ABSTRACT
A common motif of Latin American Jewish narrative is the rewriting of history, that is, the emendatory encoding of the Jewish subject into history. Writing in Latin America—specifically, writing by Jewish authors—and theoretical polemics in the United States lead, in a manner of speaking, parallel lives. That is, the practice and the presuppositions about writing of the artists are replicated in the self-justifying strategies of the theorists. Both groups focus on the underprivileged position. The Jewish subject in Latin American literature is the product of a commitment to historical process. The notion of “escape fiction” smacks of irony in this context. There is a panorama of vantage points: ties with the Old World, the encounter with the New, the literary legacy, the trials of adaptation, new forms of persecution, the dialectic of custom and assimilation and of faith and activism, the conflict of national allegiance and allegiance to Israel, generational conflict, the writer in exile, questions of aesthetics.
