A Catalogue of Jewish Symbols by Ilan Stavans

I feel a contentment in defeat.
— J.L.B., ‘Deutches Requiem’

Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America, particularly the Left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in things Jewish. (It isn’t overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly anti-Zionist.) More often than not, Jews and their contribution to Western Civilization, are ignored. Is this silence a form of attack? Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner in 1990, never addressed Jewishness in an upfront fashion. Paz covered every single imaginable topic in the humanities in his magisterial oeuvre yet not a single poem of his deals with the Jews in general, let alone those in the Hispanic world. Likewise with Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. Exceptions to the rule are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. Fuentes has several novels on the subject: A Change of Skin on the Nazis, The Hydra Head on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Terra Nostra on the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula prior to 1492; and Vargas Llosa authored The Storyteller, about a Jewish anthropologist in Lima who becomes a griot among the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon. Vargas has also, in his sustained non-fiction career, debated issues such as anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Borges was interested in Jews, not as people overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervour and personal passions, but as abstractions. He was attracted to Jews as metaphors. This is not to say he didn’t socialize with them. While in Geneva and Spain during World War I, he befriended a number of Jews of Polish-Jewish origin, among them Maurice Abramowicz (about whom he wrote a poem in 1984) and Simón Jichlinski. They were ‘my two bosom friends,’ Borges wrote in the autobiographical pieces published in The New Yorker. He also became close to Rafael Cansinos-Assens, the latter a Sephardic author responsible for El candelabro de los siete brazos. But what attracted him was the Jew as symbol.

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