Gods of Raquel     by Moacyr Scliar Original title: Os Deuses de Raquel Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Ballantine Books, Inc. Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 107 pages ISBN: 0345336437 Edition: 1st Edition Not available for ordering Published by Ballantine Pub. Date: 1986 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 107 pages Not available for ordering

Scliar seems to have found a wonderfully eccentric and essential way of talking about ‘being Jewish in Brazil’. As a society that is both Catholic, (mildly) nationalist and mostly focused on its Western-European and African roots it is perhaps a rather complex place for a clear and self-confident Jewish sense of self to exist. Such is Scliar’s argument, at least. All the book’s protagonists and especially the Raquel of the title, a stubborn and funny girl and later young woman, struggle to live as Jews in the provincial Brazil of the 1950s, specifically the Southern city of Porto Alegre.

The origins of Raquel’s problems might lie as well with the point of view of her father, a snobbish intellectual Hungarian Jew who draws a very sharp line between himself — assimilated (his intellectual obsession is that not particularly Jewish subject, Latin), from a wealthy background — and what he calls ‘ghetto Jews’, who, in his view, tend to poverty, speak Yiddish and come from Poland. The result of this attitude is to send Raquel to a convent school where she experiences an intense adolescent religious confusion interpretable as a individualistic form of rebellion against being Jewish in a Catholic environment.

After the convent she falls into an insensate, very physical love-affair with a motor-mechanic, which seems like another confused and passionate attempt to negotiate a coherent world for herself between the various prohibitions of Catholicism, her father’s arid snobbery and her mother’s more traditional Jewish position.

One has a powerful and haunting sense of Raquel’s loneliness, her combined sentimental and spiritual homelessness, the solitude of the detached Jew in a Christian world with its own foibles about difference, but also the loneliness of a person who is different, highly interior and not understood or recognised by others.

Apart from Raquel’s crisis-ridden existence and its rehearsal of Jewish identity issues in Latin America The Gods of Raquel contains splendid glancing portraits of Brazilian city neighbourhoods and middle-class seaside resorts; Scliar is economical and telling in his writing and he brings this particular book to a quite indescribable and very beautiful close with a passage of old-fashioned spiritual redemption.

Sleep wasn’t always good. It wasn’t good because the sea, roiled by the teeming billions of tiny creatures in its cold, dark water, would not remain quiet. The seasoned vacationers at the resort barely paid any attention to the sea at all, it was only to reassure themselves — if they woke up wondering, Where are we? Who are we? — that they were in Tramandaí, that it was three o’clock in the morning, and that everything was all right. 96