“No idea what it means”. Polish Language in Latin American Jewish Writers’ Novels

Abstract

The article analyses the presence of the Polish language in the literary output of selected Latin American Jewish writers. The following texts are interpreted from this perspective: the long story Oh gueto my love by Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon, and the novels: Poste restante by Chilean Cynthia Rimsky, The Letters That Never Came by Uruguayan Mauricio Rosencof, and Lengua vespertina [Vespertine Language] by Argentinian Perla Sneh. The texts in question relate the narrator´s journey to Poland (meaning, to their grandparents’ land of origin), during which attempts are made to establish different modes of communication with the natives, whose language remains unintelligible. Thereby, it connotes the incomprehensible, also as a metaphor of the incomprehensibility of the past atrocities. Most of the time, the narrator needs to request the assistance of an interpreter who filters the information received from a native speaker and acts as an intermediary between the two cultures. The interpreter intermediation takes place as well in the paradigmatic documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, which is a reference point to some of the analyzed texts. The presence of Polish in Latin American texts written in Spanish ranges from merely residual displays (in the form of single words or/and proper names) to more complex reflection about the possibility of adopting Polish as a language of literary writing and its role in the recuperation of one´s own identity and history. Moreover, the affective charge of the Polish language is considered, starting from the assumption that –at least in Holocaust testimonies– its neutrality and objectivity are bound to be questioned.