The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes     by Moacyr Scliar, Translated by Eloah F. Giacomelli Original title: Estranha naçao de Rafael Mendes Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Ballantine Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback List Price: $4.95 Not available for ordering Published by Harmony Books: NY Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: USA Not available for ordering

Scliar, a descendant of Russian-Jewish immigrants from the beginning of the century, has, since the early 1960s, led a dual career as a medical practitioner in Porto Alegre, capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, and as Brazil’s leading Jewish fiction writer. This is his seventeenth book, originally published in 1983, and is his most explicit, if ironic, investigation into the history of the Jewish contribution to the making of Brazil — a still neglected subject shrouded in ignorance, despite evidence that the immigrant Portuguese population during colonial times was disproportionately Jewish (or converted New Christian*) in its composition.

The idea of a crypto-judaic identity at work beneath the surface of Brazil’s chequered evolution is the central theme of The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, which embraces a panoramic stretch of history and myth from Jonah’s encounter in the belly of the whale, through the Diaspora to the Iberian peninsula and beyond to the South American New World.

In a characteristic blend of fact, speculation and fantasy, Scliar weaves his account of the Mendes dynasty, whose wanderings are driven in part by the dream of magical wealth, the Gold Tree, in part by the vision of a mythical country that bears more than a passing resemblance to a paradisiacal Brazil — ’a beautiful bay with waves lapping on the pure white sands of the beach, coconut trees, brightly coloured birds wheeling in flight, a gloriously blue sky, a country inhabited by friendly people (bronze-skinned men, women and children, their faces painted in gaudy colours, their long black hair adorned with feathers).’

Most of all, though, it is the perennial ’perplexity’ of the Mendes nation, caught between the impulse to adventure, the wisdom of caution and restraint, and the dilemma of the Jewish condition, endlessly called to serve yet hounded by paranoia and suspicion. Such is the fate of the physician Maimonides, who discovers the cholera responsible for the illness of the sultan Saladin, but is forced by the palace conspirators to collude in his death. Or of the Rafael Mendes, a descendant of New Christians, who foresees in a dream the execution of Tiradentes, the leader of an eighteenth-century revolutionary movement, but is disbelieved by those around him. Or of the doctor Rafael Mendes, appointed to a sinecure by the populist Vargas regime of the 1930s, and who becomes innocently embroiled in a scandal concerning an Indian land occupation, a mysterious epidemic, and a media campaign against the regime.

Something of an anti-epic, then, this unwritten history is a healthy antidote to other, more triumphalist accounts of nation-building, one in which the Mendes line plays a, by turns, unwilling, accidental or unheroic part. And when it finally does comes to light, it illuminates the life of its most recent protagonist against a background of renewed chaos and crisis, the Brazil of the mid 1970s, as the euphoria of the Economic Miracle is beginning to crumble. Only now is it revealed to an unsuspecting Rafael Mendes, the junior partner in a collapsing finance company, in the form of two notebooks left to him by his father, who had mysteriously disappeared to Spain at the time of the Civil War. Rafael reads the notebooks on the eve of his arrest for collusion in embezzlement, as he finds out that his wayward daughter has been having a secret affair with his best friend, the Jewish company director Boris Goldbaum ("Goldtree"), and that together they are plotting their escape to Paraguay.

One of the book’s many ironies is that the pursuit of the mythical Gold Tree has led the last unwitting heir of the Mendes dynasty to an understanding of its foolish futility, in the shape of his failed business partner. With his life falling to pieces about him, surrounded by betrayal, the perplexed Rafael, one of a long line of perplexed Mendes, all at once discovers his own fantastic ancestry, his Jewishness no less, and is freed from ’the perplexity of generations’ in order to confront his destiny, a wiser man.

’He feels fine; now he feels fine. His head light, his forehead cool; fine. And thus he drifts off into drowsiness; and in this twilight between sleep and wakefulness, it seems to him that all of them are there, standing around the bed — Jonah and Habacuc, Maimonides and Rafael Mendes, all the ones named Rafael Mendes. In silence they look at him. Suddenly he realizes. All of them have the face he saw in the mirror a while ago; all of them are him, he is all of them. Now he understands the Notebooks of the New Christians; they are his father’s legacy to him — Rafael is no longer beset by doubts. Instead of solutions, fantasies; instead of answers, imaginary possibilities. The perfect message from a perplexed individual, concludes Rafael — and then the figures begin to vanish, and he falls asleep.’ p296

Scliar, a descendant of Russian-Jewish immigrants from the beginning of the century, has, since the early 1960s, led a dual career as a medical practitioner in Porto Alegre, capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, and as Brazil’s leading Jewish fiction writer. This is his seventeenth book, originally published in 1983, and is his most explicit, if ironic, investigation into the history of the Jewish contribution to the making of Brazil — a still neglected subject shrouded in ignorance, despite evidence that the immigrant Portuguese population during colonial times was disproportionately Jewish (or converted New Christian) in its composition.

The idea of a crypto-judaic identity at work beneath the surface of Brazil’s chequered evolution is the central theme of The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, which embraces a panoramic stretch of history and myth from Jonah’s encounter in the belly of the whale, through the Diaspora to the Iberian peninsula and beyond to the South American New World.

In a characteristic blend of fact, speculation and fantasy, Scliar weaves his account of the Mendes dynasty, whose wanderings are driven in part by the dream of magical wealth, the Gold Tree, in part by the vision of a mythical country that bears more than a passing resemblance to a paradisiacal Brazil — ‘a beautiful bay with waves lapping on the pure white sands of the beach, coconut trees, brightly coloured birds wheeling in flight, a gloriously blue sky, a country inhabited by friendly people (bronze-skinned men, women and children, their faces painted in gaudy colours, their long black hair adorned with feathers).’

Most of all, though, it is the perennial ‘perplexity’ of the Mendes nation, caught between the impulse to adventure, the wisdom of caution and restraint, and the dilemma of the Jewish condition, endlessly called to serve yet hounded by paranoia and suspicion. Such is the fate of the physician Maimonides, who discovers the cholera responsible for the illness of the Sultan Saladin, but is forced by the palace conspirators to collude in his death. Or of the Rafael Mendes, a descendant of New Christians, who foresees in a dream the execution of Tiradentes, the leader of an eighteenth-century revolutionary movement, but is disbelieved by those around him. Or of the doctor Rafael Mendes, appointed to a sinecure by the populist Vargas regime of the 1930s, and who becomes innocently embroiled in a scandal concerning an Indian land occupation, a mysterious epidemic, and a media campaign against the regime.

Something of an anti-epic, then, this unwritten history is a healthy antidote to other, more triumphalist accounts of nation-building, one in which the Mendes line plays a, by turns, unwilling, accidental or unheroic part. And when it finally does comes to light, it illuminates the life of its most recent protagonist against a background of renewed chaos and crisis, the Brazil of the mid 1970s, as the euphoria of the Economic Miracle is beginning to crumble. Only now is it revealed to an unsuspecting Rafael Mendes, the junior partner in a collapsing finance company, in the form of two notebooks left to him by his father, who had mysteriously disappeared to Spain at the time of the Civil War. Rafael reads the notebooks on the eve of his arrest for collusion in embezzlement, as he finds out that his wayward daughter has been having a secret affair with his best friend, the Jewish company director Boris Goldbaum (‘Goldtree’), and that together they are plotting their escape to Paraguay.

One of the book’s many ironies is that the pursuit of the mythical Gold Tree has led the last unwitting heir of the Mendes dynasty to an understanding of its foolish futility, in the shape of his failed business partner. With his life falling to pieces about him, surrounded by betrayal, the perplexed Rafael, one of a long line of perplexed Mendes, all at once discovers his own fantastic ancestry, his Jewishness no less, and is freed from ‘the perplexity of generations’ in order to confront his destiny, a wiser man.

He feels fine; now he feels fine. His head light, his forehead cool; fine. And thus he drifts off into drowsiness; and in this twilight between sleep and wakefulness, it seems to him that all of them are there, standing around the bed — Jonah and Habacuc, Maimonides and Rafael Mendes, all the ones named Rafael Mendes. In silence they look at him. Suddenly he realizes. All of them have the face he saw in the mirror a while ago; all of them are him, he is all of them. Now he understands the Notebooks of the New Christians; they are his father’s legacy to him — Rafael is no longer beset by doubts. Instead of solutions, fantasies; instead of answers, imaginary possibilities. The perfect message from a perplexed individual, concludes Rafael — and then the figures begin to vanish, and he falls asleep. 296