The same intolerance that
threw you out of Cologne… For the same cause, for the same reasons. Have you
ever heard this cry? “We shall not allow our blood to mix with an impure one!”
Doesn’t it ring a bell?[1]
(Max Aub, San Juan)
Introduction
This essay approaches a writer who, in his work, left
a vivid testimony of his own experience. Max Aub, a Spanish republican exile
who took asylum in Mexico was also the heir to another heartbreaking
experience: he was an assimilated Jew. Based on one of his most relevant texts
about exile—San Juan—we shall reflect on the issue of the Spanish
republican one and also on Aub’s own personal experience dealing with it. The
reading of this play, in which he seeks to reproduce the distressing experience
of those exiles who navigated from port to port in the hope of finding refuge,
transmits to us what thousands of exiles lived in those years and what Aub
himself experienced. The disconcerting matter about this tragedy is that the
characters are not Spanish republicans but, rather, Jews fleeing Nazism. The
reason for this choice is enigmatic. One might expect an exiled Spanish
republican writer, who talks about his own experience, to recreate the
situation of his compatriots fleeing Francoism and not that of the Jews. To
approach this problematic it is necessary to understand what exile meant for
Aub and his way of expressing this significance in this emblematic work.
In order to understand the
deep significance of this tragedy and the author’s reason to address the issue
of exile based on the Jewish experience and not on the Spanish one, we shall
reflect on what it meant to be a diasporic Jew as a way to differentiate it
from the experience of the sheer political exile. First, we shall expose, in a
schematic way, how we understand the Jewish diaspora and what the text
represents in this millenary tradition. Continuing with this reflection, we
shall review Aub’s positions concerning the central themes of politics,
society, and culture. In this sense, it should be remembered that he was a
multifaceted writer: in addition to novels, plays and poems, throughout his
life he wrote articles for many newspapers, including the most renowned ones.
Before analyzing San Juan, we shall stop at these journalistic
pieces to determine what the author thought about nationalisms, religious
beliefs and sectarian appropriations of literature. For de purpose of illustrating this
condition—which we identify as diasporic—we shall stop at Aub’s reflection on
two authors with whom he identified: Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine. In these
two great writers he saw his own desire reflected: to make literature an
instrument of criticism and a source of hope. In 1964, on the occasion of its
publication in Spain, Aub wrote: “San Juan still represents the idea
that I have of my time’s literature; it does not and cannot go without being a
chronicle and a denunciation” (Aub 1998: 225–226).[2]
His literary analyses of these two writers explain the denunciation he has in
mind when he retrospectively refers to this play while in exile during the
Spanish Civil War. After exposing all the elements that make it possible to
differentiate exile and diaspora and that help us comprehend how Aub understood
his role as a writer, we shall go on to analyze his work San Juan to
determine why this great Spanish writer chose as traveling companions the
stateless Jews, whose fate had nothing to do with the Spanish Civil War.
Spanish Republican Exile and Jewish Diaspora
The terms exile and diaspora refer to different
phenomena, although not entirely disconnected. The first one alludes to the
condition of a person or a collective that is expelled from their place of
residence and cannot return to it because of external reasons. The second one
refers to the dispersion of a community or its members in different places who,
despite their spread, do not lose the link with their origin.
There
are countless experiences of exiles throughout history and each of them
responds to very particular circumstances. In this reflection we shall focus on
what has been defined as the Spanish republican exile, which originated from
the coup led by Francisco Franco in 1936. The military uprising led to a
three-year war that ended with the establishment of a dictatorship and the expulsion
of many republicans. Mexico provided refuge for thousands of these exiles,
among whom was Max Aub, who arrived in 1942.
The
term diaspora also refers to different collective experiences. In this
essay we shall focus on what is known as the Jewish diaspora.[3]
During the first century, the Romans quelled the Jewish rebellion in Palestine,
destroyed the Second Temple, and expelled the Jews, beginning what the Hebrew
tradition knows as galut:
The Jews gave
an expiatory explanation for their segregation and suffering, relating them to
their unique position as the chosen people. As a result of this new
interpretation, they shifted the centers of authority: from the
political-religious structures (of their life as a nation in their State before
exile) to the study of the scriptures and the adaptation of the written laws
(in order to rule a nation that lived in exile) (Pilatowsky 2008: 59).
This adaptation to the life in exile has specific
characteristics and elements and has have—and still has—many interesting ways
of expressing itself. Now we shall describe some of these elements, as they are
related (generally) to Aub’s conception of his own life and experiences and
(specifically) to his play San Juan.
Elements of the Jewish diaspora reflected in Aub’s
work
The policies implemented by Western governments in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries under the directive of achieving
equality for all citizens dismantled the areas where the Jews were confined and
sought to assimilate them into society. However, they did not focus on changing
the prevailing measures of exclusion in Christian society. This supposed
emancipation did not achieve its objective and, rather, generated a rejection
that resorted to a biological imaginary. The concept of race replaced
that of faith and modern antisemitism took the place of medieval
anti-Judaism.
The transition from medieval anti-Judaism to modern
antisemitism did not allow religious conversion to achieve a true integration.
The discrimination against converts and their descendants continued. The reason
the Nazis murdered Christians, agnostics, and atheists was because their
grandparents had been Jews: according to racial laws this condition—Judaism—was
transmitted by blood. In the case of Jews who had renounced their faith and who
sought to assimilate into Christian society, there was an ambivalent
relationship with respect to Judaism as they sought to erase its traces and, at
the same time, recognized that they were not fully accepted. Aub’s parents were
in this situation, as they have tried to assimilate completely, but failed.
Another aspect that characterized Jewish diaspora since
the Enlightenment was the rise of Orthodox Judaism. The change in religious
practices that it fostered with the aim of facing massive conversion to
Christianity focused on the radicalization of differentiating elements such as
clothing. Access to unauthorized press and literature was restricted by the
religious authorities, and there was a prohibition of social exchanges with the
Christian majority as well. Along the same lines, marriage with non-Jews was
condemned and the norms for conversion to Judaism were hardened. The ascription
to a community where its members’ lives were regulated—as the Orthodox
communities did and still do—implied an exclusion of those who were not willing
to participate. Aub considered this demand a form of exclusion as reprehensible
as any other.
Another
solution found by the Jewish collective to the paradoxical situation posed by
the breakdown or their traditional ways was the adoption of nationalism. There
were different expressions of this nationalism; the one that finally prevailed
was the one that identified the land of the current State of Israel as the
place for the concentration of the Jewish diaspora.
The
resignification of the text is one of the most important elements of the Jewish
diaspora. George Steiner describes the condition of the diasporic people:
On the other hand, assuredly, writing has been the indestructible
guarantor, the “underwriter”, of the identity of the Jew: across the frontiers
of his harrying, across the centuries,
across the languages of which he has been a forced borrower and frequent master. Like a snail, his
antennae towards menace, the Jew has carried the house of the text on his back.
What other domicile has been allowed him? (Steiner 1985: 7–8)
We can find examples of
diasporic Jews—who, as Steiner describes them, carry their house of text on
their back—in all forms of knowledge, in the different expressions of art and
in the diversity of political reflections.
What Steiner argues is that in the diasporic experience
the relationship with the text acquired very particular characteristics among
which prevailed “the mystique of fidelity to the written word, the reverence
bestowed on its expositors and transmitters” ( ibid.: 17). According to this
author—who also assumed his citizenship within this territory—in the transition
to modernity contents were secularized, but the devotion for the truth was not
lost, as well as the admiration for beauty or the demand for justice:
It
is these which have made so many Jewish men and, more recently, women most native
to modern intelligence. It is these that have generated the provocative
pre-eminence of the Jew in modernity, be it humanistic or scientific. The
“bookish” genius of Marx and of Freud, of Wittgenstein and of Lévi-Strauss, is
a secular deployment of the long schooling in abstract, speculative commentary
and clerkship in the exegetic legacy (ibid.).
Many of these figures
abandoned Jewish religion or even declared themselves atheists, critical of all
forms of exclusive communitarianism. They distanced themselves from Jewish
centers and did not identify with Zionism; in search of inclusive universality,
they clung to the text with a devotion that did not admit concessions. In this
territory we can perfectly locate Max Aub who dedicated his life to writing,
where he always embraced truth, beauty and justice as his highest values.
Max Aub’s biographical note
Max Aub was born in Paris on June 2, 1903. His father,
Frederick William Aub Marx, came from Bavaria and his mother, Susana Mohenwitz,
was born in France, but her family was of Saxon origin. Both his parents had
Jewish origins, but they had already separated from religion and raised Max in
agnosticism. During the first years of his life “he faced for the first time
the bitter xenophobic insults of sales juifs! which he would never
forget” (Meyer 2007: 11). His family moved to Spain in 1914 for his father’s
business. From a young age, Aub learned German and French, and very soon also
Spanish.
In
1920 he finished high school, a significant period for him, since when asked
about his nationality, he always replied: “one is from where one studies high
school” (ibid.: 233).[4] This
statement can be understood as a recognition of the determining factor that his
adolescent experience was, but it is also a questioning of what the great
nationalistic ideals mean. For Aub it is only a circumstantial element that
determines his identification as a Spaniard.
He joined the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE,
Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in 1928; throughout his life he considered
himself a socialist and identified with democratic Marxism. From 1936 to 1937
he was sent to France as Cultural Attaché of the Spanish Embassy. After the
coup of 1936 he had to leave Spain and was interned in various concentration
camps and prisons in France and Algeria until 1942, when he got his release and
was welcomed by the Mexican government; the play San Juan refers to this
moment in his life. Throughout his life, he visited many countries, where
he was invited to give courses and lectures; we shall highlight only two of
them that are related with our subject: he traveled to Israel in 1966 and to
Spain in 1969 and 1972. He died in Mexico City, shortly after his last trip to
Spain, on July 22, 1972.
Max Aub’s position towards exclusive identifications
Any attempt to ascribe Aub to a religious, national
or, cultural tradition ends up reproducing the complexity and even
inappropriateness of this task. To begin with, his name is included in the list
of Spanish republican exiles that arrived in Mexico; however, when reading his
reflections on this experience, this identification becomes questionable.[5]
The Mexican imaginary also includes him, since, in 1956, he received citizenship;
however, this ascription is also questioned by him. Some of the scholars who
address his personality identify him as Jewish because of his ancestry, but, at
the same time, point out that he did not receive any religious education and
that he remained on the margins of the community life and did not identify
himself with Zionism. Aub himself, in his diaries, alludes to what it meant to
have been left out of identity classifications and how writing gave him the
strength to face this situation:
What a harm
has not done to me, in our closed world, not belonging anywhere! Being named as I am named, with a first and last
name that can be from one country or another […] In this hours of closed
nationalism, being born in Paris and being Spanish, having a Spanish father
born in Germany, a Parisian mother but also of German origin and with a Slavic
last name, and speaking with that French accent that tears my Spanish apart,
what a harm has it not done to me! The agnosticism of my
parents—freethinkers—in a Catholic country like Spain, or their Jewish ancestry
in an anti-Semitic country like France, what annoyances, what humiliations has
it not caused me! What a shame! I have drawn some of my strength to fight
against so much ignominy (Meyer 2007: 19).[6]
In this passage, it can be seen how this condition of
not belonging anywhere pushed him to exclusion and caused him even harm. The
only place where he found refuge was the text.
Later on, we shall return to
Aub’s relationship with writing and how, for him, it represented a place of
identification; but first, and in order to understand what he describes as the
damage of not belonging anywhere, we shall observe his considerations on his
identification with the Jewish, the Spanish and the Mexican. Regarding his
relationship with Judaism, Aub makes the following reflection after returning
from a trip to Israel in 1966:
I thought I was somewhat Jewish, not because of the blood (which, poor
thing, what does it know about that?), but because of my ancestors’ religion—my
parents did not have it—and I came here with the idea of resenting something, I
don’t know what, of facing myself. And there was nothing. I have nothing to do
with these people more than with others, as I have nothing to do with the
Germans, or the Poles, or the Japanese, or the Argentinians. My ties are with
the Mexicans, the Spaniards, the French
and, perhaps a little, with the English. Perhaps more with the Spaniards, but
maybe only with those of my time. I am not Jewish at all. I am sorry, but I
cannot cry, they are strangers to me, as much or more than the Norwegians or
the Turks (ibid.: 29).[7]
This consideration clears
any doubt: he did not feel any particular closeness to the Israelis, neither
based on the religion of his ancestors, nor from a definition of biological
nature, nor in relation to the national element. What is interesting to
highlight here is his recognition of a concern that required clarification,
since he comments that he believed he was somewhat Jewish. The confession of a
need to examine his emotional identifications with respect to the Jewish
element, as expressed in his account, refers to the existence of something that
was present in him and that he identified as Jewish and of what he could
finally get rid of after the trip. It is difficult to decipher what that
something meant. What Aub wrote in other texts leads us to suppose that what
aroused that feeling was the antisemitism he suffered throughout his life.
Regarding
nationalisms, a mention should be done in relation to a conference he gave in
1963,[8]
where he clearly spoke out against them. In it, he questioned any national
appropriation of literature based on the language in which it was written:
Perhaps
tomorrow, for the sake of common markets, languages will again depend on
themselves and not on geography—that is, on nationalism. There will be no
reason to speak of Belgian or Swiss literature if in fact there is no longer,
economically, with their borders, Belgium or Switzerland. And the English will
be what is spoken in English, and the Spanish what is spoken in Spanish. It is
my long-term hope against nationalism, a cancer that still gnaws—day and
night—our world (Meyer 2007: 735–44).[9]
To reinforce this
statement, another of Aub’s remarks regarding Spanish nationalism can be read:
We Spaniards are extraordinary because a Genoese Jew discovered America,
because a German king founded the empire, because thanks to an English general
we resisted Napoleon, because with the help of multicolored communists and
anarchists of all kinds during three years we fought other Spaniards, helped by
uniformed Germans and Italians (ibid.: 849).[10]
From these words we can
conclude that Aub did not conceived himself as a Spanish writer in the
nationalistic sense of this term. Although he recognized that his language of
expression was Spanish, he rejected being considered a Hispanic author.
Aub’s criticism of all
nationalisms did not exclude the Mexican one: “the truth is that we are a
handful of people with no place in the world. In Mexico, despite being Mexican,
they do not consider us as such. Here we can only live in silence” (ibid.).[11]
Also, in the article “La cultura en México” [The culture in Mexico]
(1963), he stated: “Since the beginning (Death to the gachupines!), nor
recognizing Spain (sic). Neither Franco nor, tomorrow, whoever. The
Malinche, unforgettable. Absurd at first glance. But a rationalist who wants to
love Mexico must give up many things. This is the only way to preserve oneself”
(Meyer 2007: 716).[12] Aub
was neither Spanish, nor Jewish, nor Mexican, he was, rather, a citizen of the
world who adopted a language different to his native one and used it to
describe, in his writings, a culture filled with pieces of many others which he
considered part of his own.
Max Aub and the text as territory of permanent
residence
Aub, unlike many of the Spanish republican exiles who
arrived in Mexico, did not see this episode of his life as something that
reinforced his religious or national identifications. In his writings we find
rather a critical distancing from them. The aspect of his life nurtured by this
experience was his conviction that writing can be used as a tool to fight
injustice and to build a better world.
In a piece written in 1962 and
entitled Homenaje a los que nos han seguido [Homage to those who have
followed us] (Revista de la Universidad de México, 1962), Aub presents a
reflection on the link between exile and writing. What can be read there are
the considerations of a man in his seventies who chooses to understand his
life, and particularly his exile, from a writer’s perspective:
It is difficult to talk about
the homeland when one gets old far away from it because, what is it like, even
knowing how it is? There are no other images than those brought by the
encouragement—or the discouragement—of others’ words. They recount and they do
not end. Without great variations, optimistic and non-optimistic ones can only
agree that the only visible thing of the old seed of freedom that, in its
day—by the force of things—we incarnate are students and writers. Too much
honor for those of us who only know how to write (Meyer 2007: 656–657).[13]
Aub considered himself a member of a group that he
identified as ‘a writers’ fraternity’. While in exile he learned to appreciate
this fraternity and the people he considered its members; he thought of the
writers of yesteryear as his masters and guides, and the ones to come were
valuable for him because they represented a hope for the present and the future
of literature, which was the path Aub saw to escape as established and
exclusive identifications, including that imposed to him by Franco’s
dictatorship:
Even if we do not want to, we
are all one. From others we come to others. We are always children of the best.
If you scratch my bark, you will find the sap of Cervantes, Quevedo, Galdós,
and even the humors—good or bad—of Ortega, and those of Tolstoy and Martin du
Gard. (And in the worst poet those of Bécquer, Rubén, Juan Ramón, without considering
Gil Vicente, Garcilaso, Lope, Quevedo or Jorge Manrique.)
They wanted to rip us out of
Spain, without success. There, more alive than ever, Antonio Machado, Federico
García Lorca, Miguel Hernández and the living that I name, in the blood of the
new ones (Meyer 2007: 657).[14]
This account gives us examples of the members of that
writers’ fraternity which Aub considered so important. Also, in Aub’s work it
is possible to find literary analyses that allow us to understand more clearly
the value he placed on writing. We shall address just two very illustrative
examples of his analyses: that of the literatures of Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
and that of Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).
Kafka
Aub’s reflections on Kafka’s life and work are
centered in two aspects with which he identifies: his distancing of nationalist
and religious affiliations and the emancipatory function of writing. In 1948,
he wrote a sequence of three articles in which he presented, in a very
synthetic way, his analysis of the author’s literature. In “El Proceso de
Franz Kafka” (Franz Kafka’s Process, Últimas noticias, March,
9 1948), he comments on the staging of a theater adaptation of The Process. After
addressing the adaptation, he goes on to analyzing the psychology of the
writer: “Kafka spent his painful life accusing himself of the ‘crime of being
born’. The Process is nothing more than this trial. His hero ignores the
reason of the persecution to which he is subjected by beings that are both real
and ghostly” (Meyer 2007: 290).[15] Aub
interprets the novel as the expression of the feeling that accompanied the
author throughout his life. The representation of an absurdity where a judicial
process does not require the concrete specification of the crime alludes to
Kafka’s personal condition but acquires its universal literary value when he
describes the way in which society operates: “Judges have been the subject of
bloody ridicule since the administration is the administration, with its
bureaucracy and its mountains of files. But Kafka’s bitter irony has gone
further: he has completely dehumanized them” (ibid.: 291).[16]
In
the second article of this series, “Drama de nuestro tiempo”
[Drama of our time] (Últimas noticias, March 10, 1948), he
continues with his reflection on The Process and among other things he
affirms that: “Kafka always fled from himself, even from his own body, from
health to illness. Life was for him ‘a perpetual deviation that does not even
allow one knowing it is deviating’” (Meyer 2007: 292).[17]
There is a clear allusion to the writer’s tuberculosis, but Aub’s description
goes beyond that. He talks about Kafka’s position on life in general: “only the
author’s work and life make the trance clear: his hero’s punishment is due,
above all, to his loneliness” (ibid.).[18]
In
the last article of the series, El sacrificio de Abraham (Abraham’s
sacrifice, Últimas noticias, March 12, 1948), Aub resorts to
Kafka’s diary to explain the link between the author and his work:
“I
assumed—writes Kafka—my time’s denial… I have no right to fight it but, in a
certain way, I represent it.” Crucified between Christianity and Judaism he
only glimpses the possibility of saving himself by “creating himself.” “It was
not laziness, ill will, or clumsiness that led me to fail in everything: family
life, friendship, marriage, profession, literature, but the absence of soil, of
air, of law” (ibid.: 293).[19]
Aub interprets Kafka’s work as the paradoxical
expression of the messianic feeling of diasporic Judaism where, without soil,
air, and law, writing becomes the last resort to dream of a better world. In
that sense he quotes the Czech writer: “‘Writing is praying’—he even said ‘God
does not want me to write’” (Meyer 2007: 294).[20]
This is how we can understand Kafka’s determination to represent his time’s
negative aspect, despite feeling like a failure, since, according to Aub: “he
still harbored a messianic hope, the same one abandoned, in the negative sense
and that will end up drowning them, by the existentialists greatly influenced
by him” ( ibid.: 293).[21]
Heine
Heine was an author with whom Aub identified in a
particular sense. In an article published in 1956, Notas acerca de Enrique
Heine. Homenaje a Enrique Heine [Notes about Heinrich Heine. Homage to
Heinrich Heine] (Novedades, May 6, 1956), Aub recovers some notes he had
taken at a conference that he gave that same year, along with María Douglas, on
February 17 at an event commemorating the poet’s centenary. In a few lines he affirms
that: “the greatness of Heine, like that of all important writers, lies on his
power of rebellion. He rebelled against his times’ society, against his
country, against the one that sheltered him, against God” (Meyer 2007: 550).[22]
In Heine, Aub saw an author who managed to touch his readers regardless of
borders, languages, or beliefs, precisely because he did not feel attached to
any of these. “Heine was always a foreigner because he never felt his feet step
on solid ground. He always had the sensation of being in the air. Perhaps that
is why his poetry is so winged, so out of nowhere, so universal, so well
understood by everyone” (ibid.: 546).[23]
Heine was born in Germany,
into a Jewish family. He converted to Christianity in order to survive in a very
inhospitable environment for the Jews. Aub emphasizes this motivation when he
states that: “he wanted to be a Protestant and married in the Catholic Church.
Surely he wanted to ‘alternate’, to blend together with indifferent people,
perhaps to live unnoticed as was the dark and deep desire of so many
Israelites” (ibid.).[24]
According to Aub, Heine’s conversion did not have a religious inspiration and
it did not mean an approach to God in any of his expressions: “It is not
surprising that Heine never took well-established religions seriously; he
demonstrated it with his conversion to Protestantism, with his Catholic
marriage without a new baptism. He died as he lived, skeptical, despite those
who want to suppose that his Hebrew melodies represent a return to his
family’s religion” (Meyer 2007: 546–547). [25]
In the opinion of Aub, Heine
exemplifies the condition of the Jews who sought, unsuccessfully, to break away
from their heritage, but without really wanting to assimilate into Christian
society. In another article (“Heine”, Excelsior, July 8, 1956) Aub rejects
the attempts to judaize Heine by identifying his claims for social justice as a
characteristic of the Jewish tradition present in him. He states:
“War against injustice,
reigning stupidity and evil,” he wrote to Inmermann, at the beginning of his literary
life. A background of this magnitude is enough to take on the rest of humanity,
even without being Jew.
Social justice, as promotion
of the literary, may be Hebrew leaven, although, if it were, it would be
necessary to recognize that the push is not its, but that of its persecutions.
Heine writes to Moser, before leaving the country, that the reason he was
leaving was “less the desire to wander the world, than the martyrdom of my
personal situation—for example, Jewishness is not going away, no matter how
much I wash myself” (Meyer 2007: 565).[26]
Aub identifies with Heine for many reasons: for his
posture towards religion, his questioning of nationalisms, his fight against
injustices and, above all, his quest to find in writing the art that allows people
to continue longing for coexistence exempt from exclusions or exiles.
San Juan
Based on the analysis done to this point, a hypothesis
can be ventured regarding Aub’s motives to write San Juan, a tragedy
where he attempts to talk about his exile as a Spanish republican by referring
to the experience of the Jewish exiles fleeing Nazism. We can affirm that the
play San Juan reflects the diasporic experience more than the political
exile. Throughout this text we have highlighted Aub’s distancing from identity’s
elements that were important for other Spanish republican exiles, such as
religion, nation, language or political ideologies. With his writing, he
managed to recreate the situation of the Jews, who no longer had a place to
return to, and who could only hope for a better world, one where limitations in
the national borders did not end up exterminating them.
We can thus answer the
question with which we opened this text: why San Juan’s characters are
Jews and not Spanish republicans? As we mention at the beginning, this tragedy,
written in 1943, short after Aub arrived in Mexico, is placed in a ship where a
group of Jews travel, while fleeing the Nazis, searching a place of refuge.
This fiction must be read as the literary elaboration of a personal experience.
Aub himself commented on the matter:
As for what prompted me to
write this tragedy—in addition to considering it to some extent representative
of one of the phases of our times’ drama—was simply the reading of the event
briefly recounted in a newspaper. I had the set before me in the hold of “Sidi
Aicha”, the ship in which the Vichy France deported me to the Sahara (Aub 1998:
245).[27]
Although this work is part of the author’s writings on
the vicissitudes of the Spanish Civil War, we find in it a situation that could
be understood as alien to this historical event, for the central character’s
exile is not related to Franco’s coup. The only way to understand why the
author decided to express his personal exile with a fiction where the
characters were Jews is by understanding that he identified himself with them,
and not with the Spanish republicans. In this sense it is important to note
that the Spanish war is mention in the play only in an incidental way. In the
first act we read:
GUEDEL: Are there news?
RABBI: Nothing. Nothing. The
Captain has not returned.
ABRAHAM: Send fifty dollars’
worth of telegrams! Fifty dollars’ worth of herring would be better!
GUEDEL: What does the radio
says?
RABBI: The Spanish republicans
have started an offensive by the Ebro (Aub 1998: 139).[28]
The allusion to this historical event, which the
author put in the words of a rabbi, is not in line with the story and, also,
has no follow-up in it. The plot focuses, rather, on the tragic condition of
the Jewish exiles. Aub recognized that the tragedy is inspired by the
experience of his own exile and asylum search, so we can say that he felt
closer to these Jews than to his Spanish compatriots, although without ceasing
to refer to this aspect of his identity.
Aub’s identification with the
Jewish condition is also reflected in another dialogue in the play, when one of
the characters rebukes a young communist with the following words: “Stop right
now. You are not here as a communist, but because of your sad ancestry. You
will say: ‘what does it has to do with it?’ You blind! Are you not here? No!
You live in a fantasy world. Do you know what you are? Some disgusting
idealists...” (ibid.: 136).[29] In
this passage we see how the author makes a clear difference between those who
were exiled for their political ideas and positions and the Jews, who were
persecuted only for being Jews. It does not cease to surprise that in his
literary expression he highlights the Jewish condition over political factors,
as he himself was exiled for being a republican.
Unlike Spanish republican
exiles, not all the Jews fleeing Nazism had participated in politics, many had
not fought in a war, nor were all persecuted for their ideas or actions, but
for their condition. And for the same reason—their condition—they were rejected
in most countries where they asked for refuge. In his play San Juan, Aub
reproduces that feeling or powerlessness and injustice. One of the characters
comments:
BERNHEIM: What a danger we
represent to humanity! Huh? What a danger to America! What a danger to England!
What a danger to Turkey! Six accountants, one-hundred-forty merchants,
fifty-three lawyers, two rabbis, twenty farmers, one-hundred odd shop
assistants, three stage directors, six journalists, two-hundred old men and
women who are totally wiped out, thirty-five children…! Is Brazil not big
enough? Is there no room in Palestine anymore? What a danger are these
fugitives of the Nazis! (ibid.: 147).[30]
This quote sums up everything that has been said so
far about the Jewish condition. Here can be seen how characters with such
different professions come together because of their stateless situation and
how their fate is not defined. There is a banker, representing the Jewish
bourgeoisie, a communist militant, representing the proletarian sector and the
social fighters, a rabbi, representing the religious element; also Palestine is
mentioned, a reference to the aspirations of Jewish nationalism. Hopelessness
unifies the passengers of the San Juan, as expressed by one of them:
CARLOS: What you want are
children, of course, children. You are in the age. For what? So that they flee,
like us, from town to town, from hour to year, and that not only the right hand
is ashamed of the left one, but the right of the right. Are you not enough? You
want more and more. As long as I live, no (ibid.).[31]
Nevertheless, a character who is not present on this
ship, where despair is prevalent, is the writer. As we were able to identify in
his analyses of Kafka and Heine—two diasporic Jews—there is always a
possibility of hope, even in the most extreme conditions. In this sense, the
tragedy San Juan is the work, on the one hand, where the extreme
condition of the Jews persecuted by the Nazis is represented and, on the other,
where Aub places a possibility of hope, for it denounces the evil and seeks to
fight against it.
Conclusions
Max Aub was a writer whose talent allowed him to
express himself in all literary genres: novels, plays, poems, and essays. His
commitment to justice represented an incorruptible search for truth; this is
what he identified as the mission of the writer. Throughout his life he
distanced himself from nationalistic claims over languages and from any
religious expression.
The historical and personal
circumstances that he experienced made him a Spanish republican who, along with
thousands of his comrades, ended up settling in Mexico, where he lived most of
his life. What was unique about his experience, what distinguished him from
most of Spanish writers and intellectuals who suffered exile, was the factor of
his Jewish diasporic condition. This is how it can be explained why in his work
San Juan, written during the Spanish Civil War and where he sought to
transmit his experiences of this historic event, he reproduced the situation of
a handful of Jews fleeing Nazism, which was not related to what happened in the
Iberian country.
In his way of understanding
the Jewish condition as a radical expression of exile, Aub, using Steiner’s
expression, understood himself as ‘a snail with his antennae alert towards
menace’. With that safe-conduct he went from a circumstantial exile to the
diasporic condition, where he could finally obtain universal citizenship, the
one granted only to the guardians of the text.
REFERENCES
Aub, M. (1964), “De la literatura de nuestros días y de la española en
particular”, Cuadernos Americanos, 23 (3): 262–272.
Aub, M. (1998), San Juan, edited
by Manuel Aznar Soler, Madrid: Pretextos.
Mate, R. (2019), ‘Un exilio poco republicano’, El Periódico, 7
May.
Available online:
https://www.elperiodico.com/es/opinion/20190507/articulo-opinion-reyes-mate-un-exilio-poco-republicano-guerra-civil-7442895 Accessed on January 10,
2021.
Meyer, E. (2007), Los
tiempos mexicanos de Max Aub. Legado periodístico (1943–1972), Valencia:
FCE.
Pilatowsky, M.
(2008), La autoridad del exilio: una aproximación al pensamiento de Cohen,
Kafka, Rosenzweig y Buber, México: UNAM.
Steiner, G.
(1985), ‘Our Homeland, the Text’, Salmagundi, 66: 4–25.
[1] The original says: “La misma intolerancia que os echó de Colonia… Por
el mismo motivo, por las mismas razones. ¿No ha oído nunca este grito?: ‘¡No
consentiremos que nuestra sangre se mezcle con otra impura!’ ¿No le suena?”
[2] “San Juan representa todavía la idea que tengo de la literatura
de mi tiempo; no pasa ni puede pasar de ser crónica y denuncia.”
[3] In the history of the Jewish people
two exiles should be specially recalled: the one that is known as Babylonian
exile in the late sixth century BCE, and the Roman exile in the first century
CE, which lasted until the creation of the current State of Israel. The term diaspora
generally refers to the latter.
[4] “Se es de donde se hace el
bachillerato.”
[5] “It is undeniable that many exiles
lived in exile as a sacrifice for the Republic, hoping that one day it could
yield results in republican restoration. A few, like María Zambrano or Max Aub,
however, thought that with exile, a way of understanding the State was closed
and another opened, one that had nothing to do with the past” (Mate 2019). Translation is mine.
[6] “¡Qué daño no me ha hecho, en nuestro mundo cerrado, no ser de ninguna
parte! El llamarme como me llamo, con nombre y apellido que lo mismo pueden ser
de un país que de otro. […] En estas horas de nacionalismo cerrado, el haber
nacido en París y ser español, tener padre español nacido en Alemania, madre
parisina, pero de origen también alemán y de apellido eslavo, y hablar con ese
acento francés que desgarra mi castellano ¡qué daño no me ha hecho! El
agnosticismo de mis padres – librepensadores –, en un país católico
como España, o su prosapia judía en un país antisemita como Francia ¡qué
disgustos, qué humillaciones no me ha acarreado! ¡Qué vergüenza! Algo de mi
fuerza – de mis fuerzas –, he sacado para luchar contra la ignominia.”
[7] “Creí tener algo de judío, no por la sangre (que, pobrecita, ¿qué sabe
de eso?), sino por la religión de mis antepasados – mis padres no la tuvieron
–, y vine aquí con la idea de que iba a resentir algo, no sé qué, que me iba
a enfrentar conmigo mismo. Y no hubo nada. No tengo que ver con estas
gentes que no sea lo mismo que con los demás, como nada tengo que ver con los
alemanes, ni con los polacos, ni con los japoneses, ni con los argentinos. Mis
ligazones son con los mexicanos, los españoles, los franceses y, algo tal vez,
con los ingleses. Tal vez más con los españoles, pero sólo quizá con los de mi
tiempo. No tengo nada de judío. Lo siento, pero no puedo llorar, me son
extraños, tanto o más que los noruegos o los turcos.”
[8] ‘De la literatura de nuestros días y de la
española en particular’ [On literature of our days and on Spanish
literature in particular]. This lecture was delivered in the Sociedad de Cultura Española in
December 1963 and published a year later in Cuadernos Americanos (1964:
262–272).
[9] “Tal vez mañana, por mor de los mercados comunes, los idiomas
dependerán otra vez de sí y no de la geografía – es decir, del nacionalismo –.
No habrá razón de hablar de literatura belga o suiza si de hecho dejan de ser,
económicamente, con fronteras, Bélgica o Suiza. Y lo inglés será lo hablado en
inglés; y lo español será lo hablado en español. Es mi esperanza, para dentro
de mucho tiempo, en contra del nacionalismo, cáncer que roe – de día y de noche
–, todavía nuestro mundo.”
[10] “Los españoles somos extraordinarios porque un judío genovés descubrió
América, porque un rey alemán fundó su imperio, porque gracias a un general
inglés resistimos a Napoleón, porque con la ayuda de comunistas multicolores y
anarquistas de todas clases combatimos durante tres años a otros españoles
ayudados por uniformados alemanes e italianos.”
[11] “La verdad es que somos un puñado de gente sin sitio en el mundo. En
México, a pesar de ser mexicanos, no nos consideran como tales. Aquí no podemos
vivir más que mudos.”
[12] “Desde el principio (¡Mueran los gachupines!), no reconocer a España.
Ni a Franco ni, el día de mañana, a quien sea. La Malinche, inolvidable.
Absurdo a primera vista. Pero un racionalista que quiere amar a México debe
renunciar a muchas cosas. Sólo así se salva uno.” In Mexico, the term gachupín (plural:
gachupines) is used to pejoratively refer to the Spaniards. Malinche is,
in Mexican imaginary, the woman who helped Hernán Cortés as a translator; she
was also, allegedly, his mistress.
[13] “Es difícil hablar de su patria cuando uno se hace viejo lejos de
ella, porque ¿cómo es, aun sabiendo cómo está? No hay más imágenes que las
traídas por el aliento – o el desaliento –, de las palabras ajenas. Cuentan y
no acaban. Sin grandes variaciones optimistas y los que no lo son coinciden en
que lo único visible de la vieja semilla de la libertad que, en su día – por la
fuerza de las cosas –, encarnamos, son estudiantes y escritores. Demasiada
honra para los que sólo sabemos escribir.”
[14] “Aunque no queramos, todos somos unos. De otros venimos a otros.
Siempre somos hijos de los mejores. Si rascáis mi corteza hallaréis la sabia de
Cervantes, de Quevedo, de Galdós, y aun los humores – buenos y malos – de
Ortega, y los de Tolstoi y los de Martín du Gard. (Y en los del peor poeta, los
de Bécquer, Rubén, Juan ramón por no traer a cuenta y cuento a Gil Vicente, a
Garcilaso, a Lope, a Quevedo o a Jorge Manrique). Quisieron arrancarnos de cuajo
de España, sin lograrlo. Allí más vivos que nunca, Antonio Machado, Federico
García Lorca, Miguel Hernández y los vivos que nombro, en la sangre de los
nuevos.”
[15] “Kafka pasó su dolorosa vida acusándose del ‘delito de haber nacido’. El
proceso no es otra cosa que este juicio. Su héroe ignora el porqué de la
persecución de la cual es objeto por seres a la vez reales y fantasmagóricos.”
[16] “Los jueces han sido motivo de burlas sangrientas desde que la
administración es la administración, con su burocracia y sus montañas de
expedientes. Pero la amarguísima ironía de Kafka ha ido más lejos: los ha
deshumanizado por completo.”
[17] “Kafka huyó siempre de sí mismo, aun de su propio cuerpo, de la salud
a la enfermedad. La vida fue para él ‘una perpetua desviación que no permite
siquiera saber que se desvía’.”
[18] “Sólo la obra, y la vida del autor, deja el trance claro: el castigo
de su héroe se debe, ante todo, a su soledad.”
[19] “‘Asumí – escribe Kafka – la negación de mi tiempo… no tengo derecho a
combatirlo, pero, en cierta manera, lo represento.’ Crucificado entre el
cristianismo y el judaísmo sólo vislumbró la posibilidad de salvarse
‘creándose’. ‘No fueron la pereza, ni la mala voluntad, ni la torpeza las que
me llevaron a fracasar, en toda cosa: vida de familia, amistad, matrimonio,
profesión, literatura, pero sí la ausencia de suelo, de aire, de ley.”
[20] “‘Escribir es rezar’ – llegó a decir ‘Dios no quiere que escriba’.”
[21] “abrigaba todavía una esperanza mesiánica, en la misma que han
abandonado, en el plan negativo, que acabará por ahogarlos, los
existencialistas, en quien tanto ha influido.”
[22] “La grandeza de Heine, como la de todos los escritores que cuentan,
depende de su potencia de rebeldía. Se rebeló contra la sociedad de su tiempo,
contra su país, contra el que lo albergó, contra Dios.”
[23] “Heine fue siempre extranjero porque nunca sintió que sus pies pisaran
tierra firme. Siempre tuvo la sensación de estar en el aire. Tal vez por eso su
poesía es tan alada, tan de ninguna parte, tan universal, tan bien comprendida
por todos.”
[24] “Quiso ser protestante y se casó por la Iglesia católica. Seguramente
quería ‘alternar’, confundirse con gente indiferente, tal vez vivir inadvertido
como fue el oscuro y profundo deseo de tantos israelitas.”
[25] “No es de extrañar que Heine no tomara nunca en serio las religiones
bien ordenadas; lo demostró con su conversión al protestantismo, con su
matrimonio católico sin otro nuevo bautismo. Murió como vivió, escéptico, a
pesar de los que quieren suponer que sus Melodías hebreas representan
una vuelta a la religión familiar.”
[26] “‘Guerra a la injusticia, a la estupidez reinante y al mal’, escribía
a Inmermann, al principio de su vida literaria. Un bagaje de esta envergadura
es suficiente para echarse encima al resto de la humanidad, aun no siendo
judío. La justicia social, como fomento de lo literario, tal vez sea levadura
hebrea, aunque, si así fuera, habría que reconocer que el empuje no es suyo,
sino de sus perseguidores. Heine escribe a Moser, antes de expatriarse, que lo
que le echaban eran ‘menos las ganas de vagar por el mundo que el martirio de
mi situación personal–por ejemplo, lo judío que no se me quita por mucho que me
lave’.”
[27] “En cuanto a lo que me motivó a escribir esta tragedia – a más de
considerarla hasta cierto punto representativa de una de las fases del drama de
nuestro tiempo –, fue sencillamente la lectura del suceso escuetamente contado
en un periódico. El decorado lo tuve ante mí en la bodega del ‘Sidi Aicha’,
barco en el cual los franceses de Vichy me deportaron al Sahara.”
[28] “GUEDEL: ¿Hay noticias? RABINO: Nada. Nada. El Capitán no ha vuelto.
ABRAHÁM: ¡Ponga usted cincuenta dólares de telegramas! ¡Más valdrían cincuenta
dólares de arenques! GUEDEL: ¿Qué dice la radio? RABINO: Los republicanos
españoles han empezado una ofensiva por el Ebro.”
[29] “Para la burra. No estás
aquí por comunista, sino por tu triste ascendencia. Dirás: ‘¿qué tiene que
ver?’ ¡Oh, ciego! ¿No estás aquí? ¡No! Vives en las nubes. ¿Sabéis lo que sois?
Unos asquerosos idealistas...”
[30] “BERNHEIM. ¡Qué peligro representamos para la humanidad! ¿Eh? ¡Qué
peligro para América! ¡Qué peligro para Inglaterra! ¡Qué peligro para Turquía!
¡Seis contables, ciento cuarenta comerciantes, cincuenta y tres abogados, dos
rabinos, veinte agricultores, ciento y pico dependientes de comercio, tres
directores de escena, seis periodistas, doscientos viejos y viejas que ya no
pueden con su alma, treinta y cinco niños…! ¿Es que el Brasil no es bastante
grande? ¿Ya no cabe nadie en Palestina? ¡Qué peligro estos huidos de los
nazis!”
[31] “CARLOS. Lo que quieres son hijos, claro, hijos. Estás en la edad.
¿Para qué? Para que vayan huyendo, como nosotros, de pueblo en pueblo, de hora
en año, y que no solamente se avergüence la mano derecha de la izquierda, sino
la derecha de la derecha. ¿No te basta contigo? Quieres más, más… Mientras yo
viva, no.”
Traducción del español por Claudia Larios Padilla.
Publicado en: Cynthia Gabbay Ed. Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish War, In Search of Poetic Justice, Bloommsbury Academic, New York, 2022, pp. 76-91
