85, 90–91, Faerstein, Ariadna 176 128, 133, 145, 150–151, 154, 156–157, 174, 190 Falkland Islands (Malvinas) 69–70, 72, Discourse v, 4–6, 9–10, 14–15, 19–20, 23, 127 27–29, 44–46, 48–50, 52–54, 56–58, 62, Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas del 80, 103, 123, 156–157, 168, 171, 179, 189 Atentado a la amia (Family Members and Discrimination; discriminate ix, 35, 59, 63, Friends of the Victims of the amia 71, 139, 156 Bombing) ix, 2, 4, 19, 28, 73, 78–84, 95, “Dona Dona” 181 100, 128–130, 140–142 Dujov, Simja (Gabriel Dujovne) 187 Faudree, Paja 180, 188 Dúo Guefiltefish (Gefiltefish Duo) 181, Faulk, Karen Ann 137, 150, 155, 165–166, 168, 183, 185 174–175, 185, 189 Feierstein, Ricardo (see El caramelo Editorial Acervo Cultural 103–104, 124 descompuesto; La historia de los judíos Editorial Dunken 104 argentinos; La logia del umbral; Mestizo; Editorial Milá 70, 76, 100, 102, 104, 106–107, also El libro del centenario, co-ed. with 110–111, 114, 121–123, 173 Perla Sneh) viii, xii, 61–62, 67, 102–104, Editorial Planeta 12, 43, 61, 67, 103, 115, 122 106–107, 114–118, 120–123, 173 Eichelbaum, Samuel 66, 105 Fingueret, Manuela 61 En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir “Flights of death” (see Death flights) 12 (Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky) 85, 100 Folksong 175, 181–183, 185 “Encuentro” 104–106 Forgetting; forget; forgotten; unforget- England 19 table 26, 63–64, 66, 69–73, 84, 100, 134, Enlightenment 166 170, 174, 187–188 “Escombros” exhibit 121 frepaso (Frente País Solidario or Front for a esma (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada; or Country in Solidarity) 55 National School of Mechanics) 2 Freud, Sigmund 133, 150
Galeano, Judge Juan José 24, 155–156, 164 Heredia, Victor 174 Gaucho xi, 114–115, 117, 122–123 Hezbollah 8, 20, 24, 118 gauchos judíos, los (see Alberto Hirsch, Baron Mauricio von (or Maurice; Gerchunoff) xi, 122 see Jewish Colonization Gautier, Ana María Ochoa 172, 189 Association) 183 Gender (see Identity—gender identity; Hirsch, Marianne (see Memory— women) 4, 10–12, 43, 60, 63, 94, 145, 151, Postmemory) 85, 100, 179, 189 156, 159, 174, 176, 190 Historia de los judíos argentinos (Feierstein, Generations of the Shoah (Generaciones de Ricardo) 115, 122 la Shoá) 105 Holocaust (see Shoah) xi–xiii, 69–70, 73, 76, Geography 70 100, 102, 104–105, 110, 119, 127–128, Gerchunoff, Alberto xi, 61, 66, 99, 102, 104, 130–132, 135, 151, 179, 189 121–122, 188 Hombre de dos amores (Leviton, Sol) 105 German; Germany 68, 160, 179, 189 Hospital de Clínicas iv, 91, 94, 140 Germano, Gustavo 89, 99 Human rights (see Rights) xi, xiii, 2, 4–6, Gieco, Léon (see “La Memoria”; Bandidos 9–10, 13–20, 23–29, 34, 36–43, 48–50, Rurales) 174–176 52–55, 58, 60, 83, 129, 135, 137, 140, Ginsberg, Laura vii, 25, 28–29, 65–66, 81, 130 143–145, 150, 153, 155–158, 161, 163–168, Glickman, Nora: Liturgías 105 175–176, 185 Globalized; globalization 15, 69, 79, 100 human rights organizations; human rights González, Lucho 174 movements 4, 9–10, 13–15, 17, 20, Gramscian 14 25–26, 28–29, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 48–50, gran mentira, La (Guterman, Sofía 52, 144–145, 156–158, 161 Kaplinsky) ix, 84–85, 100 human rights violations; human rights Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo abuses; atrocity/atrocities 9, 14, 17, (see Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) ix, 13, 20, 24, 26–27, 34, 41, 43, 48, 53–54, 78, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, 49–50, 85 84, 156, 164, 176 Greater Buenos Aires 16 Humanity 113, 165 Grieve (see Mourning) 66, 107 Huyssen, Andreas 4, 79, 90–91, 98, 100, Grimberg, Susana (see El espejo de las 180, 189 palabras) 107, 112–113, 123 Hybridization 53, 187 Grünberg, Carlos 66 Guterman, Andrea 73, 78, 81, 83, 85–89, 95, Identity xii, 3, 5–6, 10–12, 16–17, 19, 26, 98, 111 30, 39, 42, 44–45, 47, 53, 55–57, 61, 102, Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky (see “Cada Día 18;” 105–106, 110, 114, 117, 123, 156–158, 161, Del corazón al cielo: En cada primavera 168, 171, 173–175, 177, 179–180, 183–184, renace la alegría de vivir; La gran 187–189 mentira) vii, 5, 73, 77–78, 81–85, 89, 95, Argentine identity 98–100, 107, 110–111, 123, 177 (see “Argentineanness”; identity— national identity) 6, 22, 30, 38, H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la 157, 179, 183–184 Justicia contra el Olvido y el collective identity 11 Silencio) 26, 133 gender identity (also see gender; Haggadah 108, 110 women) 12, 61, 156 Hebraica (also Sociedad Hebraica) 78, 119, 130 Jewish Argentine identity 6, 53, 57, Hebrew (language) 45, 59, 104, 110, 174 105–106, 114, 173, 180, 187–188 Hebrews 19 Jewish identity (see Jewishness) 3, 30, Heffes, Gisela 66–67 53, 56, 61, 105, 117, 161, 171, 179
Identity (cont.) Jelin, Elizabeth (see Memory—“labors of national identity (see “Argentineanness”; memory”) 4, 13–14, 26, 38, 41, 78, 100, 130, Identity—Argentine identity) 6, 11, 16, 132–133, 144, 150, 170, 173, 189 19, 105, 177, 183 Jewish Colonization Association (jca) (see religious identity 158, 175 Baron Mauricio von Hirsch) 183 “Imagined Communities” (see National Jewish community 1, 3, 8–9, 19–20, 23–26, Imaginary; Benedict Anderson) 10, 39 44–45, 53, 56–58, 69, 77, 103, 110, Immigration; immigrants; migration; 116–117, 121, 128–130, 138, 150, 157–158, migrants xiii, 3, 5, 27, 60–62, 66, 102–103, 169, 171, 186 113, 115–117, 182–183 Jewish community organizations (or Impunity; (also counterimpunity; see institutions; see amia; daia) 44, 53 Injustice) vii, ix, 2–7, 18, 20, 22–23, Jewish Museum (Museo Judío) 110 27–30, 32, 34–36, 38, 50, 52, 55, 63, 65, 71, Jewish music (also see Music) 6, 169, 171, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 85, 127, 129, 133, 135, 173–174, 179, 186–188 142–146, 148–149, 155–156, 164, 167–168, Jewishness (see Identity—Jewish 175–176 identity) 53, 171, 179 “National Document Against Johansen, Kevin (see “Candombito del Impunity” ix, 30, 176 recuerdo”; Sur o no sur) 177–179 “regime of impunity” 18, 27, 34 Judaism (also Jewish holidays) viii, xi, 20, Inclusion; inclusive 7, 10–11, 13–14, 17, 19, 47, 46, 105, 112, 117, 121, 169 49, 62, 165, 184 Jujuy (Province in Argentina) 16, 154 Inequality; unequal 16, 182 Justice; Justicia iv–v, vii–ix, xi–xii, 1–6, 8, Injustice; “Injusticia” (see Impunity) 1, 4, 16, 13–14, 16, 22, 24, 26–30, 33–39, 41, 20, 34, 52, 71, 78–79, 83–85, 139, 143, 148, 44–45, 47–49, 51–52, 54–56, 59, 62, 153–154, 161 64–67, 71–72, 77–85, 89, 91–95, 98, Insecurity (see cement barriers; pilotes; 100–101, 108, 111, 113, 123, 125–129, security) 27, 55–56, 65, 117 135–137, 139–140, 142–145, 148–149, 151, Inter-American Commission on Human 153–158, 161, 163–164, 167, 171, 173–176, Rights (iachr) 2, 129, 163–165, 168 185, 189 Iran (see Memorandum of Understanding “Justicia y Memoria” (Justice and with Iran) 3, 8, 24, 58, 62, 81–83, 101, Memory) 29, 80 118–119, 129 “Justicia, Justicia Perseguirás” (Justice, Islam; Islamic 58, 119–120 Justice Thou Shall Pursue; also Islamist 20 tzedek, tzedek, kirdof) ix, 33, 36, 48, 65, Israel 8–9, 19, 103–105, 114, 120, 157, 174 129, 185 Israeli; Israelite 1, 8–9, 19, 22–23, 28, 44, 52, Kabalat Shabat 185 59, 62, 65, 69, 74, 77–78, 98, 104, 107, 109, Kaddish 129 113, 118, 120, 125, 128, 156–157, 164, 169, Kapszuk, Elio 170–171, 177 171, 174, 176–177, 184 Kates, J. 107, 110 Israeli Embassy Bombing 1, 8, 19, 22–23, 28, Katz, Jevl (see “Basavilbaso”) 182–183 44, 62, 69, 77–78, 98, 113, 118, 125, 128, King Lear 102 156–157, 164, 171, 176, 184 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de 2–3, 58, Italy 19, 23, 113 81–82 iwo (also Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Kirchner, Néstor 58, 171 Institut; yivo) viii, 78, 130 Kirshbaum, Michal 110 Klezmer (also see Jewish music; music) 105, Jabotinsky, Vladimir 104 174–175, 181, 187, 190 Jaievsky, Irene xii, 110, 123, Klicksberg, Clara 104
Korea 114 Marc Turkow Library (see Centro Marc Korin, Moshé viii, 103, 186 Turkow) vii, 102, 120, 169, 172, 177 Kosice, Gyula 71, 74 Marcela y Judith (Amster, Enrique) 104 Kosovo 59, 71 Marginalization 1, 18, 60 Kosteki, Maximiliano 57 Market; market economy 15–17, 28, 40, 170 Kovadloff, Santiago 60, 62, 67 Martín Fierro (Hernández, José) 114, 123 Kuperman, Basia 105 Martínez, Tomas Elroy 63–64, 67 Kupferminc, Mirta (see Monument to the Martyr (shahid; see amia— Victims of the amia Bombing) x, victims) x, 73, 119, 148 146–148 Mazur, Gerardo 25, 27–28, 34 Media ix, 8, 13, 28, 35, 45, 51, 55, 65, 129, 135, Ladino 102, 114 144, 146, 155, 167 Landscape 3–5, 7, 9, 12–13, 24, 26, 44, Memorandum of Understanding with Iran 68–70, 77, 95, 128, 130, 134, 149, 151, (see Iran) 3, 58, 129 187, 190 “Memoria, La” (Gieco, Léon) 176 Laub, Dori 100, 131–134, 151 Memoria Activa (see Active Memory) v, ix, Lazar, Sian 159, 168 2, 4–6, 9, 19–32, 34–38, 44–53, 56–58, Lerner, Alejandro 174 64–67, 73, 78–82, 101, 106, 111, 125–130, Lerner, César 105, 174–175, 187 135–137, 139–140, 142–146, 148, 155–161, Levi, Primo 132, 151 163–165, 174–176 Levine, Annette 110–111 “Memoria Activa” (song) (Copani) 176 Leviton, Sol (see Hombre de dos amores) 105 Memory vii–xi, xiii, 2–7, 9–10, 14, 20, 22, Levy, Carlos 113–114, 123 29–30, 39, 42–43, 45, 58–60, 64, 68–73, Liberman, Horacio 181, 184, 186 75–81, 83–85, 87, 89–92, 95, 98–101, 105, Libro cd Testimonio 175 123–137, 140, 142–147, 149–152, 155, libro de los recuerdos, El (Steimberg, 157–160, 168–171, 173–182, 184–185, Alicia) 103, 123 187–190 libro del centenario, El (ed. Ricardo Feierstein commemoration; commemorate; and Perla Sneh) 103, 122 commemorative vii, ix, 3–5, 14, 28, 31, Liniers, Ricardo (see “Candombito del 35, 45, 69–70, 73–74, 77–81, 90, 95–98, recuerdo”; 85 puntos de color) 177 125, 127, 129–131, 133, 140–141, 143, 145, Listening; listener 5, 7, 22, 100, 125–127, 149–150, 170, 173–175, 177–179, 181, 187, 189 130–137, 139–146, 148–151, 184 mnemonic map 75 Lithuanian 182 “labors of memory” (also “vehicles of “Local Connection” 31, 64–65 memory”; see Elizabeth Jelin) 4, 78, logia del umbral, La (Feierstein, Ricardo) 38, 144, 150, 170, 176, 179–180, 188–189 114, 116–117, 122 collective memory 42, 123, 180 cultural memory 39, 43, 190 Macabi 78 memorial; memorialization ( see Madres de Plaza de Mayo (see Mothers of monuments) 2–5, 63, 68–70, 72, Plaza de Mayo) vii, ix, 4, 13, 26, 28–29, 74–76, 78, 84, 90, 98–100, 125, 130–131, 35, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 64–65, 67, 69, 73, 76, 140, 142–143, 149, 155, 161, 179, 185, 85, 101, 127, 131, 135, 145, 157, 161 187–188 Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora monument (see memorial) x, xii, 3–5, (see Mothers of Plaza de Mayo-Founding 68–72, 74–79, 84, 90–92, 98–99, 104, Line) 26, 161 143, 146–148, 154, 157, 162, 177, 179, 189 Malamud, Diana 31, 107 musical memory 176, 180, 187 Malvinas (see Falkland Islands) 69–70, postmemory (see Marianne Hirsch) 85, 72, 127 100, 179, 189
Memory (cont.) 35, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 64–65, 67, 69, 73, 76, transmission 5, 90, 94, 179 85, 101, 127, 131, 135, 145, 157, 161 memoryscape 77 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line Memory Park (Parque de la memoria) 70, (also Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea 91–92 Fundadora) 26, 161 Menem, Carlos Saúl 2, 8, 15–20, 22–25, Mourning; mourn (also see grieve) 77, 98, 27–29, 34, 37–38, 42, 55, 61, 65, 107 129, 178, 185, 190 Menemism; Menemist; menemista 15–16, Murga; murgueros 153, 181, 189 123 Museo Judío (see Jewish Museum) 110 Mestizo (Feierstein, Ricardo) xii, 60, 62, Music (see Jewish music) xii–xiii, 1–6, 44, 67, 103 103, 105–106, 111, 153, 169–190 Meyer, Rabbi Marshall T. 53 music in the everyday 173, 179, 190 Mihanovich, Sarah 169 Muslim 61, 118 Military (see Military dictatorship) ix, 1–2, 9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 25–26, 34–35, 37, Nación, La 12, 81–82, 100, 169, 171 43, 48–49, 54, 62–63, 70, 115, 120, 128, Narrative xii, 3, 5–7, 9, 13–14, 16–19, 23, 25, 145, 154, 157, 160, 170, 174, 176 36–38, 85, 90, 100, 127, 130, 132–135, 142, Military Dictatorship (1976–1983) 144–145, 149–151, 170–171, 176, 183, 187 (dictatorship; military government; Nasatsky, Miryam Gover de (See Desde la military junta; military regime; state cima; La pasión de un visionario; terrorism; also see “Dirty War”; military; Persistentes vibraciones; Resonancias de Proceso de Reorganización Nacional) ix, Auschwitz) 111–112, 122 xii, 1–2, 9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 25–26, 29, Nation; national (see Argentina; nation- 34–35, 37, 43, 48–50, 53–54, 58, 62–66, state) ix, 1–3, 6, 8–20, 22–27, 30–31, 69–71, 90–92, 115, 120, 128, 133, 145–146, 154, 36–38, 40–43, 45–48, 51–53, 60, 62–64, 66, 156–157, 160, 164, 170, 174, 176, 188, 190 69, 71–72, 74, 77, 79, 83, 90, 98, 101, 105, 113, Minority 12, 19, 28, 62 115, 117, 120, 128–130, 135, 139, 143–145, 149, mjdh (Movimiento Judío por Derechos 156, 158, 165–166, 169–171, 174–177, 180, 183, Humanos) 53 188–189 Moguilevsky, Marcelo 105, 174–175, 187 Nation building 10–11, 37 Moises Ville (see also Jewish Colonization Nation-state (see Nation; State) 120, 166 Association) 115–117 National imaginary (see also “Imagined Monalisa de Jerusalén, La (Sherbacovsky, Communities”) 2, 158 Elías) 104 Nationalism; nationalist (also see Identity— Monday morning gatherings [in Plaza National identity) 3–4, 10–11, 15, 38–39, Lavalle] (also weekly actos; also see actos; 42–43, 145, 151, 174, 183, 190 protests) 20, 22–23, 26–27, 30, 36, 79, Nationhood 11, 38 126–129, 135–137, 139, 142–143, 145–146, 149, Nazi; Nazism 23, 25, 62, 131, 145, 150–151, 160, 190 157–161, 175 Neoliberalism; neoliberal xi, 2, 9, 15–17, Monument to the Memory of the Victims of 19–20, 27, 34, 37–38, 40, 43, 51, 55–56, the Terrorist Attack on amia (see Yaacov 137, 150, 155, 165, 168, 175, 185, 188–189 Agam) 177 Neruda, Pablo 68, 73, 75–76 Monument to the Victims of the amia Neuquén (Province in Argentina) 16, 18 Bombing (or Monument to the Martyrs of Nexo (Brodsky, Marcelo) 90–91, 100 the amia; see Mirta Kupferminc) x, Nisman, Alberto 2, 129 146–148, 162 Non-Jew; non-Jewish 8, 23, 29, 44, 47, 59, Monumentality (of photographs) 84, 92, 113, 118, 121, 135, 170, 176 98–99, 179, 189 Norma Editorial 15, 42, 76, 104 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (see Madres de Nunca Más Report (see conadep) 13, 25, Plaza de Mayo) vii, ix, 4, 13, 26, 28–29, 40, 64, 66, 128, 150
Obelisk 136 Plaza Huincul 16 “Oif’n Pripetchik Brennt a Feier” Plaza Lavalle (“Plaza of Memory”) vii, ix–x, (Warshawsky, Marc) 175 4–6, 20, 22–23, 27, 35, 45–46, 65, 71, 73, Ombú Yiddish Theater 102 78–81, 101, 125–127, 129, 135–137, 139, Once (Neighborhood) 111, 140, 161, 180 142–143, 145–147, 157, 159, 161, 175 Opus Cuatro 174 Plaza Libertad 20 Organization of American States (oas) 163–164 “Plaza of Memory” (also see Plaza Orquesta Kef 187 Lavalle) ix, x, 5, 20, 125–126, 127, 135–137, “Otherness;” “Others” (see Exclusion) 11, 13, 140, 142–145, 147, 149 16, 19, 37 Plaza San Martín 71 Pluralism (also plural) 3, 6–7, 59–60, 66, 71, Pact of San José (See American Convention 76, 99, 135, 158 on Human Rights) 164 Poetry xii, 73, 103, 107, 110–112, 137 Páez, Fito x, 169–172 Poland 112, 136, 139, 160 Página/12 27, 31, 43, 47, 63–64, 67, 129, 169–171 Police; police brutality (also police “Palace of Injustice” (also see violence) 17–18, 24, 29, 34, 62, 119, 140, 164 Tribunales) 143, 153 Populism (or populist) 12, 15, 41 Pampas, Las 116–117 popurrí 181–182, 189 Papiernik, Charles (see Una vida) xii, 110, 123 post-amia; post-atentado v, 5, 66, 77–78, pasión de un visionario, La (Nasatsky, Miryam 127, 145 Gover de) 112, 122 Poverty 56, 106, 138 Pasteur Street vii, ix, 4, 28–29, 59–60, 64, 71, Privatize; privatization 16, 20, 24, 27, 39, 73–74, 77–81, 91, 95, 98, 113–114, 120–121, 41–42, 55 126, 129, 140–145, 149, 180 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional Performance; perform; performative; (Process of National Reorganization; see performativity v, x–xi, xiii, 3–6, 11–12, 43, “Dirty War;” Military Dictatorship) 1, 45–47, 53, 58, 85, 90, 99, 105, 125, 133, 139, 69–70, 72–73, 115, 184 143, 151, 159, 169–181, 183, 185–188, 190 Prose 103, 111 Perón, Juan Domingo (also Peronist; Protest literature 102 Peronism) 15–16, 41, 48, 116, 161 Protest music (also musical protest) 178 Persistentes vibraciones (Nasatsky, Miryam Protests (also Marches; Rallies; See also Actos; Gover de) 111–112, 122 Monday morning gatherings) 3–4, 6–7, Photograph; photography v, vii, 5, 54, 12–13, 16–18, 20–21, 30, 35, 39, 42–43, 45–50, 77–78, 84–85, 89–92, 95, 98–101, 110, 140, 52–55, 57, 74, 77–79, 102, 106–107, 111, 121, 162, 179 125, 127–130, 139–140, 145, 153, 155–156, 158, Photojournalist (also see José Luis 163, 167, 175, 178, 184–185 Cabezas) ix, 18, 28, 35 Public sphere; public arena 2, 16, 18, 25, 28, Piedras por la justicia (Stones for Justice) 37, 40, 54, 77, 130, 165, 170, 188 (Brodsky, Marcelo) vii, ix, 91–94 Publicness 10, 22, 27 Pilotes (see Cement barriers; also see Insecurity; Security) 44, 140 Rabbi 53, 113, 135, 171 Piqueteros; piquete 16–17, 39, 55 Rabin, Yitzhak 107 Plager, Silvia 61, 102, 105 Radio jai 106 Plaza Bernardo Houssay 91, 94 Rago, Juan Martín 177 Plaza de los dos Congresos (or Plaza del Rago, Juan Martín (see “Cada 18”) 177 Congreso) (also see Tarde de los Recognition 15, 17, 39, 49–50, 52, 85, 117, 134, Paraguas) 1, 9, 17, 153 158, 166 Plaza de Mayo ix, 12–13, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, Reconciliation 16, 18, 40, 85, 134, 150–151 42, 49–50, 64–65, 67, 69, 73, 76, 85, 101, Rein, Raanan vii, 78, 101, 105–106, 124, 127, 116, 127, 130–131, 135, 145, 153, 157, 161 130, 152, 159, 168, 173, 185, 189–190
Representation 3–7, 16, 52, 77–78, 98, Shoah (see Holocaust) xiii, 70, 73, 105–106, 131–132, 144, 150, 179 110, 124, 127, 132, 152 Repression 4, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 26, 29, 42, 78, Shofar (also shofarot) ix, 20–21, 23, 45, 100, 128, 144, 150, 170, 189 126–129, 136, 143, 148, 161, 175 Resonancias de Auschwitz (Nasatsky, Miryam Shua, Ana María 61, 102–103, 105, 123 Gover de) 112, 123 Silence 1, 12, 20, 26, 29, 65, 69, 73, 75, 104–105, Reterritorialization (see Deterritorialization; 109, 125–126, 134–135, 144, 151, 162 Territory) 14, 31 silencio de los aparecidos, El (Wang, Rights (see Human rights) v, xi, xiii, 2, 4–6, Diana) 104–105, 124 9–12, 12–20, 23–29, 34, 36–43, 48–55, Site (also site of memory) vii, 4–5, 7, 24, 28, 58, 60, 63, 83, 129, 135, 137, 140, 143–145, 59, 68, 72–73, 75, 91, 102, 116, 129–130, 150, 153, 155–158, 161, 163–168, 175–176, 132, 140, 143, 173, 179, 183, 187–188, 190 185, 189 Sneh, Perla (see El libro del centenario, co-ed. Río de la Plata (River Plate) 12, 34, 92, 115, with Ricardo Feierstein) 103, 105, 122, 184 138, 183 Social change 53, 78, 101, 105, 124, 127, 130, Ritter, Jonathan 179, 189 135, 152, 159, 166, 168, 185, 190 Rodríguez, Jorge 28 Social movements 2–3, 9, 13, 17, 36, 39, 42, “Rock nacional” 169–170, 179, 190 47, 49–50, 128, 131, 145, 184 Roffé, Reina 61 Sosa, Mercedes 174 Rosario 14, 39, 106, 189 Sosa, Patricia 169 Ross, Fiona 134, 144, 151 Space for Memory and Human Rights (Espacio Rubble 34, 59, 66, 72–73, 78, 91–92, Memoria y Derechos Humanos) 2 103–104, 121 Spaces (also public spaces) v, 4–6, 9, 12–14, Ruins 68–69, 72, 74 20, 26, 37–38, 69-70, 72, 77–80, 101, 111, Russia; Russian 102, 115 123, 128, 130, 139–140, 142–143, 145–146, Rwanda 114 149, 151, 167, 180, 186, 188 Spain 19, 105, 113 Sábato, Ernesto 64 Spectacle 4, 10, 43, 145, 151, 169, 174–175, 190 Sacralization 187 Spectator 11, 85, 89, 99, 145, 177 Salta (Province in Argentina) 16 Spinetta, Luis Alberto x, 169–172 Santiago del Estero (Province in State (see Nation-state) 2, 4, 9–11, 13–19, 22, Argentina) 16 24–27, 29, 31, 37, 38, 40–43, 47–50, Santillan, Danilo 57 53–54, 58, 65, 74, 77, 84, 90–91, 101, 103, Schapiro, Mariana 104 105, 112, 120, 128, 132–133, 140, 143–144, Scherman, Gabriel 177 146, 150, 156–157, 163–168, 170–171, 189 Schramm, Katharine 187, 190 Steimberg, Alicia (see Cuando digo Magdalena; Security (see Cement barriers; Insecurity; El libro de los recuerdos) 61, 67, 102 Pilotes) xiii, 1, 8, 24–27, 29, 48, 54, 58, Steuerman, Miguel 106–107, 123 66, 74, 77, 101, 103, 116, 119, 121, 128, 140, Strier, Mirta 120 165, 181 Sur o no sur (Johansen, Kevin) 177 Seder 110 Survivor; Survival xii–xiii, 7–9, 24–25, 72, 74, Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) 128 100, 104–106, 110, 124, 127, 131–135, 142, Sephardic 60, 78, 114 144–146, 151–152 serpaj (Servicio Paz y Justicia) 26 Synagogue (or temple) 23–24, 63, 73, 78, 128, Shahid (see martyr) 119 138, 162, 169 Shapiro, Marian (see amia—amia Syria 24, 61, 183, 190 Memorial) 75 Szichman, Mario 61 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman 183, 190 Sherbacovsky, Elías (see La Monalisa de Tablada Cemetery, La (see amia—amia Jerusalén) 104 Memorial) 71, 73, 75, 78
“Taiere Malke” 181 Verón, Anibal (Coordinadora de Trabajadores Talcahuano Street 153 Desocupados) 57 Tarde de los paraguas (The Afternoon of the “Vi Nemtmen a Bisele Mazl” 181 Umbrellas) (see Plaza de los dos vida, Una (Papiernik, Charles) 110 Congresos) 1 Videla, General Jorge Rafael 12 Taylor, Diana 4, 10–11, 13, 43, 133, 145, 151, 173, Vila, Pablo 170, 179, 190 174, 190 Villa Crespo (Neighborhood) 136 Teatro Gran Rex 174 Viñas, David 66–67, 102 Temporality 167 Violence xiii, 4–7, 9, 18–19, 25–27, 29, 34, 36, Territory (see Deterritorialization; 49–50, 59, 63–64, 71, 90, 99, 127–128, Reterritorialization) 10, 37 130–134, 142–145, 150–151, 170–172, Terrorism; terrorist 1, 12, 18–19, 48–50, 174–175, 178–179, 181, 185, 187–190 53, 58, 62–63, 65, 70, 74–77, 91, 103, 107, 118–121, 128, 133, 139, 146, 157, Wailing Wall 73 169, 177 Wall 27, 39, 68–69, 72–76, 110, 127, 140, 153, Testimony; testimonial ix, xiii, 5, 8, 19, 25, 155, 168, 180–181 43, 50, 60, 65–67, 70, 79, 84, 94, 100, 102, Wang, Diana (see El silencio de los aparecidos) 104, 106–107, 110, 117, 120, 122–124, 127, viii, 104–106, 121, 123, 132, 145, 151, 190 129, 131–132, 134–137, 140–144, 148, Warshawsky, Mark (see “Oif’n Pripetchik 151–152, 175, 179, 187, 190 Brennt a Feier”) 175 Theater 102–103, 105, 153, 173–174, 176, Wasser 115 180–181 Wassner, Dalia 119–120, 124 Tiempo, César 102 Weil, Mina 104 Timerman, Héctor 81 Weinstein, Ana (Anita) viii, 74, 120 Timerman, Jacobo 25, 43, 128, 151 “White Tent” (Carpa Blanca Docente) 17, 55 “Todos somos judíos” (We are all Jews) 1 Wilensky, Gabriela 186–187 “Todos somos Memoria Activa” (We are all Witnessing; witness 1, 3–5, 7, 69, 80, 85, 89, Memoria Activa) 136 99–100, 103, 107–108, 127, 130–135, Torres, Gabriela 174 142–144, 151, 179 Torture 2, 4, 13, 17, 25, 40, 60, 156 Wlodarski, Amy 179, 190 Transnational; transnationalism 156, 165, Women (also see gender; identity—gender 173, 182 identity) 17, 39, 43, 47, 49, 59, 64, 66, 85, Trauma; traumatic 3–5, 7, 9, 84, 92, 98–100, 101, 110, 134, 138, 144, 151, 153, 157, 159, 163, 107, 123, 131–135, 142, 144–145, 149–151, 168, 176 173, 179, 187 Triangle 71 Yad Vashem 69, 73 Tribunales (or Judicial Palace; Palace of Yiddish (also Ídish) xiii, 6, 59, 61, 70, 78, Justice; Palacio de Justicia; Supreme 102–106, 115, 124, 130, 152, 159–160, 168, Court; high courts; See also “Palace of 175, 181–185, 190 Injustice”) 20, 23, 45, 65, 71, 79, 125, 127, yivo (Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher 129, 135, 139, 143, 153, 158, 164, 175 Institut; also see iwo) viii, 78, 130 Tucumán Street 160 Yúdice, George (see “expediency of “Tumbala Laika” 181 culture”) 172, 190 “Tzedek, tzedek, kirdof,” (see “Justicia, Justicia perseguirás”) ix, 33, 36, 48, 65, Zaretsky, Natasha 105–106, 110, 173, 175, 157, 174 184–185, 190 Zenko, Julia 174 ucr (Radical Party) 55 Zionist; Zionism 114 último día, El (Weil, Mina) 104 Zucker, Mirtha 181, 186 United States xiii, 12, 19, 103, 105, 110 Zuppi, Dr. Alberto 23, 31