Topographies of memory in the short stories Judite and Réquiem para um solitário by Samuel Rawet

ABSTRACT

This contribution aims to analyze space as a constituent element of memory in the collection Contos do Imigrante (1956) by the Jewish-Brazilian writer Samuel Rawet. Following the example of the short stories Judite and Réquiem para um solitário, the domain of space is considered as a constitutive element of the individual, the family, and the collective memories of the characters. The point of departure is the assumption that the spaces they stage and inhabit, as well as the narrative functions attributed to the fictionalized spaces, set the basis for constructing the narrative of a topography of memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Samuel Rawet
• Contos do Imigrante
• memory
• space
• topography
• Jewish literature
• migration

Samuel Rawet

The Jewish writer Samuel Rawet was born in Klimonotov, a small village near Warsaw (Poland) in 1929 and came to Brazil in 1936.¹ During his first seven years of life, he lived in a Polish shtetl², having Yiddish as his mother tongue.³ When he arrived in Brazil, the writer, later a naturalized Brazilian, settled in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, in the northern part of the city. He worked as an engineer in Oscar Niemeyer’s team and participated in the project for the construction of the new capital, Brasília. Apart from that, he wrote countless short stories, essays, novellas, plays, and literary and theatrical critiques.⁴ According to Assis Brasil, Samuel Rawet’s short stories gave way to a new genre, with different and rich aesthetic concerns, “[leaving behind] once and for all his influences and [letting] go the Machadian⁵ ‘ballast’ as well as the naturalistic aspect of fiction.”⁶ In an interview with Flávio Moreira da Costa, Rawet said that he learned Portuguese on the streets “by being beaten and speaking it wrongly”:

I am fundamentally a suburban man; the suburbs are very connected to me. I learned Portuguese in the streets, by being beaten and by speaking it wrong – I even think that this is the best pedagogical method in all senses. I learned everything on the street.⁷

Urban and suburban landscapes, as will later be seen, are essential narrative elements in Samuel Rawet’s work. As an immigrant, he moved among three distinctive cultural references – Polish, Jewish, and Brazilian.⁸ At the age of 27, he wrote his first collection of short stories, Contos do Imigrante [Immigrant Tales] (1956), which consists of 10 texts, five of them portraying the stories of immigrants and their experiences in the new country. Rawet wrote this first anthology between 1951 and 1954, a period when many Jewish immigrants were arriving in Brazil. The book stands out for its different view of the Jewish immigrants of that time, problematizing “aspects of their experiences of cultural translation.”⁹ The narratives are marked by a “deterritorialization” of the characters, who address their difficulties of adaptation in the country of destination, their deepest feelings marked by melancholy and incommunicability, as well as their (non-) identification with the Jewish community in the diaspora:

Although not a general rule, one can see the predominance of the feeling of melancholy, the remembrance of the pain of not belonging anywhere among the people who have lived through this experience. […] In a subsequent moment, one can add the impossibility of interaction in one’s homeland […] and the estrangement in the new place.¹⁰

While in other books by Rawet, the Jews appear on the margins of society, in the collection Contos do imigrante they emerge as “newly arrived individuals estranged from their new reality” and as “objects of rejection, both by the local population and by the Jewish community itself.”¹¹

This rejection and lack of belonging is also present in the two narratives analyzed here, which show the Jewish immigrant’s experience in the diaspora. Due to their uprooting, the immigrant characters find themselves in a sort of “in-between-space”¹², that is, a space between the world left behind and the new world where, however, the unfinished past is constantly reflected in the present. This happens to the protagonist Judite in the short story of the same name and to the main character in Réquiem de um solitário [Requiem of a Lonely Man]; they both experience exclusion, isolation, and loneliness.

Geographical and linguistic displacement

As shown previously, geographical displacement often engenders feelings of disorientation, alienation, and exclusion. This psychological state of literary characters not only transpires from their actions and dialogues in the narrative, but also from their own fragmented and elliptical language. It is precisely the gaps and the textual fragments that represent the process of a “narrative memory”¹³ in literary texts. Neumann understands narrative memory as a task that is performed by narrative in pursuance of preserving memory, thus becoming a cultural practice as an archive of knowledge and cultural heritage. Narrative memory, therefore, plays the role of (re)memorizing the past and vice-versa: literature becomes a discourse of memorialization, “fictions of memory,” as stated by Birgit Neumann.¹⁴

Within this process of (re)memorializing the past, the geographic and mental spaces of the protagonists work, primarily, as the staging of belonging, identity, isolation, and loneliness, both in the territory travelled by and in the one inhabited or left behind.

In this paper, we intend to address the relationship between the characters and the space they settle in or move through by analyzing to what extent their inner lives are reflected in the environments and landscapes represented in the narratives. We depart from the assumption that the literary landscape is always organized and perceived by the subject-protagonist, who, in this case, is strongly affected by the past, thus creating a past topography, a topography of memory.¹⁵

The term topography is applied here in two different but coherent senses. On the one hand, it refers to the literary geographies themselves – that means, to the fictional representation of the spaces travelled or inhabited and their function in building individual or collective memories; on the other hand, it refers to language and textual architecture as spaces of memory.

Topography of memory: representations of space and memory in literature

Since the spatial turn ¹⁶ in the 1980s, cultural and literary studies have taken up the theme of space and its literary representation in various ways.¹⁷ However, the relationship between space and memory in literature is the result of a rediscovery of the origins of intellectual history since in Western classical rhetoric (Cicero) the step of rememoration of textual arguments is strongly linked to the element of space in which the interplay of loci et imagines¹⁸ stands out. In this type of rememoration, the interlocutor memorized long texts by placing the arguments at different imaginary points and then reconstructing the text from those points. In her monograph Erinnerungsräume (2010), German researcher Aleida Assmann uses the term ars to name the art or practice of archiving knowledge, distinguishing it from functional memory, or vis, which focuses on memory as a selective process. Another researcher who calls attention to the relationship between space and memory is the French historian Pierre Nora. In his text Les lieux de memóire (1992), he shows the importance of memory places for the cultural imaginary of a country; he also links collective memory to spaces and objects, differentiating them from generational memory.¹⁹

The German researcher Renate Lachmann defines literature as a “mnemonic art par excellence”²⁰, emphasizing the immediate relationship between memory and literature. Lachmann attributes the function of literature as a mnemonic art to the intertextual characteristics of literary language and relates, therefore, remembrance and intertextuality: “The text is formed by the intertextuality of its references”²¹ (ibid., p. 304). In such a manner, we can understand the various references among literary texts – Gérard Genette (1997) uses the broader term of transtextuality for those phenomena – as well as spatial relations.²² The weaving of a text always implies a transtextual and, as it were, a spatial crossing, connecting elements of actual texts, in the past and in the present, both geographically close and distant.²³

This understanding of intertextuality as a spatial metaphor implies the concept that literature is a constitutive part of the memory of culture. Literary memory, considered from the perspective of cultural semiotics, functions as an articulated cultural memory. This idea of cultural memory (“Literature is the memory of culture”²⁴), is one of the most influential conceptualizations in the investigation of literary memory. One must therefore distinguish between space in literature, that is, the mimetic construction of different environments/places/spaces inhabited by the characters – and the literary text as a space that visualizes the memorialistic process itself.

Spaces of memory in Samuel Rawet

The procedure of spatial construction of memory emerges as a characteristic mark in almost all of Samuel Rawet’s texts, where the characters establish dialogues with their immediate surroundings, and reconstruct the past on the basis of the spatial impulses they find around them. The literary space is thus, shaped by the characters’ memorial feelings: the past is reflected in the present and contributes to the construction of a melancholic atmosphere. Both Judite and the protagonist of Réquiem para um solitário are confronted with decisions made in the past that had an immediate impact on the present. In this context, the semantics of literary spaces is of paramount importance. How do the fictionalized spaces in the texts relate to the past and to the characters’ memories? According to Frémont, lived space is established from the “diverse relations of a man with space”, which “combine in a lived experience that, according to the ages of life, is formed, structured, and undone.”²⁵ This means that the literary space is not a “real object in itself”²⁶, but is constructed from the direct relationship between the narrator’s gaze in the face of the inhabitant and the inhabited space, a thesis that serves as a foundation for an analysis of literary topography.

Undoubtedly, Samuel Rawet’s experiences as an immigrant, as well as his experiences with the Jewish community, are engraved in the author’s writing.²⁷ The first five stories of the collection, Contos do Imigrante, have as main characters Jewish immigrants with different features, and this diversity, according to Saul Kirschbaum, indicates.

a metonymic comprehensiveness; the ensemble of these characters practically encompasses all individual possibilities, allowing us to formulate the hypothesis that Rawet set out in those stories to develop a broad critique of the specific, concrete Jewish community in which he lived, from within the community.²⁸

The main spaces in which Rawet’s characters move about are their homeland and their new “chosen” country. This is an urban and marginal space built from the characters’ relationship with their social environment. That means that the represented spaces are created from the interaction between a man and his inhabited space²⁹, attributing special significance and even new meanings to everyday experiences.

Topographies of memory in the short stories Judite and Réquiem para um solitário

In the anthology Contos do imigrante, the immigrant as a character appears in different dimensions, challenging issues of identity and belonging in the context of the diaspora. Thus, in the short stories Judite and Réquiem para um solitário, the protagonists are in constant search of themselves after having gone through geographical displacements: for different reasons, they had to leave their homeland. The displacement brings out characters who are adapting to a new reality, a new space. What are the spaces they inhabit? And, to what extent do the fictionally represented environments reflect the emotional states of the two protagonists? In the sense employed by Gaston Bachelard, the domestic space represented here “is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind.”³⁰

Judite

At the centre of Judite, as in all of Samuel Rawet’s short stories, the family universe plays a very important role; at the centre of the narrative lies the fracture between the family institution and the Jewish traditions. In this short story, we follow the main character, Judite, on her visit to her sister’s apartment. Judite seeks out her sister in search of sisterly support since her entire family withdrew from her due to a decision she made in the past: she married a goy. ³¹ Therefore, her relatives reject her and virtually mourn her decision just as they would the death of a loved one: “[…] there was weeping and wailing as if accompanying the departure of a dead person.”³² All of her relatives moved away as a result of her marriage, even though, marrying a non-Jew in a civil union did not imply abandoning her roots completely, and even though her husband did not demand from her such an attitude. However, it was not only her parting with the Jewish tradition that separated her more and more from her heritage. Apart from not being Jewish, Judite’s husband also came from a different social background; that is, he was from the suburbs; and this led Judite to a new social reality:

When he drove her to the suburbs at night, she knew that something had been broken, and despite the courage she had been imbued with, she could not stop the bitter weeping of someone who, despite convictions, carried within and made a whole ballast of affections break.³³

The story begins with a description of the setting where the protagonist is in her sister’s apartment, located in an urban area near the sea: “Meekly. From the sea, the breeze dulled the white curtains and fluttered the fringes of the armchairs, and she sat down. The maid asked her to wait there for a moment.”³⁴ This first paragraph of the story already features the social difference between Judite and her sister. Judite, wearing dirty shoes full of mud splashes, takes the elevator up to her sister’s house and is greeted by the housemaid: “Rotten toecaps. Mud splashes on the fold of the sole.”³⁵ The elevator can here be seen as a metaphor for “social advancement”, a narrative element that allows Judite to access her sister’s world. After arriving at the apartment, she waits for her sister, sitting in the living room. Due to the time gap and the circumstances that separate them, a strange atmosphere of fear and discomfort hangs around the meeting. Judite starts talking to her surroundings, unveiling her psychological state through the way she perceives the space:

Earlier, she would scan the walls and the heavy furniture with her eyes. She would find amusing the baroque characters framed in bad taste. […] Today, it is impossible. [..] She was afraid that her palpitations would be heard, or that the gasp of her breast would draw attention. Today she was all hesitation. She had created for herself a wrapping that forced her to restrain her movements, which, now and then, she rebelliously tried to break.³⁶

We find in Judite a confrontation between two completely different worlds: even though Judite and her sister shared the same origins, their lives today could not be more different; the social stability and comfort that marriage provides to her sister is in opposition to Judite’s family rejection and social exclusion. While her sister lives a quiet life in the city centre, with an elevator and a housemaid, Judite suffers the consequences of her husband’s death, killed by a bullet in the factory: “The day after tomorrow it will be a month since they brought him back from the factory, already dead. (The bullet had reached his skull).”³⁷

Judite, a widow with a newborn baby, shows up at her sister’s house hoping to receive emotional support. However, the sister denies it. Quite the contrary, due to the affective and social distance, Judite does not attain any closeness. Upon letting her in, the maid notifies her sister of Judite’s arrival, as if she were just an acquaintance. The meeting of the two sisters is cold, just as though they were not related, as it would be for two strangers in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. The rupture with family traditions alienated them from each other, even though they once had a very close relationship: “She had certainly not forgotten the mutual dreams by the window pane on a rainy day, or at bedtime in their shared room, the confidences exchanged.”³⁸ While observing the details of the apartment, Judite comes across a portrait of her parents on the wall, which immediately brings memories of familiar and cozy times, further underlining the weight of grief that followed the “departure” from her family.

As for her sister, who remains anonymous throughout the narrative, when she enters the room, the strangeness between the two is evident: their conversation is static and empty, based mostly on short elliptical sentences that only scratch the surface, a striking fact in the very structure of the text. The sisters are, quite obviously, in two different worlds; a hiatus hinders communication between them. Judite’s attempt to see at least some sparkle in her sister’s eyes during the “conversation” turns out to be a mere creation of her mind:

In the eyes, yes, the eyes, I accidentally glimpsed a sparkle that was the remembrance of dreams; elusive though. Inexistent, even. Who knows? Perhaps, it was all in her head, trying to forcefully identify the image she had been putting together all night in the other. Perhaps they were both looking for a thread that could reattach them, but this did not exist either.³⁹

Judite’s present is marked by incommunicability, something that does not appear as a language barrier – as in the short stories O profeta [The Prophet] or Gringuinho [The Little Foreigner] – but as an emotional and affective barrier, a circumstance that makes conversation between the two sisters difficult or even impossible. The dead husband has left a vacuum in Judite’s life, now a widow, which she tries to fill by approaching her sister during her visit. She fluctuates between a more harmonious past and a present that crumbles around her. All that remains are the ruins of her past, something that manifests itself in the fragmented dialogues. As for the question of language, Stefania Chiarelli observes:

The experience of language appears as a possible space to articulate the dismemberment – of languages, of living, of the experience of being between distinct worlds. […] For Rawet and Hatoum, language emerges as a homeland, a possible and desirable territory, a space that shelters and equates, even if, in a tense and provisional way, those are dilemmas and conflicts that concern multiple belongings.⁴⁰

After the oppressive, yet forceful and incisive encounter with her sister, Judite decides to return to her Jewish roots and to have her son circumcised. One could see this step as a desire to belong again to the Jewish community, a world that she rediscovers for herself. The decision to return to her roots brings back a sense of hope, something that surfaces in the way she perceives the world:

While being struck by the breeze, she felt the childlike joy of someone who discovers new worlds in an old shoebox, of someone who, after mourning, rediscovers small joyful details in the gray surroundings. Now, the train.⁴¹

At the end of the story, Judite goes down in the elevator from her sister’s apartment and takes the train back to the suburbs, a structural element that connects her world with her sister’s and takes her back to her social reality.

The sister’s apartment, a space of passage in which the protagonist finds herself on a visit to her family, can be interpreted as a metaphor for the memories of a life now gone. It is, so to speak, a past memory that, nevertheless, paves the way for new directions and, who knows, a better future. Even though there is no immediate closeness between the two sisters, the visit awakens a certain hope in Judite with regard to the next steps to be taken on her part. The space of the (Jewish) family apartment opened a door to her memories, triggering a whole process of (re)memorization of a shared past, providing, at the same time, the necessary help not only to avoid forgetfulness but also to revivify her past, both in the present moment and in the near future with her son. The topography of memory, therefore, served as a narrative and as a structural element, allowing a whole past, present, and future to unfold from the protagonist’s mind when she is confronted with a certain space and her sister’s fragmentary conversation.

Réquiem para um solitário

In the short story Réquiem para um solitário, the main narrative space is a house with a small garden that the protagonist bought through his own efforts. The short story is narrated in the third person, with the protagonist being a displaced subject, a Jewish merchant in his house, the only space in which the characters move. As in Judite, the narrative begins with a detailed description of the space: the protagonist is in his home kitchen, opening the refrigerator with a “trembling hand”.⁴² This gesture anticipates a certain discomfort of the protagonist, who, bearing a cold smile and with no appetite at all, tries to pick a grape from the bunch. The mood in the narrative is once again manifested through the psychological state of the character. The plot emerges in slow motion, and, through enumerations and nominal phrases, the narrator builds an atmosphere of stagnation:

Meat in the plastic drawer. Beer and milk in the storage racks. Platters. Fruit plates. The fingers tried to untangle a grape from the bunch, but the cluster insinuated itself into the palm. No desire to eat. A cold smile.⁴³

More than twenty years ago, the protagonist left his homeland in search of a new beginning in a new country, seeking better social and economic conditions. Through his daily dedication, he achieved stability and economic security, which the text represents with a spatial metaphor: “He had the impression of having formed […] a monolithic, indestructible block.”⁴⁴ The construction of the so-desired stability involved a selfish stance on the part of the protagonist so that he could overcome all difficulties and achieve his goals: “Human solidarity, for him, could take, at most, the form of charity.”⁴⁵

Although he had immigrated to Brazil so many years ago, his memories of the past were still very recent:

He had the impression of having formed, in more than twenty years, a monolithic, indestructible block. Enclosed in his world, from which God had been away for a while but was now back, he thought that he had found for himself an unshakable stability. Deaf to noises from the outside, he was told that he was enclosed in a selfish web. But the Order? The order of things that had come to him from overseas, that had been instilled in him during his years of deprivation, and for which he had crossed an ocean he had never seen. America. He had made it in America.⁴⁶

The protagonist’s wife, “who was part of the monolithic block he dreamed of”, is on the veranda, a place where she remains for quite some time. Even though the house is normally an intimate place, it is evident that the home environment in this tale is cold and the relationships between the family members are marked by a lack of dialogue and affection. The merchant, after a conversation with his son, is still suffering from insomnia. In his conversation with his wife at night, the lack of intimacy and understanding between the spouses is evident:

The woman rubbed her sleepy face, moving on to the kitchen. […] The refrigerator door slammed. – Would you like a glass of milk? – No! – Business is bad? – No! … On the contrary! … She disappeared into the room after a loose question: “Aren’t you going to sleep?” The same as a few years ago. […] How to communicate the sensation of crumbling?⁴⁷

When he is criticized for his selfishness and lack of solidarity with his family and relatives in Nazi Europe, the protagonist is confronted with a feeling of guilt and melancholy: “Deaf to the noises from the outside, they came to tell him that he was enclosed in a selfish web.”⁴⁸

His eyes drifted and drew old memories on the wall. In third class, huddled with twenty others on dreams of a land that awaited him, he mulled over desires and plans with the certainty of a man with empty hands and a dizzy head. […] Lonely in the crowded harbour of cranes, giraffes wave their necks in the shuttle of bales. A rhythmic thought, counterpointing the dialing of the machines.⁴⁹

A crucial moment in the tale is the arrival of a “lengthy letter” with a “pitiless account of a world gone”⁵⁰, which immediately takes the character back to his past. It is from this feeling of melancholy that he recalls the moments of his immigration to Brazil. With those mounting memories, the short story addresses the issue of guilt that many exiles felt when they left their relatives in Europe.

The character, from then on, talks to the space, fluctuating between the past and the present but also around different times and spaces, only connected through analepsis. Through those fragmentary memorial flashes, he recalls the moments of his immigration and reflects on the decisions he made in the past:

On the table, a lengthy letter, a merciless account of a world gone by. Two o’clock. Night. Tires buzzing on the asphalt. Somewhere, a muffling radio. […] From the houses, there was nothing but ruins. […] Why did not they all, like him, shake themselves in a ship’s hold?⁵¹

It is by talking with the space that the protagonist relates to his past, giving it a new meaning. Due to the difficulties in communicating with his wife, his dialogues with her become monologues, thoughts that the protagonist keeps to himself, mulling over and reliving past moments:

The letter had arrived and with it, a wave of remorse and images. Then, the dulling. The question of why they died, he never understood. He knew that things were happening in the world, but he had never considered them to be so important as to disturb his Order […].⁵²

He plunges into the vastness of guilt and loneliness, looking from the balcony of his house to the “small well-tended garden, and, in front of it, the block of gray buildings shrunken in sleep.”⁵³ One can interpret the ledge as a spatial schism in which the protagonist still has some control over the events of his life. Plunging his head into the pillow, after remembering his past, the protagonist changes his perception in the face of facts: “The images that came with the letter were also unambiguous. He had learned from them. He crumbled”. In the end, he manages to sleep peacefully: “He tried to grasp, with his eyes blinded by pressure, the pieces of his crumbling order, but he understood the inevitable. Inert, a dead body in prostration. He slept.”⁵⁴

In Réquiem para um solitário, the memories of the past serve neither to awaken hope nor to lead to any decision regarding the future; such is the loneliness, incommunicability, and lack of understanding that separate the protagonist from his social environment. The protagonist’s body, on the contrary, eventually finds itself finished and dead, content with “the burden” of inadaptation to the “revealed America”⁵⁵ In order to become aware of the harsh reality of his present life, he needed the triggering moment of the letter which, as a (topo-)graphy of memory, traced his own path, reminding him of his destiny. However, instead of mere resignation or disappointment, he finds a certain serenity in his “monolithic” life; for, after all, after so much insomnia and emotional upheaval, he can finally sleep.

Final considerations

The analysis of the short stories Judite and Réquiem para um solitário presents the immigration experiences of two Jewish immigrants in Brazil, showing that the narrative space is built from the perception and interaction of the characters. By interacting with the space and the objects in it (portraits on the wall, letters, and other characters that are present in the environment), the protagonists rebuild past experiences and resurrect buried memories in order to create new future paths. Through this form of a “topography of memory” drawn in the stories, domestic space acquires a new meaning: it appears as a chronotope, in accordance with Michail Bakhtin (2008), building bridges between the present and the past, between Europe and Brazil, between urban and suburban space. The encounter with the other, that is, the perspective of otherness within one’s own family, raises questions of identity and belonging (or strangeness) to the Jewish community and its traditions. The rupture with family and Jewish values raises a fundamental question: the repositioning of the characters in the face of their lives and their religious and cultural identity. Both Judite and the anonymous protagonist in Réquiem para um solitário deal with the consequences of past choices: away from their families, they live a life marked by feelings of loneliness, guilt, and incommunicability, which, as was analyzed before, appear in the plot/actions and dialogues, as well as in the language and textual architecture of the stories.

The topography, by recalling the transnational routes described by the protagonists in search of a new life, as well as their spatial, mental, and emotional dislocations, helps them recall memories of the past in order to, perhaps, build a new present, and who knows, a better future.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathrin Sartingen

Kathrin Sartingen is Full Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Culture and Media at the University of Vienna. Her areas of research are Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Film and Theatre, Intertextualities and Intermedialities, Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies (memory, migration, testimonial and fictional narratives). Among her publications are A tradução em movimento. Figurações do traduzir entre culturas de Língua Alemã e culturas de Língua Portuguesa (Frankfurt a.M. et al: Peter Lang Verlag, 2017); Tudo menos invisível. Teatro, literatura e cinema no mundo ibero-românico (Frankfurt a.M. et al: Peter Lang Verlag, 2017); Uma Arena de vozes: Intermedialidades e intertextualidades em literatura e cinema da América Latina, África Lusófona e Portugal (Frankfurt a.M. et al: Peter Lang Verlag, 2018); Espaços, tempos e vozes da tradução: Entre literaturas e culturas de língua portuguesa e língua alemã (Frankfurt a.M. et al: Peter Lang Verlag, 2021); Cinema de migração em língua portuguesa. Espaço, movimento e travessia de fronteiras (Frankfurt a.M. et al: Peter Lang Verlag, 2021).

Tatjana Wais

Tatjana Wajs holds a master's degree in Romance Philology and German Philology from the University of Vienna. In 2019 she completed her master's thesis on identity construction in works by Stefan Zweig and Albert Drach. Her doctoral thesis is in progress on the memory of the Shoah in Brazilian Literature. She is currently university assistant in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Vienna.

Notes

1 Cf. Séferin, “Samuel Rawet: fiel a si mesmo”, 10.

2 Shtetl means “little town” in Yiddish; those were the small towns, from where the Jews of Europe came (apud Igel, 1997, 22).

3 Cf. Igel, Imigrantes Judeus. Escritores Brasileiros, 22.

4 Cf. Séferin, “Samuel Rawet: fiel a si mesmo”, 13.

5 A reference to the Brazilian author Machado de Assis (1939-1908)

6 Assis Brasil, A nova literatura, 49.

7 Rawet apud Séferin, “Samuel Rawet: fiel a si mesmo”, 12.

8 Chiarelli, Vidas em trânsito, 32.

9 Ibid., 31.

10 Ibid., 31.

11 Ibid., 35.

12 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4.

13 Neumann, Erinnerung – Identität – Narration, 94 ff., 153.

14 Ibid., 15 ff.

15 Cf. Erll and Neumann 2005a.

16 “Spatial turn” or “Topological turn”, cf. Bachmann-Medick, 2014.

17 Cf. Bachmann-Medick, 2014; Dünne and Günzel, 2006; Hallet; Neumann, 2009.

18 Rupp, “Erinnerungsräume in der Erzählliteratur“, 183.

19 According to Aleida Assmann, generational memory is the short-term memory of a society that dissolves after about 80–100 years (“3 generation memory”, German “Drei-Generationen-Gedächtnis”, Assmann, 2018, 26).

20 Lachmann, Mnemonic and intertextual aspects of literature, 301.

21 Ibid., 304.

22 In this context, it is also worth mentioning Aby Warburg’s concept of the “Mnemosyne” (cf. Warburg, in: Warnke, 2000).

23 See also Michel Foucault’s concept of literature as an archive of knowledge (cf. Foucault, 2008).

24 Ibid., 301.

25 Frémont, A região, espaço vivido, 17.

26 Ibid.

27 Cf. Mendonça Gomes, “Experiências da Imigração Judaica”, 110.

28 Kirschbaum, Samuel Rawet: Profeta da Alteridade, 38.

29 Cf. Frémont 1980.

30 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 6.

31 In Yiddish: a non-Jewish person.

32 Rawet, Contos e novelas reunidos, 37.

33 Ibid., 36.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 37.

38 Ibid., 36.

39 Ibid., 39.

40 Chiarelli, Vidas em trânsito, 46.

41 Rawet, Contos e novelas reunidos, 41.

42 Ibid., 38.

43 Ibid., 46.

44 Ibid., 47.

45 Ibid., 48.

46 Ibid., 47.

47 Ibid., 50-51.

48 Ibid., 47.

49 Ibid., 48.

50 Ibid., 49.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., 52.

53 Ibid., 52.

54 Ibid., 62.

55 Ibid., 49.