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ABSTRACT
The article deals with the literary treatment of a female immigrant’s arrival in the host land Mexico in Gloria Gervitz’s poem Migraciones. This arrival, as a topical moment, has been often described, remembered and imagined in autobiographical texts by Mexican authors of Ashkenazi origin, second- or third- generation immigrants. The article shows how Gervitz, in her repetition and variation of the arrival as a foundational scene, gives special weight to the emotional dimensions of the process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Sefamí, 2005; Dolle, “Jewish Mexican Literatures”.
2 Vergara, “La memoria y el olvido en la poesía de Gloria Gervitz”.
3 ECLAC, “Migraciones”.
4 Gallo González; Leuzinger; Dolle, “Introducción”, 2s.
5 In what follows, I reflect on the introduction to our volume Hispanos en el mundo [Hispanics in the World] (Gallo González; Leuzinger; Dolle, “Introducción”, 1-14). I would like to emphasize that I am speaking of “emotions” embedded in the migration process, not of traumatic experiences due to persecution and flight during the Nazi regime. On the situation of immigrants being “in-between”, Life on the Hyphen by Guillermo Pérez Firmat (1994); on Jewish immigration to Argentina, Saúl Sosnowski, La orilla inminente. Escritores judíos argentinos (1987).
6 Cf. Gallo González; Leuzinger; Dolle, “Introducción”, 3.
7 Ibid., 3.
8 Karageorgou-Bastea, “En lo más íntimo”, 96.
9 Favela, “Migraciones dentro de Migraciones”, 126.
10 Sefamí, “La herida y el milagro en las Migraciones de Gloria Gervitz”, 18.
11 Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 18s. “the only true thing is the reflection of the dream that I am trying to fracture/ […] the grandmother lightens the sabbatical candles from her death and looks at me/ […] my grandmother who died of dreams/ cradles interminably the dream that invents her/ that I invent/ a crazy girl looks at me from inside” (here and in the following: my translation, V.D.).
12 Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 10: ”a girl eats an icecream in Chapultepec”.
13 Ibid, 15 and 17.
14 “[…] I wait awake in airport corridors/ in the landscapes of neurons” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 17).
15 “heartbeats that are fixed in a daguerreotype” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 15).
16 “One of the ways to revive that past is through the digression around a few photographs”, comments Jacobo Sefamí, “La herida y el milagro en las Migraciones de Gloria Gervitz”, 15.
17 “the photo does not reveal anything to us (she is still a young woman) / I have never met her/in what moments did those dreams begin to haunt me? // […] she doesn't want me to remember her/let me talk” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 55s.)
18 In Genealogías, by Margo Glantz, the printed photos from the family album not only confirm what is said in the text, but also comment on it, giving another level of meaning to the ex post interpretation of the process of immigration and adaptation to life in Mexico (Dolle, “La construcción del sí mismo”; “Autorretratos. Las relaciones entre imagen”; “Intercultural Memory and Violence in Jewish Literature”).
19 Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 11.
20 “and the music abyssing/and the photographs in cigar boxes//the cables very thin rivers of swallows/the heat like a boar’s tusk///the sun sinking in the heat wave/and she with a bouquet of alcatraz flowers disembarking at the Port of Veracruz///do you remember?//break memory/break me” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 23).
21 On this typical tension of poetry, see Schmitz-Emans, Zwischen weißer und schwarzer Schrift. Edmond Jabès' Poetik des Schreibens.
22 Another lack of concretization is seen in the expression “the music abyssing” because it does not explain into what music abysses, that is, we are facing one of the many elliptical or fragmented constructions of the poem that are open to suggestions.
23 The adjective “delgadísimos [very thin]”, interposed between two masculine nouns, fluctuates amid the two. For this reason, it is necessary to read this poem out loud in order to understand the adjective as a prefix to “rivers”.
24 One has to compare this with the literary shade that we find in On Borrowed Words by Ilan Stavans: “In her memoir [i.e. Bela’s, the I-narrator’s grandmother; V.D.], Bela’s arrival in Tampico is described in astonishing detail. As the vessel approached the port, she saw from afar the many shanties, las chozas y casuchas [huts and shacks]. The town was rustic and primitive, nothing like Warsaw in sophistication. She disembarked from the Sparndam and was exposed, for the first time, to a different type of muzhik: the mestizo. Repeatedly, I have tried to visualize these first few minutes— the shock, the disquieting confusion” (On Borrowed Words, 71s.); see also Dolle, “Intercultural Memory and Violence in Jewish Literature”, 311s.).
25 Diego Rivera: Mujer con alcatraz o Desnudo con alcatraz [Woman with Alcatraz or Nude with Alcatraz], 1944; Vendedora de Flores [Flower Vendor], 1949; see Barradas, “Alcatraces, Diego Rivera y México”, unpaged.
26 Ibid, unpaged.
27 Ibid, unpaged; translation and italics V.D.
28 “the words are worn like those pieties with the marble worn by kisses/Mother of God pray for us/and she who came from Kiev/bouquet of flowers against the chest/life to be lived in a longer time/oh mother I forgot/now and at the hour of our death/Adonai […]/bye/bye/oh mother/bye///And who cares about these memories?//she girl with flowers/and the pleated dresses and the very red mouth smiling/now just a portrait kept in a cigar box” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 31s.; bold, V.D.).
29 On the previous page, the journey by boat is mentioned for the first time, seen from a third person, in a cyclical movement with the woman on the dock, as the starting and the arrival moment, and taking up the generic denominations “woman/she”, child, men: “the woman framed in her own landscape leaning on the railing/the waves in that apparent immobility fix her dream/and abruptly breaking into sleep the words of Kaddish/and the men playing dominoes and drinking beer/and the child falling asleep and the afternoon sinking/and on the railing her figure/(reverberation of the gray dress)” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 48).
30 “a girl alone on the dock/the heat is very intense the light is white and it hurts/it is so violent this light that it undresses her/strips her/the light is endless she has to close her eyes/the boy lets go off her hand/she is there for the first time and forever/the light is empty/I descend/through closed blinds music I have never heard/I descend/sellers with unknown fruit /I descend/slow endless descent//same scene again//the dazzled woman on the dock/the boy runs along the pier/inside forever the longing/beyond the sea the other shore of nostalgia/I was unfair to my mother/and after all, what did I do with my life?/I descend///we disembarked at midday at the Port of Veracruz/we brought the grandparents’ astrakhan coats/and in Havana I ate medlars and mangoes for the first time/who to tell this to?//memory of the sea of its tedium/of the girl that I was/of the dress that now looks ridiculous in the photograph//memory of the damaged wood boards of the ship/of those waves unperturbed in their beauty/almost unbearable memory of the moon//and it’s noon and it’s today and I disembark and it’s a day in August/and I had never felt so attached to life” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 49s.).
31 It is not completely clear whether the self that says “the memory of the girl I was” and “I was unfair to my mother” is the same person – rather, it could be interpreted as a transgenerational self that encompasses and brings together the voices that speak. Regarding the plurality of female voices, Favela (“Migraciones dentro de Migraciones”, 123) comments: “[…] it is an empty I, unstable, vacillating: it is the grandmother, the mother, the daughter, the child, the old woman, the girl.”
32 Sensuality and the exotic, the novelty of the Caribbean countries is already filtered in those verses (Havana, the fruits eaten for the first time) without any qualifying adjective, but at the same time combined and contrasted with another isotopy, the inadequacy of the dresses and clothing brought from Eastern Europe in the face of this heat and this light, namely, the “astrakhan” garments.
33 It should be said that Margo Glantz, in the story of the arrival of her parents, highlights the dark night of the tropics as a differentiating and menacing element (Dolle, “Intercultural Memory and Violence in Jewish Literature”, 311s.).
34 Sefamí, “La herida y el milagro en las Migraciones de Gloria Gervitz”, 19.
35 Dolle, “Jewish Mexican Literatures”, 482.
36 Furthermore, the light is so bright that it is even “empty” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 49).
37 Stavans, On Borrowed Words, 53-55.
38 “my life left no trace/water in water/insipid//for years I have spoken in a language that is not mine/am I perhaps ready to die?” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 64).
39 Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 56 and 23.
40 “that girl alone on the dock/this image forever/what life was that?//and my voice/blending with yours/the birds hitting the light/summer overflowing/and she writing letters in a Yiddish that no one speaks anymore/is that woman me?” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 57).
41 The demonstrative pronouns “aquella” and “esa” [that] are used to indicate distance, as opposed to the pronoun “esta” [this] in the first remark.
42 In his “memoir on language”, Ilan Stavans devotes a complete chapter to his grandmother’s attitude towards Yiddish in a Spanish speaking surroundings: “Rise and Fall of Yiddish” (On Borrowed Words, 45-90).
43 “and I ashamed of my foreign accent/and the customs at home” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 59).
44 “the bloodless women under the light (many wear wigs)/murmur words recently learned in that foreign language” (Gervitz, Migraciones. Poema 1976-2020, 61).
45 This is somehow similar to what French novelist Robert Pinget does, especially in Fable (Dolle, Tonschrift). In my next article, I will explore that topic in Gervitz’ oeuvre in more detail.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Verena Dolle
Verena Dolle is Chair of Romance Literatures and Cultures at Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen, Germany, and specialist in colonial Hispano-American literature and contemporary Latin American literature and culture (representation of violence; Jewish Latin American literature; migration and cultural translation in a globalized world). Among her edited books are Múltiples identidades. Literatura judeo-latinoamericana de los siglos XX y XXI (Iberoamericana, 2012), ¿Un ‘sueño europeo’? Europa como destino anhelado de migración en la creación cultural latinoamericana (2001-2015) (Iberoamericana, 2020), and Hispanos en el mundo. Emociones y desplazamientos históricos, viajes y migraciones (together with Danae Gallo González and Mirjam Leuzinger; De Gruyter, 2021). In 2021, she published her translation of Ilan Stavans’s autobiography On Borrowed Words into German (Hentrich & Hentrich).