Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict his fictional suburban Jews in an unpleasant light, a portrayal that would only give succour to antisemites. Ten years later, in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint somehow scandalised an America that had witnessed a shocking number of political assassinations, watched nightly the televised carnage of Vietnam, and feared the revolutionaries that seemed to be taking over its cities. (To be fair, most Americans had never before read a depiction of an adolescent masturbating with a piece of liver.) None of the scandals that followed ever reached the heights of these first two, but Roth has, despite writing within a culture that seems to have less and less time for the printed word, shown a consistent talent for making headlines.

So it is not surprising that an apparently uncontroversial event — Roth, America’s grand old man of letters by now, receiving the Man Booker International Prize, a sort of lifetime achievement award for writers — was accompanied by yet more rancour and fuss. Carmen Callil, one of the prize’s three judges, supplemented the announcement of the award with her own announcement: she vehemently disagreed with the other judges’ choice of Roth, and was stepping down. Her stated reasons for contesting Roth’s win? “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book,” and, in a turn of phrase for which Roth scholars will be forever grateful, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” She would later clarify her position by rather sensibly arguing that North American writers such as Roth receive more than their share of such awards, and that in giving the Booker to Roth the judges missed an opportunity to highlight some of the significant writers of other literary cultures. But it is her criticism of Roth as monotonous, always writing about the same thing, that was printed in bold type. The charge strikes me as both lazy and unsupported, and yet it is one Roth has heard from critics for decades.

In 1972, back when Roth was still living in Alexander Portnoy’s shadow, the distinguished cultural critic Irving Howe took it upon himself to take the author down a notch or two. In the pages of Commentary magazine (where Roth had made a splash in 1961 with his essay ‘Writing American Fiction’), Howe tore Roth’s books apart, asserting that they were held, “in the grip of an imperious will prepared to wrench, twist, and claw at its materials in order to leave upon them the scar of its presence.” The contention throughout the piece, anticipating Callil by nearly 40 years, is that Roth goes on and on about the same subject: himself. This criticism would haunt Roth, intensifying whenever he wrote a book featuring his Roth- like alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Claiming that Roth wrote only about himself became an easy way to bash him, and to ignore the ways in which his books diverged from his biography. Carmen Callil, in dissenting from her fellow judges, has joined herself to this hallowed tradition.

What’s maddening about criticism such as Howe’s and Callil’s, to my mind at least, is that it lowers the discussion about literature to a nearly childish level. To respond to the charge that Roth, “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book” is to descend into absurdities: Look, I want to say, Roth writes about plenty of subjects — sixties radicalism! Jewish settlers on the West Bank! Baseball! Racial passing! But what kind of a perspective on literature is this? Do we read and re-read Lolita to find out more about paedophilia? Has The Great Gatsby endured merely because readers are fascinated by the roaring twenties? Surely readers find something more vital beyond a book’s subject matter — a pinhole that lets light into the dark tunnel of our own subjectivity, an urgent reminder of the variety and fullness of experience, the mysterious way a book — pages filled with typed words — comes alive in our hands. I am befuddled by those who see nothing but an author’s biography in a work of fiction, or who read a representation of subjectivity as self-obsession and solipsism. This seems to me a very simple-minded form of misreading. Isn’t this fundamental stuff — some of the very first lessons we learn when we begin reading fiction? What’s clear is that it is a criticism that has rankled Roth over the years, provoking him to respond vociferously in interview after interview, and respond, often provocatively, in his fiction.

In Roth’s 1981 novel The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman is beset by the twinned calamities of chronic pain and writer’s block. These afflictions are compounded by a vicious critical takedown in the pages of Inquiry magazine by critic Milton Appel, “an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical.” Appel is modelled, of course, on Irving Howe and Roth has great fun with Zuckerman here, milking the righteous anger of a writer wronged for pages and pages of unhinged vitriol. Zuckerman, hopped up on painkillers, pot, and alcohol, calls Appel in a rage and semi-coherently gives the elder writer a piece of his mind. But more than that bit of inspiration, Howe’s piece plays a bigger role in The Anatomy Lesson, as the novel has Roth seemingly taking Howe’s central criticism seriously: what if it were true that Roth can only write about himself? What if Howe’s diagnosis is right, and Roth only has a talent for plastering himself all over his pages? He plays out these questions through Zuckerman, who has grown sick of mining his self for literature, and feels that he has exhausted that self. Zuckerman muses, “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole.” The novel takes flight when Zuckerman decides to quit the writing life to go to medical school, all the while impersonating Milton Appel, and introducing himself as a pornographer, the publisher of a magazine called Lickety Split. More than just two fingers up to Irving Howe, the book seems to show how different Zuckerman is from his author: while Zuckerman attempts to escape the writing life because he has exhausted his self, Roth clearly has no such problem, steadily producing another installment in the Zuckerman saga, his third in four years, finding no shortage of material to keep him going.

A more adventurous critic than I could make the case that not just The Anatomy Lesson, but nearly all of Roth’s 1980s publications were in some way written in perverse response to the oft-repeated criticism that he only writes about himself, that he insufficiently fictionalises experience. There are the first five Zuckerman books, each taking noticeably from Roth’s biography to enact the comedy of late-twentieth century America. There is The Facts, a seemingly straightforward autobiography bookended by letters to and from Zuckerman, throwing a wrench into the non-fictional works (the latter is a passionate missive from Zuckerman to his creator, urging him not to publish the preceding memoir). There is Deception, a novel as transcription of conversations, featuring a writer named Philip who sounds for all the world like Philip Roth. The plot, such as it is, centres on whether or not Philip will publish his notebooks (which we have been reading) as is, or change all the names (including changing “Philip” to “Nathan”). At one point, Philip barks, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.” Roth’s first novel of the 1990s, Operation Shylock, took things a step further. Subtitled ‘A Confession’, the book is told in the first person by Philip Roth, who tells us the ostensibly true (though obviously false) story of how he went to Israel to put a stop to the hijinks of a man who calls himself Philip Roth, and is agitating for a meshugge cause called ‘Diasporism which advocates the wholesale migration of Israeli Jews back to Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Each of these books seemed provoked in some way by a bee in Roth’s bonnet that looked and sounded an awful lot like Irving Howe. The books seem to dramatise the process of taking experience and converting it into writing, taking great pains (and many pages) to show just how grey the area between fact and fiction really is. I happen to think that there’s a lot more going on in these books than Roth making the same point over and over again, but if ever there was a time to criticise Roth for only writing about himself, it was in 1993, after Operation Shylock capped 14 years of books that each seemed to put Philip Roth front and centre.

But something drastic changed after Operation Shylock, something that makes Carmen Callil’s recent comments all the more mystifying: Roth forgot about Irving Howe and began a stretch of books that had, at least on the surface, little to do with his old oppositions of fact and fiction, life and writing, Philip and Nathan. In 1995, he published Sabbath’s Theater, a frankly stunning steamroller of a novel, centering on the despicable Mickey Sabbath, an obscene, arthritic, and now disgraced puppeteer who wants, more than anything, to die. It is hilarious and sad and provocative and, although it does feature a white male of Roth’s vintage and plenty of talk about sex (two Rothian hallmarks), the book pretty clearly sets its sights far beyond the writing life. This was followed by the already-canonised “American Trilogy”: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Nathan Zuckerman returns for these novels, but it is a changed Zuckerman, one content to stay on the sidelines and narrate other lives, each tied to a different significant period in American history. It is these books that, for right or wrong, got many critics to sit up and take note of Roth’s greatness, often for the very reason that the books seemed to move past Roth’s old preoccupations. “What happened?” Ken Gordon asked in Slate, “The new books seem to recognize the existence of other people.” The books that have followed since the turn of the century have similarly branched outward from Roth’s comfort zone and, although their relative merits have been debated, seem to have tossed aside that old chestnut that Roth only writes about himself. To my mind, that criticism was never very convincing — doesn’t it misunderstand the very nature of literature? — but it’s all the more puzzling to hear in 2011, from a distinguished literary editor no less.

But enough already on the subject of Roth’s many subjects; I’d like to talk about a more subtle misreading that has crept into recent Roth criticism. Beginning with the publication of The Human Stain in 2000, the list of Roth’s prior publications in his books’ front matter, instead of being displayed in a single chronological block, now appears broken up, with the books divided into various categories: “Zuckerman Books”, “Kepesh Books”(the three books featuring David Kepesh as a narrator), “Roth Books” (including The Facts and Operation Shylock), even a grab-bag category called “Other Books”. One effect of this division is to highlight the diversity of Roth’s back catalogue: another shot across the bows to those critics who claim Roth has but one subject. But a more subtle effect can be seen in the way the categories seem to be telling us how to read Roth, how to conceive of his long and varied career. Just as we should be wary of readings that can’t see beyond the author’s biography, there are plenty of reasons to distrust reading Roth the way Roth tells us to. Roth long ago proved himself to be a most unreliable guide to his own work — in interviews he maintained for instance, that Operation Shylock was 100% true — and to take the author’s word for it when interpreting a book is merely the other side of the coin from assuming that he’s always writing about himself.

This phenomenon has particularly cropped up in the response to the publication of Roth’s most recent novel, last year’s Nemesis, which brought with it a new category in the book’s front matter. “Nemeses: Short Novels” includes four of the last five books Roth has published: Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and, now, Nemesis. Each of these books, so the reviews have told us, is a short, spare meditation on fate and death. They are the products of an aging author who has seen many of his friends, and his only sibling, die within the last few years. They are the works of a man bravely staring down his own mortality, and responding with an appropriate “late style”. This is, of course, a valid reading. But why should it be the only one? Discussion of Roth’s fiction should not be left to the likes of Howe and Callil, who cannot see past their prejudices as to how much distance an author must keep between himself and his books. But the discussion should not be determined by Roth either. Roth may offer an interesting reading of his own work, and can certainly grant us insight into the creative process, but it must be up to us, the dwindling mass of serious readers, to deliberate over a work’s meanings.

Nemesis tells the story of Bucky Cantor, who, in 1944, is the 23 year old gym teacher and playground director who must preside over the children of Weequahic (Newark’s Jewish neighbourhood) during a terrifying polio outbreak. After afflicting most of the city, the disease reaches Weequahic, and two of Bucky’s eighth grade charges become infected and die. Bucky’s fiancée arranges for him to take a job as a counsellor at a children’s summer camp out in the country. He initially declines the invitation, insisting that he cannot abandon his post. But then, in a change of heart nearly inexplicable to himself, he accepts and flees “equatorial Newark” for the safety of rural Pennsylvania, where the camp is a world away from the overheated, overpopulated precincts of Newark. But within a week of Bucky’s arrival, one of his campers falls prey to polio and is sped off to the hospital. Bucky himself tests positive for the disease. It spreads quickly and the camp is shut within days. In a wickedly tragic irony, Bucky, who flees Newark to escape polio, ends up bringing it with him to the camp; not only is he powerless to protect the children of Newark, he helps the disease infect still more children. After a long and painful recovery that leaves him debilitated, Bucky becomes a recluse, rejecting his fiancée (he doesn’t want her to be tied down to “a cripple”), forever cursing God for creating polio. Although polio does not kill him, his once-promising life is essentially over. He never forgives himself for his role in spreading polio, or for his fateful abandonment of the kids of the Weequahic playground.

My brief summation does not begin to do the novel justice. But it’s enough to convey the fact that, yes, Nemesis shares certain features with Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. All four feature protagonists reckoning with the fateful circumstances that shape a life. All four are written in a spare, direct prose style with little of the humour that has characterised much of Roth’s previous work. And, if you see Bucky as having effectively died as soon as he discovers he is the polio carrier, all four protagonists end up dead. But when I first read Nemesis, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Roth’s earlier books — The Plot Against America and Goodbye, Columbus, in particular — and of an interview with Roth from 1984, in which he explained why he hadn’t dealt with the Holocaust directly in his fiction like, say, William Styron had:

“It works through Jewish lives less visibly and in less spectacular ways. And that’s the way I prefer to deal with it in fiction. For most reflective American Jews, I would think, it is simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten. You don’t make use of it—it makes use of you.”

Although Nemesis is set among American Jews in 1944, the Holocaust is conspicuously absent. There is much talk of the war but no reference to the fate of European Jews. Might this be because, as in The Plot Against America, the book imagines an alternate history for American Jews, one in which they lose the security they were blessed with in reality?

“Our Jewish children are our riches,” a mother of one of Bucky’s students cries out. “Why is it attacking our beautiful Jewish children?” Although polio, of course, does not discriminate, throughout the book the danger is figured as specifically coming after the Jews of Weequahic. In a striking early scene, a group of hooligans from Newark’s Italian neighborhood drive up to Bucky’s playground and threaten to spread polio to “you people”. As the disease spreads, many parents decide to keep their children confined at home until the danger passes. And when the outbreak reaches epidemic proportions within Weequahic, there’s talk of barricading the neighbourhood, creating a ghetto to quarantine the Jews. For some in Newark this doesn’t go far enough: “Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it.” I don’t want to push these parallels too far (or make too much of the fact that the false haven is presented here as a camp); it is certainly not necessary to read Nemesis as an allegory. I am merely suggesting that a fictional polio outbreak allows Roth to put his American Jews in the hands of the sort of historical threat they never had to face.

It is a testament to Roth’s success here that Nemesis is about much else as well. Bucky’s indecision over whether to stay in Newark, or flee to the safety of pastoral Pennsylvania recalls Neil Klugman’s dilemmas over assimilation in Goodbye, Columbus. The book’s depictions of 1940s Newark are as vivid as any in Roth’s canon, and it manages the difficult trick of presenting the past in a way that doesn’t read like costume drama. And I enjoyed the book’s knotty narrative structure, in which the narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff, one of Bucky’s playground boys, only reveals himself halfway through the novel. Before then, the events are narrated in the first-person plural, the ‘we’ an unusually effective way to convey the sense of camaraderie and affection the boys have for their hero, Bucky Cantor. What a book like this, so richly rendered, seems to me to produce is not a single, distilled meaning, like Carmen Callil might suggest (Roth once again resurrecting Jewish Newark), but rather a multiplicity of meanings, with a suggestive power that reaches out in many directions at once; it is, at once, ‘about’ polio, or the Holocaust, or assimilation, or the tragedy of having a body that ages, or the glories of growing up in Newark in the 1940s. You might say that its meanings go on and on and on, though I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way

The consensus among Borges’ biographers and critics is that he was deeply apolitical and remained disengaged with local, national, and international affairs throughout his life. It is true that Borges was, especially in his adolescence, a dilettante à la Oscar Wilde minus the ornamental outspokenness. But to certain events he offered political comment, often heavy with sarcasm, of great force. A partial yet enlightening record of his opinions can be found in Selected Non-fiction, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Of the entire selection, only a small portion address the events in Europe; still, they are significant in that they allow a glimpse of Borges’ beliefs and the trenchant style with which he debunked ugly stereotypes. Borges denounced Hitler almost from the start, decrying the arrival of Nazism as a catastrophe for German culture. In ‘A Pedagogy of Hatred,’ he attacks the publication, in Germany of the children’s book Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruener Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don’t Trust Any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath]. Here is Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation included in Selected Non-Fiction:

Take any page: for example, page 5. Here I find, not without justifiable bewilderment, this didactic poem —‘The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle. Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising’ — followed by an equally informative and explicit quatrain: ‘Here’s a Jew, recognizable to all, the biggest scoundrel in the whole kingdom. He thinks he’s wonderful, and he’s horrible.’ The engravings are more astute: the German is a Scandinavian, eighteen-year-old athlete, plainly portrayed as a worker; the Jew is a dark Turk, obese and middle-aged. Another sophistic feature is that the German is clean-shaven and the Jew, while bald, is very hairy.

Borges ends his exposition ‘What can one say about such a book? Personally, I am outraged, less for Israel’s sake than for Germany’s, less for the offended community than for the offensive nation.’
Borges was an unequivocal admirer of German literature and was distressed by its decline. ‘I don’t know if the world can do without German civilization’ he wrote in Sur, the magazine edited by his friend and admirer Victoria Ocampo; and, in another issue of the same journal, he stated: ‘It is unarguable that a [German] victory would see the ruin and debasement of the world.’ This judgment could only have a limited impact on public opinion yet Borges regularly used the written and spoken word to denounce the excesses of fascism. Still, Germanophilia was on the rise in Argentina and in 1939 a small incident, narrated without consequence by some biographers, brought the war closer to home. In Punte del Este, Uruguay, the British attempted to sink the German battleship Graf Spee which took refuge in Montevideo but was dispelled by the Uruguayan government in support of the Allies. The British fleet awaited the ship, which the German crew itself eventually sank and the Germans escaped to Argentina.
This result was discouraging, but to Borges it only confirmed the country’s endorsement of Nazism. This openness to receive refugees from Germany would continue until after World War II, when former officers and soldiers, with fake passports, were allowed entrance and protection, at times making a life in the same neighborhoods where survivors of concentration camps and other Jewish refugees lived. Arguably the most famous case is that of Adolf Eichman who because a cause célèbre when, having been located by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the Israeli Secret Service Mossad flew him out of Argentina and into Israel before the news was made public worldwide.
Finally, in an essay of 1940 that is probably the most important, and surely the most discussed of his essays on this topic ‘Definition of a Germanophile,’ Borges openly ridiculed germanófilos in his country. portraying them as monstrous people whose knowledge of German civilization is sketchy at best and who indulge in obvious acts of censorship of the most egregious form of their own culture, often verging on Anglophobia as they describe the excessess of the English. These Germanophiles, Borges states, are nothing but admirers of Hitler, ‘not in spite of the high-altitude bombs and the rumbling invasions, the machine guns, the accusations and lies, but because of those acts and instruments.’ He adds:

He is delighted by evil and atrocity. The triumph of Germany does not matter to him; he wants the humiliation of England and a satisfying burning of London. He admires Hitler as he once admired his precursors in the criminal underworld of Chicago. The discussion becomes impossible because of the offenses I ascribe to Hitler are, for him, wonders and virtues… The Hitlerist is always a spiteful man, and a secret and sometimes public worshiper of criminal ‘vivacity’ and cruelty. He is, thanks to a poverty of imagination, a man who believes that the future cannot be different from the present, and that Germany, till now victorious, cannot lose. He is the cunning man who longs to be on the winning side.”

Borges was forty-six when the war ended. He greeted the news of the liberation of Paris with a sense of inexhaustible exhilaration which he articulated in full in an essay that has been insufficiently read and studied in detail: ‘A Comment on August 23, 1944.’ Here, Borges discusses the multiple contradictions of the many Argentineans that supported Nazism. He lists their contradictions, which he prefers to call ‘incoherences’:

They adore the German race, but they abhor ‘Saxon’ America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the wonders of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; … [and] they idolize San Martín, but they regard the independence of America as a mistake. For Europeans and Americans, one order and only one is possible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tartar, sixteenth-century conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like [John Scotus] Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound or kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.

‘Hitler wants to be defeated,’ italicised by Borges is, in my eyes, a paradigm: Hitler wanted to succeed in his campaign to dominate the planet, the Argentine argues, yet, upon realising that the endeavor is impossible, he deliberately sought to be crushed. He indulged in an effort that could only culminate in his own defeat. For this defeat Hitler saw as a triumph: a triumph of evil over good, a triumph of barbarism over civilization.
The paradigm is best articulated in another aspect of Borges’ response to Nazism: his fiction. While in his non-fiction he regularly discussed the impact of fascism at home, in his stories he took a different route: every tale on the subject is set in Europe, from Czechoslovakia to Germany itself. Perhaps this is because it allowed him to tackle the issue head-on, to go to the source; and because he knew well that, since these pieces were in Spanish, their immediate impact would take place in Argentina. Another significant feature is that none of these fictions takes place inside a concentration camp, nor do they make reference to gas chambers or any other method of extermination. And yet, they tackle the Holocaust fearlessly, in a fashion far more overt that almost anything produced by Argentine literati at the time.
‘Deutsches Requiem’ is about faith, endurance, and posterity. As fiction it is flawed, yet it contains the seed of a more mature, developed viewpoint by Borges than the majority of the non-fiction pieces about the war. He drafted it later than  ‘The Secret Miracle’ and it was collected in his collection of stories The Aleph (1949). Otto Dietrich zur Linde, the narrator, is a former German officer who in his youth was an avid reader of Schopenhauer and a listener of Brahms, but who cohered to the Nazi party, raising in 1941 to become subdirector of the Tarnowitz concentration camp. Zur Linde, from his cell, offers a diatribe about the battle for Nazi supremacy of the globe and, thus, delivers a justification of Hitler’s actions. Borges uses the character as a springboard to explore the psyche of a ‘Germanophile.’
Towards the end of the story Zur Linde comes across a camp inmate who changes his views: the poet David Jerusalem. Is it emblematic that neither Zur Linde nor Jerusalem are real-life individuals? Borges prefers to work on composites, seeking to create archetypal figures that represent not one single person but humanity as a whole. This quality of unreality is, in fact, what the Argentine is aiming for: a sense that people are not as different from one another as they might believe themselves to be; instead, that they are version of a Platonic ideal. The following lines, in a footnote by an anonymous editor in ‘Deutsches Requiem’ (Borges himself)ratify this assumption:

In neither the files nor the published work of Sögel does Jerusalem’s name appear. Nor does one find it in the histories of German literature. I do not, however, think that this is an invented figure. Many Jewish intellectuals were tortured in Tarnowitz on the orders of Otto Dietrich zur Linde, among them the pianist Emma Rosenzweig. “David Jerusalem” is perhaps a symbol for many individuals. We are told that he died on March 1, 1943; on March 1, 1939, the narrator had been wounded at Tilsit. [Ed.]

The protagonist says of Jerusalem that he was ‘the prototypical Sephardic Jew, although he belonged to the depraved and hated Ashkenazim.’ He becomes obsessed with his victim: the talent of his hexameters, the capacity to consecrate his genius to hymns of happiness. His obsession and his admiration accentuate his repulsion. Utlimately, he drives Jerusalem insane and forces him to commit suicide. By killing Jerusalem, Zur Linde trusts that he will able to eradicate his own compassion.
But sooner rather than later he realises that what we must detest in the outer world has a chamber in our own soul; that those we hold as victims are actually an essential part of ourselves. It is here where the italicised sentence from Borges’ essay ‘A Comment on August 23, 1944’ acquires its full meaning. Hitler wants to be defeated: as the Nazi ponders his own destiny, he acknowledges that everything in the universe evil is the reverse of good and, therefore, Nazism and Judaism are two sides of the same coin. He admits that Hitler wanted, his own ruin. and announces that the Führer did not fight for the German nation only but for all nations — since every man is all men, each of us simultaneously beautiful and abominable.
It is an attractive idea, which, unfortunately, history often corroborates. Hitler’s demise, for instance, coincided, in the national front, with the ascent to power of Juan Domingo Perón, another brutal dictator, one with deceitful Socialist aspirations. Perón emulated Mussolini and other European tyrants by instigating rowdy youthful groups and by channeling their impetus against Jewish targets, from student groups to institutions. During the first of his two regimes, between 1943 and 1945, a series of anti-Semitic events orchestrated by the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista took place, mostly in Buenos Aires.
The endorsement of Nazi values by Perón and his followers was disturbing to Borges, by then a celebrity among a small but solid intellectual elite. In a series of declarations, he showed signs of deep concern:

The situation in Argentina, is very serious, so serious that a great number of Argentines are becoming Nazis without being aware of it. Tempted by promises of social reform — in a society that undoubtedly needs a better organisation than the one it now has — many people are letting themselves be seduced by an outsize wave of hatred that is sweeping the country. It is a terrible thing, similar to what happened at the beginning of fascism and Nazism [in Europe].

It was during this period that Borges not only suffered public affront, as one peronista after another attacked or ridiculed him; he also was the target of personal humiliation. His mother and sister were arrested and put imprisoned for a brief period of time, and he himself was demoted from librarian at the Miguel Cané Public Library to the job of inspector of poultry and rabbits in the municipal market of Calle Córdoba, a gesture by the tyrant’s entourage of the kind of respect figure like Borges truly deserved.
Borges’ reaction, in return, was dignified: he never lost his posture as he pursued his desire to transform the affront, though metaphor, into a lucid assemblage of essays and stories. Among them a collaboration with his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq, called Monsterfest (La fiesta del monstruo) published in 1955. A handful of Perón’s supporters equated their idol to Hitler and, at a time of international remorse about the excesses of Nazism, were offended by it. But they were more offended by the man of letters himself, who, in their view, refused to recognise Perón as the creator of una nueva Argentina. None of this deterred Borges in his quest to unveil the brutal side of the nation’s populist leader, nor did it diminish his love for one of Perón’s Guinea Pigs: the Jews.
In a conversation of 1978, by then old and blind, Borges stated (and I translate): “

The preeminence of the Jewish in Western Civilization has to do with the fact that a Jew, aside from being English, French, German or whatever, is always a Jew. He is not tied by any form of loyalty or especial tradition, which allows him to innovate in science and the arts. In that sense, to be an Argentina offers an advantage similar to that of the Jew.
Argentines might be Hispanic Americans but also and more emphatically, citizens of the world. In a conversation with Antonio Carrizo four years later he added ‘There are some people that see the Jew as a problem. I see in him a solution.’
This view is manifested, as an esthetic doctrine, in a lecture Borges delivered in Buenos Aires in 1951, called The Argentine Writer and Tradition. In part, he was responding to T.S. Eliot’s own views included in his 1919 lecture Tradition and the Individual Talent. in which he stated the following; ‘The native Argentine, in my understanding, is sardonic, suspicious, over and above everything without illusions, and so utterly lacking in verbal grandiosity that in few can it be forgiven and in none extolled.’
Borges wondered what themes the Argentine writer should address. He answered by discussing a tangential argument in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which the author Edward Gibbon suggests that ‘in the Arabian book par excellance, in the Koran, there are no camels.’ Borges argues:

I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camel, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.

Borges wished to see his own role in the world beyond the ghettoized confines of regionalism and it is this exact same feeling he projects toward the English language: it wasn’t his fully, but he would do anything possible to appropriate it. And indeed, his fiction is filled with local types, but their presence is sheer artifice. He turned these local types into a Platonic archetype. And therein his most enduring contribution: he showed that in Latin America, all of us are all Xerox copies of a European original, yet in a relativistic world where nothing feels authentic anymore, a Xerox is equally, if not more, valuable.
The Buenos Aires lecture includes a bonus:

What is Argentine tradition? I believe that this question poses no problem and can easily be solved. I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the inhabitants of one Western nation or another may have. Here I remember an essay by Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the intellectual preeminence of Jews in Western culture. He wonders if this preeminence authorizes us to posit an innate Jewish superiority and answers that it does not; he says that Jews are prominent in Western culture because they act within that culture and at the same time do not feel bound to it by any special devotion; therefore, he says, it will always be easier for a Jew than for a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture.

Borges sought to promote literature unconfined to borders, a universal literature beyond patriotism — belonging to everyone. That universality, in his eyes, was Jewish. What he strove for, as the Xeroxed Jew that he was, was to make the patrimony of the Argentine writer not a little piece of land near the South Pole but the globe entire. And, through his effort, he wanted to be within that culture and at the same time not to feel bound to it. Toward the end of the lecture, he asked his fellow Argentine writers to be bold, innovative, and free, just as Jews in Western culture were. ‘We should essay all themes, and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentine subjects in order to be Argentine; for either being Argentine is an inescapable act of fate — and in that case we shall be so in all events — or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask.’

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.

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.
This obsession with Jewish symbolism started with the Zohar, the canonical text in Kabbalah. His knowledge on this area came from secondary sources, such as Jewish Magic and Superstition, by Joshua Trachtenberg, The Holy Kabbalah by Arthur E. Waite, and Le Kabbale by Henri Sérouya, as well as texts by Adolphe Franck and Knorr von Rosenroth, and the entry on the subject in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Borges liked the concept of Sephirot, the method of Gematria and the idea, expounded by Jewish mystics, that language precedes the creation of the world.
During his trip to Israel to receive the Jerusalem Prize in 1971, Borges was asked what he wanted to see. ‘Don’t ask me what I want to see because I am blind,’ he responded. ‘But if you ask me who I want to see I’ll answer, right away, [Gershom] Scholem.’ Shortly after, Borges wrote a poem about the Golem. Herein the first three stanzas in of Alan S. Trueblood’s translation included in Alexander Coleman’s Selected Poems (1999):

If, as the Greek maintains in the Cratylus,
A name is the archetype of a thing,
The rose is in the letters that spell rose
And the Nile entire resounds in its name’s
ring.

So, composed of consonants and vowels,
There must exist one awe-inspiring word
That God inheres in—that, when spoken,
holds
Almightiness in syllables unslurred.

Adam knew it in the Garden, so did the stars.
The rusty work of sin, so the cabbalists say,
Obliterated it completely;
No generation has found it to this day.

Borges places the myth of the Golem in the kabbalistic tradition. He’s interested in the power of the Hebrew language, which, according to legend, was created by God even before the universe came into being. He pays attention to the Saussurian relationship between object and word.
Borges discovered Kabbalah at an early age. In the conversation with Alazraki, which took place at Buenos Aires’ National Library, he suggested his interest was sparked by Dante’s Divine Comedy and by his adolescent readings of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

I found it in Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy which he undertook during the Civil War to avoid thinking about the war he was too preoccupied with. There is a three-page appendix in that translation that Longfellow took from a book — I believe it was Rabbinical Literature — by J.P. Stehelin where there is a discussion of the Hebrew alphabet and of the different meanings and values that the Kabbalists attributed to those letters. And the other reference must have come from the Britannica. As a youngster, I used to come here, to the Library, quite frequently, and since I was very shy and didn’t dare ask the librarian for books, I would take a volume of the Britannica, any volume, from the shelf myself. Since they were readily accessible in the reading room, I did not have the request of any librarian, so I would take a volume and read it. But the old Encyclopaedia Britannica was far superior to the more recent editions. It used to be a reading work, and now it has been turned into a reference book.

Borges’ first piece on the Kabbalah,‘Una vindicación de la cabala’ (‘A defense of the Kabbalah’). was published in Discusión (1932). His style at the time was still unformed:

Neither the first time it has been attempted, nor the last time it will fail, this defense is distinguished by two facts. One is my almost complete ignorance of the Hebrew language; the other, my desire to defend not the doctrine but rather the hermeneutical or cryptographic procedures that lead to it. These procedures, as is well known, include the vertical reading of sacred texts, the reading referred to as boustophedon (one line from left to right, the following line from right to left), the methodical substitution of certain letters of the alphabet for others, the sum of the numerical value of the letters, etc. To ridicule such operations is simple; I prefer to attempt to understand them.

Borges talks about the Kabbalah itself indirectly. His mission was to discuss the divine nature of the Holy Scriptures, he wasn’t interested in religion but in the fact that ‘the Spirit’ created the universe. His interest was in literature:

Let us imagine now this astral intelligence, dedicated to manifesting itself not in dynasties or annihilations or birds, but in written words. Let us also imagine, according to the pre-Augustinian theory of verbal inspiration, that God dictates, word by word, what he proposes to say. This premise (which was the one postulated by the Kabbalists) turns the Scriptures into an absolute text, where the collaboration of chance is calculated at zero. The conception alone of such a document is a greater wonder than those recorded in its pages. A book impervious to contingencies, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of revelations lying in wait, of superimpositions of light… How could one not only study it but do so to absurdity, to numerical excess, as did the Kabbalah?

Throughout his life, Borges used a number of kabbalistic motifs, sometimes overtly, others in a tangential, even subliminal fashion. ‘The Circular Ruins,’ for instance, might be read as a tribute to the myth of the Golem. In the story a magician who has never had a child decides to create his own son. Night after night he shapes his successor, until the creation acquires its own life. Then there is ‘The Aleph’, arguably Borges’ most emblematic — and famous — tale. The leitmotif behind it isn’t the Zohar but the Divine Comedy. The protagonist, Borges himself, is in love with a deceased female named Beatriz. He has a rivalry with another writer, Dante Argentino Daneri, who is awarded a prize Borges believes he himself deserves. Daneri invites Borges to visit a basement in his Buenos Aires house where a magical object, ‘The Aleph,’ is found. The descent allows the narrator to sense a journey before him.

Borges was interested in Jews, not as people overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervour and personal passions, but as abstractions.

Another story where the Hebrew alphabet serves as a map is ‘Death and the Compass’ first published in the magazine Sur in 1942 and later gathered in Artifices (1944). It became part of Ficciones (also 1944). In his forward to Artifices, translated by Andrew Hurley, Borges writes:

Two of [the stories], perhaps, merit some comment: ‘Death and the Compass’ and ‘Funes, His Memory’. The second is a long metaphor for insomnia. The first, in spite of the Germanic or Scandinavian names in it, takes place in a Buenos Aires of dreams: the twisting rue de Toulon is the Paseo de Julio; Triste-le-Roy is the hotel where Herbert Ashe received, yet probably did not read, the eleventh volume of an imaginary encyclopaedia. After this fiction was written, I thought it might be worthwhile to expand the time and space the story covers: the revenge might be bequeathed to others, the periods of time might be calculated in years, perhaps in centuries; the first letter of the Name might be uttered in Iceland, the second in Mexico, the third in Hindustan. Is there any need for me to say that there are saints among the Hassidim, and that the sacrifice of four lives in order to obtain the four letters that the Name demands is a fantasy dictated by the shape of my story?

The story ‘Death and the Compass’, inspired by Spinoza, takes place in a European city much like Amsterdam and can be seen as a tacit tribute to one of its illustrious citizens, Baruch Spinoza. After all, this is a detective story with a geometrical plan. The detective is Erik Lönnrot and his nemesis is Red Scharlach. Lönnrot is invited to test his intelligence by solving a series of four murders, each committed within symmetrical coordinates of time and space (December 3rd, January 3rd, February 3rd, etc., in the northern part of the city, the western part, etc.). The victims are all Jews, at times Hassidim — one of them has an octavo volume about the teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tov. Lönnrot gets information from a journalist of the Yiddische Zeitung about the Tetragramaton, the four-lettered divine name: YHVH. After each murder, a sign appears: ‘a letter of the Name has been written.’
Red Scharlach, also known as Scharlach the Dandy, was a criminal who ‘had sworn upon his honour to kill Lönnrot, but Lönnrot never allowed himself to be intimidated. He thought of himself as a reasoning machine, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer in him, even something of the gambler.’ Eventually Lönnrot realises a fourth murder is to take place in a precise time and place: March 3rd, at the abandoned Villa Triste-le-Roy. He suspects that Red Scharlach might be the last victim but then dismisses the idea. When he arrives, he sees Scharlach. Lönnrot asks: ‘Scharlach — you are looking for the secret name?’ Hurley’s translation:

Scharlach stood there, impassive. He had not participated in the brief struggle, and now moved only to put out his hand for Lönnrot’s revolver. But then he spoke, and Lönnrot heard in his voice a tired triumphance, a hatred as large as the universe, a sadness no smaller than that hatred.
‘No’, he said. ‘I am looking for something more fleeting and more perishable than that — I am looking for Erik Lönnrot’.

Scharlach explains how he carefully executed each of his crimes so far. Lönnrot realises he’s about to die and considers the three symmetrical crimes:

‘There are three lines too many in your labyrinth,’ he said at last. ‘I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well. When you hunt me dawn in another avatar of our lives, Scharlach, I suggest that you fake (or commit) one crime at A, a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B and halfway between them. Then wait for me at D, two kilometers from A and C, once again halfway between them. Kill me at D, as you are about to kill me at Triste-le-Roy.’
‘The next time I kill you,’ Scharlach replied, ‘I promise you the labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless.’
He stepped back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired.

Borges was the first, and for a while the only, supporter of Kafka in the Hispanic world. In his essay ‘Kafka and His Precursors,’ published in 1951 and included in Other Inquisitions (1952), Borges writes in Eliot Weinberger’s rendition:

At one time I considered writing a study of Kafka’s precursors. I had thought, at first, that he was unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after spending a little time with him, I felt I could recognise his voice, or his habits, in the texts of various literatures and various ages. I will note a few of them here, in chronological order.

Rather than offer a hermeneutic interpretation of Kafka, the essay then concentrates on a catalogue of echoes: Zeno’s paradox against motion, a fable by the ninth-century Chinese author Han Yu, Kierkegaard, the anti-Semite Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. Borges concludes:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of those writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Robert Browning anticipates the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word precursor is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as well as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn’t matter. The first Kafka of Betrachtung is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

The conclusion serves as confirmation of Borges’ need to see literature globally. He refuses to approach Kafka in the context of Jewish literature exclusively. He doesn’t even mention his Czech origins and his German-language style. What matters to him are the reverberations of Kafka’s motifs. Borges is interested in the Kafka of the Hassidic parables, not in the novelist of  ‘Metamorphosis’ and ‘The Castle’.
Still, in 1943, he introduced, for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, Kafka’s La metamorfosis. A few years earlier he talked about him in El Hogar (1938). Borges also included material by Kafka in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), as well as in his compendium Libro del cielo y el infierno (1960), Libro de los seres imaginarios (1967), and Libro de los sueños (1976). The third and fourth pieces by Borges on Kafka were in the form of introductions. The third in A Personal Library, Borges’ last editorial project, published between 1985 and 1986. His selection included ‘Amerika’ and some short stories. The fourth piece is a prologue he wrote toward the end of his life, as part of a project called The Library of Babel. The volumes were designed to be short. They were fantastic tales selected by Borges. From Kafka he chose ‘The Vulture’. The book appeared in 1979. The prologue offers fresh views on Borges’ opinion not only on the author but also on Jews:

Everyone knows that Kafka always felt mysteriously guilty toward his father, in the manner of Israel with its God; his Judaism, which separated him from the rest of mankind, affected him in a complex way. The consciousness of approaching death and the feverish exaltation of tuberculosis must have sharpened those faculties…
Two ideas — or more exactly, two obsessions — rule Kafka’s work: subordination and the infinite. In almost all his fictions there are hierarchies, and those hierarchies are infinite…
The most unquestionable virtue of Kafka is the invention of intolerable situations. A few lines are enough to demonstrate: ‘the animal seizes the whip from the hands of its master and beats him in order to become the master and doesn’t realise that this is nothing but an illusion produced by a new knot in the whip.’ Or: ‘Leopards invade the temples and drink wine from the chalices; this happens suddenly; in the end it was foreseen that this would happen and it is incorporated into the liturgy’. The elaboration, in Kafka, is less admirable than the invocation.

A less overt, yet equally significant, tribute to Kafka appears in the story ‘The Secret Miracle’ which is barely six pages in length. Like ‘Deutches Requiem,’ it has a single, unifying argument: the last hours of a prisoner about to be executed by the Nazis. Both stories focus on self-redemption from different perspectives. The former has a Jew as its protagonist, but it is narrated in the omniscient third-person; the latter, instead, has a Nazi as its main character, and it is he who delivers the tale.
‘The Secret Miracle,’ written during World War II and is collected in Ficciones, in a triptych with Borges’ other Jewish tales: ‘Emma Zunz’ and ‘Death and the Compass.’ It is more than a subliminal tribute to Kafka, already dead by then for a couple of decades.
The story opens with an epigraph from the Qur’an, 2:261: ‘And God caused him to die for an hundred years, and then raised him to life. And God said, “How long hast thou waited?’”He said, “I have waited a day or part of a day.”’Borges sets the plot in Prague in 1943. In the first scene Jaromir Hladik, a translator and playwright arrested by the Nazis for being Jewish, is taken to prison. The first scene is emblematic: it describes a dream Hladik has of a chess game so long that the opponents have forgotten not only what the prize but also the rules of the game.
From his cell, Hladik communicates with God. We find out Hladik is the author an unfinished drama called The Enemies and he knows that if his life is to have any meaning, it is because of his authorship of this drama. So he requests that God grant him a miracle — a secret miracle, since only he and he alone will know about it. In the final scene, as Hladik faces a German firing squad, the universe comes to a stop:

The guns converged on Hladik, but the men who were to kill him stood motionless. The sergeant’s arm eternized an unfinished gesture. On a paving stone of the courtyard a bee cast an unchanging shadow. The wind had ceased, as in a picture… He had asked God for a whole year to finish his work; His omnipotence had granted it. God had worked a secret miracle for him; German lead would kill him at the set hour, but in his mind a year would go by between the order and its execution.

In the very last line, Borges has Hladik shot to death. Even though no evidence of a finished manuscript of The Enemies can be found, the prisoner dies satisfied: his life has been justified. Borges’ statement is clear: a writer’s raison d’être is to leave behind the greater part of his talent. It seems clear that in the face of tyranny and death, Borges understood what Jews in Europe were about: faith, endurance, and posterity.

Another modern Jewish writer attracting Borges’ interest, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm, was Agnon (Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes). In the mid- sixties, Borges delivered a couple of lectures at the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Israelí in Buenos Aires, one on the Book of Job, the other on Spinoza. These lectures were eventually translated into English. A chance comment with Neal Sokol — included in Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations (2004) — in which I state that Borges never read Agnon, prompted a Canadian friend, Carl Rosenberg, editor of Outlook, to send me a third, previously unknown and significantly shorter lecture by Borges, It was delivered in the same institute in 1967, approximately a year after Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he shared with the German poet Nelly Sachs.
In ‘On Sh. Y. Agnon’, which I hereby reconstruct in English, Borges mentions, in passing, Agnon’s edition of the Tales the Ba’al Shem-Tov. He also refers to Days of Awe, which Schocken issued in 1965 with a subtitle more suitable for poetry slams than for libraries ‘being a treasury of traditions, legends and learned commentaries concerning Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the days between, culled from three hundred volumes, ancient and new.’ As the non-believer he was — and an even less enthusiast of religious rituals — Borges prefers Contes de Jérusalem (1959), which he read in the French rendition of Rachel and Guy Casaril. The anthology includes nine of Agnon’s tales, among them ‘The Whole Loaf’ and ‘Ido and Enam’.
I begin with some considerations that run the risk of appearing digressive but which should take us to the essential theme: the personality and oeuvre of our great contemporary, Shmuel Yosef Agnon. My ignorance of Hebrew — ignorance which I deplore but which it’s too late to remedy — has forced me to judge him through Days of Awe, about the Jewish liturgical year; and Contes de Jérusalem. I’ll limit myself to the astonishment I’ve experienced in these volumes, the latter especially.
Let me ask a simple yet complex question: what is a nation? My first reaction is to offer a geographical answer but it would be insufficient. Instead, let us envisage a nation as the series of memories stored at the heart of a people. George Bernard Shaw was once asked: How much suffering is humankind able to bear? His answer was that the suffering of a single individual is enough and is also the limit. In other words, the limit might be an abstraction, although the suffering itself is real. And so, if misery is impossible to measure in collective terms, how might one define a nation?
To me there isn’t a clearer example of a nation than Israel. It’s origins link it with those of the whole world, and it reaches us today after much misery and exile. A nation is made of the accumulated memory of successive generations. In itself, memory is often approached in a couple of ways: as a barren collection of dates, names and locations; and as a catalogue of curiosities. But there’s another approach neither endorsed by historians, nor by students of folklore: memory as experience incarnated in people. This, precisely, is what I find in Agnon.
Contes de Jérusalem ought to be read like one reads Dante: as a series of tales, at once tragic and humorous; and as a set of symbols. Agnon enables us to appreciate ancient Jewish tradition through a game of mirrors. In it he also invites us to recognize the role of Hassidism. Unquestionably, the Hassidic tales compiled by Martin Buber and, in his early years, by Agnon too, left an indelible imprint on him. For instance, ‘Ido and Enam,’ filled with mystery, is the bizarre tale of a scholar who, in an act of revelation, sees ninety-nine words of an unknown language. Ninety-nine are also the names of God; the Tetragramaton, which is the hundredth one, is infallible. Indirectly, Agnon recalls in his pages the legend of the Golem, made out of sand by means of words by a Cabalist in Prague’s Jewish quarter.
I shall now refer to ‘The Whole Loaf,’ a story about chance. It reminds me of Kafka, who is part of Jewish memory too. Agnon chronicles the infinite yet minuscule obstacles undergone by its hungry protagonist as he prepares for the Sabbath. Whereas Kafka had no hope, or at least a hope so remote it generates in us a terrible feeling of despair, Agnon is patient: he waits because he’s a believer. Indeed, one of the right decisions the Swedish Academy made recently was not to award its Nobel Prize to a writer of sadness and despair. Instead, it honoured one who, like Bernard Shaw, also a laureate, is sensitive to tragedy but knows that a joyful conclusion to the human quest isn’t altogether beyond us.
Another story in Contes de Jérusalem is about a country that could be any country. This one in particular is punished with a drought marked by an inexorably blue sky. Furthermore, enemies are always on the attack, the earth is barren and rivers are empty. The population is divided into two parties: on one side are the cover-headed, on the other the naked-headed. […] The two parties are ready to destroy each other. Yet there’s a single individual who is beyond any affiliation. He furtively leaves the city, praying for God to send a compassionate storm to stop the destruction. When the others find out, they excommunicate him. His sin: not to have alerted the authorities to his wishes. A decision is then made to have everyone build a huge tent for protection from the storm, which must be large enough to cover the entire country. A commission is established to decide what name to give to the tent. Alternative commissions take the responsibility of studying the etymology and orthography of the chosen name. As the population wastes its energy in trivialities, God allows rain to fall — and the barren land is fertilized, just as modern Israel itself was fertilized. I hear a distant echo in Agnon’s story of the Jewish tradition that says that every generation includes a total of thirty-six just men. By the way, this tradition was studied by Max Brod, Kafka’s friend. Unacquainted with one another, these just men navigate the world and are replaced as soon as they die. Right now their dynasty redeems us.
Israel’s memory is in Agnon — not an erudite but a living memory. He is known through a pseudonym; he didn’t write for his own vanity. Somehow he knew he was the living memory of that admirable people to which, beyond the vicissitudes of blood, we all belong: the people of Israel.

The interest in Agnon is part of Borges’ admiration for Israel as a young nation. His relationship with the Jewish state was ambivalent at first and only in later years — when he himself became an institutional luminary — did he soften his approach to it. It isn’t that Borges was critical of Zionism, in fact, judging by his work, he seems to have a limited knowledge of it, but international politics didn’t interest him in the least. He seldom talked about Theodor Herzl, not even about Eliezer ben Yehuda, credited for the modern revival of the Hebrew language.
Borges’s first trip to Israel came at the invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in recognition of his philo-Semitism, and in particular of his positive views on Israel. Borges had been active in the Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to build in Jerusalem an Argentine cultural centre. In the autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker, Borges stated:

Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Geneva days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I immediately found myself taking sides. While the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week later, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:

Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet,
Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.

Actually, there are a total of three poems in Borges’ collection In Praise of Darkness (1969). All were later included in his Obras Completas. There’s a strange, triumphant, pompous tone and tune to these poems. They eulogize the Six-Day War figuratively, in abstract, without placing it in context: The oldest of nations/ is also the youngest. Whoever is interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict won’t get an uninterested picture through them. Instead, the reader appreciates a blind fervour. I don’t believe these poems have been translated into English. Herein my versions.

‘To Israel’:

Who shall tell if you, Israel, are to be found
In the lost labyrinth of secular rivers
That is my blood? Who shall locate the places
Where my blood and yours have navigated?
It doesn’t matter. I know you’re in the Sacred
Book that comprehends Time, rescued in
history
By the red Adam, as well as by the memory
And agony of the Crucified One.
You’re in the Book that is the mirror
Of each face approaching it,
As well as God’s face, which, in its complex
And hard crystal, is appreciated in terror.
Long live Israel, who keeps God’s wall
In your passionate battle.

‘Israel’:

A man incarcerated and bewitched,
a man condemned to be the serpent
that keeps the infamous gold,
a man condemned to be Shylock,
a man wandering through the globe,
knowing he had been in Paradise,
an old and blind man who ought to tear down
the temple columns,
a face condemned to be a mask,
a man who in spite of humankind
is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the
Kabbalists,
a man that is a Book,
a mouth praising heaven’s justice
from the abyss,
an attorney or a dentist
who talked with God in a mountain,
a man condemned to ridicule
and abomination, a Jew,
an ancient man,
burnt and drowned in lethal chambers,
an obstinate man who is immortal
and now has returned to battle,
to the violent light of victory,
beautiful like a lion at noon.

And ‘Israel, 1969:

I feared Israel would be threatened,
with sweet insidious,
by the nostalgia that secular diasporas
accumulated, like sorrowful treasure,
in the cities of the infidel, the juderías,
the twilight of the steppe, the dreams—
the nostalgia of those who, near the waters of
Babylon,
longed for you, Jerusalem.
What else were you, Israel, if not that nostalgia,
the will to safe-keep,
from the inconstant shapes of time,
your old magical book, your liturgy,
your solitude with God?
I was wrong. The oldest of nations
is also the youngest.
You haven’t been tempted by gardens,
otherness and boredom,
but by the rigor of the last frontier.
Israel has announced, without words:
you shall forget who you are—
you shall leave behind your previous self.
You shall forget who you were in those lands
that gave you their afternoons and mornings
and which you shall no longer cherish.
You shall forget your parents’ tongue
and learn the tongue of Paradise.
You shall be an Israeli. You shall be a soldier.
You shall build the homeland with swamps,
you shall erect it in deserts.
You brother shall work with you, he whose
face you haven’t seen before.
Only one thing is promised:
your place in the battlefield.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.

If I am not one of Thy repetitions or errata…
—J.L.B., ‘The Secret Miracle’

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of unworthiness. He was, he claimed, unworthy of friendship, of love, and of public attention. The more he achieved, the more puzzled he was by the praise he received. He kept waiting for the day when people would finally recognize how mistaken they had been about his genius. This, of course, might be seen as an excess of modesty; it could also be equated with a complex Jews are often linked to: self-deprecation.
For years I have been reading Borges’ oeuvre, turning it into a map. I myself have learned what it means to be a Hispanic Jew (I was raised in Mexico) through his meditations on time, dreams, doppelgangers and God.
Borges’ life-long feeling of unease, this unworthiness is the force behind his writing. Borges wasn’t an aristocrat, although often he behaved as such. And even though his genealogical connection with the soldados in Argentina on his mother’s side of the family is ethereal, his eulogies to them are defined by envy. Simply put, Borges refurbished his background, making it look more distinguished and more exciting than it really was. This enhancement of one’s own heritage, this falsification of the self, is a common trait in the Hispanic world where las apariencias engañan, nothing is at it appears on the surface.
One of Borges’ grandfathers, Francisco Borges Lafinur, had fought at the Battle of Caseros against the tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas; he was killed by two bullets shot from a Remington rifle, the first time such a weapon had ever been used in Argentina. In his Autobiographical Essay, published in The New Yorker in 1974, Borges wrote of his military forbears who ‘may account for my yearning after that epic destiny which my gods denied me, no doubt wisely.’ This line suggests that he saw himself for what he was not and used literature to impersonate that absence — to become the warrior he could never be.
Borges’ paternal grandmother, Fanny Haslam, was an English woman with a Quaker past. More important, she was a great reader. Her Spanish was fluent but poor; her English, on the other hand, was hypnotizing. She fell in love with her favourite authors: Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, Dickens and Thackery and she introduced her grandson to the beauty of the English language. Thanks in large part to her, Borges grew up in both English and Spanish. Most of his early reading was in English, including Don Quixote. The original, which he read years later, seemed to him like a second-rate translation.
His genealogical tree shows no Semitic lineage, but he longed for one. In a poem written in 1967, celebrating the triumphant Six-Day War he states: ¿Quién me dirá si estás en el perdido laberinto de mi sangre, Israel? — ‘Who shall tell me if you, Israel, are to be found in the lost labyrinth of my blood?’ He faithfully searched throughout his entire life for a trace of Jewish blood in his ancestry. This is evident in a brief but seminal essay called Yo, judío. Herein the first paragraph from Eliot Weinberger’s English translation, included in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fiction (1999):

Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past is one of those things that can enrich ignorance. It is infinitely malleable and agreeable, far more obliging that the future and far less demanding of our efforts. It is the famous season favoured by all mythologies.

In 1933, Megáfono had devoted a full issue to Borges, who was regarded locally as un raro— a Wildean dandy, an Europeanized auteur infatuated with metaphysics and prone to an obtuse vocabulary. As a response to the Megáfono festschrift, the right-wing, nationalist periodical Crisol, also published in Buenos Aires, attacked Borges for hiding his ‘Israelite’ origins. Yo, judío, his brave and unapologetic response to Crisol, pointed out, in the measured prose that was to become his trademark, a deep desire to find the missing link in his ancestry — the Jew in the mirror. The essay continues:

Borges Acevedo is my name. Ramos Mejía, in a note to the fifth chapter of Rosas and His time, lists the family names in Buenos Aires at that time in order to demonstrate that all, or almost all, ‘come from Judeo-Portuguese stock’. Acevedo is included in the list: the only supporting evidence for my Jewish pretensions until this confirmation in Crisol. Nevertheless, Captain Honorario Acevedo undertook a detailed investigation that I cannot ignore. His study notes that the first Acevedo to disembark on this land was the Catalan Don Pedro de Azevedo in 1728: landholder, settler of ‘Pago de los Arroyos,’ father and grandfather of cattle ranchers in that province, a notable who figures in the annals of the parish of Santa Fe and in the documents of the history and the Viceroyalty — an ancestor, in short, irreparably Spanish.
Two hundred years and I can’t find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.
I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, but hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sefiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.

Yo, judio is among Borges’ least known essays; he saw it as an orphan piece, never including it in Other Inquisitions or any of his nonfiction volumes. Although it has always been available in Spanish it appeared only briefly in English in a 1970s American anthology published by E.P. Dutton. It continues:

Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol [Crucible], in its issue of January 30, has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; it speaks of my ‘Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden’ (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me).

The final section of Yo, judío is emphatic. In it Borges states his unequivocal position.

Statistically, the Hebrews were few. What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan province everywhere? Our inquisitors seek out Hebrews, but never Phoenicians, Garamantes, Scythians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyians, Cyclopes, or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, of Babylon, of Carthage, of Memphis, never succeeded in engendering a single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that this gift was granted.

In the context of Argentine letters and, by extension, in the Hispanic world in general, Borges is a rara avis. No other non-Jewish author from the region addresses Jewish themes with his depth and complexity. Why, in a place so disinterested in lo judío, should as influential and visionary a figure as Borges emerge?
Borges’ personal journey paints a sharp picture of the fragile status of Jews in the Hispanic world. He was less attracted to the Sephardim than to the Ashkenazi culture of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who arrived at the River Plate at the end of the nineteenth-century. He maintained close ties with a handful of urbane, forward-looking intellectuals, among them his tutor Alberto Gerchunoff, considered the grandfather of Jewish-Latin American letters. His collection of vignettes The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, originally published in 1910, is a celebration of Argentina’s first hundred years of independence.
Borges’ Jewish education was far more cosmopolitan than that of most Jews at the time. While still young, he read Joyce (whose character Leopold Bloom stroke him as emblematic of ‘the Wandering Jew’) and Kafka, a writer that inspired him to such an extent that he translated him into Spanish and for decades was among his first promoters in the Spanish-speaking world. He was also fascinated by Gustav Meyrink’s German novel The Golem and the Hassidic tales compiled by Martin Buber.
By the time Borges came of age Jews, mostly poor and uneducated, were a fixture in Argentinean society. The more recent Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim replaced the earlier wave of crypto-Jews who had arrived in their thousands from Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Northern Africa from 1525 to 1810 and who slowly disappeared.
Argentina was a magnet for large-scale philanthropists and organisations involved in the resettlement of Jews from Europe. The French benefactor Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Alliance Israélite Universelle poured funds into establishing socialist agricultural communes in the Pampas for Jews fleeing the pogroms in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. The early immigrants found themselves in rural milieus where Gaucho life prevailed, explaining the lore of the Jewish gaucho at the turn of the nineteenth-century. But life in the countryside only lasted one or two generations. The Jewish settlers and their children slowly moved to urban centers, especially Buenos Aires and by the thirties, the majority of Jews were fluent in Spanish and active in Argentine society. Still, anti-Jewish sentiment, a fixture in Latin America since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and the Catholic missionaries, remained rampant, and to this day refuses to vanish altogether.
As a young man, Borges travelled with his family to Europe. They were trapped there by World War I and returned five years later to Buenos Aires. The contrast between the Old World and the New affected Borges deeply and on his return he became aware of a series of national types (e.g., gauchos, compadritos, and orilleros) that seemed to define the character of Argentina. He felt a purely intellectual attraction toward these natives and sublimated them into universal Everymen. From his first short story, Streetcorner Man, to his 1975 volume of tales, The Book of Sand, the figures of Argentinian folklore feature prominently in his work.
Years later, with his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, he edited a two-volume anthology of gaucho literature. He also produced brilliant essays on subjects such as the Argentinian language, and on local men of letters like Evaristo Carriego, Paul Groussac and Leopoldo Lugones. Borges, as one of his biographers, James Woodall, stated, ‘was as steeped in the poetry of his Argentine predecessors, gaucho traditions and porteño slang, as he was in the stories of Henry James and the novels of Franz Kafka.’

A key story exploring Borges’ relationship with Argentinian Jews is ‘Unworthy’. The story is part of Doctor Brodie’s Report (1970). Architecturally, it is shaped as a story within a story. In the introduction Borges describes his friendship with a Jewish businessman, don Santiago Fischbein, the owner of the Librería Buenos Aires, on Calle Talcahuano. By the time the narrative begins Fischbein has died,  allowing Borges to write freely about him and offering some insightful views on politics in Argentina:

Fischbein had tended toward the obese; his features are not as clear in my memory as our long conversations are. Firmly yet coolly he would condemn Zionism — it would make the Jew an ordinary man, he said, tied like all other men to a single tradition and a single country, and bereft of the complexities and discords that now enrich him. I recall that he once told me that a new edition of the works of Baruch Spinoza was being prepared, which would banish all that Euclidean apparatus that makes Spinoza’s work so difficult to read yet at the same time imparts an illusory sense of rigor to the fantastic theory. Fischbein showed me (though he refused to sell me) a curious copy of Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, but my library does contain some books by Ginsburg and Waite that bear Fischbein’s seal.

Fischbein himself then takes control of the narrative. He tells Borges a definitive anecdote from his youth, when he was still struggling to become Argentinian. ‘I don’t know whether I’ve ever mentioned that I’m from Entre Ríos,’ he states. ‘I won’t tell you that we were Jewish gauchos—there were never any Jewish gauchos. We were merchants and small farmers.’
Fischbein’s parents moved to Buenos Aires, where they opened a store in a neighbourhood of street-corner gangs one of which attacked the young Fischbein. He is rescued by Francisco Ferrari, whom he describes as a hero: ‘He had black hair and was rather tall, good-looking — handsome in the style of those days. He always wore black.’ Fischbein idealizes him and Ferrari invites him to his clan. During this time, Fischbein is struggling to find his Jewish-Argentine identity. He tells Borges:

Today I’ve carved out a place for myself. I have this bookstore that I enjoy and whose books I read; I have friendships, like ours; I have my wife and children; I’ve joined the Socialist party — I’m a good Argentine and a good Jew. I am respected and respectable. The man you see now is almost bald; at the time I was a poor Jewish kid with red hair in a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. People looked askance at me. I tried, as all young fellows do, to be like everyone else. I had started calling myself Santiago to make the Jacob go away, but there was nothing I could do about the Fischbein. We all come to resemble the image others have of us: I sensed people’s contempt for me, and I felt contempt for myself as well. At that time, and especially in that setting, it was important to be brave; I knew myself to be a coward. Women intimidated me; deep down, I was ashamed of my fainthearted chastity. I had no friends my own age.

Fischbein’s self-esteem improves temporarily when Ferrari invites him to be part of a robbery.

Friendship, you know, is as mysterious as love or any other state of this confusion we call life. In fact, I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification. However that may be, the fact was that Francisco Ferrari, the daring, strong Ferrari, felt a sense of friendship for me, contemptible me. I felt he was mistaken, that I was not worthy of that friendship. I tried to avoid him, but he wouldn’t let me. My anxiety was made worse by my mother’s disapproval; she could not resign herself to my associating with what she called ‘the riffraff,’ nor to the fact that I’d begun to ape them.

True to his unworthiness, Fischbein turns informer. Shortly before the robbery, he goes to the police station and reveals the details of the robbery to the authorities.
As expected, in the middle of the robbery the police appear. Fischbein hears four shots and sees the bodies of Ferrari and an accomplice being dragged out of the building. They had been shot at point-blank range. Fischbein adds: ‘In their report the police said the robbers had failed to halt when they were ordered, and that Ferrari and don Eliseo had fired the first shots. I knew that was a lie, because I had never seen either of them with a revolver. The police had taken advantage of the occasion to settle an old score.’
This is a story of guilt and betrayal. A Jewish pseudo-Gaucho enters the world of gangs and hopes to become a compadrito. But in the end he is incapable of establishing a bond with that world and joins ranks with the wrong side. Borges frames the narrative from the perspective of Jewish belonging. Are Jews Argentines? Superficially they are, sometimes in spite of themselves. But as perennial outsiders, they will never truly penetrate the Argentine psyche. They might be Argentines on paper, but they’ll never be compadritos.
This is not an indictment by Borges. Rather, it is a celebration. Borges always admired gauchos and compadritos; they were courageous. They were brave. He instead was simply an intellectual attempting to understand Argentine tradition. Fischbein, then, is just like Borges: an interloper, more connected with books than with life itself.
Among his most unusual stories about Ashkenazi Jews is ‘Emma Zunz’, included in The Aleph (1949) in part because she is one of Borges’ few female protagonists, and moreover a rebellious one,who takes the law in her own hands. I wrote about it years ago from the perspective of Jewish theodicy: characters that defy social rules and compete with the divine.
The story takes place in early 1922, as the protagonist, Emma Zunz, receives a letter from Brazil announcing the death of her father, Manuel Meier, also known as Emanuel Zunz. Although she is told he died of an accidental overdose of veronal — that is, a suicide— she knows better. She recalls a scandal in his business and the fact that her father’s partner, Aaron Loewenthal, drove him to his end. Borges devotes himself to exploring Emma’s inner emotions and her determination to take the law into her own hands and wreak revenge. She devises a cunning plan to make Loewenthal pay for his crime. ‘She did not sleep that night, and by the time first light defined the rectangle of the window, she had perfected her plan. In the mill, there were rumors of a strike; Emma declared, as she always did, that she was opposed to all forms of violence.’
Emma is still a virgin. She decides to go to the pier and have herself deflowered by an anonymous sailor. She then goes to Aaron Loewenthal’s office above the mill when he’s alone. She pretends to be sexually abused by him and then kills him with a revolver. The actual scene of revenge is described in a complex manner:

Sitting before Aaron Loewenthal, Emma felt (more than the urgency to avenge her father) the urgency to punish the outrage she herself had suffered. She could not not kill him, after being so fully and thoroughly dishonored. Nor did she have time to waste in theatrics. Sitting timidly in his office, she begged Loewenthal’s pardon, invoked (in her guise as snitch) the obligations entailed by loyalty, mentioned a few names, insinuated others, and stopped short, as through overcome by fearfulness. Her performance succeeded; Loewenthal went out to get her a glass of water. By the time he returned from the dinning hall, incredulous at the woman’s fluttering perturbation yet full of solicitude, Emma had found the heavy revolver in the drawer. She pulled the trigger twice. Loewethanl’s considerable body crumpled as though crushed by the explosions and the smoke; the glass of water shattered; his face looked at her with astonishment and fury; the mouth in the face cursed her in Spanish and Yiddish.

Borges’s scene is cinematic. He focuses on the gun, then on the victim. He then allows Emma a few dramatic words: ‘I have avenged my father, and I shall not be punished…’ .The story concludes in  philosophical tone:

Then she picked up the telephone and repeated what she was to repeat so many times, in those and other words: Something has happened, something unbelievable… Sr. Loewethnal sent for me on the pretext of the strike… He raped me… I killed him…
The story was unbelievable, yes—and yet it convinced everyone, because in substance it was true. Emma Zunz’s tone of voice was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real, as well; all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names.

Its important to focus on the rape scene — the only such description ever included by Borges in his fiction. When Emma goes to the pier, her approach is mimetic. She enters a few bars to study the way women behave towards men in such places. She then looks for a possible suitor. Having identified a young one, she fears he might inspire in her tenderness. She opts for another ‘so that there might be no mitigation of the purity of the horror.’ The sailor (a Swede or Finn) takes her down a hallway which leads outside. Her did not speak Spanish. ‘He was an instrument for Emma,’ Borges writes, ‘as she was for him — but she was used for pleasure, while he was used for justice.”

When she was alone, Emma did not open her eyes immediately. On the night table was the money the man had left. Emma sat up and tore it to shreds, as she had torn up the letter a short time before. Tearing up money is an act of impiety, like throwing away bread; the minute she did it, Emma wished she hadn’t — an act of pride and on that day… Foreboding melted into the sadness of her body, into the revulsion. Sadness and revulsion lay upon Emma like chains, but slowly she got up and began to dress.

Like a black-and-white Hollywood film, sex isn’t so much described as insinuated. Why doesn’t Borges detail the actual moment of horror? Instead, he concentrates on Emma’s mental — and spiritual—plight: what she experiences after the act has been consummated.
Why does Borges set the plot amid Yiddish-speaking immigrants? As a result of his financial dealings, her father was forced to flee, changing his identity by opting for another name. Emma’s memory brings her back to her childhood in the province of Entre Ríos. But she lives in Calle Liniers, in Lanús, a middle-class neighbourhood in southwestern Buenos Aires. Aaron Loewenthal’s mill is on Warnes Street, in central Buenos Aires, near the Villa Crespo commercial district.
Do the names of these immigrants signal a connection to the world of the shtetl? Emma is the daughter of a newcomer, an Argentine by birth. Thus, she is a full citizen. But she still acts like an outsider. Rather than trusting the judicial system, she resorts to implementing her own punishment against her father’s victimizer. Some critics approach the text from a Psychoanalytic perspective: Emma and her father are united by a natural pact, which she sanctifies when an outsider distresses their liaison. Other scholars like Edna Aizenberg have struggled to understand the story from an esoteric perspective. They approach Emma Zunz as the kabbalistic myth of the Shekhinah, the female part of God. Aizenberg states in The Aleph Weaver (1988):

Emma, her wronged and exiled father, and the embezzler, Aaron Loewenthal, reenact the mystical story of God’s Daughter — the feminine hypostasis of the divine — who is separated from her heavenly progenitor and falls into an unclean physical-sexual world as a result of sin. Since the Daughter is God the Father’s power of stern judgment, she proceeds to punish the wrong-doer through destruction and violence, without, however, restoring the harmony which existed in the happy days before the sin.

I believe that Borges, who was still in his forties when he crafted Emma Zunz (it appeared in Sur 167, September 1948), made Emma’s odyssey far more mundane. The plot was given to him by his friend Cecilia Ingenieros. Borges in turn dedicated the story to her, as rather, ‘I was not so much dedicating it to her as giving it to her back.’ The names of his characters — as is typical — aren’t accidental. The words Emma and Zunz are made of four letters each, like the Tetragramathon, e.g., the divine name. The repetition of the letters m and z in them accentuates this relation. In an interview, Borges said: ‘I was trying to get an ugly and at the same time a colorless name… [T]he name seems so meaningless, so insignificant.’ If he was conscious at all, Zunz, Meir, and Loewenthal have a Germanic extraction. This suggests that Borges places his story in the context of educated Yiddish speakers from the Rhim whose view of their Polish and Ukrainian counterparts was unfavourable. They perceived themselves as cosmopolitan, whereas the shtetl people were uneducated. Seen through this prism, the characters might have yet another element of discomfort toward Argentine society: they are upper-class snobs, unrelated to the proletarian Tevyes and Yentls whose manners are stereotypes by gentile society. In other words, they are neither at home among Jews nor non-Jews.
Emma Zunz, finally, is also about stereotypes. Manuel Meier and Aaron Loewenthal are businessmen. Money is in their mind. Money becomes a source of dispute. They speak Yiddish. One kills the other. This is the pecuniary world of Shakespeare’s Shylock. But Emma’s action unsettles the stereotypes: she sacrifices herself in order to achieve a superior form of justice. She is also a feminist figure eager to prove that women aren’t passive. Why call her Emma? Easy: as a tribute to Emma Bovary and Emma Woodhouse, strong-willed women in Western literature who refuse to conform to the male establishment.
Still, the question persists: Why does Borges make Emma Zunz a Jew? It isn’t clear from interviews if Cecilia Ingenieros offered him the story with the Jewish ingredients already set. Most likely, Borges inserted them as he crafted the final outcome. Even though he makes Emma a non-observant Jew, her religious ancestry emphasizes the rebellious spirit he wants to infuse in her. The female protagonist is Jewish because Borges designs his tale in the interstices between divine and human law. Emma is aware of Loewenthal’s crime but knows no human court will convict him. What choice does she have? She isn’t a believer, which means she cannot procrastinate her sense of justice: she won’t be calmed by the thought that Loewenthal will be punished in the afterlife. Solution: to plot her own punishment. This places her in the tradition of biblical characters: if society isn’t ready to hand in a sentence, she is ready to do it herself. It is clear to me that Borges’s Judaism emphasizes individual responsibility above social conventions. It also stresses spiritual purity and the connection between the heavenly and earthly domains. Emma’s decision to give up her virginity so as to avenge her father is a sign that the higher order is more important than integrity. She is ready to sacrifice herself for an abstract idea of justice.

In 1977 Borges delivered seven lectured on seven different topics in seven nights in Buenos Aires. The topics he chose included nightmares, The Divine Comedy, poetry, The Arabian Nights, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah. The transcripts of the lectures were published in book form in 1980 as Seven Nights. Marvellous as these disquisitions are in their encyclopedic broadness, Borges also reduces his themes to a series of similes. Arguably the most inspiring of the lectures was the last one on blindness.
Borges had known since early childhood he would one day become blind. It was congenital, his father, among other relatives, was also blind. And blindness struck librarians in Argentina who, like him, were directors of the National library, Paul José Marmol and Groussac. What is inspiring about Borges’ lecture is the resignation with which he approaches his argument. He talks of different blind writers: Homer, John Milton, W. H. Prescott (the historian who wrote Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru), and Joyce. Borges states (in Eliot Weinberger’s translation):
People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world. There is, for example, Shakespeare’s line: “Looking into darkness which the blind don’t see.” If we understand “darkness” as “blackness,” then Shakespeare is wrong.
Borges adds that the blind live in a universe that is inconvenient, but not more so than any other inconvenience that affects those people able to see. And herein his message, in which uses misfortune as a way to appreciate life. This appreciation comes from his love for Jews, who have turned suffering into vision:
A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is always one, and continually assaulted by poetry. I suppose a painter feels that colors and shapes are besieging him. Or a musician feels the strange world of sounds—the strangest world of art—is always seeking him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him. For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. It may be an instrument. Fray Luis de León dedicated one of his most beautiful odes to Francisco Salinas, a blind musician.
A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.