Oy, Caramba!: An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America

by Ilan Stavans (Editor)

First published in 1994 as Tropical Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers, Ilan Stavans's classic anthology is expanded and updated in this new edition.

Genres: Short Stories, Jewish, Fiction, Judaism

344 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2016

About the author

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. An award-winning writer and public television host, his books include Growing Up Latino and Spanglish. A native of Mexico City, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Rachel]

Overall this collection didn’t work for me, and that might be partly my fault.

For a long time I only read one story a year(!!), in honor of an annual BookTube tradition. Last February I finally decided to pick up the pace, and…still read this for BookTube, but for videos that would come out a couple of times a month.

I started this #AmReading tradition with Dorothy Parker’s collected short stories, and can a hodge podge anthology really live up to that? This particular collection is sprawling, broken up by Latin American countries, and often each section contained several authors. Their writing styles ran the gamut, even if many of them were European refugees and Holocaust and pogrom trauma featured prominently.

Stavans’s editorial asides leaned towards the grandiose, and often took me out of the story with a lot of high brow literary allusions. Plus, some are chapters from novels, which is a strange anthology conceit. Here’s some that stood out to me:

“The Closed Coffin” by Marcelo Bimajer, where a reviewer’s opinion of a book changes after a conversation with a long-lost acquaintance. (The conversation makes him think differently about relationships.)

“Temptation” by Salomon Briansky, who pays a lot to take a Torah with him away from Poland and into a new land with few Jews. He ultimately gives up his Torah for free so the Jewish community there can celebrate the High Holy Days, which is a nice morality tale about doing what’s right. It’s also harrowing to think the author wrote this in the 1930s, when the European Jewish community was about to be decimated.

‘In the Name of His Name” by Angelina Muniz-Huberman, a female writer delving into the fantastical! It’s a short enough story where I was entranced. :P The main character is trying to find “the Source of the Word,” or really G-d. But in Jewish folklore you gotta be careful on a search like this because G-d is really too powerful to comprehend. You may think you’ve found the path, but it can lead you astray. (Though this tangent that led the protagonist astray was a magical river which may lead to the lost tribes of Israel…something I may also be alluding to in my Jewish fantasy project, so I’m with you by getting distracted by that river! :P)

“Xerox Man” by Ilan Stavans. OK I’ll throw a bone to the editor with his own story. :P In his story an alter-ego character tries to confront someone making illegal xerox copies of ancient Jewish texts (also based on a true story.) It’s a bit of a rumination on how much of reality is real and how much is fake, especially as the xerox man isn’t only copying the texts but editing them, in essence censoring material!

“The Bar Mitzvah Speech” by Salomon Zytner. An immigrant to a Latin American country is desperate for his son to have a connection to Judaism via his bar mitzvah. But as the boy grows ill, the protagonist’s priorities shift from the boy learning his haftorah perfectly to being able to attend at all. Reminds me of the Jewish folktale about the man who went to the rabbi to complain about his life, and the rabbi taught him in a roundabout way to be grateful for what he had.

“Kindergarten” by Victor Perera, where a Jewish boy in a gentile school faces harassment. The pervasiveness of anti-Jewish sentiment and how it starts at a young age. :/ Difficult to pull off a story with characters this age, too.

“The Secret Miracle” by Jorge Luis Borges. Ending with more magical realism about a man who strikes up a deal with G-d when being hunted by Nazis, and time freezes when he’s about to be executed. He gets an extra year to complete a kabalistic translation. I found this an emotional way to confront the harrowing reality of genocidal persecution.

[Phyllis]

This was great to read before my South American trip. For me, translated short stories are difficult to read, and this proved to be true. But I learned a lot, and some stories were excellent.

[Lewis Szymanski]

I received this in a Goodreads giveaway. This is a subject I knew nothing about. Most of the stories are a slice of life, with a few magical realism thrown in. The editor did a really good job picking stories for this collection. They are all well written and interesting, not a dud in the bunch. My personal favorites are Temptation by Salomon Briansky, Asylum by Ariel Dorfman, and Emma Zunz by Jorge Luis Borges. I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in Latin American literature, Jewish literature, or just likes stories about being the other.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the March 2017 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...