Book Review : Latin American Jew as Alienated Hero

Play by Play by Isaac Goldemberg (Persea: $13.95)

There stands a version of the myth of the Lost Tribe of Israel to which some early Spanish accounts of the conquest of the New World allude, a version in which the wandering Jews build rafts of reed, sail westward until they reach the tropical eastern shores of what now we call South America, and populate the region there. The Spaniards who toyed with this myth had a certain ironic sense of story, since the large infusion of Moorish--and Hebrew--blood (and culture) into the Iberian main artery made the race question always problematic. In that sense, the Inquisition was not so much a questioning of “strangers” to the Church as it was a direct interrogatory of the purity of heart of the Spanish Church itself.

More Expectations

Isaac Goldemberg, a Peruvian Jew who for the past 20 years has made New York City his home, calls to mind the ambiguous heritage of Latin America even as he attempts, in his second novel, to sharply define the alienated condition of the Latin American Jew, an individual (and by implication) a type who stands apart from all the rest of the members of Latin society. The style certainly shows Goldemberg’s strenuous effort to set his book apart from classic South American fiction; it uses the frame of a metaphorical soccer game in which our hero, Karushansky, a half-Jewish boy from the Peruvian provinces named Marquitos, plays his heart out on behalf of the national team. But seen from another perspective, the novel, divided as it is into two soccer “halfs,” is no more or less experimental in form than half a dozen other new novels out of Latin America. While the subject matter may appear exotic to North American readers, one of the most noticeable features of fiction from below the Rio Grande these days is its emphasis on the alienated hero.

So with this paradox in mind--that no one can be less at home in Latin America than the half-Jew soccer champion Karushansky, and no one can feel more at home in the modern Latin world--we can read this novel with more expectations than if we were merely seeking novelty.

Isn’t it the narrator himself who suggests the affinity of Jew and Peruvian Indian in a passage describing Kraushansky’s father listening to Quechua songs on the radio? “Of course,” we’re told, “he couldn’t understand the songs . . . and perhaps because he couldn’t figure out the words, he would lapse into a kind of trance, a stream of nostalgia welling up in his eyes. He was always saying, “It’s incredible how Yiddish and Quechua sound so much alike. . . .”

Unfortunately, by this standard, Goldemberg’s fiction doesn’t stand up very well alongside the finest innovators of Latin American fiction today. The book is all voice and little plot, a hyperactive meditation on Peruvian Jewishness or Jewish Peruvianism. However you’d like to put it, “Play by Play” remains little more than an oddity of contemporary Latin American literature. When Goldemberg finds the right plot, he might give us more than narcissistic experimentalism. But right now he seems content to splash about on the shore instead of building his reed boat and heading into the great Western ocean.